TURKEY: WHY ERDOGAN CONVERTED THE HAGIA SOPHIA TO A MOSQUE & WHY THE STATE DEPARTMENT SHOULD BE CONCERNED
BY ROBERT SPENCER
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:
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.
There is more. Read the rest here.
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Turkey: MP says “Decision to convert Hagia Sophia to mosque will make life more difficult for Christians here”
BY ROBERT SPENCER
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:
Indeed it will, as it is a new indication that Erdogan intends to destroy Turkish secularism altogether and restore Islamic rule to Turkey, which will involve the subjugation of the country’s remaining Christians as dhimmis.
“Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan formally makes Hagia Sophia a mosque,” by Suzan Fraser, Associated Press, July 10, 2020:
…Turkey’s high administrative court threw its weight behind a petition brought by a religious group and annulled the 1934 Cabinet decision that turned the site into a museum. Within hours, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan signed a decree handing over Hagia Sophia to Turkey’s Religious Affairs Presidency.
In a televised address to the nation, Erdogan said the first prayers inside Hagia Sofia would be held on July 24, and he urged respect for the decision.
“I underline that we will open Hagia Sophia to worship as a mosque by preserving its character of humanity’s common cultural heritage,” he said, adding: “It is Turkey’s sovereign right to decide for which purpose Hagia Sofia will be used.”
He rejected the idea that the decision ends Hagia Sophia’s status as a structure that brings faiths together.
“Like all of our other mosques, the doors of Hagia Sophia will be open to all, locals or foreigners, Muslims and non-Muslims,” Erdogan said….
Vladimir Dzhabarov, deputy head of the foreign affairs committee in the Russian upper house of parliament, called the action “a mistake.”
“Turning it into a mosque will not do anything for the Muslim world. It does not bring nations together, but on the contrary brings them into collision,” he said.
The debate hits at the heart of Turkey’s religious-secular divide. Nationalist and conservative groups in Turkey have long yearned to hold prayers at Hagia Sophia, which they regard as part of the Muslim Ottoman legacy. Others believe it should remain a museum, as a symbol of Christian and Muslim solidarity.
“It was a structure that brought together both Byzantine and Ottoman histories,” said Zeynep Kizildag, a 27-year-old social worker, who did not support the conversion. “The decision to turn it into a mosque is like erasing 1,000 years of history, in my opinion.”
Garo Paylan, an ethnic Armenian member of Turkey’s Parliament tweeted that it was “a sad day for Christians (and) for all who believe in a pluralist Turkey.”
“The decision to convert Hagia Sophia into a mosque will make life more difficult for Christians here and for Muslims in Europe,” he wrote. “Hagia Sophia was a symbol of our rich history. Its dome was big enough for all.”…
The Istanbul-based Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, considered the spiritual leader of the world’s Orthodox Christians, warned last month that the building’s conversion into a mosque “will turn millions of Christians across the world against Islam.”
On Friday, Archbishop Elpidophoros of America said the decision runs counter to the vision of secular Turkey’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk “who understood that Hagia Sophia should serve all Turkey’s people and indeed the whole world.”
“The days of conquest should remain a closed chapter of our collective histories,” he told The Associated Press, adding that Turkey’s government “can still choose wisely” but letting Hagia Sophia remain a “monument to all civilizations and universal values.”…
Some Islamic prayers have been held in the museum in recent years. In a major symbolic move, Erdogan recited the opening verse of the Quran there in 2018….
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Christian theologian: “Christians should be delighted” at Hagia Sophia becoming a mosque
BY ROBERT SPENCER
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:Useful Idiots such as Giles Fraser, who couch their capitulation in the guise of being broadminded, tolerant, and generous, will be the death of us.
Giles Fraser has offered an argument from authority, which is the weakest of all arguments: Christians and Muslims worship the same God because the Pope Francis and the Second Vatican Council say so. In reality, there are immediate and obvious differences: the Trinity, the crucifixion, and the divinity of Christ. Beyond that, Islam in its traditional theological formulations denies free will, the nature of good and evil (both of which, says the Qur’an [91:7-8], are placed in the soul by Allah, while the Christian idea is that evil stems from a rejection of God), and the nature of the deity. Allah is absolute will; Islamic theologians throughout Islamic history have held that even to expect consistency in moral or physical laws would be placing restraints on his sovereignty.
All this was known in the Christian world up until the 1960s. Vatican II’s affirmation that Muslims and Christians together worship the one God, and pointed omission of any discussion of what had led the two to be in conflict for 1,400 years, was a radical departure from the statements of many popes, as well as of saints and martyrs.
“Theologian: Vatican II Justifies Hagia Sophia As Mosque,” by Jules Gomes, ChurchMilitant.com, July 10, 2020:
ISTANBUL (ChurchMilitant.com) – A controversial theologian is quoting Pope Francis and Vatican II to justify Turkey’s decision returning the world’s largest Byzantine basilica to its conquered status as a mosque.
Giles Fraser, a liberal Anglican, says he “cannot but applaud” radical Islamic president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s “desire to return this once holy place back to a mosque.”
“Christians should be delighted” if Hagia Sophia reverts to being a mosque because “Muslims are our brothers and sisters with whom we share a faith in the living God,” Fraser argues.
Church Militant reported Thursday that the Council of State, Turkey’s top administrative court, reached a unanimous verdict declaring that secularist President Kemal Atatürk’s 1934 decision to turn Hagia Sophia into a museum was unlawful.
Fraser, a Nietzsche scholar, claims he is offering “no less an authority than the pope himself,” to “those Christians who believe that Muslims and Christians worship something different.”
The former columnist for The Guardian quotes Pope Francis’ tweet ahead of his trip to Morocco last year to make his case that Christians and Muslims worship the same God: “We Christians and Muslims believe in God, the Creator and the Merciful, who created people to live like brothers and sisters, respecting each other in their diversity and helping one another in their needs,” the pontiff tweeted in March 2019.
“This view goes back to the Second Vatican Council, where it was affirmed that Muslims, ‘together with us adore the one, merciful God,'” writes Fraser, citing Lumen Gentium.
“And from the Muslim side, the Qur’an makes it clear that Muslims worship the same God as the Jews,” notes Fraser, providing a hyperlink to the Koran (2:132).
“Giles Fraser has offered an argument from authority, which is the weakest of all arguments: Christians and Muslims worship the same God because Pope Francis and the Second Vatican Council say so,” distinguished Islamic scholar Robert Spencer told Church Militant.
“In reality, there are immediate and obvious differences — the Trinity, the Crucifixion, and the divinity of Christ,” said Spencer, author of over 20 books including Inside Islam: A Guide for Catholics: 100 Questions and Answers. “All this was known in the Christian world up until the 1960s.”
Spencer explains:
Vatican II’s affirmation that Muslims and Christians together worship the one God — and pointed omission of any discussion of what had led the two to be in conflict for 1,400 years — was a radical departure from the statements of many popes, as well as of saints and martyrs….
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Turkey’s New Mosque a Monument to Western DeclineWe may think we’re exhibiting high-minded principles, but our enemies know the score.
BY BRUCE THORNTON
SEE: https://cms.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/turkeys-new-mosque-monument-western-decline-bruce-thornton;
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:Bruce Thornton is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
Last week Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced that on July 24 Hagia Sophia, for a thousand years one of Christendom’s most storied and significant churches, will once again become a mosque. So far, the remnant of established Christianity has been silent. But this affront to the faith that is one of the pillars upon which the West was founded reveals how damaging has been the historical amnesia and appeasing double-standards that have compromised our response to the challenge of Islamic jihadism.
Until recently Turkey had been a poster-boy for the dubious globalist consensus that liberal democracy and free-market capitalism are the destiny of all humanity, including Muslims. In 1923 founder Kemal Atatürk created Turkey to be a modern Western nation-state, with religion separated from the secular government. He abolished the caliphate, closed Islamic courts, gave women equal rights in divorce and inheritance, allowed them to vote, restricted sharia to religion, and secularized education for females as well as males. In 1934 Hagia Sophia was turned into a museum, part of Atatürk’s program to recognize Turkey’s pre-Muslim history and strengthen Turkey’s modern global identity and prestige.
But over the years it took the military to maintain this modernizing, secular program in the face of the more traditional and conservative Muslim masses and their discontent. Starting as mayor of Istanbul in 1994, Erdoğan became their champion, and as president has abandoned Atatürk’s democratic, secular program: He has jailed more journalists than any other country, and built 17,000 new mosques. Nearly a century of efforts to reconcile Islam with liberal democracy are failing under Erdoğan’s incremental Islamization. Turning Hagia Sophia back into a mosque is an important sign of his success, and a gesture of defiance of the “rules-based international order.”
And it is a repudiation of the West’s belief that transforming Islamic majority states into secular liberal democracies, what we spent lives and resources futilely attempting to do in Iraq and Afghanistan, could defuse the materialist and political dysfunctions that the idealistic internationalists champions claimed created jihadist terrorism. This belief is a colossal failure of imagination, enabled by a refusal to take seriously the traditional doctrines, scriptures, jurisprudence, and behavior documented in 14 centuries of Islamic history.
One constant of that history is the totalizing role Islam plays in Muslim societies, and the depths of a religious fervor now nearly extinct in the Christian West, where Christianity has been driven from the public square, and relegated to private and, at holidays, commercial life. Contrary to our focus on material causes to account for historical and political change, as Bernard Lewis has written, Islam’s “most characteristic, significant and original political and intellectual responses [to Islam’s retreat before the West] have been Islamic. They have been concerned with the problems of the faith and the community overwhelmed by infidels.”
Given that religious focus, Lewis also writes, “In most Islamic countries, religion remains a major political factor,” for “most Muslim countries are still profoundly Muslim in a way and in a sense that most Christian countries are no longer Christian.” Given how secularized the West is, we discount faith and its doctrines and look for material, economic, political, or psychological causes of jihadist terrorism and violence, from the lack of economic development to justified anger over the West’s sins such as imperialism, colonialism and modern versions like globalism.
Moreover, our fashionable civilizational self-loathing leads us to accept these specious causes, even to the point of whitewashing Islam’s long history of violence in the name of Allah, and styling Islam, as presidents from both parties have done, as the “religion of peace.” This bad habit explains as well the relative indifference of Western politicians and clergy to Erdoğan’s announcement that one of the West’s most glorious and beautiful cultural treasures, already partially defaced by its first conquerors in 1453, will be turned into a venue for the faith that attacked, plundered, occupied, and enslaved Westerners for a thousand years, and continues today to slaughter and enslave Christians.
This dismissal of faith has also led to a double standard in the West’s responses to events. Addled by multiculturalism and its noble-savage fantasies of the exotic “other,” we strain out the Western mite and swallow whole herds of non-Western camels. Churches across Christendom are vandalized or demolished with scarcely a “tut-tut” from our political and ecclesiastical leaders. But let one mosque be defaced with graffiti, and passionate denunciations of “racism” and “Islamophobia” will fill the airwaves and bandwidth for days.
Similarly, scarcely a day passes when we don’t hear heated complaints about Israel’s “illegal occupation” of its traditional homeland as documented in historical writing, inscriptions, and archeological finds. But seldom, if ever, do we hear that for nearly 50 years Turkey has illegally occupied and colonized northern Cyprus, ethnically cleansing Greek Cypriots; destroying, looting, and vandalizing more than 550 churches; and refusing to this day to inform the Greeks about the fate of over 2000 of their compatriots who disappeared during the invasion.
Worst of all, we allow mosques to arise on Western lands and solicitously protect them, even as many are centers of jihadist recruitment and indoctrination. Germany alone has 2400, 900 of which are controlled by Turkey. Yet Saudi Arabia will not allow a single church on its territory, and punishes Christian evangelism with death. Other Muslim countries restrict, according to sharia law, the number and size of Christian churches, which are frequent targets of vandalism or destruction. Turkey continues to forbid new churches, though a few years ago it did allow a new church to be built––the first in 90 years.
Perhaps nothing illustrates this cringing double-standard as well as the continuing Arab control over the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The holiest site of Judaism, it was strictly off-limits to Jews during Jordan’s occupation, as was the Old City. Forty to fifty thousand headstones from the Mount of Olives cemetery were desecrated, some being used to pave latrines, and 56 synagogues were destroyed.
Yet despite this record of destruction and contempt, after the 1967 Six Days War and Israel’s reconquest of Jerusalem, Israelis didn’t just let the two mosques on the Temple Mount survive, but allowed Arabs to maintain significant control over the Mount. Worse yet, in 1996 a new mosque and prayer hall was built below the Temple Mount on the remains of Solomon’s Stables, and during construction excavations thousands of precious artifacts from the as far back as the First Temple era were contemptuously dumped in the Kidron Valley along with excavation spoil. Israeli archaeologists for years had to sift from the mounds of dirt 1000 ancient objects like coins, inscriptions, building stones from the two temples, and tools.
Finally, this myopic and cringing double standard is manifested in the use of “imperialism” and “colonialism” as epithets to delegitimize the West and Israel, which in Arab propaganda is routinely characterized as a Western colonial and imperial outpost. This bad habit is particularly cringing, given Islam’s long record of imperial conquest, colonization, and occupation: At one point three quarters of the Roman Empire and over a third of what was then known as Christendom were occupied. From the beginning, as historian Efraim Karsh writes, Muslim armies “acted in a typically imperialist fashion . . . subjugating indigenous populations, colonizing their lands, and expropriating their wealth and labor.” And whereas Western imperial powers abandoned almost all their colonies and continue to aid those peoples in determine their own political destiny, the descendants of Muslim invaders, colonists, and occupiers continue to live and rule most of the territories they conquered centuries ago: all of North Africa, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Turkey, Iran––all except the last had been Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian, i.e. proto-Western, for as long as nearly 3000 years before Islam even existed.
Which raises some questions: By what moral calculus do the imperialism and colonialism of the past in the West come in for constant condemnation and scapegoating for the rest of the world’s problems, while no one holds Islam and its colonial and imperialist sins to the same standards of judgment and accountability? Or why does the West’s history of brutal slavery remain an indelible stain on today’s Westerners, while Islam’s much longer and more brutal history of slavery, not just of Africans, but of millions of Europeans, is scarcely mentioned, though it continues to this day? Or why are the richest, freest women in the world defended by militant feminists against sexist “microagressions,” while in many Muslim countries, the misogynistic customs and laws, including polygamy, veils, genital mutilation, honor killings, and inequality before the law, are, when not just ignored, admired as exotic chic by ignorant Western activists?
Accepting a double-standard is always a sign of weakness, inferiority, and fear. We may think we’re just displaying our high-minded principles and cosmopolitanism, but our enemies know the score: We are displaying a civilizational failure of nerve, and a sordid materialism that will not let us risk our rich dolce vita lifestyle. Just like the current destruction of America’s history as expressed in statues and monuments, and just like the libelous revision of American history to legitimize an illiberal collectivist ideology and its impossible utopias, the shrugging off––with a few exceptions like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo––of Turkey’s conversion of Hagia Sophia into a mosque bespeaks a civilization that no longer is willing to defend and fight for its ideals, its history, its achievements, and its future.
The word for that condition is “decline.”
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Hagia Sophia Is a Mosque Again! (But That's Not as Terrible as You Think!)
On July 10, 2020, Turkish President Erdogan announced that Hagia Sophia ("Holy Wisdom"), which had been a museum since 1935, was again being converted into a mosque. Since the Church of Hagia Sophia was built by Christians in honor of Jesus Christ, many are upset about its reconversion to a mosque. David Wood, however, has a different perspective.
