Introduction During the last decade, socially conservative political parties and civil society groups have been on the rise in Russia, across Central and Eastern Europe, and also in Western Europe and the United States. Such actors mobilise against LGBT-rights, women’s and children’s rights, and reproductive rights in the name of the ‘traditional family’, and they…
It goes without saying that Father Joseph Gleason of Russian Faith is making his mark in the world for the Kingdom of God in Jesus Christ. His theological journey has finally taken him into the priesthood of the Russian Orthodox Church. Geographically, the journey he and his family have embarked upon has taken them from…
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…
Sultan Abdul Hamid II, in the face of a rising secular nationalism in the late 1800s, that culminated in the Young Turk movement, tried to restore the influence of the Ottoman Empire among Islamic nations and the Empire’s many peoples by stressing the importance of Islam and the Ottoman Caliphate, of the role of the…
Late afternoon in May 29, 1453, Sultan Mehmet, the third son of Murad, born of a slave-girl – probably Christian – in the harem, fluent in Turkish, Arabic, Greek, Latin, Persian and Hebrew, followed by his top ministers, his imams and his bodyguard of Janissaries, rides slowly towards the Great Church of St Sophia in…
A defining moment came, rather unnoticed, when the foreign ministers of the European Union (EU) held a virtual meeting on July 13 where the group’s relations with Turkey was on the agenda. The resumption of Muslim prayers in the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul came up for discussion. This was how the EU’s foreign policy chief…
