Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan capped 18 years of uninterrupted Justice and Development Party rule today by fulfilling his long-cherished dream of holding Friday prayers in the Hagia Sophia, the glorious domed edifice built by the Byzantines as a cathedral in the sixth century. Today’s ceremony followed the Hagia Sophia's formal conversion from a museum to a full-service mosque July 10. Thousands of faithful brandishing Turkish flags and chanting "God is Great" streamed from across the country to celebrate the historic reversal of the Hagia Sophia’s status.

Most were unable to enter the Hagia Sophia because of strict social distancing rules within the building to prevent the spread of COVID-19. They observed the events on a giant screen erected in the large square in the heart of old Istanbul, where the newly minted mosque sits.

Erdogan, a trained imam, flanked by his top lieutenants and sporting a white prayer cap, recited verses from the Koran in a moving and masterful delivery ahead of the prayers. Turkey’s head of religious affairs, Ali Erbas, delivered today’s sermon, thanking Mehmed the Conqueror, who wrested Istanbul from the Byzantine Emperor Justinian in 1453, and who converted the Hagia Sophia, then a cathedral, into a mosque.

Dangling a sword from his left hand, a gesture of magnanimity practiced by the sultans in the wake of conquests, Erbas intoned that the revival of the Hagia Sophia as a mosque augured “the liberation” of the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. He made no mention of Kemal Ataturk, the long-venerated secular founder of modern Turkey who salvaged the country from occupation and dismemberment by the Allied powers who had defeated the Ottomans in World War I; Ataturk converted the Hagia Sophia into a museum in 1934. Erbas reminded the congregation of Mehmed’s alleged testament that the Hagia Sophia remain a mosque “until Judgment Day” and that those who defied this would "be damned." Turkey’s beleaguered secularists and even an Islamic scholar took Erbas' words as a thinly veiled attack on Ataturk and further evidence of the determined unraveling of his pro-Western legacy. “Ataturk was cursed from the pulpit today,” tweeted theologian Cemil Kilic.