On the occasion of Hagia Sophia, Muslims' word to Muslims

After an interval of 86 years, the Hagia Sophia Grand Mosque has been opened again for worship with a magnificent congregation and a beautiful Friday prayer. The squares, filled with great reverence and excitement by people from every part of Turkey and even of the world, witnessed a historic day. It was not the Hagia Sophia that was freed from 86 years of captivity; it was this congregation itself, which had been barred from reaching it. That is why the Hagia Sophia, toward which the congregation ran to embrace it with great longing, seemed with all its dignity, its calm, its witness, to greet those who came with longing.

How many generations make 86 years?

It is not, to be sure, a very long span in human history, and for the age of the Hagia Sophia it counts as a very short one. But it is, after all, the time of an ordeal that for the last century the whole Islamic world, in the person of this nation, has fallen into, each day of it stretching like a century. It is as though the whole weight of this long ordeal had been laid upon the Hagia Sophia's old but powerful body. Yet the Hagia Sophia bore this burden with patience and resistance. For years it endured the indifference and disrespect of tourists who did not know it, who walked through it as a dead object of the past, disregarding its character as a house of worship. Perhaps not for every visitor, but for most travelers the Hagia Sophia was a dead temple. A temple whose function had been locked, buried alive in history. Yet the Hagia Sophia was built so that Allah would be worshipped in it, so that Allah would be remembered. The perfection of its existence could be realized only when it met its congregation that remembers Him freely, and of course it would fit into no history in which it had been buried alive.

On the occasion of the Hagia Sophia decision, Turkey and Muslims have much to say to the world, but we said that part of what is to be said will first of all be said to the so-called Muslim world.

Muslims all over the world watched the opening of the Hagia Sophia for worship with great excitement. Because they know very well what this step means. If the Hagia Sophia is being opened to the worship of Allah, it means that the way to the freedom of Jerusalem and of the Masjid al-Aqsa is being opened too. This step gives the footfalls of the will of Muslims in every corner of the world to emerge from the interregnum. The opening of the Hagia Sophia for worship, the revival of its character as a mosque, rekindles the fire of hope not only of Muslims but, together with them, of all the oppressed, the wronged, the downtrodden, the exploited.

In this state, the Hagia Sophia is issuing a call to prayer not only to non-Muslims but, first of all, to all Muslims, to shake off the deadness upon them and to rise up.

Unfortunately, today, before the words Muslims must say to the world, Muslims themselves are in a state of heedlessness. Neither the ears nor the hearts of Muslims are sufficiently open to the cause and call of Islam, which rises as a mercy to the worlds. That is why the words Islam will say to the world on the occasion of the Hagia Sophia must first be grasped, embraced and lived by Muslims, that is, by those who will carry the message.

Yet the Islamic world today is far from the spirit of the Hagia Sophia. In defiance of Islam, which places the rights of servants above all rights, the greatest number of human rights violations in the world are in Islamic countries. They have no share left of the delicacy and sensitivity of a Prophet who said, "He is not one of us who sleeps full while his neighbor goes hungry." With the food that is left over from the tables of the rulers and the rich of some Islamic countries, which sit on the wealth of the world with the natural resources that Allah has given abundantly, and is poured into the garbage, the hungry of a continent could be fed. But neither is this waste given up nor is the slightest sensitivity shown toward the hungry of the world.

Religious, belief, thought and expression freedom, symbolized in the existence of the Hagia Sophia, means nothing to the leading Islamic countries. Today in the dungeons of Egypt, BAE and Saudi Arabia, among the leading countries of the Islamic world, Islamic scholars and intellectuals are held arbitrarily in dungeons without question or inquiry. They are made victims of extrajudicial executions, or their lives are blackened by sham trials. Human life is not worth as much as a bird.

The plundering mentality of the age of jahiliyya, in which whoever has the power seizes the property, honor and authority of others, has become dominant. The political counterpart today of this plundering-marauding mentality is coup-making. The coups set in motion against the Arab peoples who set out to live a spring in pursuit of their freedoms, their honor and their bread constitute today the governing vision of an important part of the Islamic world.

Is it possible, from this vision, to hear the call to prayer that will echo from the minarets of the Hagia Sophia?

Indeed, while the whole Islamic world was grasping the opening of the Hagia Sophia Mosque for worship with its heart, its mind, its soul, a strange voice came from Egypt's Mufti Shawki Allam: "Churches should be preserved as they are and not converted into mosques, and likewise mosques should not be converted into churches. Nothing like this has ever happened in Egyptian history. The conversion of the Hagia Sophia into a mosque is unacceptable."

The sensitivity displayed on the subject of converting churches into mosques by a country that in the recent period turned thousands of living people into corpses is enough to bring tears to one's eyes.

In fact, all of those very segments that have turned the Islamic world into utter chaos with their coups and sedition have displayed this shameless attitude on this matter. Of course, there is no point in explaining to them that the Hagia Sophia has today been converted again not from a church to a mosque but from a museum to a mosque, or that the Hagia Sophia was in any case taken over by Fatih 567 years ago as the personal property of the Byzantine Emperor, in a ruined state, and was repaired by Fatih and virtually rebuilt, and so on.

What we have to say to them, and to the whole Islamic world, is to lend an ear to the call to prayer rising from the Hagia Sophia, and not to close their ears to the voice that will revive them.

After faith, there is no way to turn back and sink once more into jahiliyya after the conquest of Mecca, in which you will also find the message of the Hagia Sophia.