I do have a few Turkish friends who are close enough to make us feel like our own family members so that we really worry about their safety in these days. So I do NOT want to add my personal opinion on this event to give any harm to them.

Indeed, I was horrified to find out my casual lament on my visit to Jordan years ago I wrote on this SNUMA website must have given harm to one of my close colleagues in Amman - I was shocked how Jordanian (security?) could have an access to review my comments on Jordanian colleagues on half-Korean written website!-, who wrote to me lately to delete some of the contents involved to him. 

BB Lee

Wow... It can happen because the Internet search can dig out anything anywhere.

No matter how small and inconsequential we may be in the Internet universe,

our contents can get exposed very easily.

For example, if you mentioned your friend's name, our webpage will come up because of his name.

It doesn't matter whether it was about religion or politics.

Frequently, I feel insecure after having written derogatory remarks on someone else.

But one wants to say what he wants to say.

I forgot to inform you that I deleted my second part of the comments on him in regard to the liability as a minority in their society, which gave me a motivation to give him a special help to arrange the vascular fellowship through my close friend's program. Anyhow, I really wonder how in the world such comments on the fact/reality could harm him! After all, there is no other place like here/USA throughout the world at least to claim for equal opportunity, and even in Korea, we know the discrimination especially to 전라도. 

BB Lee

The Christianity and Islam changed hands many times in the history of Mediterranean Europe.

Another good example is the Alhambra Palace in Granada in the Andalusia region of southern Spain.

Very originally, it was a Catholic place and Arabs took it over as a Moorish nation

and remodeled it into the world-famous Alhambra Palace.

Then, it was taken over by the Christian regime of the Spanish last time.

The Hagia Sophia is taking the same fate in reverse this time.

Really, nothing new. The ruler of the region dictates the fate of the building and religion.

Hagia Sophia is a bit different issue beyond a simple conversion of the structure for the worship by Muslims. Its impact is way beyond the level of religion but the beginning of another bout of the execution of intellectuals in Turkey and I worry about them dearly! 

My interests in Behçet's disease as the vasculitis involved to the artery and vein- after I shamefully screwed up on arterial aneurysm of Behçet's origin- three decades ago gave me a momentum to build such unique relationship with quite a few expert colleagues in Turkey. Beyond the professional level, we developed further close relationship to the family level to spare the vacation seasons to spend together. So it gave us immense opportunity to learn about Turkish culture, foods, and complicated history, etc through years.

And when Erdogan took over the country, we started to worry about their safety and sadly so many elite professionals including the physicians try to get out of country to immigrate to the secular countries where they could keep the privilege of ‘freedom’ without fear of persecution. And I was also happened to be actively(?) involved to their plans, to accommodate them in Western countries including the States with all the efforts I could generate.

Because of mounting fears to give a harm to the friends by our too visible? helps, we are trying not to communicate with them openly through the last few years so that I don’t want to disclose further if any but we worried Kemal Ataturk’s secularized new Turkish Republic will be over soon!

Finally, the declaration of conversion of Hagia Sophia by Erdogan, which is a symbol of ‘Harbinger of Freedom’, is an official signal of ‘Rebirth of an Islamic Turkey’ as Orhan Pamuk told the BBC. Indeed, Erdogan asserted Turkey’s rebirth as a Muslim nation after a century of misguided (?) efforts by Kemal Ataturk (1934?) to imitate the Christian West through Hagia Sophia the byzantine cathedral turned Ottoman mosque.   

I like to share some more story in this regard as below;

Erdogan Asserts Rebirth of an Islamic Turkey at Hagia Sophia

By Marc Champion  and  Constantine Courcoulas

July 11, 2020, 3:00 AM EDT

Third change in a millennium is again seen as turning point 

To President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his religious conservative supporters, the reconversion of the Hagia Sophia to a mosque is a milestone in Turkey’s rebirth as a powerful, Muslim nation after a century of misguided efforts to imitate the Christian West.

Opponents of the move -- at home and abroad -- see it as the latest dramatic evidence that a less secular and tolerant Turkish state has emerged on Erdogan’s watch.

“To convert it back into a mosque is to say to the rest of the world, ‘Unfortunately we are not secular any more’,” Orhan Pamuk, the Nobel Prize-winning Turkish novelist, told BBC News. “There are millions of secular Turks like me who are crying against this, but their voices are not heard.”

The Byzantine cathedral has seen its status shift on two previous occasions in the past millennium, both of them momentous junctures for the region. It was turned from a Christian church into a mosque after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople, now Istanbul -- and from mosque to museum in 1934, as part of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s efforts to secularize his new Turkish Republic.

‘Harbinger of Freedom’

Friday’ court ruling, which annulled Ataturk’s move, was less dramatic than the fall of Byzantium. Still, Erdogan -- an Islamist who’s governed Turkey for almost two decades -- sought to frame it as a hinge of history.

“The revival of Hagia Sophia is the harbinger of freedom of Al-Aqsa and the footsteps of Muslims emerging from the era of interregnum,” the Turkish president said late Friday, referring to the mosque in Jerusalem that many Muslims consider under occupation.

Erdogan will open the Hagia Sophia to worship on July 24, the anniversary of the 1923 treaty that established Turkey’s current borders. That settlement was long considered a victory by Turks, but lately Erdogan has criticized it for ceding territory and robbing Turkey of its rightful status as a great power.

On Friday evening, thousands prayed outside the building, many crying with emotion at the symbolic triumph.

For Turkey’s religious conservatives, “converting the Hagia Sophia is the ultimate moment,” said Mustafa Akyol, a senior fellow specializing in Islam and modernity at the Cato Institute, a Washington think tank.

‘Right of the Sword’

“They believe in what they call the right of the sword, the right of the Ottomans to convert the church into a mosque as a result of conquest,” Akyol said. “Turkey has the sovereign right to do what it wants. But I ask them: What will you say if Israel does something to Al Aqsa? Will that also be the right of the sword?”

Hagia Sofia isn’t the only cathedral or mosque to have been converted. In Cordoba, for centuries a center of Islamic rule in Spain, the great mosque was made over to Christianity with a cathedral built at its heart after the region’s reconquest in the 13th century.

One possible difference, according to Akyol, is that Muslim imagery remains for all to see in Cordoba. Islam does not permit Christian-style depictions, and it remains unclear whether some of the Hagia Sophia’s iconography, whitewashed by the Ottomans and uncovered in 1934, will be hidden once more.

Erdogan said in Friday’s address that the building would “maintain its status as a cultural heritage of humanity.”

The decision has been a long time coming. And like Ataturk’s museum conversion -- which helped smooth the path to a defense pact with Greece, at a time of rising military threats in Europe -- the timing was political. Erdogan’s popularity has been sagging under the weight of a damaged economy, and conservative rivals threaten to eat into his vote.

Today, though, Erdogan’s move is more likely to damage already difficult relations with Greece, for which the Hagia Sophia carries a special significance as one of the most important Orthodox Christian monuments. Tensions between the two countries have been rising already over rights to energy exploration in the Mediterranean.

Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis condemned the decision in a statement Friday night, saying it affected “not only Turkey’s relations with Greece, but also its relations with the European Union, Unesco and the global community.”

Hagia Sophia is on Unesco’s World Heritage list and the organization said it “deeply regrets” the decision by the Turkish authorities. The EU also described Erdogan’s move as “regrettable.”

“It really is in many ways a shocking decision,” said James Ker-Lindsay, a visiting professor at the London School of Economics, who focuses on security in southeast Europe. “It just contributes to the downward spiral in relations between Athens and Ankara that we’ve been seeing in recent years, and this is calculated to remove any remaining levels of trust.”

— With assistance by Sotiris Nikas, Caroline Alexander, and Selcan Hacaoglu

Sadly,

BB Lee

P.S. I have been involved to their academic activity as an editorial board and/or reviewer to a few leading journals and still do - see the attachment- and gave lectures/workshops almost a dozen times through years.