Ankara unfolds Hagia Sophia card against COVID-19 crisis
Erdogan’s government has signaled it could consider turning the Hagia Sophia Museum into a mosque as part of religious messages aimed at keeping its voter base intact under the strain of economic turmoil, made worse by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We’ve been longing for it! But a little more patience. We’ll make it together,” the Turkish president’s communication chief, Fahrettin Altun, tweeted May 10. The subject of his yearning was revealed in a picture attached to the tweet: the Hagia Sophia Museum in Istanbul. And the promise of success was about a decades-old “cause” of Turkey’s Islamists — converting the Hagia Sophia into a mosque — which they have inflamed at times and damped down at others, depending on their political interests.
The Hagia Sophia — “Holy Wisdom” in Greek — was built as a church during Byzantine times in 537 and functioned as such for 916 years before the Ottomans conquered Istanbul on May 29, 1453, and converted the edifice into a mosque on the same day. Almost half a millennium later, on Nov. 24, 1934, the Hagia Sophia became a museum by a Council of Ministers decree under the modern Turkish republic.
Hence, reverting the Hagia Sophia to a functioning mosque has been a holy grail for the Islamist movement in Turkey. Today, the Hagia Sophia is the only subject of “victimhood” that the movement has left for political use after the abolition of the headscarf ban for public servants and students, starting from secondary school, and the removal of “restrictions” and “pressure” on imam-hatip schools, which provide Islamic education in line with the Sunni faith.
Altun’s tweet went viral, generating 12,400 retweets, 57,600 likes and 4,200 comments. And though some “troll contribution” was probably involved, the fact remains that the Islamist cause for a “Hagia Sophia Mosque” has lost nothing of its vigor.
