OCT 15 —- Snatching a break from covering IMF and World Bank annual meetings in Istanbul last week, I took the opportunity to revisit one of the city's great religious monuments, the Hagia Sophia.
While officials were arguing over the state of the global economy, bankers were debating how to recover their lost wealth and protesters were crying a plague upon both their houses, I decided to take refuge for a while in this seat of “holy wisdom”.
For 2,000 years, Istanbul has provided a bridge between Asia and Europe, physically in that it has one foot in each of the two continents and culturally because it has for millennia been a melting pot of Asian, European and African peoples. The city is a model of religious inclusiveness too, embracing as it does an ecumenicity of Christian churches as well as 2,700 Islamic mosques and many Jewish synagogues.
This spirit of tolerance is perhaps best symbolised by the Hagia Sophia, built under the Emperor Constantine as the world's largest cathedral after Rome embraced Christianity in the first century AD, then converted from a patriarchal basilica to a mosque under Sultan Mehmet II in the 15th century, and finally turned into a secular museum under Kemal Ataturk, founder of the Republic of Turkey in 1923.
Yet, for all its architectural splendour, there is something sad about the Hagia Sophia, something that speaks more to the state of Western society and Christendom today than it does to the condition of Islam. With its soaring columns, vaulted arches and magnificent dome, the building still has a numinous sense of the presence of a deity — one who goes unnoticed and unloved.
Within a stone's throw is Istanbul's equally famous Blue Mosque where the faithful gather many times a day in large numbers to answer the fervent calls to prayer, while in the Hagia Sophia the clamour and babble of tourists' voices substitutes nowadays for prayers or hymns of praise and, where once candles burned in devotion, cameras now flash incessantly.
The building is a metaphor for societies that preserve the trappings of a religion and its value system but without an inner core of belief. Converted into a secular monument specifically to avoid conflict between the two religions — Christianity and Islam — that had laid claim to the building over the centuries, it has unintentionally acquired a wider symbolism.
Magnificent cathedrals and churches abound in Europe, and despite the fact that unlike the Hagia Sophia they have not been formally deconsecrated, they nevertheless are little more than monuments to a past belief, mere “tombs of God”. Does this signify enlightenment and release from superstition, or is it simply that agnostics and atheists have lost their way?
Curiously, it was during another of these IMF/World Bank annual meetings — in Prague nearly 10 years ago — that similar thoughts came to mind. On that occasion, the then President of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Havel, delivered a speech that lifted what is normally a very mundane and material occasion to an entirely different plane.
Prague, too, is a city of magnificent churches and Havel urged the finance ministers, private bankers and others gathered there to “look up” at the soaring Gothic spires and ask themselves why such magnificent edifices were built. Because, he suggested, they point to “something higher” than the preoccupation with material values.
The builders of such edifices as St Vitus' Cathedral in Prague took centuries over their labours because they did not share the view held in the West nowadays that “everything dies when we do”, said Havel. This “atheistic” view motivates its adherents to plunder the world of natural resources and to “treat the world as an endless source of short-term profit”, he added.
There was no such inspiring orator in Istanbul to remind the assembled officials and financiers that human existence can transcend the material and the ephemeral — only the stately Hagia Sophia offering mute testimony to what happens when spiritual values are excluded from an edifice or body, leaving behind a hollow shell.
Maybe this explains why so much debate had to be devoted at the Istanbul meetings to regulating greed in Anglo-Saxon financial markets of the kind that brought about the recent crash. Counselling self-restraint and consideration for others is no longer considered the business of the religious establishment. Official regulators are the priests of the new order. — Business Times Singapore
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