Hagia Sophia’s siege in Istanbul has stood tall as empires rose and fell around it, as rulers and statesmen came and went, as creeds flourished and withered.
Now the 1,500-year-old former cathedral and mosque is at the center of a modern struggle between Turkey’s secular roots and its president’s Islamist aspirations. The battle over who, if anyone can pray at the UNESCO World Heritage site, reflects a larger battle going on in a society torn between secularism and religious conservatism.
On Thursday, the Turkish State Council heard arguments from lawyers for the Association for the Protection of Historical Monuments and the Environment, a group calling for the church of Hagia Sophia to be reverted from a museum to a mosque.
The association is pressing for the annulment of the 1935 decision that turned the iconic structure into a museum, where no religious services or group prayers would be held. A decision is expected in two weeks.
If the court decides in favor of the NGO, it will be the last in a long line of twists and turns for Hagia Sophia, which has long dominated the Istanbul skyline, a symbol of the city’s status as a bridge between the East and the West, and the Muslim and Christian worlds.
Built as a church, after being completed in 537, the church of Saint Sophia was immediately central to early Christianity and its great cathedral dome was hailed as a wonder. In 1453, when the Ottomans conquered the city formerly known as Constantinople, it became a mosque. Fast forward about 500 years and became a museum shortly after the founding of modern and secular Turkey.
Today, it is one of the most popular attractions in the country, with millions of visitors each year.
But Turkey’s hardline Islamist president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has set his sights on the building. In a campaign speech before last year’s local elections, he said it had been a “big mistake” to turn it into a museum.
Ziya Meral, a member of Turkey’s Christian community believed to number around 100,000, says turning it into a mosque and allowing only Muslims to pray would feel exclusive.
For Meral, it is the mixture of the building of his Christian roots and the Arabic scriptures that has extraordinary meaning for all Turks.
“Every time I entered Hagia Sophia, I always felt like I was entering history or heritage on this earth that I related to,” said Meral, who is a senior associate member of the London-based Royal United Services Institute, during an interview by phone. “But I am also entering a synthesis of culture that I carry within my body, within my habits of life, within my vision of the world, that somehow that sacred space unites everything.”
Hagia Sophia’s mix of religions and societies is what made it so symbolic for Turkey, a country that has struggled to be predominantly Muslim, but was founded in the early 20th century on secular beliefs of separating religion and state.
The move has caught the attention of many abroad, including in the United States.
“We urge the Turkish government to continue to maintain the Hagia Sophia as a museum, as an example of its commitment to respect Turkey’s diverse faith traditions and history, and ensure that it remains accessible to all,” the secretary recently said. of State Mike Pompeo. .
Despite pressure from lifelong allies like the United States, Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party, or AK Party, have increasingly pushed the balance in favor of religion in Turkey.
He has worked to make mosques even more a part of public life than Turkish history has already provided.
One of the most controversial is still under construction in the city’s central square, which served as a center for anti-government protests in 2013.
Erdogan, and the Turkish association in the court case, certainly have sympathizers.
Onur Erim, a Muslim Turk who runs a consulting firm in Istanbul, is in favor of bringing Muslim prayers to Hagia Sophia and said that he would go pray himself there.
He believed that even though the building is a museum, it is also a mosque, just one that has no Muslim prayers.
As such, he didn’t think much needed to be done if a court decision allowed Muslim prayers to return, but some analysts have suggested that curtains could be used to cover precious Byzantine Christian mosaics and other works of art.
He said, through a phone call, that from his understanding, the Koran does not allow a building to serve as both a church and a mosque.
“When you conquer a place … that’s all, you get all the rights to it,” said Erim, who worked for the former mayor of the capital’s AK party, Ankara.
“For me, opening the Hagia Sophia mosque is a big problem. It goes beyond the AK Party, it goes beyond Erdogan, it goes beyond any party in Turkey or any kind of political point of view. “
In response, Meral said that Istanbul had been conquered and that “the Turks have nothing to demonstrate about the strength of their country, the strength of their defense, their armed forces and their position in the region.”
However, there may be more than religious devotion behind the movement to turn it into a mosque, says Berk Esen, an assistant professor of international relations at Bilkent University in the capital Ankara.
On the one hand, the debate diverts attention from the most pressing concerns for many Turks, such as rising unemployment amid a pandemic in a country with one of the largest outbreaks in its region.
Going against the wishes of Western leaders like Pompeo and pushing a cultural wedge issue could also allow Erdogan to build on his populist and conservative image, but it would not win him many voters, Esen argued.
Erdogan “increasingly presents himself as a leader who is not in touch with contemporary times, with contemporary problems,” Esen said during a telephone interview.
For Meral, the mere politicization of Hagia Sophia is what he said saddens him.
“Capture a unique story, why bring that into politics?” he said. “Does this really add anything?”
