Call to reinstate Istanbul icon as mosque

November 15, 2013 5:55 pm

Call to reinstate Istanbul icon as mosque

By Daniel Dombey in Istanbul

One of Turkey’s most senior ministers has called for Istanbul’s ancient Ayasofya museum to be converted back to being a mosque, amid an intense debate about the social and religious agenda of the country’s Islamist-rooted government.Speaking in the city’s historic district, which is crammed with Byzantine and Ottoman relics, Bulent Arinc, deputy prime minister, said that in the past it had been possible to accept that former mosques could function as museums “but there is a different Turkey now”.

He added: “We are looking at this innocent Ayasofya and wishing that its happy days come soon.”

Ayasofya, designed as a Christian basilica in the sixth century by Anthemios of Tralles and Isidoros of Miletus, is dubbed a “unique architectural masterpiece” by Unesco and is one of Istanbul’s most visited tourist attractions.

Mr Arinc’s proposal to add the museum to Istanbul’s list of more than 3,000 mosques comes at a moment when Turkey’s domestic political debate is already highly charged.

Ayasofya, known in Greek as Hagia Sophia, or church of the Holy Wisdom, is the most prominent of all Istanbul’s surviving Byzantine monuments, crowning the peninsula of Sultanahmet where the city of Constantinople was once located.

It was inaugurated in 537 by Justinian, the last Latin-speaking ruler of what was then the Eastern Roman Empire – a domain that during his reign included southern Spain, parts of Italy, Northern Africa and the Middle East. The building, with its 31m diameter dome, was for centuries the world’s most spectacular church. Byzantines compared it to heaven itself.

Upon his conquest of Constantinople in 1453, Sultan Mehmet II converted Ayasofya into a mosque, scattering earth on top of himself as a gesture of humility as the muezzin struck up the call to prayer. The mosaics of the church were covered with whitewash until the building was converted into a museum in 1935, as the country’s new secular republic sought to break with the Ottoman past.

But today, as the country’s ruling AK party prepares for elections next year after more than a decade in power, the issue of religion in society is once again at the heart of politics.

In recent years, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, prime minister, has spoken of his desire to “raise a more religious generation”, reintroduced state-run religious schools for younger children and, this month, suggested that unmarried male and female students should be outlawed from living together, even off campus.

Mr Arinc, who says he wants to retire from public life, clashed with the prime minister over the controversy over student housing, amid signs of strain within AKP ranks over the prime minister’s personalised style of government and pronounced social conservatism.

By contrast, his comments about Ayasofya signal how much the mainstream has shifted, at least within the AKP.

Mr Arinc said he was “very happy” about the recent reconversion into mosques of two other buildings named Ayasofya, in the cities of Iznik and Trabzon – decisions seen by some as test cases for the great monument of Istanbul.

Mr Erdogan himself has suggested that Istanbul’s Ayasofya should be left alone, but the issue has gathered pace, with the imam of the neighbouring Blue Mosque calling last month for Ayasofya to become a mosque again to deal with the overflow of worshippers during Muslim festivals.

A lead article in the in-flight magazine of Turkish Airlines, which is 49 per cent owned by the Turkish state, suggested that the decision to turn Ayasofya into a museum broke the terms of the foundation established by Mehmet II.