Islamic Prayers Said in Hagia Sophia

I have blogged multiple times about a contradiction in Muslim attitude toward Jewish prayer at the Temple Mount.

The Islamic Waqf authority emphatically denies Jews the right of freedom of worship at the location of the Two Temples, Judaism`s most sacred site. Yet at the same time, they act to pray at the Cordoba Cathedral in Spain and the Hagia Sophia in Turkey.

In other words, churches that became mosques due to Muslim conquest, must be at the disposal of Muslims as mosques even though they have been returned to their normal state.

But a Jewish holy site that was turned into a mosque must not be allowed to revert to a Jewish synaggoue even thought the Jews returned that site to Jewish authority.

The news?

Turkey Uses Hagia Sophia as Mosque for Islamic Prayer AgainBy Philip Chrysopoulos
The Islamic call to prayer was heard in what was once the center of Orthodoxy, Hagia Sophia, on Monday, as a video calling the former Byzantine cathedral “Hagia Sophia Mosque” on Youtube shows...This is the third year in a row that similar acts challenging the supposed status of Hagia Sophia as a secular museum have taken place in March.
...Hagia Sophia was built in 537 and served for nearly a thousand years as the cathedral of the Byzantine Empire, later to become the Greek Orthodox Christian Patriarchal Cathedral. It was converted to an Ottoman mosque on May 29, 1453, just after the fall of Constantinople, and it remained a mosque until 1931. Four years later, the iconic Byzantine basilica, once the very symbolof Greek Orthodoxy, began operating as a museum, after a decision by the first Turkish President and founder of the Republic of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

...The use of the museum as a place of worship since 1931 has been strictly prohibited. However, in 2006 the Turkish government allowed the allocation of a small room in the museum complex to be used as a prayer room for Christian and Muslim museum staff, and since 2013 the muezzin singsthe call to prayer twice per day, in the afternoon from the minarets of the museum.

...In May of 2017 the Anatolia Youth Association (AGD) organized a gathering in front of Hagia Sophia for morning prayers and called for the re-conversion of the museum into a mosque...On March 31, 2018 Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan recited the first verse of the Quran in Hagia Sophia, dedicating the prayer to the “souls of all who left us this work as inheritance, especiallyIstanbul’s conqueror,” reiterating his position to make Hagia Sophia a mosque once again.

In March 2019 Erdogan said that he will change the status of Hagia Sophia from a museum to a mosque...

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