The Hagia Sophia decree is about more than religious chauvinism

As the choreography of culture wars goes, it cannot be faulted. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish president, last week decreed that the 1,500-year-old Hagia Sophia, the Byzantine cathedral-turned-mosque-turned-museum, will once again become a mosque. This crown jewel of Istanbul’s majestic skyline is being weaponised for the purpose of mass distraction.

Mr Erdogan, the towering figure of Turkey this century, has won more than a dozen electoral victories to sweep aside a parliamentary system with an authoritarian presidency that allows him to rule like a neo-Sultan. He is nevertheless under political stress.

Last year his winning streak was checked by opposition triumphs in Istanbul — the city essential to his mystique, where he had his political start as mayor — the capital Ankara, and a string of other important urban centres. These proved he is politically mortal.

This year, the coronavirus pandemic has piled strain on to a faltering economy. Mr Erdogan’s success has more to do with his record of delivering strong economic growth than his Islamist revivalism. The ability to provide trumps identity politics. That is doubly so now that the city governments run by his enemies have outperformed national government in the Covid-19 emergency.

The Hagia Sophia decree is about more than religious chauvinism. It is calibrated to rally far-right nationalists on whom Mr Erdogan increasingly depends. Anticipating the outcry from abroad, from Pope Francis to Patriarch Kirill of Russia, from Unesco to the EU, from the White House to the Kremlin, Mr Erdogan had his answer ready: “Are you ruling Turkey or are we?”

Yet this preaching to the converted probably has limited value at home. Nor will it endear Mr Erdogan to his strongman friends: President Vladimir Putin in Russia, who has assumed the role of champion of the Orthodox Church worldwide, or President Donald Trump in the US, who will rely on evangelical Christian voters for his re-election in November. In Europe, if Turkey’s EU accession bid was already moribund, the Hagia Sophia decree is probably its death certificate.

Hagia Sophia was completed in 537 by the Byzantine emperor Justinian I, before the advent of Islam. It became a mosque after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople (later Istanbul) in 1453. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of the Turkish republic, then turned it into a museum in 1934. Reclaiming it as a universal legacy for Turkey was a plural gesture, pointing to a secular future, in part to shift attention away from how the collapsing Ottoman Empire emptied Turkey of Christians in mass killings of Armenians, Assyrians and Greeks.

It is a reminder that identity politics gets especially lethal when laced with religion. Yet there are different comparative examples. Jerusalem is historically the most contested and combustible space in the world, a thrice holy city to Jews, Christians and Muslims, all of whose traditions are in the grain of its stone. It has also seen horrendous carnage. When Christian crusaders captured Jerusalem in 1099, they slaughtered an estimated 70,000 Muslims and Jews. But Jerusalem has also been an arena of courtesy and tolerance.

When Muslim armies defeated the Byzantines in Syria and conquered Jerusalem in 637, Umar, the second caliph after the death of the Prophet Mohammed, refused an invitation from the patriarch to pray in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which Christian tradition holds housed the tomb of Jesus before resurrection (and is itself built on the ruins of a Roman temple to Aphrodite).

Umar feared it might be seen as a signal to turn the church into a mosque. He also cleared the refuse from Temple Mount, called by Umar the sanctuary of David, but used by the Byzantines as a stable.

This showed an understanding that emotive sacred tradition is not to be trifled with. Even today, after Israel has annexed and colonised Arab East Jerusalem, and won Mr Trump’s recognition of all of the Holy City as Israel’s capital, the Israelis enforce a ban on non-Muslims praying within the Holy Sanctuary or in Haram al-Sharif housing the Dome of the Rock and Al Aqsa mosque, Islam’s third holiest site.

A contrasting example is the Babri Masjid case at Ayodhya in northern India. There, a 16th-century mosque was demolished in 1992 by followers of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a Hindu supremacist parent organisation of the ruling Bharatiya Janata party. Narendra Modi, India’s current prime minister, is a life-long member of the RSS. In November last year, India’s supreme court gave the go-ahead to build a temple on the mosque’s ruins to Lord Ram, the Hindu deity whose birthplace they claim it was.

But will this triumphalist moment be held tantalisingly out of reach, to keep the Hindu revivalist base mobilised? Or will it be acted on to intimidate India’s 200m Muslim minority, painted as fifth columnists who bow to Mecca?

These two cases provide stark alternatives for Mr Erdogan to choose between. He seems to prefer the Modi model of painting Turkey’s big Sunni Muslim majority as victims. Not for him the humane formula of the Caliph Umar in Jerusalem, let alone Ataturk’s universal solution for Hagia Sophia, offering it to those of all religions, or none.