This past week, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced that Hagia Sophia will, once again, be converted into a Mosque. The cathedral was completed in the 6th century during the reign of Justinian I. And in 1453, Hagia Sophia was seized and made a Mosque by the invading Ottomans, who brought the ancient world to an inglorious end. In 1934, the secularizing Turkish government converted the cathedral into a museum, and it was designated a “World Heritage” site by the United Nations. Many in the Western world expressed shock and alarm by the latest developments. The Pope, reportedly, is sad. But being that Hagia Sophia was taken from the West more than 500 hundred years ago, are we really in any position to object? The panel discusses this symbol of Roman triumph and Medieval conquest—and how this might signal the coming to an end of 20th-century liberalism. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radixjournal.substack.com/subscribe
This past week, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced that Hagia Sophia will once again be converted into a mosque.
The cathedral was completed in the 6th century during the reign of Justinian I. And in 1453, Hagia Sophia was seized and made a mosque by the invading Ottomans, who brought the ancient world to an inglorious end.
In 1934, the secularizing Turkish government converted the cathedral into a museum, and it was designated a World Heritage Site by the United Nations.
Many in the Western world express shock and alarm by the latest developments.
The Pope, reportedly, is sad.
But being that Hagia Sophia was taken from the West more than 500 years ago, are we really in any position to object?
The panel discusses this symbol of Roman triumph and medieval conquest, and how this might signal the coming to an end of 20th century liberalism.
1453 is now.
It's a bit of an exaggeration.
I think what we've seen over the past week in near Asia is at least somewhat reminiscent of that world historical point that was the Ottomans' conquering of...
The Roman Empire, the continuation of the Roman Empire in the East, or Constantinople, and the building of minarets around the magnificent Hagia Sophia Cathedral of the 6th century, which almost lasted a thousand years,
and the transformation of the ancient world, kind of the final ending of the ancient world, you could even say, the transfiguration of the second Rome.
And we're seeing it again.
So Erdogan gestured towards this over the past month that he might very well be transforming Hagia Sophia to a mosque.
And he did it.
And he has declared that it will be open to visitors.
And those include non-Muslim visitors.
And I, of course...
I think that that is a good thing.
I actually have visited Hagia Sophia when I was invited to speak at Hans-Hermann Hoppe's conference, I guess in 2010, I believe, and maybe 2011.
It's a magnificent building, but I actually was quite disappointed with the condition that it was kept in.
The way that I would look at this situation is, I think a lot of...
You've seen...
Patriarchs in the Eastern Orthodox Church and so on and other people object to this matter.
And understandably so.
But I ultimately support returning Hagia Sophia to a mosque because I think it establishes the returning of Hagia Sophia to a...
capital of a greater European empire of the future.
And I know that probably strikes many as outlandish, but this is how I think that we should be thinking It was transformed into a museum, technically, even though some of the...
Accoutrements of the mosque remain, but it was transformed into a museum during the Atatürk period.
So this was the attempted transformation of the kind of rump state of the Ottoman Empire into a secular nation state by Atatürk and the kind of secularizing nationalist influences.
And I think the transformation of that cathedral into a museum was a kind of full expression of 20th century liberalism, or you could say the end of history, in the sense that...
This site is no longer sacred.
It's actually a site that you can attend much like the Metropolitan Museum, and you can look at the dusty old artifacts from the past and think about how different they are from our secular individualist world today.
And I think it kind of desacralized that building, which does express our civilization at its very heart, that is Rome.
And it also expresses our own humiliation in 1453 with the conquest of Near Asia by the Ottoman Empire.
And I think making it a mosque again is more honest.
It also is a way...
I think we have to overcome.
process.
It is a sacred site again.
It's not just some museum that fat tourists can go visit and gaze upon the It's now a real thing that is connected to a tradition.
And it is also now a kind of humiliation again.
We can't tell ourselves that, well, all of those things from the past are over.
It's now just some neutral museum.
That we can visit.
We now can think of it, as we should, properly, as an expression of the greatness of our civilization and an expression of our own humiliation and our tendency towards decline and defeat.
And so I ultimately think this is a very good thing.
I have a deeply ambivalent, you know, take on Erdogan.
But I ultimately think this is a positive thing going forward.
It almost has to happen.
Yes, I agree.
I quite like the symbolism of it.
I quite like what it's saying.
And I can't help but have a certain degree of respect for the chap that's in charge of Turkey.
He's taken it over, Erdogan.
He's taken it in a particular direction.
It's a direction of empowerment.
It's a direction of making the country more formidable.
It's a direction of making the country more of a player in the world.
And he's motivated by religion, which a lot of these kinds of people, societies that are dominant in the world, tend to be.
And so, yeah.
I think we should take stock of what's happened here.
So I'm not unhappy about it at all.
Yeah, I mean, it's one of those things where it's certainly a sign of a return to a sacred place, as Richard was saying, but it's also a sign, of course, of our defeat there and the want to want to retake a sacred place back.
Because the interesting thing under liberalism is everything becomes kind of like a museum, right?
It becomes a universal World Heritage Site, which I guess, you know, the idea of World Heritage Sites was actually kind of respectable, and that was like a conservationist movement of how, you know, human architecture was played off the land and the environment, which I think is respectable.
But what ends up happening, of course, is the idea here is that, like, everything that is sacred is just simply...
Passed in time as an artifact and we've been this enlightened age where we have a universal rationality we have the UN designating this is a heritage site and you know we can all come together in dialogue and the interesting thing about that is when you push that message you're basically saying yeah I respect the particularity of your religion but I don't actually really believe it enough to think it's sacred because you know right In your own particular socially constructed, contingent circumstances, your religion is, you know, just a construct.
But here we are being respectful because we acknowledge that.
And what you're actually saying to the person in that religion, you're basically saying that it's just completely constructed, right?
And so it's a way of deconstructing it through the idea of dialogue.
So then when you have, like, this heritage site...
And it's basically like, you know, treating the past like just some artifact and the secularization upon this universal rationality.
So when you're returning to that, it's returning it from an idea where, you know, it represents universality, which means it's everywhere and if something's everywhere, then it's really nowhere.
It has no home.
And that's what the global condition of liberalism is, is global homelessness.
And so you're returning it to a sacred place.
You're not only saying this is a place.
This is what we have.
This is what we've conquered.
But it's also like, you know, maybe come and get it, right?
It's a bit of a flex.
But this is the return away from liberalism.
It is the recognition that, you know, we don't all have the same universal interest, but it's not always sacred.
The way in which someone takes something that was sacred to you and puts their own on it, like that was originally what it was in the first place when it was first conquered.
And so this is just a rebirth of history.
Yes.
I think what this guy's saying, what they're saying by doing this, they're saying we, Turkey, have been through this secular phase, this phase where we supposedly at least haven't been religious, where we haven't had a sense of our own eternal importance, where we haven't had all of these values which permit your group to better survive in the struggle between groups.
And that phase is over.
And we are now looking towards eternity again.
That's what it's saying.
We are the future and this decadent phase that we've been through, this decadent phase where we just imitated the West and where we thought the West was better than us.
Even if they are to the point, we thought the West was better than us and we felt inferior to them and whatever.
And we adopted their ways of thinking and we took our first sacred religious principles.
It's over.
We're moving away from it.
It's the past.
It's gone.
It's dead.
And I think that's an important statement that they have made.
Even from a conservationist perspective, you could argue that Hagia Sophia will be preserved better when it is connected to eternity and not connected to mere tourism.
And again, I visited Hagia Sophia and I was overwhelmed, but I was also very disappointed with the upkeep of the facility.
If it is a sacred place and declared as such by the state, you know, one could...
One could argue that the Muslims are going to tear it down and destroy it.
I don't think that's going to happen.
But one could also argue that they are more likely to maintain it in a continuous condition and a serious condition as it is connected to God and not connected to some tourist from Ohio who pays five bucks to...
Take a selfie outside of it.
And so, yeah, I think it's just an overarching good thing.
And the people who don't like this are the same people who don't want us connected to eternity as well.
They're the same people who would want to turn the damaged Notre Dame Cathedral into a Disneyland park, or who want to conserve tradition, but only in the sense of putting it in a museum somewhere where the public can go gaze upon the past.
And, yeah, I would, in a kind of funny way, trust this cathedral's upkeep to Muslims before I would really trust it to liberals who simply would want to neutralize it.
They might very well maintain it.
On the other hand, though, you could get certain branches of Islam that were opposed to art and whatever that were iconoclastically tear down some of the historical artifacts.
I don't think they're going to do that.
I think on one level, even though they won't admit it, is that it is a source of pride in the sense that it's something that they conquered.
I mean, that was one thing that I noticed when I was visiting Turkey, is that maybe this was just my perspective, but it felt like it was occupied territory.
There were these red flags flying over places that almost seemed like They had just been stamped down into the ground by a military.
It seemed occupied.
There seemed to be a kind of disconnect with the older parts of the city and the state.
I think they might very well want to keep it as a sign of their badassery, which is, again, something that I respect, even if it's not the badassery that I would want to promote.
Right now, it's on a geologic fault line.
I think I read somewhere that it's looked after maybe once a month with a worker at the moment.
So maybe it'd be better if it becomes a mosque, at least when it comes to preservation.
But they just might change more things about it when it comes to redoing the maintenance, which could be rather unfortunate.
Yeah, and in terms of the West, If you really want it preserved, why don't you take it back?
You know?
I mean, why are you complaining?
You know, this is actually in our control.
We had multiple opportunities to retake Constantinople, and we failed because we were weak.
So it stands as a kind of challenge that I think will wake up white people.
I want it too.
I want to tear down the minarets, although we would do it safely and humanely.
But I want this to be ours.
I want this to be, you know, if I could imagine a capital of the coming ethnostate, it would certainly be in Eurasia, it would be Constantinople.
I want us to do this.
But so we've got to do it and stop complaining about people or, or just regressing to some 20th century liberal mindset of, you know, oh, we should keep it as a museum, a tourist site.
That's, We need to overcome liberalism ourselves, and we need to take it back.
Well, it's really illusion-breaking.
I mean, that's what the UN and all these other bodies, that's the appeal they're making to.
It's like it's an appeal to universal rationality where there is no difference between where you are, who you are, what your race is, religion, like that.
It's just like, well, don't you want to keep this as a nice sight for the world?
You know, you think twice about what you're doing.
This is, you know, come on, be reasonable about this.
And your reason here is, of course, Western liberal reason.
And so this is really breaking that illusion that this Western liberal reason is something that's universally shared.
