Status Update

India’s telling silence on the Hagia Sophia controversy

- ISHAN MUKHERJEE

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.