Turkey Plans Ottoman Revival With Mosque Building Program Around The World

If he could have his way, there would probably be an Islamic mosque for every street on earth in no more than a few short years.

Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Erdogan seeks to create the image of an Islamic civilization on the rise once again - A revived Ottoman Empire of sorts - with the Turks acting as the vanguard of this revival.

To that end, Erdogan is relentlessly pursuing a very aggressive and ambitious mosque-building program virtually all over the world.

Giulio Meotti, an Italian journalist with Il Foglio recently reported on Erdogan's passion for building mosques in Europe. Since he took power in Turkey, Mr. Erdogan has built 17,000 Islamic prayer sites.

The largest in the world stands on the Camlica Hill, dominating the Asian side of Istanbul, where the East, in the words of Cocteau, extends to Europe "its old bejeweled hand".

The Turkish president is committed to the construction of mosques in European capitals as well. In the words of Erdogan, "the minarets are our bayonets, the domes our helmets, the mosques our barracks."

As Meotti explains, ten mosques have been financed by the Turks abroad, from Mali to Moscow; five of them in the past year. Ten more are in the planning stage, including one in Cambridge, UK. 

Next summer, Mr. Erdogan will be in Amsterdam at the opening of the famous "Westermoskee", the mega mosque in the Dutch city. 2,500 people will pray there every Friday.

Recently, Erdogan financed the largest mosque in the Balkans in Tirana, before flying to the US to inaugurate a mega mosque in Maryland.

In Gaza, Erdogan has personally pledged to rebuild Palestinian Arab mosques damaged during the war between Israel and Hamas and used by the terrorists to fire rockets into Israel.

The Turkish government is also financing thirty places of worship in Switzerland. In Bucharest, there is a controversy about the great mosque that the Turks are funding in the Romanian capital.

To build these mosques, at home as abroad, Erdogan has expanded the Diyanet, the Ministry of Religious Affairs of Turkey, which has a budget of two billion euro, equal to twelve ministries combined, and 120,000 employees (they were 72 thousand in 2004).

As revealed this week by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Turkey controls 900 mosques in Germany. These mosques and imams have a big influence on German public opinion. Europe is the new land of conversion - except for a majority of the Catholic countries.

According to a blacksea.eu publication last September, tensions between the Catholics and the Ottomans stretch back six centuries and culminated in a Papal War against the Ottomans which ended outside Vienna in 1683. The only Catholic countries where Turkey is planning mosques - Haiti, Cuba, and the Philippines - are those furthest from Rome.

According to the blacksea.eu report compiled by Michael Bird and Zeynep Sentek last September, Erdogan is exporting his nation's brand of Islam to over 30 multi-million mosque projects across five continents - but he risks creating monuments to a leadership in decline.

The Black Sea maps the mosque plans - from Havana to the Philippines, Mali to Cambridge and Cologne to Bucharest, revealing sizes, delivery times and who is financing their construction, a sum worth close to half a billion Euros.

However, not all Turkish Muslims are impressed -some critics believe Erdogan is constructing palaces to his power using his own people's money in bizarre and irrelevant locations.

Some of these hypermarket-sized mosques are set for urban centers with a Muslim majority, such as Tirana and Istanbul, but others target capitals where Muslims number only a few thousand, such as Bucharest, Havana, and Budapest.

The project's master plan is drawn up by President Erdogan and his prime minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, seen as the architect of Turkey's aggressive foreign policy to project itself as the pre-eminent Muslim nation.

"Ultimately every mosque abroad with a Turkish brand name seems to contribute to the discourse of Turkey as a leading Islamic power," says Kerem Oktem, Professor of Modern Turkey at the University of Graz (Centre for Southeast European Studies).

According to Oktem, Erdogan's ramping up of the mosque-building program in the last two years may come from a fear of losing control over his country. "Erdogan's 'grand mosque program' is, above all, a function of his own delusions of grandeur, of his waning power and his growing impotence," says Oktem.

Ozgur Kazim Kivanc, spokesman for Istanbul-based association Anti-Capitalist Muslims commented: "...This [plan] is not about worship, it is about marking the territory of their authority through a monument. It is quite difficult to argue that this is something that Islam would accept."

Kivanc agrees that this is a diversion tactic targeting voters. "This strategy is aimed at the Turkish electorate," he says. "It is about [the AKP] getting more support from people and strengthening their authority by saying 'look at us, we are so powerful that we build these extravagant mosques for our religion".

Turkey sees a gap in the market for its "mild" brand of Sunni Islam, which includes women-friendly mosques and an intolerance of extremist rhetoric. Western leaders view Turkish Islamic expansion as more favorable than the spread of places of prayer from rogue Imams or what they view as the radicalism of Wahhabism.

Turkey's new places of worship are mixed with cultural centers, places of learning, shops and cafes - indicating that these "mega-mosques" aim to act as showrooms selling the concept of Turkish Sunni Islam.

Turkey is also focusing on opening mosques in its backyard of the Balkans and east Europe - with mosques planned for Georgia, Hungary, Romania, Albania, Kosovo, Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia and in its own territory.

Many of the new mosques are built without public consultation and are the result of Government-to-Government deals, while in Turkey the mosques are often built on protected land, causing further tensions.
 
Dorian Jones for the Voice of America news stated that experts see imperial aspirations behind this strategy. Returning Turkey to the glories of its Ottoman past is a common theme of Erdogan and his ruling AK Party, according to Yuksel Taskin, an expert on center-right politics at Istanbul's Marmara University.

Adrien Lelievre for worldcrunch.com reported a parallel objective: that despite Turkey's recent diplomatic setbacks and increasing international isolation, Ankara continues its worldwide project of mosque construction in order to spread a moderate vision of Islam.

Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, credited in the 2000s as the mind behind the "neo-Ottoman policy," declared that Turkey's vision of Islam could act as an "antidote" to the ideology espoused by the Islamic State (ISIS), which draws its ideas from the Sunni movement of Wahhabism.

Even internationally it's not all been smooth sailing for Erdogan and Davutoglu. In an article for euobserver.com mid last July, Michael Bird noted growing resistance in Bucharest to a giant mosque proposed for the city and financed by Turkey as part of its push to build religious centers in major cities outside the country.

The Romanian government has given 11,000 square meters of terrain next to the exhibition center 'Romexpo' with a market value of ¬3.9 million for free to the Mufti of the Romanian Muslim Community, Murat Yusuf. On the site, Turkey will finance the building of a mosque, initially meant to be "the largest in a European capital".

But opposition to the project comes from a broad mix of Romanian intellectuals, ex-President Traian Basescu, extreme-right groups and even some Muslims. At a protest mid-July 2015, hundreds demanded the government to begin a "democratic process" involving an open and public discussion followed by a referendum.

A referendum is likely to produce a rejection of the building. Local newspaper Gandul ran an Internet survey, attracting 10,000 visitors - which found 92 percent of respondents were against the mosque.

This resistance seems to be founded largely on extremism fears. A poster on the site of "We don't want a mega-mosque in Bucharest" uses an image of a giant Islamic Fundamentalist terrorist brandishing a rocket launcher looming over the Romanian parliament.

Erdogan also seems to hold to some somewhat eccentric motivations. A reuters.com write-up by Daren Butler early last year reported his proposal to Cuba on the construction of a mosque on the Caribbean island during a visit to Havana. This was said to be a push apparently inspired by his belief that Muslims discovered the Americas.

Erdogan's Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu shows no sign of waning in passion for the building, opening or dedication of mosques either. A few weeks back in early May, Davutoglu attended the reopening ceremony of the historic Ferhat-Pasha mosque in Bosnia's Serb statelet.

Davutoglu said all the works built in Bosnia as part of Turkey's shared heritage will be under Turkey's protection, referring to the 16th-century mosque, which is under UNESCO protection as an outstanding example of Ottoman architecture.

"Those who bombed Ferhat Pasha mosque 23 years ago, not only destroyed a mosque but also destroyed humanity's shared conscience," Davutoglu said."We are in fact reinstated humanity's conscience through rebuilding this mosque."