Hagia Sophia: Why It Matters So Much to the Muslim World

Hagia Sophia, Istanbul

Stand in the square between the Blue Mosque and Hagia Sophia at dawn, before the tour groups arrive, and you feel the weight of the place before you understand it. For roughly five hundred years this building was the great mosque of an empire. For another eighty-six it was a museum. Since 2020 it has been a working mosque again. No single label has ever held it for long, and that restlessness is exactly why it means so much to so many people.

This article is about one strand of that story: what Hagia Sophia represents to the Muslim world, and why it has held that meaning since the morning of 29 May 1453. I will keep the real history straight, share the legend that Ottoman storytellers told about the place, and finish with honest, current advice for actually visiting in 2026. If you want the full architectural backstory first, the complete Hagia Sophia history and facts guide covers the Byzantine chapters in more depth.

How did Hagia Sophia become a mosque?

The short answer: conquest, in 1453. The longer answer is more interesting.

Hagia Sophia, Istanbul

Hagia Sophia was finished in 537 AD for the Byzantine emperor Justinian, and for nearly nine centuries it served as the cathedral of Eastern Christendom. When the twenty-one-year-old Sultan Mehmed II, later called Mehmed the Conqueror, took Constantinople in 1453, his first Friday prayer was held inside this building. That choice was deliberate. By praying under the greatest dome in the known world, he claimed the prestige of the old empire for the new one.

What Mehmed did next tells you how he saw the place. He did not tear it down. He converted it, added a wooden minaret first and then stone ones, and ordered the building protected as a charitable endowment. Later sultans added the three remaining minarets you see today, so the four corners frame the dome from every angle. Inside, the Byzantine mosaics were gradually covered, and the giant calligraphic roundels naming Allah, Muhammad, and the first caliphs went up around the prayer hall. The result is a layered building where a sixth-century Christian apse looks down on a mihrab pointing toward Mecca, slightly off-center because the original architects were not aiming at it.

For nearly five centuries it was the principal mosque of Istanbul and a symbol of Ottoman power. Then, in 1934, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s secular republic turned it into a museum, a gesture meant to belong to all humanity rather than one faith. That status held until July 2020, when a Turkish court annulled the museum decree and Hagia Sophia reopened for Muslim prayer. The first Friday congregation in eighty-six years filled the floor and spilled into the square outside. The decision drew celebration at home and criticism abroad, and both reactions were really about the same thing: everyone understands that whoever holds this building holds a piece of history.

How Hagia Sophia shaped Islamic architecture

Walk through almost any imperial Ottoman mosque and you are looking at Hagia Sophia’s children. That is not an exaggeration.

Hagia Sophia Praying Area

When Mehmed’s architects studied the building, they were trying to understand how the Byzantines had floated a 31-meter dome on what looked like thin air. The trick was the pendentive, a curved triangle of masonry that carries a round dome on a square base. Ottoman master builders absorbed that lesson and spent the next two centuries improving on it. The peak of that effort was Mimar Sinan, the chief imperial architect who openly treated Hagia Sophia as the problem to beat. His Suleymaniye Mosque on the third hill and his masterpiece, the Selimiye in Edirne, are direct answers to it: vast central domes, cascading half-domes, courtyards that flood the interior with light. You can trace the whole conversation in person, and the Suleymaniye Mosque history and facts guide is a good place to start if you want to compare the two side by side.

The influence runs past stone. Because figurative images are avoided in a mosque, Ottoman artists poured their skill into calligraphy and geometric pattern instead, and Hagia Sophia became a showcase for both. The eight enormous leather roundels in the prayer hall, painted in the 1840s by the calligrapher Kazasker Mustafa Izzet, are among the largest examples of Arabic script anywhere in the world. If the wider story of how this city built its skyline interests you, the overview of Istanbul’s master architects puts Sinan and his rivals in context.

Hagia Sophia and the legend of the Prophet Muhammad

Here is where history hands over to folklore, and the distinction matters. There is no record of the Prophet Muhammad ever seeing Constantinople. But Ottoman storytellers, the kind who kept oral history alive long before it was written down, told a legend that bound Hagia Sophia to him anyway, and that story is part of why the building feels sacred to many Muslims.

Prophet Muhammad’s name.

The legend goes like this. On the night of the Ascension, the Mi’raj, the angel Gabriel guides Muhammad through the heavens. They reach a place of worship of impossible beauty: forty ruby columns, walls of emerald and turquoise, silver floors, and a pool fed by the waters of Kevser running between rings of gold and silver. Whoever enters, the story says, never wishes to leave. Gabriel explains that Allah created this place for Muhammad’s community, and that it has an earthly twin: a great house of prayer in a city ringed by sea on three sides and land on the fourth, in Constantinople, called the Mosque of Sughra, which the tradition identifies with Hagia Sophia. Allah promises that whoever prays two rakat there with sincere intention will be rewarded, and whoever prays there for forty days will receive the merit of four prophets, Adam, Noah, Abraham, and Muhammad himself. The Prophet thanks Allah, returns from the Ascension, and tells his companions, who fall in love with a place none of them will ever see.

It is a story, not a hadith, and serious scholars treat it as such. But it explains the emotional charge the building carries. For the conquering Ottomans, taking Hagia Sophia was not just a military prize; in the imagination of the time it was the fulfillment of a promise. If you enjoy this kind of layered storytelling, there are more legends attached to Hagia Sophia that locals have passed down for centuries, including the famous sweating column and the half-finished apse.

Visiting Hagia Sophia in 2026: what to actually expect

My honest advice: come, but come informed, because the rules changed and the building is mid-restoration.

Since the 2020 reconversion, the ground floor is a working mosque and free to enter for worship. Tourists now use a separate route through the upper gallery, where the surviving Byzantine mosaics live, and that gallery carries a flat foreign-visitor fee. At the time of writing, in mid-2026, that ticket is around 25 euros for adults, with children under eight free. The old Museum Pass Istanbul is no longer valid here, so budget for it separately.

The bigger thing to know is the dome. In April 2025 Turkey began the largest restoration in the building’s history, a multi-year project to reinforce the structure against the major Istanbul earthquake that geologists keep warning about. A steel platform some 43 meters tall now stands inside, carried on four columns so that prayer and repair can happen at the same time, and the main dome has been wrapped on the outside while the old lead roof comes off. In practical terms, this means the great central dome and parts of its mosaics may be screened or scaffolded when you visit, and that is expected to continue into 2027. It is still absolutely worth seeing. Just go with the right expectation, and let the half-built scaffolding remind you that this building has been a permanent work in progress for fifteen hundred years.

A few practical tips. Dress modestly: shoulders and knees covered, and women should bring a scarf for the head, though wraps are usually available at the door. Take your shoes off at the carpet line. Avoid the five daily prayer times if you only want to sightsee, since the tourist flow pauses then, and skip midday Friday entirely unless you are coming to pray. Early morning is calmest. When you are done, you are two minutes from the Blue Mosque and a short walk from Topkapi Palace, so it slots neatly into a day in Sultanahmet.

See it at least once. Whatever it has been called across the centuries, Hagia Sophia is still the single building that best explains how Istanbul became Istanbul.