ISTANBUL – The conversion of Istanbul’s symbolic and shifting Hagia Sophia building into a mosque is described as a victory for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s conservative religious agenda.
The Hagia Sophia was once a cathedral, and then it was a mosque. And then, in 1934, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, who aspired to build a secular state, declared it a museum.
After a Turkish court overturned Atatürk’s decision a week ago, Erdogan quickly declared that Hagia Sophia was, once again, a mosque.
Analysts said the decision showed how desperate the president is to maintain his popularity among his conservative religious and nationalist base, which has kept him in power for years but now appears to be declining.
Erdogan was once celebrated for overseeing Turkey’s rapid development and booming economy. But the praise has given way to deep concern about the country’s volatile finances and imperfect democracy, intensified by the coronavirus pandemic.
Last year, fears led to his biggest political defeat since he came to power, as his Justice and Development Party lost control of Turkey’s two largest cities in municipal elections.
Erdogan now rules with sharp public rejection of having made voters elect the main opposition party, the Republican People’s Party, to run both the capital Ankara, where he lives, and Istanbul, his hometown, where he was once mayor. .
The government, unwilling to accept criticism, has launched investigations into opposition figures, removed elected mayors and jailed journalists during the coronavirus pandemic while passing a bill to free tens of thousands of prisoners, to COVID-19 not to be contracted due to crowding.
“Turkey wanted to be a member of the democratic world, but that story is over,” said Garo Paylan, 48, a Christian Armenian who is one of the founders of Turkey’s pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party.
Erdogan “cannot give people bread, and he is giving more radicalism to the Muslim majority,” Paylan said by phone.
While Hagia Sophia’s decision was a great symbolic victory for the country’s Islamists, Paylan argued that it closed the door to the future for minorities in the country and removed a symbol of respect for the country’s diversity. He has stopped telling his fellow Armenians to stay in the country.
Last year, the United States Senate declared that the mass murder of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century was genocide, a label that Turkey firmly rejects.
In any case, minority rights were also not well supported after the Ottoman Empire ended.
With the founding of modern Turkey, Atatürk established a nationalistic approach to Turkish identity that often went against struggles for greater minority rights.
The Kurds, who make up nearly 20 percent of the population, have found themselves at odds with secular nationalists and Islamists, many of whom fear that the country could fall into civil war if there were a push for self-government.
The calculation has fueled many of Erdogan’s nationalist policies, but, according to analysts, so have the threats to his power from the Peoples’ Democratic Party.
In 2015, the party entered the Grand National Assembly, Turkey’s parliament, for the first time, preventing Erdogan’s party from obtaining a majority. That led him to partner with the ultra-nationalist Nationalist Movement Party, further cementing his need to push forward a conservative agenda.
Erdogan’s supporters claim that it has increased the linguistic rights and standard of living of the Kurds, many of whom vote for their party.
Paylan said he will likely go to prison when he is no longer a member of parliament with immunity.
Other members of the Peoples ‘Democratic Party are already there, accused of being connected to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, a Turkish militant group designated by Ankara and Washington as a terrorist organization.
Paylan rejected the accusation. However, it has led the government to remove members of his party from the mayor posts they won in last year’s municipal elections.
Elmira Bayrasli, a Turkish-American who is director of Bard College’s globalization and international affairs program, said Hagia Sophia’s decision represented Erdoğan committing “the offense” in the face of mounting challenges, some of them from new dispersed parties of its Justice and Development Party.
“I think it will only get worse,” Bayrasli said. “He is desperate to hold on to power.”
Feminist activists blame government conservatism for what they say is a steady increase in gender-based violence.
The vice president of the Justice and Development Party suggested this month that Turkey could exit the Istanbul Convention, a treaty to protect women from violence.
In a telephone interview, Neslihan Duran, 24, a student at Gaza University in Ankara, said that “with such policies, women are designated as an inferior gender.”
Duran helped set up a Twitter campaign to demand justice for his fellow college student Şule Çet, who was raped and killed in 2018. Duran argued that the government’s promotion of conservative religious values led to Çet being criticized during the trial for not being Virgin.
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For Yusuf Erim, 40, a Muslim Turk, Erdogan’s conservatism is a reminder to the country’s Muslims that they are part of a larger Islamic community.
Erim, a general editor at Turkey’s state broadcaster, TRT, said turning the church of Hagia Sophia into a mosque was another way to do it. He said he believed Muslims from around the world would gather to pray in the historic building.
“Let’s say it is an Islamic wish list,” he said by phone.
The nearly 1,500-year-old monument is significant to both Christians, because it was built as a cathedral during the Byzantine Empire, and to Muslims, because it became a mosque after the Ottoman Turks conquered Istanbul in 1453.
Erim said that under Erdogan, Turkey has become a regional power due to its major infrastructure projects and military campaigns.
“How can you not be proud?” I ask. “I can say, ‘Wow, my country has come a long way.'”
Others were less enthusiastic about Hagia Sophia’s conversion into a mosque. The US State Department said it was “disappointed”.
When asked for comment, the Turkish government pointed to Erdogan’s speech last week in which he said the building would be open to “locals and foreigners, Muslims and non-Muslims.”
Paylan, a member of parliament for the Peoples’ Democratic Party, feared the decision would lead to a backlash against Muslims, while Christians in Turkey have a sacred symbol taken from their history.
“This will increase the tension between Muslims and Christians,” he said.
