Reflecting on Reactions to Hagia Sophia's Reopening as a Mosque

In this essay, we reflect on the conversion of Hagia Sophia from museum back to mosque in light of the discussions that have taken place since the transformation happened on 24 July 2020. Let us begin with the initial reactions to the museum-to-mosque conversion, especially in mainstream media in the US and Europe. In much of that reporting, Hagia Sophia's Byzantine past was emphasized, and narratives of Ottoman conquest connected to misleading notions of Islamic iconoclasm followed. Thus, the building's life as a church (537–1453) has obscured its history as a mosque (1453–1934). Among reactions to the 2020 transformation, writing that also carefully considered the Hagia Sophia's Ottoman context, and the fact that the building was affected by changes in Ottoman political and religious life over time, was slow to emerge.¹ Why does this matter? Hagia Sophia is a Byzantine monument, it is an Ottoman monument, and it was until 2020 one of modern Turkey's most important museum-monuments. This statement should be self-apparent, yet in reactions to the museum-to-mosque conversion, Hagia Sophia at times appeared only as a Byzantine monument that has now—through the insistence of Turkey's current government, fulfilling a long-time dream of right-wing politics—turned into a mosque to the detriment of its Byzantine past. We contend that this view is mistaken because it does not take into account the entire history of the building, and it neglects the multiple and complex past(s) of both the monument and the city where it is located.

Interestingly in Turkey, we have a mirror image of this one-dimensional representation of Hagia Sophia, this time as a mosque. The Ottoman conquest of the city in 1453, according to the supporters of Hagia Sophia's conversion, was seen as an almost eschatological event, resulting in the building's rebirth as a spiritual monument for Muslims, rendering its earlier history irrelevant. This view becomes clear from the name of the building, which now appears as "Ayasofya-i Kebir Camii" (Grand Ayasofya Mosque) on an official website presenting cultural sites in Turkey.² Commemorative coins issued recently use the same name with the dates 1453–2020, ignoring the first 900 years of Hagia Sophia's existence.³ Islamists saw the 1934 decision to turn the mosque into a museum during the early Turkish republic as a top-down imposition, ignoring the sensitivities of pious Muslims and also waqf law.

This conquest narrative emphasizing the rebirth of the building as a mosque has, since the 1950s, been popular among different branches of Turkey's right wing political establishment. It is now also the official view of the state, the result of a larger push toward homogenizing the historical representation of Istanbul under the Islamist AKP (in alliance with the nationalist MHP). In recent years, we have seen the government pursue a political agenda based on the representation of Istanbul as a Sunni Muslim Turkish city in a Sunni Muslim Turkey, with a glorious Sunni, Muslim, Turkish and Ottoman past. This agenda belies the past and present ethnic, racial, and religious diversity of the city (and Turkey at large). An open question at the moment is whether the new administration of Istanbul under Ekrem İmamoğlu, the social democrat mayor who was elected in June 2019 after defeating a decades-old Islamist municipal government, will change this monolithic representation. The larger point concerning the suppression of Byzantine heritage goes beyond Istanbul, but is especially poignant there due to the number of extant sites, most of which have functioned as mosques since the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.⁴ Of these sites, Hagia Sophia and the Kariye Camii/Chora Church are the only ones that had been functioning as museums until summer 2020. Soon after Hagia Sophia's reopening as a mosque, an analogous decision was taken for the Kariye Camii/Chora Church, raising fears about the fate of its fourteenth-century mosaics and wall-paintings.⁵ As Christina Maranci has...