See also: Is Russia Targeting Turkey over Hagia Sophia?
First call to Islamic prayer inside Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia in 85 years
by Robert Spencer, Jihad Watch, July 2, 2016:
The Orthodox Church has protested, but the Turks know that there is nothing whatsoever that they can do that would lose them the favor of the European Union. They know they have nothing to lose, and that Islamization is the wave of the future in Europe and the West in general. The Orthodox protests are feeble voices raised against a tidal wave, with even the Catholic Church standing mute, too afraid of harming their chimerical, self-defeating, and fruitless “dialogue” with Muslims to stand with their fellow Christians in this.
“Görmez used his appearance to describe the terrorist attack on Istanbul’s Ataturk airport, in which 44 people were killed, as part of a ‘war waged on Islam.'” Muslims murder other Muslims whom they deem to be insufficiently Islamic, and this is a “war waged on Islam.”
“First call to prayer inside Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia in 85 years,” Hürriyet Daily News, July 2, 2016:
A muezzin’s call to prayer reverberated inside the 6th century Istanbul landmark Hagia Sophia for the first time in 85 years on July 1.
The building in the city’s historic Sultanahmet district broadcast the azan from its minarets following July 1’s Laylat al-Qadr, or night of power, marking the first revelation of the Quran to the Prophet Muhammad.
The broadcast of the morning call to prayer from within Hagia Sophia is likely to reignite the controversy over the use of the building, which was designated a museum in 1935 under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the modern Turkisjh [sic] Republic.
Although the prayer call has been played from Hagia Sophia’s minarets for the last four years, the muezzin has always chanted from a prayer room in the museum grounds rather than from inside the former mosque and cathedral.
Built as an Orthodox Christian basilica during the reign of Byzantine Emperor Justinian I in 537, the famous domed structure, known as Ayasofya in Turkish, was converted to a mosque following Sultan Mehmet II’s conquest of the city in 1453.
In recent years there have been calls to return the building to Muslim worship. Last month, the Greek government complained about the reciting of the Quran in Hagia Sophia during Ramadan — criticism the Turkish Foreign Ministry described as “unacceptable.”
The azan call was televised in a July 2 program featuring Mehmet Görmez, the head of the Religious Affairs Directorate (Diyanet).
Görmez used his appearance to describe the terrorist attack on Istanbul’s Ataturk airport, in which 44 people were killed, as part of a “war waged on Islam.”
He argued Islam was among the victims of terrorism.
“The slaughtered ones are not only our lives but also the highest values that have been brought to humanity by Islam,” he said.