ICON OF SECULARISM COULD FALL IN TURKEY
Muslims want Hagia Sophia to be a house of worship again
For eight decades, the iconic Hagia Sophia museum in Istanbul has stood as a symbol of Turkey’s commitment to a secular society. That tradition is under siege by growing calls to convert the historic structure back into a practicing mosque.
The 1,500-year-old structure was built as an Orthodox Christian cathedral. It was turned into a mosque in the 15th century after the Ottoman Turks captured Constantinople, now Istanbul. In the 1930s, the founder of modern Turkey, Kemal Ataturk, turned it into a museum in his drive to create a secular republic on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire.
Now that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan promotes a more prominent role for Islam in Turkey, whose citizens are overwhelmingly Muslim, the idea of turning the popular tourist attraction into a house of worship again has become more appealing.
“We want Hagia Sophia to open as a mosque,” says Yusuf Yalcin, 37, of Istanbul, an information technology manager who co-founded a group devoted to that cause. “Hagia Sophia is the relic of our ancestors and symbol of our freedom.”
The idea has traction in Turkey’s political circles. Last year, the Turkish Ministry of Religious Affairs appointed an imam to the Hagia Sophia. That appointment came a few months after a muezzin, who calls the faithful to pray, chanted the Islamic morning prayer inside the Hagia Sophia for the first time since 1935. Sung during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, the muezzin’s call was broadcast on Turkish state television.
Those moves caused a backlash among Greeks. “Obsessions, verging on bigotry, with Muslim rituals in a monument of world cultural heritage are incomprehensible,” the Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement. “Such actions are not compatible with modern, democratic and secular societies.”
Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Tanju Bilgic said in a retort on state television that the Greek government goes out of its way to thwart the practice of Islam in Greece.
“Greece has not given permission for the construction of a mosque in its capital for years, permanently intervenes in the freedoms of religion of the Turkish minority of Western Thrace, and mistakes being against Islam for being modern,” Bilgic said.
Yalcin says Turkey, by contrast, is more open to letting Christians practice their religion. “Many churches have been functioning freely in Istanbul” ever since the city was captured by the Ottomans, he says.
That doesn’t satisfy Greeks who still feel bitter over the loss of Constantinople, once the heart of the Byzantine Empire, whose Greek-speaking citizens were among the most cosmopolitan in the world.
Visiting the Hagia Sophia last year was the trip of a lifetime for Dimitra Anagnostopoulou, 59, a Greek bookseller. “I felt awe,” Anagnostopoulou says. “But I was a bit let down by the Arabic signs left there from the time Hagia Sophia was turned into a mosque.”
Some Turks worry about the campaign to convert the museum. “Turning Hagia Sophia into a mosque has always been a cause for many conservative Islamists,” says Istanbul Bilgi University anthropologist Erkan Saka.
Historians note such changes have occurred throughout history. Christians turned pagan temples and mosques into churches or used them for secular uses. “The same happens today in the West, when empty Christian cathedrals are sold as secular buildings,” says Sotiris Mitralexis, a philosophy professor at the City University of Istanbul.
Yalcin says everyone can be satisfied by using the Hagia Sophia as both a mosque and a museum.
“All of the mosques in Turkey are open to everybody. We even recommend that the upper floor be used as a kind of museum as it is now with the display of historical works.”
“Hagia Sophia is the relic of our ancestors and symbol of our freedom.” Yusuf Yalcin, co-founder of a group devoted to Islam in Turkey