Status Update
Turkey’s highest administrative court ordered on 10 July that the Hagia Sophia be reconverted from a museum to a mosque. This prompted immediate responses from many countries, but, worryingly, none came from India.
The Hagia Sophia was built as a Christian church in the year 537 by the Eastern Roman emperor Justinian I, in what was then Constantinople. The building stood as the largest cathedral in the world for nearly a thousand years. When the city fell to the Ottomans in 1453, Mehmed II converted it into a mosque, destroyed its relics, plastered over iconography he considered idolatrous and added Islamic features such as the minarets that encircle its magnificent dome today. The Hagia Sophia remained the principal mosque of the city, renamed Istanbul, for over a century and a half, until the Sultan Ahmed Mosque—colloquially called the Blue Mosque—was completed in 1616.
By the First World War, the Ottoman Empire was in shambles, yet its sultan was considered the Khalifa, the spiritual and temporal leader of the entire Islamic world. After the empire’s defeat by the Allied powers, an international movement of Muslims arose to protect the authority of the Khalifa from their imperialist designs,
