Turkey is definitely trying to make a statement but it seems only a few will hear it:
ANSA – Polemics, accusations, and sarcasm have failed to put a damper on Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s plans to build an enormous mosque towering over the Bosphorus.
The mosque will be gigantic, covering a surface area of some 15,000 square meters on the Camlica hill on Istanbul’s Asian side, with another 250,000 square meters housing a park, museum, bar, restaurants, amusement park, and a terrace with a breathtaking view over the Bosphorus and Byzantine and Muslim Istanbul. Erdogan had announced the project a year ago, saying that the ”enormous” mosque would be ”visible from anywhere in the city” with ”the highest minarets in the world”.
In the eyes of opposition secularist Turks, Erdogan – who is referred to as ‘the new sultan’ by many – would like to leave his mark on the city in the tradition of the caliphs of the past. His mosque will be endowed with six minarets instead of two, a distinction of which thus far only Istanbul’s famous Blue Mosque can boast.
”There are many places in Istanbul where a mosque could be built, but they want to send a message,” Hurriyet was told by the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) MP Mehmet Ali Ediboglu. ”The message is that they want to build an Islamic republic in the place of the secular system. That’s what they are doing, step by step”. Erdogan’s Turkey cannot be said to be lacking in mosques.
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The ”enormous” mosque on Camlica will be another sort of symbol, said Urban Planning Minister Erdogan Bayraktar: ”a work symbolizing the AKP rule”. Nothing will stand in the way of the ‘sultan’s’ plans. Neither the sarcasm on social networking sites referring to the ‘Mosque of Erdogan the Magnificent’, nor the alarm bells from the Chamber of Architects, who say that the edifice will ”destroy Istanbul and the Bosporus’s horizon”. The cries of ”genocide” against Istanbul’s historic landscape launched by CHP leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu and the appeals from Muslim intellectuals have also fallen on deaf ears.