In the Hagia Sophia, Christianity's Madonna and Child are flanked by roundels with Arabic script bearing the names of Muhammad and Allah. The rondels were added to the basilica when it became a mosque after the Turks conquered Constantinople in 1453. All photos by BF Newhall 2009
By Barbara Falconer Newhall
As a religion writer, I’ve got plenty of respect for Islam as well as for the many (friendly, smart, lovable, cool, inspiring) Muslims I’ve met on the religion beat over the years. So, trust me. This is not a rant against Islam or Muslims.
It’s about how it feels to have one’s culture and faith obliterated by someone else’s culture and faith.
The Hagia Sophia, now a museum, draws tourists from all over the world.
I got a close-up look at this when I entered the magnificent Hagia Sofia for the first time during a trip to Istanbul in 2009. Completed in 537 by order of the Emperor Justinian, this glorious Byzantine basilica was the focal point of Eastern Orthodox Christianity for nearly a millennium.
The Hagia Sophia’s status as a Christian church came to an abrupt end, however, when the Ottoman Turks conquered Constantinople in 1453 and converted the basilica into a mosque soon after.
I am fully aware that Western Christians have done their share of imposing their culture, technology and religion on the peoples they have conquered or overwhelmed. I know, just for starters, all about how the Parthenon, a temple built to honor the Pagan goddess Athena, was taken over and turned into a church dedicated to the Virgin Mary.
Still, I see now that I’ve understood religious oppression only intellectually all these years. As a Christian living in a mostly Christian country, I’ve never really known how it feels to have one’s faith and its most cherished symbols obliterated by a colonizing force.
Until I stepped inside the Hagia Sophia.
It was dark in there. The few remaining Christian mosaics – including those of Jesus, the Virgin Mary and Saint John Chrysostom – were nearly invisible.
Not at all invisible, however, were eight huge round black disks, each one nearly 25 feet across and each one emblazoned with — to me unintelligible — Arabic calligraphy. Constructed of wood and leather, the disks were conspicuously placed, high on the columns supporting the basilica’s massive dome.
The back sides of the Arabic rondels are unfinished.
The disks – also known as medallions or roundels — felt like giant, flashy billboards for Islam. I’ve got God on my side and you don’t, they seemed to argue. It didn’t help that, when I climbed to the upstairs balconies and stood behind the disks, I could see their crude wooden backsides.
To my Muslim friends no doubt the calligraphy on those medallions would feel holy and beautiful. The inscriptions represent, after all, the names of Allah, Muhammad, Islam’s first four caliphs, and Muhammad’s two grandsons. (Peace be upon them!)
But as a Christian standing in what had once been a magnificent church, I could not feel the holiness of those huge disks. I felt bullied by them.
It’s been hundreds of years since the Hagia Sofia was seized and turned into a mosque, but on that day in 2009, it felt like the desecration had happened yesterday.
The Hagia Sophia is a museum now, and I hear there’s a campaign afoot to restore the basilica as a Christian church.
Two of the eight rondels that hang high on the walls of the ancient basilica, built by Emporer Justinian in 537.
Part of me would love to see those eight in-your-face disks go away. But another part of me knows better. Just as Jerusalem has become a holy spot for Christians, Muslims and Baha’is as well as Jews. So has the Hagia Sophia come to belong to Muslims as well as Christians.
Back home now, sitting here in my writing room, I study my photos of the offending medallions. I hunt down more pictures of them on line. I ponder their elegant, swooping lines. I open my mind – I try to – to the beauty of the calligraphy.
And after a while I see that, yes, indeed, they are beautiful. Like the Christian icons that preceded them, I find the boldface disks with the strange writing on them to be windows into the sacred. Soon I am scouring the Web for more photos. My eyes follow and are amazed by their complex, mysterious lines.
I wonder, the next time I enter the Hagia Sophia, will I feel oppressed by those medallions – or touched? I honestly don’t know.
barbara- i think that the clash of religions has and is been going on very insidiously in the u.s. especially with the leakage of secular policy into religious tolerance, and then on the flip side, with those same secular forces becoming the strong arm of religious repression and oppression. Ironically, like it or not, we are becoming creatures akin to the Dan Quaylian aliens – a society battling for its moral center.
Murphy Brown and Howard Johnson were right. we are living in a age where we have both Republicans and Democrats serving up what they believe is the “right thing to do,” often in the name of religion or humanity. The left and right governmental forces, for example, have for years been in cahoots with the Catholic Healthcare Networks who receive both tax free financing, tax free status, which george bush often praised as faith based leadership and which president obama tacitly supports in his own community organization groups.
Then on the flip side, you see government persecution of the Scouts AND the threat of taking away its 501c3 status because of its anti gay stance. This despite the fact that the scouts are 70% sponsored by religious organizations primarily the Mormon and Catholic Churches. those religious entities are against homosexuality at least in their teachings if not in their actual tolerance of alternative lifestyles as they often proclaim these days.
The water gets further muddied when you see the Episcopal Church vote to let gays be ordained as ministers and to use the judicial system as a way to protect those rights.
Finally, the decision by the IRS to discriminate in the conferring of 501C4 status against tea party groups who naturally portray themselves” as god fearing christians rising up against the system”, to me at least indicates that there is a war on between the secular but religious “the-government-knows-what-is-right” coalition and the more distrusting almost anarchical libertarian leaning but again religious and god fearing tea party.
But unlike in the Middle East, or even Europe, the U.S. religious wars are a cauldron of both secular and religious interests all boiling in the same pot.
I went to both istanbul and jerusalem in 2011 and i was more struck actually by the lack of interest overall in the “religion and the icons” and much more interest, i felt, in people being seen with one another and facebooking and taking pictures on their cell phones and yapping with one another.
I sense a real boredom actually among the citizenry with religion and a much higher emphasis being placed on material well being. When in the holy cit of Jerusalem, we got a sense of this when my wife’s cousin, an owner of a large cosmetics company in Israel who frequently brings VIPs to Jerusalem, ushered us past a waiting line of perhaps 300 people. The look of jealousy on people’s faces and then the pictures that started flashing like paparazis. It didn’t appear to me they were interested in the King David Museum.
a week after that the Seal team killed Osama Bin Laden. We were in Crete at the time and the tourists were busy taking pictures of the camels.
Thanks, Mark.
Arabic calligraphy is at the heart of the Arabic world and truly a different world to Arabic typesetting. I will be very happy to help any one in any project will need the Arabic Calligraphy touch.
http://www.talaat.me
I’d love it if you would tell us more about the Arabic calligraphy at the Hagia Sophia.