The Babri Masjid-Ram Janambhoomi case provides a template to imagine how the Supreme Court of India would have probably decided on the status of Turkey’s Hagia Sophia. How would the Supreme Court of India have decided on the status of Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia, if it had the chance? Given that the court set a precedent with the Babri Masjid-Ram Janmabhoomi case last year. The unfortunate decision of Turkey’s top administrative court to cancel Hagia Sophia’s museum status and reconvert it into a mosque has rightly been criticised all over the world. But Right-nationalist governments, such as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s, which fail to deliver and solve current problems, rely on the past and in the name of correcting historical wrongs, take pride in divisive acts. At the outset, the Indian Supreme Court would have noted that Hagia Sophia is neither sacred for Orthodox Christians nor Muslims. It has nothing to do either with Jesus Christ or Prophet Muhammad, though the latter had predicted the Muslim conquest of Constantinople. It was constructed by one sovereign as a church and subsequently converted into a mosque by another sovereign. Church to mosque to museum The Eastern Orthodox Church, the sect to which Hagia Sophia originally belonged, has just 0.001 per cent share in the population of Turkey today. This is due to the Treaty of Lausanne signed in 1923, which ended Ottoman rule and led to an exchange of population between empires. It resulted in almost one million non-Muslims going to Greece, Armenia, and Muslims from these states settling in Turkey. Hagia Sophia was constructed by Emperor Justinian I between 532 and 537 AD and remained an Orthodox Christian church for almost 900 years. Although, in the middle, it was converted into a Roman Catholic Cathedral during the fourth Crusade of 1204, but it was converted into an Eastern Orthodox Church again when the Byzantine empire made a comeback in 1261. After the fall of Constantinople in 1543, Ottoman Sultan Mehmat II converted it into a mosque by purchasing it and creating a waqf. The petitioners in the current case had alleged that the building belongs to the Fatih Sultan Mehmat Han Foundation of Mehmat II. Hagia Sophia remained a mosque until 1931 when it was closed. It was reopened as a museum in 1934 in a decision by the Mustafa Kemal Ataturk cabinet. It was ‘secularised’ and opened to all with an entry fee. We are deeply grateful to our readers & viewers for their time, trust and subscriptions. Quality journalism is expensive and needs readers to pay for it. Your support will define our work and ThePrint’s future. If the Indian Supreme Court was deciding on the status of Hagia Sophia, it would have cited its own historic judgment on the Babri Masjid-Ram Janmabhoomi dispute in Ayodhya to observe that the Eastern Orthodox Church could not conclusively prove its ‘uninterrupted possession’ of the Hagia Sophia, because, from 1204 to 1261, it was used as Roman Catholic Cathedral. On the other hand, Hagia Sophia remained a mosque from 1453 to 1931, and Muslim prayers were continuously offered there. Moreover, the court may have attached a lot of importance to the fact that Muslims never gave up their ‘belief’ that Hagia Sophia was a mosque and prayed there. Hindu beliefs were similarly given lot of weightage in the Babri judgment. Unlike the Babri case, where the Muslim petitioners had failed to produce any document indicating dedication of the mosque by Babur as the foundation of a legal title prior to 1857, the decree of Mehmat II is still available, creating an endowment and dedicating Hagia Sophia as a mosque. Once a property is dedicated to God, the Indian law is clear that such property becomes inalienable. Section 3 of the Waqf Act, 1995, like earlier statutes, recognises waqf by user even in the absence of a specific deed of dedication. The Supreme Court, too, had upheld waqf by user doctrine in the Faqir Muhammad Shah v. Qazi Fasihuddin Ansari case (AIR1956 SC 713). In Hagia Sophia, Muslims did offer prayers for 478 years and, therefore, waqf by user stands established.