They take Hagia Sophia away from us

Between the two, we are left in the dark because just as there is a "left" that wants to appropriate culture, there is also a "right" that wants to appropriate symbols and its last and greatest representative is Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has just appropriated no less than Saint Sophia, a World Heritage Site, a symbol of Istanbul and one of the oldest and most beautiful churches in the world, now a museum open to tourists from all over the world. 

Holy Wisdom was for a thousand years the seat of the Ecumenical Patriarch, head of the Orthodox Church after a break with the Pope of Rome, and therefore has enormous symbolic and sentimental value for much of Christendom, which the historian Diarmaid MacCulloch acknowledged when he wrote that the Orthodox world "has been largely shaped around a single church, the Cathedral of Holy Wisdom". 

The struggle between the Primate of Constantinople and the Pope was as much or more political than purely religious, since the former did not accept being subjected to a declining Rome occupied by barbarian kinglets, even though even today the Orthodox still point their index finger threateningly at us Latins while reminding us of the "filioque" of the Creed as a sign of our greatest "abomination", since in this expression nothing less than the divine or human nature of Jesus Christ is at stake. 

At other times, the sex of angels was also debated in impassioned discussions which led, not without reason, to calling them "Byzantines" after Byzantium, the name of the city before the Emperor Constantine moved the capital of the Roman Empire there in 330 and modestly agreed to give it its own name. The cathedral, long the largest in Christendom, was built a few centuries later by Emperor Justinian I in 537. Its colossal dome still amazes us today, measuring 37 metres in diameter and was unequalled in the world until Michelangelo designed a slightly larger one for St Peter's in Rome. These are issues where size seems to matter. When the Ottomans conquered the city in 1453, Mehmet II transformed it into a mosque, surrounded it with minarets and covered its wonderful Byzantine frescoes and mosaics with plaster and white paint, one of which depicted the emperor himself. 

It did not occur to Mehmet to paint himself on its walls because Islam forbade it, but in return he left us a unique and wonderful portrait by the Venetian Gentile Bellini, which is now in the National Gallery in London. When the Ottoman Empire was swept away by the Great War of 1914-1918, Atatürk Mustafa Kemal transformed the mosque into a museum to reaffirm the secular character of his revolution, and as a means of separating Islam from politics and public life and returning it to the private sphere. But his policy of secularization, which also extended to Islamic clothing and practices such as the public fasting of Ramadan, provoked rejection even at the time among the country's most religious and conservative sectors, which had always considered that making a museum out of what was a mosque was an attack on Islam. 

These are people who, over the years, have maintained the restoration of Muslim worship at Hagia Sophia as a top priority...conveniently forgetting that it was a church before a mosque. And they are far more numerous and influential than the 100,000 Christians remaining in Turkey today, who have very few votes and fewer votes. Erdogan wants to win the sympathy and support of this important sector of the Turkish population at a time when its popularity is declining due to the mismanagement of the economy, its growing authoritarianism, the ever-growing corruption and, as if that were not enough, the negative impact of the coronavirus on tourism (30 million visitors in 2019) which is so important for the country's economy. 

Erdogan, who makes no secret of his militant Islamism and who has been flirting for years with the Muslim Brotherhood in Hamas, Qatar, Libya, Egypt and elsewhere, wants to present himself to the world as the true champion of Islam, and for this there is nothing better than turning Saint Sophia into a mosque, because he knows that this will give him a voice. He had already done something similar but with less impact last year with the Church of the Saviour, known as the Chora, also in Istanbul. It does not bother her that this measure has been criticised throughout the world, starting with the secular sectors in her own country, as Orhan Pamuk, the Nobel Prize winner for literature, has done, condemned in Russia and Greece, where Orthodox Christians are in the majority, and deplored by the Vatican, the United States or UNESCO.  As Bartholomew I, the ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople, has said: "Hagia Sophia... belongs to all Humanity. And it is the responsibility of the Turks to emphasize the universality of the monument".

Erdogan doesn't care about controversy, it suits him. And the more, the better. What he wants is to make politics by wrapping himself in the flags of religion and nationalism, to present himself to the world as the champion of Islam and to his own public opinion as the defender of eternal Turkey, with the aim of snatching votes from his rivals Davotoglu and Babacan who have taken them from him in the last elections of 2019 in the same capital Istanbul. 
For this reason, and to leave an indelible political and personal mark on the city where he has the most detractors, four years ago he inaugurated the monumental Çamlica mosque, which is the largest in Asia Minor; and he is building another one next to the popular Taksim Square that will transform the profile of the city while reinforcing its own good Muslim profile.

Mixing religion and nationalism is something that has often been done over the years and although it can sometimes pay off in the short term, it usually doesn't work out well because it mixes two feelings that are as volatile as they are irrational and tend to get out of control easily. It is the same thing that President Narendra Modi is doing these very days in India, although this time the current is against the Muslims. Modi is another nationalist who has launched an assault on the liberal and secular democracy enshrined in the Constitution to launch a campaign
against the Indian Muslims who are a whopping 150 million people and whose rights he intends to curtail or nullify. 
The most exalted would like to expel them from the country. Their crusade has roots in Hindu nationalism, which proclaims the Hindutva ideology, whose intolerance has already led to Gandhi's assassination, and heralds many problems for what is still the world's largest democracy. 
There is no doubt that nationalist and authoritarian populisms are becoming fashionable in the world, and that is very bad news. And it's even worse if you add to the cocktail religious feelings, whatever sign they may be.