A.S. Ibrahim: Consistent religious intolerance

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Tuesday March 5. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Up next: Muslim aggression in Turkey. WORLD commentator A. S. Ibrahim says a recent power play by the president of Turkey is nothing new.

A. S. IBRAHIM, COMMENTATOR: Imagine a beautiful Christian church in a small Middle Eastern town. The people of the town cherished their church for generations. It’s where they and their families worshiped, prayed, and got baptized. Then imagine a Muslim army invading the town with soldiers, horses, weapons, and chariots. After slaughtering the town’s leaders, the Muslims declare the church building a possession for Allah and Muhammad.

This tale is not purely imaginary. It’s a rough outline of what really happened to a Byzantine church in today’s Turkey. The Church of the Holy Savior was built in the 12th century, and it’s located in the historic area of northeast Istanbul, near the Adrianople Byzantine Gate. Sometime after Muslim Ottomans invaded in the 1400s, they converted the church to a mosque. All of its icons and frescoes were painted over to suit Muslim worshipers. The building then remained a mosque for four centuries. But in the early 1900s, history lovers and archeologists sought to restore the building after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. It was later opened as a museum in the 1950s.

But today, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has decided to turn the historic church back into a mosque. That’s after his infamous decision in 2020 to turn the stunning Hagia Sophia church into a mosque. As a strong devotee of Sunni Islam, he wants to be celebrated among Muslims as a hero—a sort of a modern caliph who advances Islamic power.

To achieve his goal, Erdoğan first annulled the ruling that designated the building as a museum, initiating the process to return it to a mosque as it was under the Ottoman Caliphate. The plan was to finish in October 2020, but it took longer than that to renovate—or deface—the church to match Islamic styles. But now, reports from Turkey reveal that the building is ready to receive Muslim worshippers.

On opening day, Erdoğan will most likely be filmed entering the mosque and performing the Muslim prayer, thus declaring it for Islam, Allah, and Muhammad. Like the Ottoman invaders of Byzantine Constantinople, Erdoğan will enter as a hero for Islam.

What do Erdoğan’s actions reveal about Islam’s attitude towards non-Muslim houses of worship, particularly churches? Intolerance.

Muslims are free to build mosques in many non-Muslim countries, especially in the West. But Christians find huge difficulties in Muslim-majority lands. Churches are frequently assaulted, and Muslims often repeat the pattern of erasing Christian heritage from Muslim lands.

Yet many Western politicians and liberal thinkers keep telling the world that Islam is all about mutual respect and religious freedom. They insist that like any other religion, Islam is what you make of it. I often wonder if they have ever read any sacred Muslim text or whether they know anything about Muslim history. Too many Western leaders—knowingly or unknowingly—are naïve propagandists for Islam. And they are wrong.

President Erdoğan’s actions show that religious liberty in Islam is not for all—it is only for Muslims to elevate Islam and its influence.

I’m A. S. Ibrahim.

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