February 7, 2025
A striking example of the political transformation of mosques is the attempted military coup in Turkey on 15 July 2016, when it was mosques that prevented the overthrow of R. Erdogan from the presidency by mobilizing a significant part of the population, thereby preventing a transfer of power.
Just because the mosques prevented the coup does not mean they were "good"—they saved the Islamic regime. They saved "one of their own." Erdogan was the man who put the country on a clear vector toward Islamization. After his "rescue," he made the patriarchal Orthodox Hagia Sophia Cathedral a mosque again (for the last 86 years the Cathedral functioned as a museum), redistributed state funding in favour of Islamic schools, and declared:
"Islam cannot be either ‘moderate’ or ‘not moderate’. Islam can only be one thing." So, how did mosques save Erdogan? In this article, the author succinctly described everything that happened, emphasizing the following:
▪️ Over 3000 Istanbul mosques organized well-coordinated megaphone proclamations and prayers with a 300-metre radius of sound coverage. At the level of the city's neighbourhoods, they turned into a mobilizing drumbeat (see illustration).
▪️ Mosques provoked a politico-religious extreme mobilization of the Islamic population. Followers followed the calls given in the mosques instantly and rigorously.
Bottom line: mosques have played a crucial role in the physical mobilization of people.
This is a relatively recent and extremely large-scale event that once again demonstrates the functional variation of mosques. Given what is written about mosques in the doctrine of Political Islam and real examples of this in modern times, we can safely classify mosques as a strategic infrastructure of Political Islam. They can be rapidly transformed into active political centres of power on demand and perceived necessity.
A note to us all.
P.S. Note the illustration showing data from mapping the activation of voice, SMS and social media around mosques. The area most densely painted with crosshatching lines is Fatih, one of Istanbul's historic centres, and a place where mosque density is higher than in other areas of Istanbul.
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