My latest in PJ Media:
Most Western media analyses of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s decision Friday to convert Hagia Sophia from a museum to a mosque have asserted that Erdogan has wanted to do this because the move is popular among Turks and will shore up his base. But there is a great deal more to it: The conversion of Hagia Sophia to a mosque is actually as clear an indication of Erdogan’s overall plans as Mein Kampf was of Hitler’s, and just as sinister, as well as just as likely to be disregarded until it is too late.
The Jerusalem Post reported Saturday that following the announcement that Hagia Sophia would again become a mosque, the Turkish Presidency website stated: “The resurrection of Hagia Sophia is the footsteps of the will of Muslims across the world to come… the resurrection of Hagia Sophia is the reignition of the fire of hope of Muslims and all oppressed, wrong, downtrodden and exploited.”
The Post added that Erdogan “linked the decision to reviving Islam from Bukhara in Uzbekistan to Andalusia in Spain. This terminology, linking al-Aqsa in Jerusalem to Hagia Sophia and Spain, is a kind of coded terminology for a wider religious agenda.”
No kidding. Erdogan is signaling his aspiration to restore the caliphate, the single unified Islamic government to which, in Sunni Islam, all Muslims owe allegiance. The last caliphate was abolished by the secular Turkish government in 1924; now that Erdogan has just about completed his work of destroying Turkish secularism, he is moving more directly than ever to reestablish the caliphate that the secularists themselves destroyed.
In light of that, the reconversion of Hagia Sophia to a mosque has enormous importance. For nearly 1,000 years, from 537 to 1453, Hagia Sophia was the foremost cathedral in Christendom. When the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror finally defeated the Byzantine Empire and took Constantinople on May 29, 1453, he almost immediately had the Islamic call to prayer proclaimed from Hagia Sophia, so as to herald its conversion to a mosque.
The glory days of the caliphate and Hagia Sophia’s status as a mosque thus went together. Hagia Sophia stood as a symbol of the triumph of Islam over Christianity, and of the power of the Ottoman Empire. Erdogan is positioning himself as a new Mehmet, destroying the monument to secularism that the Hagia Sophia museum has been since 1935, and emulating his illustrious predecessor by converting it to a mosque once again.
