7th Rangers: The Second Islamic Conquest of Hagia Sophia - President Erdogan’s power play should not go unanswered by the liberal-democratic West - By Cameron Hilditch
Fighting Seventh
The Fighting Rangers On War, Politics and Burning Issues
“We are not retreating. We are advancing in another direction.”
“It is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it.”
“Old soldiers never die; they just fade away.
“The soldier, above all other people, prays for peace,
for he must suffer and be the deepest wounds and scars of war.”
“May God have mercy upon my enemies, because I won't .” “The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.
“Nobody ever defended anything successfully, there is only attack and attack and attack some more.
“Fixed fortifications are a monument to the stupidity of man." “It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.
The Second Islamic Conquest of Hagia Sophia - President Erdogan’s power play should not go unanswered by the liberal-democratic West - By Cameron Hilditch
National Review : TheChurch
of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople is a purpose-built structure, and its
purpose is the worship of the Christian God.
This particular function is
not incidental to the way the church was designed and built by its two
visionary architects at the high meridian of the Byzantine Empire.
Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus were what their
contemporaries called mechanopoioi, a term that is best
translated, according to Richard Krautheimer, as “architect–scientists.”
Their elite proficiency in mathematics and physics suited them to the
task they’d been given by the emperor: building an originally Christian
place of worship. In the sixth century, Christians were still drawing on
the aesthetics of pagan antiquity, and the basilicas and colonnades of
classical Rome had been accepted as the supreme expression of
architectural grandeur. Hagia Sophia changed all that.
When Emperor Justinian entered the church for the first time after
its completion, he is said to have boasted, “Solomon, I have vanquished
thee!” He, or rather his two architects, certainly had. With an interior
space of almost 43,000 square feet, it was at the time the
single-greatest building ever constructed. Its crowning jewel was its
gravity-defying central dome, which in a single stroke supplanted the
basilica as the defining feature of church architecture in Eastern
Christendom. The dome serves as a mirror to heaven, believed in late
antiquity to be the most distant in a series of concentric spheres, and
its 40 windows allow light from above to shine upon the glittering
religious mosaics inside the church. But its most important religious
function is musical.
The interior of Hagia Sophia was designed for the
antiphonal singing of the Christian liturgy, with two choir sections
alternating chants across from one another. The dome captures and
enhances the sound of this exchange. Musical notes usually reverberate
for two to three seconds in a modern concert hall. In Hagia Sophia, they
resound for up to twelve seconds, enveloping worshippers in the sounds
of the liturgy — or at least they did, until the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453.
For 482 years after that, Hagia Sophia was used as a mosque. In the
1930s, when Turkey was born from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire as a
secular state, the mosque was repurposed once more as a museum for
Christians, Muslims, and any other admirers to visit.
But now, that
state is being systematically remade by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan,
who has come to dominate Turkish politics with his own malevolent brand
of neo-Ottoman Islamic nationalism. Erdogan has long sought to reconvert
Hagia Sophia into a mosque, and this week he was finally granted his
wish by the Turkish Council of State. The Council’s legal reasoning was
about as risible as one could possibly imagine: It ruled that the
initial conversion of the church into a museum in 1934 was unlawful,
because Hagia Sophia was the personal property of Mehmet the Conqueror,
the sultan who captured the city in 1453.
The Council then transferred
control of the museum to a foundation named after the sultan, which is
in favor of its repurposing as a mosque. There are many problems with
this ruling, but chief among them is the fact that under 15th-century
Ottoman law, as Professor Metin Günday has observed, the entire country
was the personal property of the sultan. The legal precedent set in the
case of Hagia Sophia seems to suggest that through the shell foundation
named after Mehmet II, any living heir of the sultan can lay personal
proprietary claim to the entire nation of Turkey and all of the property
therein!
What’s more, the Church of Hagia Sophia has now been reduced
to the same legal status it held at the sack of Constantinople, with
Muslims worshipping there on the legal basis of Mehmet’s bloody conquest of the Christian population.
It is true that the conquest ethic was, until very recently,
universal in human relations, and it does no one any good to condemn the
actions of medieval men in this regard or to adjudicate property
disputes accordingly. To call Mehmet the Conqueror a violent and
oppressive warlord is merely to observe that he was a political leader
in the middle of the 15th century. But for a court of law to resurrect
the logic of medieval conquest in the 21st century is truly appalling.
To repeat: Christians’ access to one of their greatest holy sites will
now be greatly curtailed on the grounds that they were conquered by a
Muslim sultan and forced into what can only be described as sacred-asset
forfeiture at the point of a sword more than 500 years ago.
The global response to Erdogan’s move has ranged from indifference to
outrage. The Turks have close ties with Moscow, and the Russian deputy
foreign minister said last Monday that changing the status of the church
to a mosque was the internal business of the Turkish government. (Given
the way in which the Kremlin has sought to blur the lines between Orthodox Christianity and Russian Nationalism,
its acquiescence to the desecration of an iconic, non-Russian Orthodox
church is perhaps unsurprising.)
By contrast, the Greek culture minister
called Erdogan’s move an “open provocation to the civilized world” in a
statement on Friday, and the Greek government is pushing for the
European Union to impose diplomatic sanctions on Turkey. The leader of
the Italian Northern League, Matteo Salvini, has also criticized the
decision, citing it as evidence that “the pre-eminence of Islam is
incompatible with the values of democracy, freedom and tolerance of the
West.”The dome that was so ingeniously designed by Anthemius and Isidore has
been used as the model for mosque architecture ever since. Indeed, when
Caliph Abd el-Malik commissioned the Dome of the Rock, now considered
one of the great masterpieces of Islamic art, to be built in Jerusalem,
he employed Byzantine architects and craftsmen, which is probably why
the structure looks so much like the same city’s Church of the Holy
Sepulchre.
“To the extent that Arab elites acquired a sophisticated
culture, they learned it from their subject peoples,” the sociologist
Rodney Stark has noted. The much-vaunted “Arabic” numeral system is in
fact Hindu in origin, based on the concept of zero, which had
theretofore eluded the Muslim overlords of Hindu populations. The
earliest scientific text that appeared in Arabic, the holy language of
Islam, was translated by a Jewish physician from the work of a Syrian
Christian priest in Alexandria, which would have surprised no Arabian
Muslim of that time. As Stark notes, “‘Muslim’ or ‘Arab’ medicine was in
fact Nestorian Christian medicine; even the leading Muslim and Arab
physicians were trained at the enormous Nestorian medical center at
Nisibus in Syria.”