Secular Turks as well as conservatives have been critical of Erdogan's plans for a mosque overlooking Istanbul[/caption]When the early seventeenth century Sultan Ahmet I ordered architects to build Istanbul's Blue Mosque, he first commissioned an extra minaret for the Grand Mosque in Mecca. It was a show of humility. If his new mosque was to have six minarets, rather than the usual four, then Islam's holiest of holies had to have one more.
Turkey's current leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan likes comparing himself to Ottoman Sultans. At the beginning of his meteoric career, campaigning to be mayor of Istanbul, he likened himself to Mehmet the Conqueror. "We are before the walls", he said. "God willing, Istanbul will fall again." God willed. And so it was this May, nineteen years on, on the 559th anniversary of that first conquest, that the now all-powerful Mr Erdogan announced his intention to crown Camlica, Istanbul's highest hill, with a mosque that would be visible throughout the city. "The bulldozers should start within a couple of months", he said, "God willing."
It's how things happen in today's Turkey: no parliamentary or municipal commissions, no public debate. Probably not so very different from Ahmet's time.
But some things have changed since 1609. In a press interview mid-June, the architect Mr Erdogan chose to build his mosque boasted that "we have ambitions... The minarets will be the tallest. We'll build them taller even than the Great Mosque in Medina. The dome will be the biggest." What, in the world, asked the reporter. "Absolutely", said the architect. "In the world."
Secular Turks unsurprisingly oppose the project. The mosque for them symbolizes the victory of Erdogan's Islamic world-view, rather as the Sacre Coeur was built to symbolize the conservative French establishment's crushing of the Paris Commune.
If anything, though, conservatives are even more critical. In a city with almost no green space, why sacrifice the last forested hill for a mosque complex the size of an Olympic stadium, asks A. Turan Alkan, who describes the gigantism of the project as "the worst sort of Guinness Book of Records idiocy." Who would attend the mosque anyway? Camlica's upper slopes are uninhabited. And mosques are supposed to be built with donations, not public money.
Yildiz Ramazanoglu, meanwhile, an Islamist feminist, invited Mr Erdogan to consider the position of the Kaaba in Mecca, "in the lowest part of the city, so that you don't see it until you get to it, ... an invitation to humility.... That is the fundamental aim of religion."
Last week, the government announced that the design of the mosque would be opened to competition. There would be a six-man jury. The winning designer would be awarded 350,000 TL (£125,000). It looked like a U-turn. Tough luck for the architect who had come all the way up from the southern city of Karamanmaras to start building work.
Except that it appears to be a stitch-up. Most major architectural competitions give potential entrants at least three months to prepare their designs. Here, they have forty days. And four of the six jury members have links with TOKI, a state construction body directly attached to Mr Erdogan's office which has filled Turkey's cities with tens of thousands of identikit Nicolae Ceaucescu-style tower blocks over the past decade. This week, one of the two jury members with nothing to do with TOKI resigned. Although perhaps resign is not right word: nobody, he explained, had bothered to ask him whether he wanted to be on the jury in the first place.
