Mosaic in the Hagia Sophia of the Virgin Mary and Jesus.
In spite of the way headlines might cause people to believe otherwise, there are other Islamic nations that can make that claim now. At the same time, however, Islam has posed a challenge to political liberalization in areas in which it is strong. Not all Middle Eastern nations with a Muslim majority, which is most of them, have Islamic or Islamic influenced governments by any means, indeed, not even a majority of them do, but contending with a faith that has seen no distinction between its religious laws and secular laws is a challenge for all of them. This has brought about revolution in some, such as Iran, and civil war in others, such as Syria and Iraq. The problem is never far below the surface.
Turkey was an exception as Ataturk aggressively secularized the nation, which he ran as a dictator, with the support of the Turkish Army. That army, in turn, served to guard the political culture he created for decades after his death, stepping in to run the government whenever it regarded things as getting too far away from that legacy. But with the election of Turkish Islamist leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan the country has been moving more and more in the other direction.
And now the Turkish supreme court, in this new era of Islamization, has ruled that Ataturk's 1935 conversion of the Hagia Sophia from a mosque into a museum was illegal.
Codex depicting the Sophia Hagia under construction.
What was overarchingly illegal, of course, was the occupation of the Hagia Sophia by Islam. It's a Christian church.
The Hagia Sophia was completed as a Catholic cathedral in 537, having first seen construction in 360. That is what it was until the Great Schism left it in the Eastern part of Christendom and it served as an Orthodox cathedral from 1054 to 1204, when it reverted to being a Catholic cathedral. It served as an Orthodox cathedral. In 1439 a murky end to the Schism was negotiated but which failed to really solve it. That a story for elsewhere, but in its final years the cathedral was once again an Eastern Catholic cathedral but one which also saw Latin Rite masses said in it. The last mass at the Cathedral was in 1453 literally during the fall of Constantinople, when the Ottoman Turkish forces broke into the cathedral and killed the Priests celebrating Mass.
The Ottoman Turks admired much of Byzantium and pressed the cathedral into service as a mosque, but keeping its numerous Christian and Byzantine symbols. It was used as a mosque from 1453 to 1935, which Ataturk converted its use, as noted, into a museum.
This would mean that the church served as a Christian church for 916 years. It was used as an Islamic mosque for 482 years. If we take into account its service as a focus of Christian efforts, it was a Christian site for 1093 years.
Ataturk and his wife in 1924.
Like a lot of the things we discuss here, this story is complicated by World War One. Going into the Great War Turkey was the Ottoman Empire and claimed to be the caliphate. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk had been an Ottoman officer who came to see the Ottoman government he served in as effete, ineffective and anti modern. He became the leader in what amounted to a rebellion against the Ottoman government over the issue of peace as that peace proposed to carve away large sections of Anatolia in favor its its ethnic minorities. This soon lead to the Turkish War of Independence which pitted the Turkish forces first against the Allies but, as time went on, principally against the Greeks.
The overplaying of the Allied hand in Turkey caused one of the great tragedies of the immediate post World War One world. The Allied powers were, by that time, too fatigued to bother with a long protracted war and occupation of Anatolia, which is what defeating the Turks would really have meant. Their presence as victors, however, gave real hope to ethnic minorities inside of Turkey, with those minorities uniformly being Christian. Moreover, they gave hope to the Greek government of amazingly recovering a portion of Anatolia that Greeks had not governed since 1453. Not only did the Greeks seek to do so, but they sought to expand their proposed territory in Anatolia far beyond those few areas that had sizable Greek populations and into areas where those populations were quite limited. Giving hope to those aspirations, moreover, caused the struggle for that goal to rapidly become genocidal on both sides.
The European Allies lost interest pretty quickly in shedding blood for Greek territorial aspirations and in October 1922 the war came to an end in a treaty which saw 1,000,000 ethnic Greeks depart Anatolia as refugees, bringing nearly to an end a presence there that stretched back into antiquity, and which at one time had defined Greek culture more than Greece itself. Some Greeks remained, but it was a tiny minority. It was a tiny minority, however that continued to be identified by its Christianity, with both Orthodox and Catholic Greeks remaining.
Ataturk and one of his twelve adopted children.
Ataturk's victory of the Allies did not prove to be a victory for Islam. Taking an approach to governance that might be best compared to that of Napoleon Bonaparte, he was a modernizing and liberalizing force who sought to accomplish those goals effectively by force. As part of that, he saw the influence of Islam as a retrograde force that needed to be dealt with.
Indeed, Ataturk's relationship with Islam has remained a source of debate and mystery, like much of his personal life in general. He was born into an Islamic family and had received religious instruction, but its clear that he held a highly nuanced view of the faith. He was not personally observant in at least some respects and was a life long heavy drinker, a fact which lead to his early death. He spoke favorably of the role of religion in society but it was clear that role was not to extend to influencing government. Comments he made about Islam suggest that he thought a reformed Islam needed to come about or even that he personally did not believe in its tenants. He was quoted to a foreign correspondent to the effect that Turkish muslims didn't grasp what Islam really was because the Koran was in Arabic, and once they really were able to read it in Turkish, they'd reject it.
As part of all of this his approach to governance, therefore, was Napoleonic, being a liberalizer and modernizer by force. Like Napoleon, his day ended short, although his rule was far more successful than Napoleon's and his Turkey became modern Turkey up until Turkey's current leadership, which seems intent to go backwards in time.
One of the things that Ataturk managed to do was to reach a treaty with Greece in 1930 in which Greece renounced its claims on Turkish territory. As Ataturk continued to advance modernization in the 1930s, the Hagia Sophia's occupation as a mosque came to an end in 1935. It became a museum dedicated to the history of Anatolia and a spectacular example of Anatolia's history and culture.
Now that's coming to an end, along with what seems to be Turkey's long period of regional exceptionalism.
Hagia Sophia translates as Holy Wisdom. This move by the Turkish government is neither holy, nor wise.
