South China Morning Post


By Serkan Yolacan


After an 86-year pause, Friday prayers will resume at the Hagia Sophia
this week, following Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s decree
to convert Istanbul’s iconic museum back into a mosque.

The decision, which has been greeted with dismay around the world, has
been interpreted by many as an Islamist attempt to undo Turkey
’s secularist legacy – Hagia Sophia’s status was changed from mosque
to museum in 1934 by a cabinet order signed by the country’s secular
founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

In Turkey, however, there has been little opposition to the move from
Erdogan’s political rivals, even secularists. In fact, in a rare
display of agreement with the government, all opposition parties save
one have applauded it.

This surprising response reveals a vein in Turkish politics that is
more powerful than either Islamism or secularism, yet is overshadowed
by both: the Turkish-Islamic Synthesis, a right-wing ideology which
holds that Islam is indispensable to Turkish identity and that Turks
have a privileged role in the spread of the religion.

Hagia Sophia, known to Turks as Ayasofya, was inaugurated in 537 as
the state church of the Roman Empire. It later became the patriarchal
cathedral of the Eastern Orthodox Church before being ransacked by
Latin crusaders in 1204. Some 250 years later, the Ottoman Sultan
Mehmet II turned the majestic building into a mosque and built his
seraglio, the Topkapi Palace, next to it upon conquering
Constantinople. Until last week, these historic structures were by far
the two most visited museums of Istanbul. No more – the
church-turned-mosque-turned-museum is, once again, a mosque.

Erdogan is not the first leader to open Hagia Sophia to Muslim prayer.
That distinction belongs to Turgut Ozal, the former Turkish president
whose centrist political legacy Erdogan openly embraced in carrying
his party to power in the early 2000s.

In 1991, Ozal dedicated the Sultan’s Pavilion, an 18th-century annex
of the iconic building, to Muslim prayer without changing the Hagia
Sophia’s status as a museum. Although this was a symbolic act, it went
a long way towards showing how the long-held dreams of Turkey’s Muslim
conservatives could be addressed without openly attacking Ataturk’s
legacy. To walk this fine line, Ozal leaned on the Turkish-Islamic
Synthesis.

Although Ataturk and his secularist reforms sat uncomfortably within
this ideology, its proponents, unlike the Islamists, did not take
issue with the modern Turkish state’s founder. After all, he was the
defender of Gallipoli, a major historical symbol for nationalists and
Islamists alike, and saved Istanbul from allied occupation after the
first world war. In their eyes, serving Turks meant serving Islam.

Ataturk thus belonged to the pantheon of Turkish leaders who brought
glory to Islam, never mind his secularist bent. The Turkish-Islamic
Synthesis provided a bridge between Islamists and nationalists, and
seeped into the mainstream over the past 30 years – nearly two-thirds
of which has passed with Erdogan in a leadership role. It now defines
the broad parameters of what passes as legitimate politics among both
the right and left.

Whether it is the conquest of Istanbul, the battle of Gallipoli, or
the Hagia Sophia, such symbols of Turkish-Islamic Synthesis are now
the cornerstone of majoritarian politics in Turkey. No political actor
can openly defy the ideology without risking the chance to occupy the
political centre – hence the broad acceptance of Erdogan’s move. But
while this seems like a win-win situation for the president, it also
signals trouble ahead for him.

For one, Erdogan’s politics increasingly rely on polarisation, and
consensus is not an advantage for him. The international opposition is
also a worrying sign. The president has an image problem in the West,
and this decision, if anything, will worsen it. More importantly, the
country is reeling economically, and cannot afford any fallout.
Erdogan knows this well. Last year, he dismissed suggestions to turn
the Hagia Sophia into a mosque, saying it was a political trap. Yet he
is now willingly entering the trap. Why?

Of late, Erdogan has had nothing to offer but symbols. Some have come
in the form of megaprojects, like the country’s biggest mosque in
Camlica, Istanbul, completed and inaugurated in 2019. Another mosque
is being completed in Taksim, the symbolic square of the republic
which was the epicentre of the massive Gezi Park protests in 2013. The
Hagia Sophia move is the latest example. In the meantime, the state he
is running is tangled in webs of nepotism and is unable to arrest the
economy’s free-fall. The patronage networks he has spearheaded have
made Erdogan unpopular with the majority, and he is using symbols to
touch base with his constituency and rally support.

Erdogan knows he is on thin ice.

In the past, as an unrivalled strongman leader, his favoured
instrument of rule was the presidential decree. This time, instead of
annulling Ataturk’s 1934 decision via this route, he chose to wait for
the Council of State, the highest administrative court in the country,
to act first. Although nobody mistakes the court’s decision for a
legal proceeding independent of Erdogan, his decision to invoke the
judiciary’s authority shows that he is uncertain of his ability to
face down international pressures, and that he knows he does not have
the political capital to take full responsibility for the move.

Despite Turkish Islamists’ joy at the move, these are ever more
uncertain times for Erdogan. When he was asked how he slept on the
night of his historic decision, he said he could not sleep until first
light.

He did not say why.

Dr Serkan Yolacan, a Turk, is a research fellow at the Middle East
Institute at the National University of Singapore