The Hagia Sophia and Turkey’s Neo-Ottomanism
To the secularized world, Erdoğan’s decision last year to convert a UNESCO museum into a mosque came as an unpleasant surprise, especially as it was made in a (still) secular country. This decision was generally condemned, but not, surprisingly, by some Christian clerics, like Giles Fraser, Priest-in-Charge of St. Mary’s in south London. For these clerics, secularization is downright demonic, and the idea of making a museum out of a place for worship a sacrilege. In the words of Fraser, “The Hagia Sophia was profaned by secularity in 1935. For secularism is not a way for all religions to share the public space peacefully; it is a systematic and deliberate attempt to drive God out of the public square.” Therefore, Fraser reasoned, “Christians should be delighted” by Erdoğan’s move. Welcoming the end of the Hagia Sophia museum as a victory against secularism, Fraser, and those who think like him, seem oblivious to the underlying motivations for this decision, which are political, not religious. But instrumentalizing religion by politics has always had a very complex history.
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Felicitări.e un articol destul de amplu.
I read the article with rapt attention and lost it when you mentioned the Babri masjid in India. Read some history as you profess from different authors then you would know the truth about Babri. Just like a existing church was occupied, locals butchered, raped,made slaves ,Hindus temples met the same end. And inspite of repeated petitions on Babri area since 1800’s mind you 1800’s Hindus were fighting for this issue. What’s makes you to conclude Islamophobia is higher by Hindu nationalists? Read engage your brain cells with more well rounded history of india, Hindus and Muslim rulers in India.
“The memory of the fall of Constantinople remained an open wound for Europe, especially for Eastern Christianity and even more so for Greek Orthodoxy”
You would never know the deepest pain we Hindus bore caused by both Islam and Christian fundamentalists imposed on us. Read about what Portugal Christians did to India( Goa)
What you ended was a straw man argument
Curiously, this series is quite accurate when it comes to very small details. For instance: in E4 S2 10:30, young Mehmet and Vlad randomly open the Iliad to read their future, according to a custom of the time. Mehmet reads the words of Hector just before his last duel with Achilles (22, 304-305) “Let me not then die ingloriously and without a struggle, but let me first do some great thing that shall be told amongst men hereafter”. The page is framed for a second or less, but if you freeze it and zoom it, it’s indeed book 22 of an old edition of the Iliad (although not at the right verse: Mehmed’s finger points verse 173, some five or four pages before!)
(Actually Mehmed’s finger points verse 230, not 173. My mistake: they are the same!)