Opinion

Hagia Sophia and laicism

photo_camera Hagia Sophia and laicism

On 24 July, Hagia Sophia (or Ayasofya, as it is known in Turkey) will open its doors as a mosque after a period of eighty-six years as a non-denominational museum. The decision to convert the thousand-year-old building back into a Muslim temple has been one of the most talked about international news in recent weeks. Most analyses agree on the symbolic importance of converting what was the main Orthodox cathedral for a millennium into a mosque: the gesture undoubtedly allows Erdogan to show himself as a leader committed to religion both within and outside its borders. 

In Turkey, where the president is not at his most popular, the measure seeks to attract back some of the conservative voters who may have switched to the two new centre-right parties led by former Erdogan collaborators unhappy with his authoritarian turn: Ahmet Davutoglu's Future Party and Ali Babacan's Democracy and Progress Party. Abroad, the decision has been celebrated by Muslim Brotherhood supporters, whose networks have reproduced the Turkish president's Arabic-language communiqué asserting that the conversion of Hagia Sophia into a mosque is the first step towards the liberation of Al Aqsa. Of course, this statement is pure rhetoric, but it is a significant nod to the president's various Islamist allies at a time when Turkey is intensifying its presence in conflicts such as that in Libya.

Many of the analyses published in the international media go into detail about how the decision to transform Hagia Sophia into a mosque threatens the building's Christian heritage. For example, an article published in the influential Foreign Policy magazine states that for "millions of Christians around the world [the move] will be a disturbing echo of the bloody conquests of the Middle Ages," while media sympathetic to Russian Orthodox Christianity warn that it will "disrupt inter-religious relations". The media have also echoed the dismay of Pope Francis, as well as the concern of some heritage experts and UNESCO itself, which warns that the building's status as a World Heritage Site could be in danger, especially if the Byzantine mosaics are permanently covered. However, the main victim of the restoration of Hagia Sophia as a mosque is neither Christianity nor the heritage legacy, but the secular heritage of Atatürk, the founder of the Republic of Turkey - in 2023 the centenary of his proclamation will be celebrated. 

The fact that the foreign media are focusing on a supposed increase in tensions between Muslims and Christians - which has not yet materialised - and not on the progressive dismantling of Turkey's secularism - which has been a reality for years - is already a victory for Erdogan. Many of these media propose compromise solutions, such as the creation of inter-confessional spaces or the allocation of different days of worship for Muslims or Christians, who unconsciously take on board the Turkish president's discourse. The secularity of Hagia Sophia is therefore presented as a problem, not as one of the milestones of the new republic that emerged after the First World War and the Turkish War of Independence. Similarly, the decision to convert it into a mosque is shown as a fortuitous occurrence by Erdogan, when in fact it has been one of the demands of Turkish religious conservatives for more than half a century. 

History is fundamental to understanding a country's conflicts and debates; the controversy over Hagia Sophia is no exception. After the Ottoman defeat in World War I, the Turkish nationalist movement led by General Mustafa Kemal - later to be known as Atatürk, the father of the Tucos - organized resistance against the Allied occupation and the plans for the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire contained in the Treaty of Sèvres. After four years of war on various fronts - nine if we count the Great War - Kemal and his followers proclaimed the Republic of Turkey in July 1923 after expelling the Allies, securing the territorial integrity of Anatolia and putting an end to the Kurdish and Armenian independence movements. 

The new Turkish state was founded on six ideological pillars that illustrate well the political trends in the interwar world - the rise of fascism and communism, the discrediting of traditional European liberalism - and that represented a radical break with the Ottoman model, which the nationalists blamed for the decline and defeat of the Allies. These six principles are republicanism - as opposed to monarchy - Turkish nationalism - as opposed to the multicultural character of the Ottoman period - populism - social policies to encourage social mobility - statism - capitalist economy intervened by a strong state, secularism - Kemal blamed the religious establishment for Turkey's backwardness, and furthermore the creation of a strong state required the neutralization and submission of the Ulema - and revolution, the latter understood as the need to transform society and its customs from above. 

The consecration of Hagia Sophia as a secular museum is therefore closely linked to the ideology of the new republic established by Mustafa Kemal. The temple was officially opened as a museum in 1934, although it had already been closed to the public in 1931 for restoration work on the Byzantine American Institute by Thomas Whittemore, which had recently been rediscovered. The Turkish government saw in Hagia Sophia a perfect monument to enshrine the new interpretation of Turkish history that the ministry of education was trying to spread: a history that conceived of the various cultures that succeeded each other in Anatolia as ancestors of the Turks, even though the latter came from the steppes of Central Asia. At the same time, the establishment of the museum allowed the Turkish government to strengthen its relations with Greece and other Balkan countries, with whom it signed a mutual defence pact in 1934.

The opening of the museum was just one of many "revolutionary" measures taken in 1934: that same year, universal suffrage was established for both genders - by comparison, French women would not obtain the vote until 12 years later - the law on dress that limited the use of the turban and veil, and the law on the surname, which obliged citizens to choose a single hereditary name of Turkish origin for their families - Mustafa Kemal set an example by adopting the surname of Atatürk. Years earlier, the Republic had adopted the Turkish alphabet, a specific version of the Latin alphabet that replaced the Arabic aliphate used in Ottoman times. This was coupled with an effort to purge the Turkish language of Arab and Persian influences. The result was a radical break with the past: most Turks today cannot understand the language used in Ottoman times.

The prestige of Atatürk and his movement meant that these measures were adopted and implemented without excessive resistance. After all, the Kemalists had been able to save Turkey from foreign occupation and dismemberment, and their policies had encouraged social mobility. The modernizing revolution from above was understood as the best way to ensure Turkey's independence in an aggressive world, and in fact the model was copied in countries like Iran, where a young Cossack officer named Reza Khan had managed to become king.

Although Atatürk's legacy is still alive a century later, it is slowly fraying. The Turkish alphabet is still in use, and the country - especially the middle classes in the big cities - is still secular. However, any project of radical social change imposed from above has its limits. Once the first generation of republican politicians disappeared, and in a context of frequent military interventions, Islamism began to grow in Turkey, especially in rural areas and among disadvantaged segments of society. For years, the country's military, judicial and educational institutions had tried to safeguard secularism through laws and proclamations, allowing Islamists to present themselves as victims of an authoritarian system that denied the religion and traditions of the people. This victimhood has its reasons: let us recall that in 1997 the party of the Islamist Necmettin Erbakan, who had won the elections two years earlier, was banned.

Turkish Islamists have managed to exploit this image of being persecuted by the law. Leyla Sahin's case is paradigmatic: in 1998, the then medical student at Istanbul University was refused permission to take an exam because she was wearing the veil and she filed a complaint with the European Court of Human Rights. In 2015, Sahin became a member of parliament for Erdogan's AKP. Erdogan himself cultivated an image of being a dissident after being sentenced to prison in 1998 for incitement to religious hatred, although since he has been in power he has tried to use justice to silence his critics and opponents.

The conversion of Hagia Sophia into a mosque should therefore be read with the historical context in mind. More than a move to the gallery or a nod to Erdogan's external allies, it should be understood as a historical revenge of the Islamist movement on the secularists, who until the early 2000s held most of the positions of responsibility in the Turkish state. The symbolism of overturning one of the historical measures of Atatürk, who is considered the father of the Turkish fatherland and a virtually unchallenged figure in the Turkish public sphere, should also be considered. Erdogan, who has been in power for more than 15 years, aims to transform the country and become as important a figure as the founder of the Republic of Turkey. By turning the museum into a mosque, Erdogan is not challenging the Christians, but the secular elements in his own country.