ANKARA (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 28th July, 2020) The Turkish opposition on Monday accused the head of Turkey's Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet), Ali Erbas, of insulting statements against the founder of the Republic of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.
On July 10, Turkey's highest administrative court, the Council of State, annulled the decree converting Hagia Sophia into a museum. The move was not particularly welcomed abroad. Austria, France, Greece, Cyprus, Russia and the United States were among the countries that expressed regrets over Ankara's decision, while Turkey views the matter as its internal affairs. Erbas, preaching during the first Muslim prayer last week, said that everything included in the waqf was inviolable, adding that anyone who breaks this rule will be damned. The opposition saw this as an attack on Ataturk, during whose reign Hagia Sophia was turned into a museum.
"You do not dare curse Ataturk by sitting in the chair of the head of Diyanet, which he created. Those who make it a habit to offend the founder also defend those who offend. Ali Erbas, you will answer for saying curses to Ataturk while sitting in this chair," Ozgur Ozel, a Turkish politician from the Republican People's Party, wrote on Twitter.
Erbas, in turn, told the Hurriyet newspaper that he did not mean the founder of the republic, adding that Ataturk died 82 years ago, "and the dead are prayed for, not cursed."
Hagia Sophia was built as an Orthodox Christian cathedral by Byzantine emperor Justinian and opened its doors to believers in 537, remaining the world's largest Christian temple for about a thousand years until Constantinople was captured by the Ottoman Empire and renamed Istanbul in the 15th century. Hagia Sophia was converted into a mosque in 1453. It then became a museum under Turkey's secular leader Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in 1934.
