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

Georgetown professor John L. Esposito was working on a book about the future of Islam — pre-9/11. He promptly put it aside in favor of more pressing topics – Unholy War: Terror in the Name of Islam (2002) and Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think (2009) are just two.

Courtesy Gallup Poll.

Now, nearly a decade later, Esposito finally returns to his subject with the publication of The Future of Islam from Oxford University Press. About 50 percent of the book was written before 9/11, he told audience of 200 last weekend who were attending an “Islam and Authors” series at the Islamic Cultural Center of Northern California in Oakland. The rest is informed by the post-9/11 political and religious tensions around the world.

One of the most intriguing chapters in Esposito’s newest book addresses the topic of reform in Islam. People have been asking Esposito, who has been studying Islam and teaching Islamic studies for more than three decades, whether Islam is capable of change. They wonder, is it compatible with Western notions of rule of law, human rights and gender equality?

“When people ask a question about Islam, they assume there is only one answer,” an exasperated Esposito told his audience. They ask questions like, “What does the Qur’an say about violence?” “Is Islam capable of modernity?” “Can it change?” There are many, many answers to those questions, he said, and the answers are constantly changing.

With an estimated 1.57 billion adherents, the world of Islam is no less complex and varied than than the world of Christianity, which includes such radically differing elements as Pentacostal, Quaker, Unitarian and Coptic Christians. But many Westerners fail to see that diversity and, out of fear, tend to perceive Muslims as a single homogeneous — threatening — mass.

“When a Christian blows up an abortion clinic, we don’t say, ‘There go those Chrisitians again,’” Esposito said. “But if it’s a Muslim [blowing something up,] we call them ‘Islamic terrorists.’”

In fact, Esposito noted, Islam holds reform and change as a founding principle. Mohammed was a social reformer as well as a prophet, securing rights for women that were radical in the Arab world of his time. Islam calls upon Muslims to follow Mohammed’s example and reexamine their practices regularly, making changes where necessary.

Of course, what those changes, if any, should be is a matter of heated discussion among Muslims today — and throughout history. “Some people are conservative,” Esposito said. “Some people think there is need for adaptation and change.”

How various Muslim groups perceive the past is often a point of conflict. Some Muslims look to past practices and traditions as authoritative. Others view them as interpretations of scripture appropriate to particular contexts, but suseptible to reform.

Reared in Brooklyn in an Italian Catholic family, Esposito spent ten years in a monastery. Since the Seventies, he has devoted himself to the study of Islam and to promoting healthier relations between Muslims and Christians. At Georgetown University, he teaches religion and international affairs as well as Islamic studies.

Esposito founded the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown and is its current director. He has served as president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America, as president of the American Council for the Study of Islamic Societies, and on the board of directors of the Center for the Study of Islam & Democracy.

Want to know more about Islamic law?

Sumbul Ali-Karamali will be speaking on Shari’ah Law at the Commonwealth Club public forum in San Francisco on March 11. Sumbul is a writing buddy of mine from the Religion Newswriters Association. A neat lady and an attorney, Sumbul’s book, The Muslim Next Door, takes a thoughtful look at Islamic law. If you can’t make the event, do check out her book. She’ll also be speaking at an upcoming ICCNC Islam and Authors event in Oakland.

The Future of Islam, by John L. Esposito, with a forward by Karen Armstrong, Oxford University Press, 2010, 256 page, $24.95.

The official White House portrait. 2009.

By Barbara Falconer Newhall

If you haven’t yet read President Obama’s memoir, Dreams from My Father, don’t miss it. It explains, I think, how Obama got so smart. As he grew from boy to man, Obama had to reconcile the many cultures that surrounded him – middle class white America in Hawaii, semi-poverty and Islam in Indonesia, urban African America in Chicago, rural Kenya, upper class Harvard.

To survive emotionally, this man had to think.

Dreams from My Father was published in 1995 and again in 2004. If you find an autographed copy of the orignal hardcover lying around, don’t lose it. It’s rare. It’s worth thousands.

I especially liked the Random House abridged audiobook version. Obama’s reading earned him the 2006 Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album.

Here’s the Amazon link to the book.

Dreams from My Father, Barack Obama, Three Rivers Press, 1995 and 2004.

© 2009 Barbara Falconer Newhall