“Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia famously switched from a Christian church to a mosque in 1453. The same sort of conversions have been taking place in Buffalo’s East Side.”
The same sort? Really? The History of Jihad From Muhammad to ISIS (which you can order here) recounts how, after over seven hundred years of trying, the warriors of jihad finally entered the great city of Constantinople on May 29, 1453. When they did, they made the streets run with rivers of blood. Muslims raided monasteries and convents, emptying them of their inhabitants, and plundered private houses. They entered the Hagia Sophia, which for nearly a thousand years had been the grandest church in Christendom. The Muslims then killed the elderly and weak and led the rest off into slavery.
The Byzantine scholar Bessarion wrote to the Doge of Venice in July 1453, saying that Constantinople had been
…sacked by the most inhuman barbarians and the most savage enemies of the Christian faith, by the fiercest of wild beasts. The public treasure has been consumed, private wealth has been destroyed, the temples have been stripped of gold, silver, jewels, the relics of the saints, and other most precious ornaments. Men have been butchered like cattle, women abducted, virgins ravished, and children snatched from the arms of their parents.
When the slaughter and pillage was finished, Mehmet II ordered an Islamic scholar to mount the high pulpit of the Hagia Sophia and declare that there was no God but Allah, and Muhammad was his prophet. The magnificent old church was turned into a mosque; hundreds of other churches in Constantinople and elsewhere suffered the same fate. Millions of Christians joined the ranks of the dhimmis; others were enslaved, and many were killed.
That’s how the Hagia Sophia “famously switched from a Christian church to a mosque,” and Salon is trying to make that bloodbath out to be a routine real estate transaction. It’s all part of the establishment media’s universal tendency to minimize, ignore, or deny outright the reality of Islamic jihad, and to whitewash Islamic doctrine and history.
“A new solution for America’s empty churches: A change of faith,” by Ashima Krishna, Salon, August 31, 2019 (thanks to The Religion of Peace):
Over the past few decades, vacant and underutilized churches have become a familiar sight in American cities.
In some cases, a congregation or a religious governing body — say, a Catholic diocese — will sell the church to developers, who then turn them into apartments, offices, art galleries, museums, breweries or performance spaces.
But what about churches in neighborhoods that aren’t doing well, areas that are less attractive to developers looking to turn a profit?
In Buffalo, New York, two empty Roman Catholic churches were recently converted — not into apartments or offices, but into other places of worship. One became an Islamic mosque, the other a Buddhist temple.
As an architect and historic preservation planner, I was drawn to this phenomenon. With the help of Enjoli Hall, who was then a graduate student at University at Buffalo, I interviewed those involved in converting the former churches.
With immigrant and refugee populations growing in post-industrial cities across the U.S., the conversion of vacant Christian churches into new places of worship can preserve historic architecture and strengthen burgeoning communities….
Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia famously switched from a Christian church to a mosque in 1453.
The same sort of conversions have been taking place in Buffalo’s East Side. Many former Catholic churches have, over the years, been converted into other denominations — Baptist, African Methodist Episcopal and Evangelical — to accommodate the area’s African American community.
But several former Christian churches in Buffalo’s East Side also now serve as sites of worship for other religions. Two mosques, Bait Ul Mamur Inc. Masjid and Masjid Zakariya, used to be Saint Joachim’s Roman Catholic Church and Holy Mother of Rosary Polish National Catholic Church, respectively….