By Victor Edwin SJ

New Delhi, July 2, 2020: Maqbool Ahmed Siraj is a journalist based in Bangalore. He did his Master’s in Journalism from the University of Madras in 1978 and started his career from the Indian Express there. He has worked for several journals, news agencies and other media outlets since then, including for the BBC World Service.

He currently contributes to The Hindu and the Deccan Herald in Bengaluru. Islam, Muslims, ecology, art and craft, science and technology and education are among his favourite subjects for writing.

In a fraternal conversation with Joseph Victor Edwin SJ, the editor of Salaam, Siraj Saheb expressed his views on the change of the status of the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, Turkey, from a museum to a mosque. Here are excerpts of the interview:

In a recent essay you wrote that the turning of Hagia Sophia into a mosque is a dangerous watershed in Turkey’s advance towards Pan-Turkism. Could you kindly explain this further?

Istanbul was the seat of the government of the Ottoman Empire from 1453 till 1923, when the revolutionary leader Mustafa Kemal Pasha dissolved the caliphate and formed a Turkish nationalist government. From a multi-ethnic empire encompassing wide swathes of land across large parts of Asia, Africa and Europe, Turkey became a nation-state.

Although Turkey has jettisoned the regions in Europe and Africa, there has been a subtle trend towards unifying people of Turkic origin inhabiting the nations that emerged out of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in Central Asia. The movement emphasizes reviving historical, cultural and linguistic links with the people in nations like Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. As of now this movement does not have a political agenda. Although not officially, several NGOs in Turkey have been building links with people in these republics through the media and schools.

Making people aware of their roots in Islam and Islamic culture is one element of the new identity consciousness being nurtured by these NGOs. Islam is not at the core of the ideology, but as we have seen in other places, ideas move from periphery to the core as movements advance and embrace more and more people under their fold. The dynamism of these movements often compels even the secular mainstream political parties to pander to fundamentalist urges stoked by them, thereby allowing them to encroach upon their territory. It is in this context that my article hints at Pan-Turkism.

Do you think the conversion of Hagia Sophia’s status from museum to mosque is a reflection of a popular religious impulse among the Turkish people, or do you feel it is a political act to shore up President Erdogan’s power and popularity?

The immediate motivation to turn Hagia Sophia from a museum to a mosque stems from the loosening hold of President Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (Turkish abbreviation AKP) on voters in Istanbul, who represent one-sixth of the total electorate in the country. Erdogan understands the value of having Istanbul and its inhabitants and administration of the city under his party’s hold. The move with regard to Hagia Sophia might be an exercise in wooing the city’s voters back to his party prior to the General Elections slated in 2023. So, he is acting as a typical politician, taking recourse to symbolism while failing to deliver any substantial benefits to the people through such a move.

Parties have a diverse array of options when it comes to choosing symbolism. These might be ethnic, linguistic and religious. Erdogan is targeting religious sensitivities. There has been no movement in Turkey to reconvert the Hagia Sophia to a mosque. Even the president himself had hinted that the conversion was not on the agenda of his party or the government. Nor is there any paucity of mosques for Turkish Muslims to pray. The massive Sultan Ahmet Mosque sitting opposite to the Hagia Sophia has barely two to three rows of worshipers on an average day. So, all this should be merely taken as political grandstanding.

What implications do you think the act of changing Hagia Sophia’s status might have on Christian-Muslim relations and on relations between Muslim-majority countries and Western countries that may in some sense be called Christian?

Turkey has been a democracy for close to a century ever since it threw away the yoke of an empire. It had aligned itself well with the West on several counts e.g., in matters of education, governance, administration, defense and in adopting benchmarks and standards that a democratic nation should adopt and pursue. Turkey was part of NATO, although it did not succeed in getting a seat in the European Union (EU). In fact, the Turkish state has been more secular than many of the EU nations on issues such as banning the wearing of hijab by women.

Turkey’s failure to get into the EU has espoused a feeling among the Turkish people that notwithstanding their strident constitutional secularism, their fact of being Muslim-majority is a roadblock in the country’s merger with the EU. There has been a debate within Turkey on whether the pursuit of a EU seat is worthwhile now that Turkey can look eastward (for the promotion of Pan-Turkism) and southwards for robust ties with Muslim-majority nations.

Christianity is not part of the Constitutions of the Western nations, but a Christian ethos provides the dominant cultural flavor of these nations. The conversion of Hagia Sophia into a museum after having served as a mosque for close to five centuries was a halfway compensation towards correcting a historical wrong i.e., turning a cathedral into a mosque. It carried a modicum of assurance that not all Muslims (or for that matter Islamic nations) are intolerant of other religions or their places of worship.

It is quite natural that in a world where national boundaries have been redrawn on the basis of nation-states, faith communities would like to stay assured that cultural landmarks would not be obliterated in the absence of political patronage. When the fanatic Taliban blasted and demolished the Buddha statues in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, apprehensions with regard to intolerance towards cultural landmarks began to gather substance. That a modern nation like Turkey should take such a step (as it did in the case of Hagia Sophia) can only aggravate interfaith bonhomie.

What implications do you think the changing of Hagia Sophia’s status might have on Islamic religious thinking with regard to issues such as democracy, religious freedom, the freedom of conscience, the rights of minorities and interfaith relations?

Except for a few countries such as Turkey, Malaysia, Indonesia and to some extent Pakistan, the concepts such as democracy, religious freedom, freedom of conscience, the rights of minorities and gender equity have not found much traction within the Muslim world by and large. Much of the Muslim world is under autocratic rulers, many of who are supported and enjoy political (and military) backing of the West. The West may desire democracy everywhere, but does not actually promote it when it comes to the oil-rich states. Algeria is one such example. Although Iran is democratic, the West insists on dubbing it ‘theocratic’.

The West did nothing to avert the return of military dictatorship in Egypt. Therefore, all the ideas that come along with democracy do not carry conviction in the Muslim world. This makes Muslims skeptical of the West’s intentions and turn to certain ideologies and forces that seem to promise them the safeguarding of their sovereignty, even if it comes at a price.