One half of my family originates from the Mediterranean island state of Malta. Strategically located between Africa and Southern Europe, Malta is an island that has, like its last colonial ruler, Britain, been invaded and colonised many times in its history. That history of colonisation – from the Phoenicians and Romans to the French and English – shows in its people, its architecture, and its language.
The Maltese language is described as a Latinised version of historical Arabic. So much so that Maltese speakers are able to understand about a third of some Arabic variants.
Maltese originated in the Arabic conquest of the island in 870 AD. With their characteristic brutality, the Muslim conquerers utterly massacred the native population, leaving it “a ruin without inhabitants,” according to Arab historians. In another typical act, the Muslim conquerors sought to erase all trace of Christianity. The churches of Byzantine Malta were looted and the marble stolen to build a Muslim fortress in Tunisia. “They desecrated what they could not carry,” according to contemporary Muslim scholar al-Himyari.
Wherever Islam has conquered, it has aggressively asserted its supremacy by converting places of worship to mosques, or destroying them. Even the Ka’ba itself in Mecca predated Islam as a sanctuary of Arabic tribal gods. In Jerusalem, Jewish and Christian sanctuaries, including Judaism’s most sacred site, the Temple Mount, were converted or destroyed.
That tradition continues today, overtly or covertly. As millions of Muslim illegals pour into Europe and Islam becomes the dominant religion practised in many areas, Christian churches are being turned into mosques by the hundreds.
Now, in an overt gesture of Islamic supremacy, Turkey is using one of the most famous Christian churches to assert Turkey’s efforts to re-establish itself as the global centre of a new Islamic civilisation.
Turkey’s strongman president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has announced that the Byzantine church of Hagia Sophia will become a mosque again, after 85 years as a museum and a designated Unesco World Heritage site. It will be the fifth church of the same name — all once symbols of the Eastern Roman Empire and priceless cultural treasures — to face the same fate in recent years.
Erdogan is facing political threats, from old allies like former prime minister Ahmet Davutoglu, and from Turkey’s poor economy. He will be hoping that this radical move consolidates his support. It is not certain that it will work. Berk Esen, international relations professor at Ankara’s Bilkent university, said that ‘if it is finally turned into a mosque, it’s going to be seen as a victory for Erdogan and the Islamist movement… But I don’t think Erdogan will be able to expand his voter base.’
But that’s almost beside the point. In the Huntingtonian Clash of Civilisations, Islamic civilisation remains without an uncontested centre. Erdogan is not just bent on repudiating the reforms of Ataturk. He plainly dreams of reviving the dominance Turkey enjoyed as the centre of the last Islamic empire, the Ottomans.
We must look beyond Turkey’s domestic troubles and raw sentiment with a cool head, because, above all, the move signals what might prove to be era-defining shifts, right on Europe’s borders. The target is not simply domestic. In the same breath as he means to placate his followers, Erdogan takes aim at geopolitical opponents in the West and the East.
When Kemal Ataturk, the founder of contemporary Turkey, turned the Hagia Sophia into a museum in 1934, he hoped to mark the end of Islam’s primacy in public life, as it was in the Ottoman years. This would be a new, secular state. It was also meant to be a gesture of good will towards Greece, with whom Turkey fought a bloody war a decade earlier that ended in ethnic cleansing and genocidal acts against Christians. It is here that Erdogan’s revisionist vision manifests, and where his greatest provocation lies.
With Turkey leaving secularism behind, Erdogan is positioning himself to lead what he sees as a resurgent Islam, with Turkey at its head as a civilisation state. He wants Turkey to become a beacon that calls to Muslims all over the world, and places himself as their protector. It is no accident that the announcement came at the same time as the anniversary of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre.
But these sorts of soft power plays are only the propaganda face of increasing Turkish aggression. As China is doing with the western Pacific, Erdogan is flexing Turkey’s muscle across the Mediterranean.
What jihadis are trying to do with guns and bombs — to eliminate the space for co-existence by creating fault-lines within multicultural societies — Erdogan is trying to do with a new paint job[…]
But Erdogan’s neo-Ottoman vision doesn’t end with soft power. The Turkish army is now engaged not only in Syria, but also in Libya (essentially against a coalition of countries that include Greece, France, Cyprus, Egypt and Turkey’s regional antagonist, Saudi Arabia), while the Turkish navy is spread out from the Black Sea to eastern Africa and all the way to Qatar.
There are constant and numerous airspace violations by Turkish fighter jets, while Greece was infuriated by a maritime boundary treaty signed between Turkey and the Libyan Government of National Accord which establishes an exclusive economic zone between them, in the Mediterranean Sea. Greece regards the deal as ‘void’ and ‘geographically absurd’, as it ignores the presence of several Greek islands between the Turkish and Libyan coasts.
The Treaty of Versailles was rightfully called a “seedbed of disaster” by H. G. Wells. But it is often forgotten that the Versailles conference spawned other treaties, including the Treaty of Sèvres, which formally dissolved the Ottoman empire. In the short term, Sèvres led to the Turkish War of Independence; in the long term, it is being used as a “perpetual irritant” to fan yet another Muslim grievance.
In this context, the abandonment of Ataturk’s legacy is also a direct challenge to the treaty of Versailles, which Erdogan has spoken of many times as disgraceful for Turkey. His revisionist worldview would seek to overturn it, and open up Turkey’s sea borders deeper into the Aegean.
It’s not the first time that a dictator on the make has used historical grievances, not to mention Versailles, to grease the skids of power.
What remains to be seen is whether the wider world will wake up to this new centre of Islamic aggression.
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