To be honest, everything about the Hagia Sophia is symbolic. It’s a spectacular building for many reasons (for me its about the gold leaf mosaics), but one of the most repeated ones points to its role as a witness to the history of Istanbul. It started as a church around 360 AD when the city was still Constantinople, and stayed a church, for one sect or another, for over a millennium. After the fall of the city to Ottoman forces in 1453 the building began a phase as a mosque, one that would last until 1935 when Ataturk designated the place a museum.
The joy of seeing the building in real life is that it feels like you’re visiting a living, breathing being rather than a collection of bricks and stone. Something that old, that large, that grand, and that holy to that many: it would be impossible not to think of it as alive in some way. To walk through it even for a few minutes is to see history unfold onto itself like a rip in time. I know that many of the white people who taught me about it at school, the building symbolized secularism above all else. They loved to emphasize how the building was so old that it rose into a firmament all its own above the petty squabbles of history.
The professors spent weeks of our classes on the Hagia Sophia, extolling everything from the glittering gold mosaics to the monolithic stone pillars supporting massive ovals of Arabic calligraphy, but always emphasizing the way it was both mosque and church but now neither. That, I was taught, is the context to its value in the new world. A non-conformational beat pageant building waving a sign of world peace.
The building’s conversion to a mosque isn’t nearly as abrupt as it may seem. It belonged to the last Sultan who stipulated that it always remain a mosque, a directive that was swiftly replaced by Ataturk’s vision of a European Turkey which branded the mosque a museum. Its latest avatar as a museum was for less than 80 years, a blip is it’s pan-religious lifespan. That people are disturbed at the conversion, as I was when I first read about it, is likely because of what it represents: the only secular Muslim nation sliding closer and closer to a religiously performative identity. My impulse is to say “oh how awful”, to mourn the loss of Secularism in a muslim majority country amidst a fear that Turkey is on a road to become more like Pakistan or Afghanistan, toxic swamps of religious intolerance that are largely the efforts of cultural rebrandings and foreign interventions gone wrong. Much like us, the Turks are at war among themselves, caught between those who want to be more like Europe and the others who are acutely aware that white Europe doesn’t want them.
What happened in Turkey has happened to mosques all over the world, which doesn’t make it at all better, but does beg the question: why do we reserve our dismay only for the Turks when it is still illegal to pray in the mosque of Cordoba in Spain? Is it because secularism is considered more fruitful than religion? OK, but if we zoom out, this sort of petty rebranding happens all over the world of any faith – usually by weak-willed men hopeful that renaming a street, city, people or even building can serve as a lazy victory for whatever culture they were hoping to honor. It’s happening next door as Indians try desperately to rebrand themselves in Hindutva rage by cherry picking which of their history they are comfortable with, which is exactly what the rest of the world does too.
Which brings us to this: One of the larger fictions destroyed over the past twenty years (and especially in the last 20 weeks) is that the West is secular. It isn’t. Not by a long shot. America (as this pandemic and presidency have laid bare) is a white, Christian nation before it is anything else, including sane. The Queen of England, lovely old lady that she might be, is the Queen because she is the head of the Church of England. That these institutions are so old that sometimes we cannot see their truth under the dusts of time doesn’t mean those truths don’t still exert themselves. My question, more to myself than anyone else, is if I am meant to be uncomfortable with the Turks converting their most famous building back into a mosque, is that supposed to be because they are Muslim and non-white? If another country, say Spain or France, did the same to a mosque, would the world react the same way? Would be having the same debate?
I don’t think we would.
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