19 October 2022; MEMO: Saudi Arabia has sentenced a Quran reciter to 12 years in prison for leading prayers at Istanbul's Hagia Sophia eight years ago, as the Kingdom's crackdown on religious figures continues to intensify.
According to the Saudi rights organisation, Prisoners of Conscience, a Saudi court last Wednesday tried the Imam and Quran reciter, Abdullah Basfar "in the context of accepting an invitation to lead worshippers in the courtyard of the Hagia Sophia mosque in Turkiye", handing him a 12-year prison sentence.
"We condemn the ruling … and we call on the authorities to release him unconditionally," the organisation stated.
As one of the most prominent religious figures within the Kingdom, Basfar previously held an associate professorship in Sharia and Islamic Studies at Jeddah's King Abdulaziz University.
That changed in August 2020, when he was arrested after a video of him leading prayers in the courtyard of the Hagia Sophia site in 2014 surfaced and spread online. The Sheikh was then held in pre-trial detention for two years, through which he was reportedly harassed by his interrogators.
The exact reasons for his arrest and charges were not clarified by reports or the Saudi authorities, but it is suspected that his detention was caused by the fact that his leading of the prayers in 2014 was conducted at a time when relations between the Saudi and Turkish governments were extremely strained.
At that time, the Hagia Sophia was still a museum, until July 2020 when the Turkish government reverted the historic building back into a mosque. A year later, Ankara and Riyadh began to repair ties and, earlier this year, their relations were fully restored.
While the Kingdom and its supporters claim that the increasing detentions of imams, scholars and religious figures are part of a crackdown on extremism, critics insist they are the deliberate suppression of any potential opposition and that the government under Saudi Crown Prince, Mohamed Bin Salman, is attempting to erase the religious identity of Saudi Arabia.
