Hagia Sophia’s conversion from a museum into a mosque has seen thousands and thousands of words committed to the page across the globe. Most of it recycles the same information – that the great church was built in the sixth century under the Byzantine emperor Justinian, that it was converted to a mosque when Mehmed the Conqueror captured…
When the caustic Evelyn Waugh visited the majestic sixth century creation of Emperor Justinian, one subsequently enlarged, enriched and encrusted by various rulers, he felt underwhelmed. “‘Agia’ will always win the day for one,” he wrote of Istanbul’s holiest of holies, Hagia Sophia, in 1930. “A more recondite snobbism is to say ‘Aya Sofia’, but…
Turkey’s controversial decision to reconvert Hagia Sophia from a museum into a mosque has been met with sharp criticism abroad from those who claim that it’ll exacerbate the so-called “Clash of Civilizations” and reverse the secular reforms of Ataturk while supporters of this move claim that it’s a justified reassertion of civilizational identity in an…
It’s just over a quarter of a century since the American political scientist Samuel Huntington wrote his famous essay on the Clash of Civilisations. It set the tone for a series of wars. Huntington was writing after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the end of the Cold War between Soviet Russia and the West. Rather…
Hindu extremists are scapegoating Indian Muslims for World War C after a cluster of the country’s COVID-19 cases was traced to a massive religious gathering at the beginning of March, with this ridiculous narrative building upon society’s preexisting hated of minorities and being fanned by an influential ideologue from the ruling BJP. *** Buzzfeed News…
An esteemed Arab League ‘grandee’ recently thundered that it was impossible for the Arab world to accept anything – ‘other’- than 21st century modern secularism: Islamism was forbidden. Egypt’s ‘coup’ (“if you wish to call it such”, against the elected Muslim Brotherhood government) was absolutely appropriate, he insisted. An Islamist government would have been intolerable,…
