Hagia Sophia merely latest move in Erdoğan’s lifelong project

The conversion of the Hagia Sophia monument is among the latest moves by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan towards his lifelong political goal of replacing Turkey’s secularism with a reasserting of the country’s Muslim identity, Booby Ghosh wrote in an op-ed for Bloomberg on Monday.

Erdoğan declared Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia a mosque on Friday, after a top court ruled the 6th-century historical site’s conversion to a museum by modern Turkey’s founding father, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, was illegal. The president’s decree constituted a major step for his party in fulfilling a long-standing demand by their core Islamist voter base.

“Throughout his career, Erdoğan has systematically chipped away at the secular foundations Ataturk laid in the 1920s and ‘30s, by encouraging overt expressions of religiosity in government as well as society,” the Bloomberg columnist said, adding that the president has done so while claiming to uphold Atatürk’s legacy.

“With the sacralising of the Hagia Sophia, which had been secularised by Atatürk in 1934, the president can drop the pretence. The Turkish state is now an expression of Erdogan’s ideal more than it is Ataturk’s.”

Ghosh predicted Erdoğan’s legacy of encouraging religion within Turkey’s government and society would likely outlast that of Atatürk’s secular vision.

The columnist cited a recent structural change the president made along with symbolic ones, such as the Hagia Sophia’s status.

Turkish parliament passed a law on Friday that would allow for multiple bar associations to be established in any given province with more than 5,000 lawyers registered. It also scraps proportional representation of bars in the national umbrella organisation by effectively decreasing the number of delegates from Turkey’s major cities, which could reduce their funding.

Erdoğan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) argues that the formation of more bar associations would ensure a more democratic and pluralistic system. However, the majority of such associations – as well as opposition parties, many lawyers and activists – argue that the real intent of the draft law is to disempower existing associations in larger cities which have criticised the government for its violations of human rights and erosion of the rule of law.

Ghosh called the law’s passing a” blow to the country’s already weakened judicial system”.

“That may not grab as much attention as Pope Francis’s statement about the Hagia Sophia, but the conversion of legal institutions says as much about the Turkey Erdogan has built as the re-purposing of a 6th century edifice,” he said.