A recent news report unwittingly demonstrates how Turkey—once deemed the most “secularized” Muslim nation—is returning to its Islamic heritage, complete with animosity for the infidel West and dreams of the glory days of jihadi conquests:
A group of devout Muslims from across Turkey prayed before the city’s historic Hagia Sophia on the 562nd anniversary of the Turkish conquest of Istanbul [Constantinople], demanding that the site be turned back into a mosque.
Men and women from across the country gathered before the Hagia Sophia museum early May 31, as part of an event organized by the Anatolian Youth Association (AGD) with the motto “Break the chains, Open Hagia Sophia,” and prayed the morning prayer with a call for the reconversion of the museum into a mosque.
In fact, this is an annual ritual. Thousands of Turks surround Hagia Sophia every May and call for it to become a mosque—often to Islam’s war-cry, “Allahu Akbar!”
This is not about a “minority of radicals.” In a survey conducted with 401 Turks, more than 97 percent wanted Hagia Sophia to be turned into a functioning mosque. Nor is this about Muslims needing a place to pray. As of 2010, there were 3,000 active mosques in Istanbul alone.
Rather, this is about Muslims wanting to revel in the glory days of Islamic jihad and conquest.
Unlike historically-challenged Westerners, Muslims fully understand the significance of Hagia Sophia. Hagia Sophia—Greek for “Holy Wisdom”—was, in fact, Christendom’s greatest cathedral for almost one thousand years. Built in Constantinople, the heart of the ancient Christian empire, it was also a stalwart symbol of defiance against an ever encroaching Islam from the east.
After parrying centuries of jihadi thrusts, Constantinople was finally sacked by the Turks under Sultan Mehmet II on May 29, 1453. Its crosses desecrated and icons defaced, Hagia Sophia—as well as thousands of other churches—was converted into a victory mosque, the tall minarets of Islam surrounding it in triumph.
Reading the primary historic texts from the period is not unlike reading current headlines concerning Islamic State atrocities—the massacres, beheadings, rapes, enslavement of Christian “infidels” and the defilement of their churches. Writes an eyewitness to the 1453 Turkish conquest of Constantinople:
The enraged Turkish soldiers . . . gave no quarter. When they had massacred and there was no longer any resistance, they were intent on pillage and roamed through the town stealing, disrobing, pillaging, killing, raping, taking captive men, women, children, old men, young men, monks, priests, people of all sorts and conditions… There were virgins who awoke from troubled sleep to find those brigands standing over them with bloody hands and faces full of abject fury… [The Turkish jihadis] dragged them, tore them, forced them, dishonored them, raped them at the cross-roads and made them submit to the most terrible outrages…
Tender children were brutally snatched from their mothers’ breasts and girls were pitilessly given up to strange and horrible unions, and a thousand other terrible things happened. . .
Temples [including Hagia Sophia] were desecrated, ransacked and pillaged . . . sacred objects were scornfully flung aside, the holy icons and the holy vessels were desecrated…. Immense numbers of sacred and profane books were flung on the fire or torn up and trampled under foot.
This is what Turkey’s Muslims are proud of. Salih Turhan, head of the Anatolian Youth Association, the group that annually organizes mass demonstrations around Hagia Sophia, boasts that, “As the grandchildren of Mehmet the Conqueror, seeking the re-opening Hagia Sophia as a mosque is our legitimate right.”
Turks know full well that Mehmet was the scourge of European Christendom; that his hordes seized and ravished Constantinople, forcibly turning it into Islamic Istanbul; that he had the fallen corpse of the Christian emperor, Constantine, who refused to forsake his besieged city, beheaded, mutilated, and mocked. Openly idolizing Mehmet and other sultans, as many Turks do, is tantamount to their saying, “We are proud of our ancestors who slaughtered, beheaded, enslaved and raped people and stole their lands simply because they were Christian ‘infidels.’”
More contemporarily, it’s tantamount to their saying “We are proud of our fellow Sunni Muslims of the Islamic State—who are currently slaughtering, beheading, enslaving, and raping people simply because they are Christian “infidels.”… Keep reading
Angemon says
And they surprise no one by doing so. Well, no one privy to islamic orthodoxy.
mortimer says
Not only ‘Islamic orthodoxy’…the Turks are ‘master race’ theorists as well.
The combination of FASCIST SUPREMACISM based upon a divine call and a RACIAL VOCATION is very similar to the Nazi aberration.
A wave of exuberant RACIAL FASCISM is sweeping Turkey…again! Turkey’s fascism must be condemned by all human rights organizations and UN with greatest urgency! A genocide of the Kurds would not be unexpected in such an atmosphere, even though they are fellow Muslims.
Shane says
More evidence that the idea of moderate Muslims is a myth. The only good Muslims are those who no longer practice Islam.
Nikiforos Fokas says
Last 5 years Turks transformed seven {7} Aghia Sophias into mosques … in Eregli {Erakleion} ,Isnik {Nicea} ,Trebizon{Trapezunta} ,Enez {Enos} …
If this is not a provocation to Christianity what is a provocation?…
Jay Boo says
Rather than climb out of the muck of Islam, Muslims in Turkey crawl into Muhammad’s hideaway cave of depravity and repel ever deeper into the slime pit of Islam’s filth.
spac says
What Secularism for Turkey .It encompassed only Muslims.The TAx law (Wealth TAx) of 1942 during WW2 was the best example . The tax for Muslims 4%.For Greeks 156% for jews 176% and for Armenians 236% Sound funny …But matter was not so .The tax system crushed the remaining Minorities of Turks after the genocide and fire of smyran and the secular Turkey become Secular (Muslims)…
I never thought that whole world would have become so dumb
jewdog says
Now that so many Muslim lands are in complete chaos, why don’t the Christians reconquer some of those territories? Then Israel won’t be the only reclaimed country.
Linde Barrera says
There was a saying before, during and right after WWI: “As cruel as a Turk”. Looks like things haven’t changed at all, even after more than a century of their so-called “progress”. I believe that anyone who cares about human rights abuses that have happened in the last 30 years should boycott Turkey and not buy Turkish made goods or go there on vacation.
dumbledoresarmy says
And the irony is that Turkish Muslims, like Persian Muslims, like every other kind of non-Arab Muslim that has embraced the Arab Imperial Cult, the Arab god of blood and war and murder and rape, will *never* quite cut it. Because the best kind of Muslim, the Muslim that is top of the heap, looking down on all the other kinds of Muslim, is the Arab Muslim. At the core of Islam is the exaltation of a particular (and very ugly) “take” on “being-Arab”; Islam is a vehicle for Arab linguistic and cultural imperialism.
Turks may use a translated Quran, but in their heart of hearts, if they are pious Muslims, they know that a *translated* Quran isn’t the real deal; *only* the Arab Quran is. Even though the Ottoman Turkish Muslims ruled over Arab Muslims for centuries, those Arab Muslims, even the rattiest Beduin, looked down on them as not quite making the grade; and during World War One, in the Sinai, ‘Palestine’ and Syrian campaigns, the Arab Muslims in those lands would just as readily rob and murder a wounded Turkish Muslim soldier – despite his being a ‘brother’ Muslim – as a wounded Infidel Australian or British soldier. They would dig up a dead Turkish Muslim soldier who had been buried, and strip and rob him, and leave the body for the carrion-eaters, exactly as they did to the buried bodies of Infidel soldiers.
Hugh Fitzgerald, who used to comment a lot at this forum some years ago, pointed out the Arabocentric mindset and Arab supremacism of Islam in 2005 in a lapidary paragraph, in an essay on Islam called “The Cultural Imperialism of the Arabs”.
http://www.jihadwatch.org/2005/10/fitzgerald-the-cultural-imperialism-of-the-arabs.html
“In Saudi Arabia there is apartheid: the signs “Muslim” and “Non-Muslim” are everywhere, both physically and in the minds of men.
“But “Muslims” are further divided into Arab (first class) and non-Arab (second class). This has not escaped the attention of the many Muslim non-Arabs who live in Saudi Arabia — or at least not the attention of all of them.”
An apostate from Islam one Anwar Shaikh, wrote a whole book about it. He described Islam as “the self-perpetuating tool of Arab imperialism”.
Not sure whether the link will still work – it’s eight years old – but here goes. and if the link doesn’t work, you can try googling “Anwar Shaikh” “Arab Imperialism” (or try Amazon) and see what comes up.
http://www.islam-watch.org/AnwarSheikh/Islam-Arab-Imperialism7.htm
Shaikh, of non-Arab ethnic origin, observes sardonically, after analysing a bunch of Islamic canonical texts, that “that to be a Muslim, a non- Arab believer has to live as an Arab to qualify for Allah’s love and pardon! ”
And if they’re not ethnically Arab – if they’re Turk, Persian, Somali, Bengali, Chechen, you-name-it – then no matter how hard they try, they’ll *never* be quite as perfectly Muslim as the *Arab* Muslim.
Essentially, the more Islamic a Turkish Muslim is, the less *Turkish* he will be and the more his psyche is colonised by Mohammed’s/ the Islamic text’s ‘take’ – its awful, antihuman, barbaric ‘take’ – on being-Arab. His own pre-Islamic Turkish history or identity counts for naught. He becomes the ruthless mercenary of a foreign imperial cultus (the cult of Ataturk and a bunch of other associated stuff was an attempt to supplant / displace that, but when Real Islam asserts itself, given that most Turks remained Muslim, the rival cult gives way).
The truth is that only when a Turkish Muslim *apostasises* – when he or she becomes a Christian or an atheist – does he or she become truly free to discover what it might to be a *Turk* – a free and decent human being of Turkish ethnicity – rather than a ersatz Arab.
The most honorable Turk I can think of is an ex-Muslim Turkish Christian who endured horrendous torture at the hand of fanatical Muslim sharia assassins, some years ago – indeed, he was martyred – rather than renounce his faith in Christ. I am sure that when his soul entered Heaven he was surrounded and welcomed by the Armenian and Greek and Assyrian Christian martyrs.
There are others: Turks who have renounced Islam and have formed little evangelical Christian churches, right there in Turkey. (And I wouldn’t be surprised if there are Turkish ex-Muslims who have been baptised as Catholics, or as Orthodox, in other countries, or even, very secretly, in Turkey itself). Pray for them!
gravenimage says
A group of devout Muslims from across Turkey prayed before the city’s historic Hagia Sophia on the 562nd anniversary of the Turkish conquest of Istanbul [Constantinople]
………………………………
And just noting that Hagia Sophia’s “holy icons and holy relics” were desecrated does not give a full sense of the horror that occurred in what was then Christendom’s greatest cathedral.
During the invasion women, children, old people, the infirm, monks, priests, and nuns took shelter at Hagia Sophia. Once the walls were breached and the Mohammedan hordes reached the church they went on an orgy of massacring their unarmed victims. Many of the women and girls—including nuns—were raped before being butchered. The few survivors were taken as slaves.
*This* is what these vicious, supremacist Muslims are “celebrating” every May 29th at Hagia Sophia.
Uncle Vladdi says
This news will only make the EUSSR traitor masochists “fast-track” Turkey into the European Disunion.
(Anyone know why Turkey is still in NATO?)!