One of the most important sites in Muslim-American history still stands in Cedar Rapids

In early July 2020, Turkey’s supreme court issued a verdict to revert the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul into a mosque. The 1,500-year-old structure was built during the Byzantine Empire in the Greek Orthodox tradition, and served as a church until the rise of the Ottoman Empire, when it was first converted into a mosque. With the fall of the Empire in 1922, the mosque was turned into a museum; a century later, it has reopened as a place of worship.