Final Blow To Secularism In Turkey?

I doubt that any of our readers have failed to notice that secular Turkey, a longtime American ally, is being swept up in the Islamist cause along with the rest of the Middle East. Relations with the United States have been chilling over the past decade, and the pattern has accelerated rapidly since the Arab Spring began. Now one of the major symbols of secular tolerance may be about to fall.

Hagia Sophia, once the greatest cathedral in all of Christendom, may very well be facing the possibility of becoming a megamosque. Built in Constantinople (modern Istanbul), the cathedral remained in Christian hands until 1453, at which time the conquering Ottoman Turks finally succeeded in bringing down the walls of Byzantium and brought Islam into the cathedral. Christian priests were tossed out or killed, and many of the Christian relics and icons were destroyed.

In the aftermath of the death of the Ottoman Empire following World War I, a secularist/modernist movement led by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk took the reins of Turkish government. Among the many reforms taken by Ataturk was the de-Islamisation of the official government. One of his acts, though not formalized until 1934, was to remove all worship, Muslim or Christian, from Hagia Sophia. By converting the great mosque, which had been switched from Christian worship by the Ottomans, he turned a great national symbol from a religious battleground into a national museum, visited by hundreds of thousands of tourists every year.

The building became a national symbol of the secularist, tolerant Turkish government for most of the remainder of the 20th Century. Sadly, over the past few years, secularism has become less palatable to religious Turks. Starting awhile back, the government began to abandon secularism in favor of increasing intrusion of Islamic law into the high elected offices. Though a republic, Turkey is rapidly becoming an Islamic Republic (which is somewhat of an oxymoron).

The remains of Arabic words and symbols have long been highly-visible on the walls of Hagia Sophia, but those Chrisitan symbols, paintings and icons which were still in existence at the time of Ataturk have been preserved. And though worship inside the building has long been strictly forbidden, the museum has until recently been thought of as a Christian historical center under Islamic domination.

That may all change in the near future. The first signs of unrest over the status of Hagia Sophia appeared in 2006 when Pope Benedict had planned a visit there. Though the historical Christian remnants are under the control of the Ecumenical Patriarchate (Eastern Orthodox Christian Church), radical Muslims saw the proposed visit by the Pope (head of the western Roman Catholic Church) as the first move in a Christian attempt to re-take the cathedral. The Pope bravely made the visit anyway, but he was greeted with general animosity including signs which read “Pope get out of Turkey.”

Now we have the earliest and largest demonstrations demanding the “proper” use of the building by Islamists. As reported by Reuters: “ Thousands of devout Muslims prayed outside Turkey’s historic Hagia Sophia museum on Saturday [May 23] to protest a 1934 law that bars religious services at the former church and mosque. Worshippers shouted, 'Break the chains, let Hagia Sophia Mosque open,' and 'God is great' [the notorious 'Allahu Akbar'] before kneeling in prayer as tourists looked on.”

While Christians are being murdered wholesale and churches burned to the ground with the congregants inside in other Middle East and northern African nations by Islamic militants, even such a moderate thing as a Christian historical museum is intolerable to the new generation of Muslim fanatics. Even though Turkey is semi-officially Islamic at this point, there still must be none of this Western tolerance in an Islamic Republic. While Muslims plan a megamosque in London and another at Ground Zero in New York City, the reverse must not be allowed anywhere in Jihadistan.

This one-sided tolerance is best explained by Salih Turhan, a spokesman for the re-conversion group which wants to turn Hagia Sophia back into a mosque. “Keeping Hagia Sophia Mosque closed is an insult to our mostly Muslim population of 75 million.” He doesn’t explain why mosques in the West overlooking the Houses of Parliament and within a block of the site of the mass murder of 3,000 New Yorkers and innocent visitors is not an insult to humanity.