“Today,” said Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Friday, “is Friday, May 29, and we had the opportunity to pray at Hagia. Attendance at Hagia Sophia was also very beautiful, magnificent. Today there was a march from Fatih to Hagia Sophia.” Fatih, or “The Conqueror,” was Sultan Mehmed II, and on May 29, 1453, he did indeed march to Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, which had stood at that time for nearly a thousand years as the grandest church in the Christian world.
His march, however, was not a serene victory march. It was a pitiless display of bloodlust and inhumanity, as the conquering Muslims laid waste to the great city and joyfully continued their orgy of rape and murder even inside the great cathedral itself. Once Mehmed entered, he had a muezzin pronounce the Islamic profession of faith and declared that the great cathedral was now a mosque. After over a thousand years, the Roman Empire was no more.
Erdogan, the child and heir of that bloodlust and inhumanity, entered that same Hagia Sophia mosque on Friday and prayed the prayers of the conquerors. The founder of secular Turkey, Kemal Ataturk, who for all his secular bent had no less bloodlust than Mehmed II, had converted the old cathedral into a museum in 1934. In 2020, however, the destroyer of secular Turkey, Erdogan, made it into a mosque again.
For centuries now, Hagia Sophia has been more valued as a symbol than as an actual place of worship. Erdogan’s restoration of Hagia Sophia’s status as a mosque is, as far as Erdogan and his supporters are concerned, the crowning, or at least the most symbolically rich, achievement of his long reign as Turkey’s neo-Ottoman sultan.
For Erdogan, the conversion of Hagia Sophia to a mosque is the symbol of Islam’s triumph over Kemalist secularism, just as for Ataturk himself, making Hagia Sophia a museum signified the triumph of secularism over political Islam. And, of course, Mehmed’s initial conversion of the cathedral into a mosque symbolized the triumph of Islam over Christianity.
The Islamization of Hagia Sophia also heralded the fall of the Roman Empire. For over a millennium, as Empire of God details, the Roman Empire, with its capital in Constantinople, had preserved the insights of the ancient Greek philosophers who laid the foundation for Western philosophical and political thought; held the line against first the barbarian hordes and then the warriors of jihad who ultimately triumphed against it, giving Western Europe enough breathing room to develop culturally, intellectually, and politically; and virtually defined the concept of “civilization” in a world fraught with nightmarish perils.
The fall of the Roman Empire is generally dated to 476, when its Western provinces fell to barbarians, and the Roman Empire in Constantinople is generally referred to as “Eastern Roman” or “Byzantine”; the people who actually lived in that empire never used those terms of themselves. They were simply Romans, the exponents of the world’s foremost civilization until that fateful day, May 29, 1453, when the ultimate barbarians finally broke through their defenses, destroyed the last remnants of their empire, and turned their great church into a mosque.
The conquest of Constantinople meant the eclipse of Christianity in Asia Minor, which had been such an important center of the faith that three of Paul’s New Testament epistles — Galatians, Ephesians, and Colossians — were addressed to Christian congregations there. It meant a massive victory for the warriors of jihad, who would continue to advance into Eastern Europe until they were stopped at Vienna in 1683, their own empire already fatally weakened by the economic decline of the Jews and Christians upon whom the jihadis depended for their living.
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It is that parasitical and violent civilization that Recep Tayyip Erdogan went to Hagia Sophia on Friday to celebrate, and that he is working so very hard to revive. As The Tragedy of Islam demonstrates, Islam instills in its adherents no work ethic, no idea that they should support themselves by the fruit of their own labors. Instead, the ideal Islamic state is one in which the Muslims live on the backs of the conquered infidels, whose lands they have seized and holy places they have appropriated and turned into mosques.
The fall of Constantinople and the conversion of Hagia Sophia were a crowning triumph for Islam, for it was a perfect example of the pattern that is always supposed to prevail: the bloody conquest of the infidels, the taking of their cherished possessions, the reduction of them to dhimmis whose labors support the Muslims. That’s what Erdogan was celebrating in his conquered and appropriated holy place: bloodlust, subjugation, and exploitation. And, with his increasing belligerence toward Greece and Armenia, he clearly means to repeat the cycle himself.
