Ankara [Turkey], August 14 (ANI): With Turkey reconverting the famed Hagia Sophia into a mosque, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is making all-out efforts to establish himself as the ruler of the Muslim world.

Even as Erdogan is undoing the foundations of modern Turkey as envisaged by its founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Ankara continues to be the regional transit hub for the Islamic State (ISIS) terror group, according to a new watchdog report released by the US State Department earlier this month.

Though democratically elected, Erdogan has behaved in an increasingly autocratic fashion and has little patience for European-styled secularism as envisaged by Ataturk. Under the Erdogan regime, there has been a crackdown on dissent and critics of the government have been sent behind bars.

Caliphate is an Islamic state under the leadership of an Islamic steward with the title of caliph. For 400 years, from 1517 to 1924, the caliph sat in Istanbul, before the position was abolished by Ataturk, according to The Washington Post.

Last month, Erdogan controversially declared the nearly 1,500-year-old Hagia Sophia open to Muslim worship after a top court ruled the building's conversion to a museum by modern Turkey's founding statesman in the mid-1930s was illegal.

Frontier Alliance International (FAI) mission President Dalton Thomas said Erdogan is openly calling for the re-establishment of an Islamic state.

"The President of Turkey is openly calling for the re-establishment of the Islamic State, the restoration of its ancient borders and the conquest of Jerusalem. When the world wakes up from the corona hangover, we will face the resurrected Caliphate," Thomas tweeted.

Thomas described the development as crushing and destruction of a secularist Turkey.

"This is an Islamic revival taking place inside Turkey. This is the crushing, destruction, dismantling and the deconstruction of secularist Turkey moving the country back to its original formation as an Islamic state that controls the middle east," Thomas said, in a video on FIA youtube page.

Last year, Pakistan had dropped out of a forum of Islamic nations at the last minute on Saudi Arabia's insistence, which saw the grouping as an attempt to challenge its leadership of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC).

The move was seen as an attempt by Turkey, which also attended the summit, to further establish itself as the leader of the Muslim world. (ANI)