Istanbul: towards a reopening of Hagia Sophia to Muslim worship?

Text by: Anne Andlauer

This Thursday is a decisive day for one of the most famous buildings in the world: the status of Saint Sophia in Istanbul, Turkey, must be debated in the Council of State. His decision could allow the reopening of Hagia Sophia - which was first a Byzantine church for nine centuries, then an Ottoman mosque, then a museum under the Republic - for Muslim worship, as President Erdogan wanted.

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From our correspondent in Istanbul , 

The Council of State meets this Thursday to examine the complaint of a Muslim association. She maintains that the 1934 decree which transformed Hagia Sophia - which was then a mosque - into a museum is a forgery. That Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Republic who nevertheless signed this decree and visited the museum as soon as it opened in February 1935, never actually made such a decision.

From a legal point of view, until recently, this complaint had almost no chance of succeeding, because the same chamber of the Council of State has rejected the same association for the same request several times in the past 15 years. .. But there are two new elements which suggest that today the highest administrative court could change its mind.

Erdogan wants to reconquer Hagia Sophia

First, last year it revoked the museum status granted in 1945 to Saint-Sauveur-in-Chora, a prominent former Byzantine church converted to a mosque after the Ottoman conquest in 1453 - just like Hagia Sophia. Then, and above all, President Erdogan himself promised to reopen the “  Sainte-Sophie mosque  ”, and his control over the judiciary is hardly in doubt.

But Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been in power for 18 years. Why act so late? In the president's political family, returning the cupola of Hagia Sophia to Islam is a dream as old as its transformation into a museum. But from the moment he came to power, pragmatically Tayyip Erdogan has constantly rejected calls to convert Hagia Sophia into a mosque. He used to answer that the faithful first had to fill the great mosque of Sultanahmet, located just opposite.

It was only last year, on the eve of local elections where his party suffered very heavy defeats - notably losing the town hall of Istanbul - that the head of state began to demand his reconversion into a mosque . Behind the scenes of power, it is said that the president would like to organize a great collective prayer there on July 15, the day of the commemorations of the failed coup in summer 2016.

Hagia Sophia, a matter of principle

On the domestic scene, Erdogan has little to gain from this change of status of Hagia Sophia. With the exception of the most conservative Muslims and Christian minorities, the Turks are generally indifferent to the fate of Hagia Sophia, even if they do not, of course, oppose it becoming a mosque again. But this is far from being an urgent request from the majority of Turks - voters of the president included - who are mainly concerned with their economic situation. A gesture as symbolic as the re-Islamization of Hagia Sophia would certainly be a means of diversion, but its effects would only have a time.

Perhaps the motivations of the Turkish president must be sought in his increasingly complicated relations with Europe, and the West in general. At a time when Turkey's candidacy for the European Union still had a meaning - or at least a future -, Recep Tayyip Erdogan would never have risked touching the status of Hagia Sophia. But at a time when his actions in Syria, Libya and the eastern Mediterranean continue to arouse criticism from Westerners, the Turkish president is now making Hagia Sophia a question of national sovereignty.

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