© Reuters. A demonstrator holds a placard reads that: “Budget for education, not for the religious affairs directorate!” throughout a rally in opposition to the federal government’s newest religion-related insurance policies on the training system, in Istanbul, Turkey December 10, 2023. REUTERS/
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By Daren Butler and Birsen Altayli
ISTANBUL (Reuters) – Turkey’s steps to advertise conventional ethical values in college students, improve Islamic classes and open prayer rooms in colleges are fuelling secularist issues within the Muslim nation and laying naked divisions over the function faith ought to have in training.
The measures, launched just lately, have fired up tensions over what’s already a extremely charged topic as Turkey marks 100 years since Mustafa Kemal Ataturk based the staunchly secular republic.
Throughout 20 years in energy, President Tayyip Erdogan and his Islamist-rooted AK Get together have reshaped Turkey in accordance with his conservative beliefs, opening many Islamic “Imam Hatip” colleges in step with his aim of making a “pious generation”.
Secularist opposition events, unions and plenty of dad and mom say Islam is now encroaching in colleges usually.
Illustrating the rising strains, some 2,000 folks protested in Istanbul on Sunday, chanting their opposition to the newest religion-related insurance policies in a rally backed by the principle opposition events and leftist teams.
“The AK Party government has really taken Turkey backwards,” stated Duzgun Ugur, 65. He stood beneath a statue depicting Ataturk instructing kids the Latin script, which changed the Perso-Arabic one utilized by the Ottoman Empire as a part of his modernising and secularising reforms almost a century in the past.
“We want compulsory religion classes abolished,” Ugur stated. “It should be up to us to give religious lessons to children at home, raising them as we wish: secular, democratic and free,”
The rally was held by teams representing Alevis, followers of an Islamic custom differing from the beliefs of the Sunni majority. They account for some 15-20% of Turkey’s 85 million inhabitants and plenty of of whom are suspicious of the AKP’s targets.
The variety of Imam Hatip colleges, based to coach Islamic preachers, has risen to round 1,700 from 450 in 2002 when the AKP first got here to energy. Their scholar physique has risen six-fold to greater than half one million.
UNIVERSAL VALUES?
However secularist criticism is now directed on the common college system, the place college students take two obligatory faith classes every week and now should take extra faith and morality courses.
Individually, below a regulation that got here into drive in October, all colleges should make areas out there for what is named a mescit, a small place for Islamic worship.
“State schools are being transformed into (religious) madrasas by making other schools’ curriculums similar to Imam Hatips,” Kadem Ozbay, head of the training sector union Egitim-Is, instructed Reuters.
Secularist unease is concentrated on a scheme dubbed CEDES, which the training ministry says goals to encourage kids to undertake “national, moral, humane, spiritual and cultural values”, however which opponents say has Islamic values at its coronary heart.
Egitim-Is has opened a courtroom case looking for the annulment of CEDES – a joint mission of the training, sport and youth ministries and the spiritual affairs directorate – on the grounds of it being anti-constitutional and anti-secular.
They complain that below the scheme a whole lot of Islamic preachers, or imams, and different spiritual officers had been being despatched to varsities. The Training Ministry has stated no such “spiritual advisers” have been appointed to varsities, with any such advisers solely concerned in actions outdoors college.
The Training Ministry didn’t reply to Reuters’ questions on the difficulty of faith in training. Training Minister Yusuf Tekin and his ministry have denied any Islamic agenda in response to many parliamentary questions from lawmakers who’ve voiced disquiet over the scheme.
“The CEDES Project is not religious education or training,” Tekin stated, including that it was in step with the structure and had obtained very optimistic suggestions from dad and mom, college students and lecturers in its pilot stage.
“The project is a club activity focused on experiencing and implementing universal values and our national values,” he added, stressing that these ‘values golf equipment’ had been voluntary and topic to parental consent.
Nevertheless, MP Nurten Yontar from the principle opposition, secularist Republican Folks’s Get together (CHP), highlighted an occasion in her constituency within the northwestern province of Tekirdag the place kids cleaned a mosque.
The native Islamic official’s workplace shared photographs of smiling kids vacuuming, sprucing and dusting the mosque, one in every of a collection of social media posts about such mosque visits below the scheme.
“The AKP government is trying to shape our country’s education system in line with ideological goals based on religious principles,” Yontar stated.
“HIDDEN AGENDA”
Erdogan himself acknowledged the political divisiveness of the difficulty in a speech final yr, greeting a small little one within the viewers and describing him as a part of “the pious generation.” He added: “This CHP fumes and goes crazy when I say the pious generation.”
Different CEDES actions posted on social media embody talks on morality, visits to folks in want and environmental actions similar to planting bushes and clearing up garbage.
However Omer Yilmaz, head of a dad and mom’ affiliation which is campaigning in opposition to the scheme, dismissed the concept it didn’t have spiritual motivation.
“They dress it up in that way to give the project a more secular appearance. When you look below the surface you can see there is a hidden agenda,” he stated.
“They are promoting the values of a particular religion.”
