What needed to be questioned was not whether the decision was good or bad, but Erdoğan’s remarks a year ago against the conversion of the monument, İmamoğlu has said.
İstanbul – BIA News Desk
13 July 2020
Click to read the article in Turkish
İstanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu has announced support for the government’s decision to convert the Hagia Sophia museum into a mosque.
“In my mind and conscience, Hagia Sophia has been a mosque since 1453,” he told reporters at the construction site of a funicular railway, referring to the Ottoman Empire’s takeover of İstanbul.
After a Council of State on Friday (July 10) annulling a Council of Ministers decree in 1934 to convert the then mosque into a museum, President and Justice and Development Party (AKP) Chair Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced that Hagia Sophia would reopen as a mosque on July 24.
İmamoğlu, a member of the secularist Republican People’s Party (CHP), further said that he had always called Hagia Sophia a mosque.
He also noted that a part of it the call for prayers had been recited from one of the minarets for 30 years and Muslims had been allowed to pray in a prayer room in Hagia Sophia.
What needed to be questioned was not whether the decision was good or bad, but Erdoğan’s remarks a year ago against the conversion of the monument, he said, without mentioning the President’s name.
At a rally last year, Erdoğan said the price of converting Hagia Sophia into a mosque would be very heavy and said, “Do those who say [Hagia Sophia should be reopened as a mosque] think about what would happen to thousands of mosques around the world?”
“Now I’d like to ask: Are our mosques in various places around the world in a risky situation now? Will anything happen to these mosques where tens of thousands of Muslims, my expat brothers pray?” İmamoğlu asked. (AÖ/VK)
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