Dar al-Ifta, Egypt’s top institution for fatwas or religious edicts, has sparked widespread controversy when it described the Ottoman control of the city of Constantinople — Turkey's capital until 1923 when it was renamed Istanbul — as an occupation before it retracted and described it as a “great Islamic conquest.”
On June 7, the media center of Dar al-Ifta published a statement, titled, “Erdogan continues to use fatwa weapons to cement his tyranny at home and justify his colonial ambitions abroad.”