With the conversion of the museum of Hagia Sophia back into a mosque, I’ve been searching for comments from the West’s many multiculturalists and Islamophiles. I half-expected a lot of cheering. For example, “Hurray, they are finally throwing off the shackles of Western oppression,” or “At last, Islamic culture can grow again unfettered by a lot of non-Islamic ideas about secularism.” So far, though, there has been mostly silence from the usual suspects. For most people, it appears unworthy of comment. However, there have been stock statements of disapproval, even from leaders whom I expected to support it. For example, the Pope has expressed sadness about it, even though he has seemed more Muslim than Christian at times.
Could it be that this change in the status of Hagia Sophia is actually a development that the Islamophiles don’t like? That would be strange. After all, if the oppression of women and gays and the murders of lots of liberals and leftists don’t upset you, why would changing the status of a mere building do it? Yet, that seems to be the case. Here, for example, is an essay in the Washington Post complaining that a multicultural symbol is being ruined. A commenter on a blog somewhere (sorry, I didn’t keep track of it) claimed that the EU was to blame for not allowing Turkey to be a member, though this ignores the long history of Islamist developments in the Muslim world which explains Turkish leader Erdogan's decision nicely (and which I have talked about here). On the other hand, it acknowledges it as a bad development.
Of course, if one digs deep enough, one can find what one expects. Here is an essay from a liberal-minded rabbi, who is clueless about Hagia Sophia’s early history, and here is an essay with the following choice quote:
It is disingenuous of Western observers to say that Hagia Sophia should remain a museum for the sake of religious tolerance. If tolerance and moderation are our goals, then we should welcome the return of the call to prayer to Hagia Sophia, just as we would welcome the return of church bells at Notre Dame, had it been turned into a museum by secular revolutionaries.
Actually, Notre Dame is mostly a museum, or at least it is treated as such by most tourists. I’m surprised the French haven’t demanded that it be turned into a museum. Anyway, it has been burned, no doubt by Islamists. Getting back to Hagia Sophia, the author of this essay, Nathaniel Handy, goes on to say that “To welcome it is to support moderate Islam.” Hardly. It’s to support reactionary Islam, but it’s hard to get through to multiculturalists on this issue.
What I want to know is, what do multiculturalists in Greece and Germany think about it? Greece, after all, freed itself from Turkey just a couple centuries ago, and one can find plenty of news articles about how Christians there are very upset. I also found a blog post from a communist group that didn’t like it, but I want to know specifically about the multiculturalists in Greece, and so far I have found nothing. I’m also interested in what the multiculturalists of Germany think because it is home to a lot of Turks, who I’m sure are celebrating. But how do such celebrations sit with all the “open borders” proponents in Germany? So far, I haven’t found anything.
Incidentally, this essay mentions some ridiculous beliefs that Turkish Muslims have about history, and then adds:
It is even worse when Westerners play along, as was the case when National Geographic, in a resource library page on Istanbul that had to be deleted after widespread Greek outcry, bizarrely referred to how “the Greeks and Romans were forced out by the indigenous Ottoman Turks.”
Sigh.
Let me close with this story, which I may have related before. In 2008, I spent a month in Cairo at a little Arabic language school there. One of my fellow students was a Turkish woman who explained to me one day that she was Muslim, and her parents were Muslim, and Turkey itself was majority Muslim, but when she told her parents she was going to Egypt to study Arabic, they said, “Watch out! That’s a Muslim country.” She thought this was pretty funny, and so did I, but the point is that her parents understood that at that time, Egypt was fundamentalist while Turkey was moderate and actually quite secular. Today, though, things have changed and Turkey is rapidly become fundamentalist, too.
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