Turkey’s Recep Tayip Erdogan has ordered the conversion of the city’s famous Hagia Sophia into a mosque after a Turkish court ruled annulled a 1934 presidential decree which made it a museum.

After Hagia Sophia, Erdogan Voices Jerusalem Ambitions | Opinion. Published Jul 15, 2020 at 7:30 AM EDT. By Johnnie Moore and Tugba Tanyeri-Erdemir . Newsweek Is A Trust Project Member.

Turkey's Erdogan formally designates Hagia Sophia as a mosque 02:17. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Friday formally reconverted Istanbul's sixth-century iconic Hagia Sophia into a ...

This month, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan reconsecrated the Hagia Sophia — a UNESCO world heritage site and museum — as a house of Muslim worship. To Erdogan’s many opponents, this ...

Hagia Sophia in Istanbul Chris McGrath/Getty Images. While bolstering Erdogan on the homefront and burnishing his appeal to Islamists globally, Erdogan's neo-Ottoman ambitions and expressly ...

He told a television interviewer last year that Hagia Sophia might be known as “Hagia Sophia Mosque” in the future. Erdogan’s justice minister, Abdulhamit Gul, told the state news agency ...

Erdogan, a devout Muslim, has frequently used the Hagia Sophia issue to drum up support for his Islamic-rooted party. Some Islamic prayers have been held in the museum in recent years.

Hagia Sophia, built by the Emperor Justinian I in 537, was once the largest and grandest church in all of Christendom and remains at the spiritual heart of Orthodox Christianity.

So Muslims already did worship at Hagia Sophia. In other words, Erdogan's maneuver is a wholly polemical gesture, a desperate act of political theater by a populist strongman faced with ever ...

Turkish President Erdogan said the city’s sixth-century Hagia Sophia, which became a symbol of secularism in modern Turkey when it was converted into a museum in the 1930s, would reopen as a ...

Turkey’s Recep Tayip Erdogan has ordered the conversion of the city’s famous Hagia Sophia into a mosque after a Turkish court ruled annulled a 1934 presidential decree which made it a museum.