by CHRISTIANE GRUBER & PAROMA CHATTERJEE
Ever since the reversion of Hagia Sophia back into a mosque, the Muslim call to prayer has been resounding from its minarets.
Originally built as a Christian Orthodox church and serving that purpose for centuries, Hagia Sophia was transformed into a mosque by the Ottomans upon their conquest of Constantinople in 1453.
In 1934, it was declared a museum by the secularist Turkish leader Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.
As of June 24 of this year, Hagia Sophia’s icons of the Virgin Mary and infant Christ are covered by fabric curtains as the edifice yet again changes functions.
Turkish officials have stated that the veiling of the images, especially the interior mosaics, is necessary to transform the interior into a Muslim prayer space.
As historians of Byzantine and Islamic art, we argue that in their rush to reassert the monument’s Islamic past, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdo?an and his associates have inadvertently – and superficially – emulated certain Orthodox Christian practices.
Images of Mary and Christ were often ritually veiled and unveiled in Byzantium, while later Ottoman Muslim rulers did not engage in such practices.
Images of Mary and Jesus in Islam
When Sultan Mehmed II, known as the “Conqueror” or Fatih, took over Constantinople, he headed straight to Hagia Sophia, declared it a mosque and ordered it protected in perpetuity.
He did not order the ninth-century mosaic of Mary and Christ in the interior removed or covered. Instead, Ottoman historians tell us that he stood in awe, feeling that the eyes of the Christ child followed him as he moved about the structure.
Although images of humans are almost never found in mosque architecture, the depictions of Mary and Jesus remained uncovered in the mosque of Hagia Sophia until 1739. At that time, the mosaic was plastered over. The plaster was later removed during the building’s 1934 conversion into a museum.
The centuries-long display may have been a gesture in appreciation of the Prophet Muhammad, who is said to have preserved an icon of the Virgin and Christ when he destroyed the pagan statues at the Kaaba, Islam’s holy sanctuary, in Mecca, Saudi Arabia.
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