There is no justification for turning Hagia Sophia into a mosque

It is official: Hagia Sophia, for a thousand years the world’s largest cathedral, and since 1934 a museum, is to be turned back into a mosque. Ever since I heard of the possibility, I have been praying it would not be so because of the impact it will have on Muslim-Christian relations in Turkey, the Middle East and beyond. A suitably purged and compliant judiciary, however, has bowed to the wishes of the authoritarian President Erdogan that Turkey should become more Islamic and less secular.

There has been a church on the site since 360 ad and the present building dates from the reign of Justinian in the mid-sixth century. When Mehmed II conquered Constantinople in 1453 and renamed it Islamople or Istanbul, Hagia Sophia was converted into a mosque and remained thus until the secular nationalists, led by Kemal Ataturk, turned it into a museum open to all. Such a turning of a cathedral into a mosque is not unique.