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.

Eight roundels emblazoned with Arabic script are focal points in the Hagia Sophia.

I got a close-up look at this when I entered the magnificent Hagia Sofia for the first time during a trip to Istanbul last October. 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 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, Muhammed, Islam’s first four caliphs, and Muhammed’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.

In the apse, Madonna and Child are flanked in roundels bearing the names of Muhammed and Allah. Photos c 2009 B.F. Newhall

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.

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.

© 2010 Barbara Falconer Newhall

Hint: Click and move your mouse around the image, then click on the plus or minus signs to get close-ups of the various paintings.

Enjoy!

By Barbara Falconer Newhall

I’d like to recommend Harvey Cox’s newest book to all my non-believer friends.

Members of the Religion Newswriters Association were treated to a visit from Harvey Cox at their September conference in Minneapolis. Photo c 2009 B.F. Newhall

So many of the sophisticated, highly educated people I know labor under the assumption that they have to believe – to assent intellectually to – the factuality of traditional Christian teaching.

It seems that the one thing they have retained from whatever Sunday schooling they had as children is that they must believe every word of the Apostles’ Creed or Nicene Creed.

They don’t. That’s my opinion. And here’s why: The idea of a fixed creed to which a true Christian must subscribe dates back, not to the life of Jesus, but to the fourth century, when the emperor Constantine converted to Christianity and took control of the church.

Constantine saw great possibilities in the popular new religion that was spreading like wildfire across his empire. But beliefs about the nature of Jesus Christ were diverse and often contradictory in that early church. A common religion with a common creed, Constantine reasoned, would help him to unify — and control – the many and varied peoples of the Roman Empire. With that in mind, he insisted that church leaders come together and settle on a single set of beliefs.

The bishops complied, and in the centuries that followed – right up into the twentieth century – Christians were taught that, to be a true Christian, one had to believe.

So powerful was the Christian belief in belief, that in some eras, heresy – incorrect belief – could get you burned at the stake.

But now, according to Harvard professor and theologian Cox, the age-old Christian belief in belief is becoming a thing of the past: the Age of Belief is over.

Harvey Cox’s ground-breaking The Secular City was a best-seller in 1965. It sold more than 1 million copies. Now, with his newest book, The Future of Faith, the Harvard theologian presents fresh food for thought: that Christianity is entering a new era. He calls it the Age of the Spirit.

Cox identifies three ages in Christian history:

The Age of Faith. In the first three centuries of Christian history, Cox argues, the early church was not concerned about creed, doctrine, belief or hierarchy. Theological ideas about the nature of God were not as important as following the teachings of Jesus.

The Age of Belief. In the fourth century, Constantine asserted control over the Christian church and insisted that everyone in the empire subscribe to a common creed. As a result, until well into the twentieth century, the church focused on correct belief, on doctrine and orthodoxy. For centuries, Westerners assumed that belief – accepting traditional Christian doctrine – was essential to faith.

The Age of the Spirit. Since the mid-twentieth century, more and more Christians have been ignoring dogma and creed and turning toward a more spiritual Christianity – while finding commonalities with other wisdom traditions. Faith and belief are two different things, Cox argues. Beliefs are opinions, while faith – fidelity – is a way of life, a placing of one’s confidence in Spirit.

Until recently, Cox was the Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard, where he has been teaching since 1965. He retired in September, but he is staying on at Harvard as research professor and is turning his attention to religion and science, and Christian-Muslim relations.

As for my non-believer friends — I hope they’ll open Cox’s book and free themselves of the burden of belief.

The Future of Faith, by Harvey Cox, HarperOne, 245 pages hardcover, $24.99.

Simone Weil’s Waiting for God was first published, posthumously, in 1951. And readers beware: Waiting for God is a dense, highly politicized book. (Weil had been a Marxist and trade unionist before encountering mysticism.) But her startling insights into the nature of God and God’s relationship to humanity remain fresh and are truly worth the struggle through this imposing text.

Weil’s life was a short one. Born in Paris in 1909 to an agnostic, middle class Jewish family, she became a Christian but refused baptism for complex reasons explained in detail in Waiting for God. She died at the age of thirty-four of physical and mental exhaustion, after allowing herself only a meager diet in solidarity with society’s poor and the soldiers suffering on the battlefields of World War II. I’m inclined to conclude that Weil was an anorexic ahead of her time, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t also the modern-day saint and mystic that many believe her to be.

Listen to Simone Weil for yourselves in these selections from Waiting for God:

On page 59: “Prayer consists of attention . . . Students must therefore work without any wish to gain good marks, to pass examinations, to win school successes; without any reference to their natural abilities and tastes; applying themselves equally to all their tasks, with the idea that each one will help form in them the habit of that attention which is the substance of prayer.”

On page 124: “Sin is not a distance, it is a turning of our gaze in the wrong direction.”

On page 126: “God produces himself and knows himself perfectly . . . But before all things, God is love. This love, this friendship of God is the Trinity . . . The love between God and God . . . in itself is God.”

On page 127: “For those who love, separation, although painful, is a good, because it is love. Even the distress of the abandoned Christ is a good. There cannot be a greater good for us on earth than to share in it. God can never be perfectly present to us here below on account of our flesh . . . The universe where we are living, and of which we form a tiny particle, is the distance put by Love between God and God. We are a point in this distance . . . ”

Hmmmm. Amazing stuff, don’t you think?