Following the decisions by the Supreme Administrative Court of Turkey and Recep Tayyip Erdogan that provide for the conversion of the Hagia Sophia Museum into a mosque, the Turkish president “re-defies Europe,” as reported by the French daily newspaper Le Figaro.
“So we have learned the name of the 3,272nd mosque in Constantinople: the ‘Hagia Sophia’ mosque,”, the text reads, adding that, thanks to the decision by the Turkish Council of State, the Turkish president can “fulfil the dream” of Islamists and nationalists in his country, which was “the religious and political re-conquest of this symbol of Constantinople.”
On November 24, 1934, Mustafa Kemal, the founder of the very young Turkish Republic, turned the former basilica, which was then an Islamic mosque, into a museum, but “86 years later, on July 10, 2020, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan turned the jewel of Constantinople into a Muslim place of worship, to the maximum satisfaction of the most conservative religious part of his electorate and the allies on the far right” of Turkey, as reported by the French newspaper Le Monde.
According to the British newspaper The Times, the move by the Turkish president, reinforced by the ruling of the country’s highest administrative court, “spells the end of Ataturk’s secular vision for Turkey.” The Times described the speech delivered by the leader of the Turkish State, a few minutes after the call to the afternoon prayer, as one of the “most dramatic moments in the history of 1,500 years” of the emblematic Byzantine building.
Source: ANA-MPA