Two compulsory religion lessons a week
Turkey’s steps to promote traditional moral values in students, increase Islamic lessons and open prayer rooms in schools are fuelling secularist concerns in the Muslim country and laying bare divisions over the role religion should have in education.
The measures, introduced recently, have fired up tensions over what is already a highly charged subject as Turkey marks 100 years since Mustafa Kemal Ataturk founded the staunchly secular republic.
Reuters stumbles over its own feet there – if Turkey is a staunchly secular republic then why does Reuters call it “the Muslim country”?
The number of Imam Hatip schools, founded to educate Islamic preachers, has risen to around 1,700 from 450 in 2002 when the AKP first came to power. Their student body has risen six-fold to more than half a million.
But secularist criticism is now directed at the regular school system, where students take two compulsory religion lessons a week and now must take additional religion and morality classes.
Separately, under a regulation that came into force in October, all schools must make spaces available for what is known as 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 education sector union Egitim-Is, told Reuters.
The same thing happens in the US of course. Daddy God is always being smuggled in one way or another.
The republic that Ataturk founded was staunchly secular. Erdogan’s AKP party is much more willing to blur the lines between religion and state, and the almost-certainly fake 2016 coup crushed the elements in the military that have traditionally resisted any attempt to reintroduce Islamic practice. The institutions of the Republic have remained secular, this introduction of religious education into the state education system is a major milestone in the attempts to change that.
The UK does this also. It has state-funded Islamic schools complete with lessons in the Islamic religion and compulsory Islamic worship.
Try complaining about this and you’ll get labelled “Islamophobic”.
Too many people in the UK think that religion is automatically a good thing.
[Note, the UK also has state-funded Church-of-England, Catholic, Jewish and Hindu schools, again with lessons in religion and compulsory worship.]
Back in 1965 I took a boat trip along the Bosphorus from Istanbul to the Black Sea. I got talking with a couple of Turkish students who flatly refused to believe that Atatürk was not religious (something I’d read in the biography by Patrick Balfour (Lord Kinross)).
My religious education, with prayers every morning, at school, as well a Sunday school (where we children were sent to get us out of the house) and Sunday services I had to attend, didn’t do me any good, though I in many ways am thankful for it since one needs an understanding of Christianity in order to have a proper understanding of Western history & civilisation. My parents decided that that I should be confirmed into the Anglican communion, since it would good for my morals (as you might geld a cat), and this was done at school through the offices of the school chaplain, a totally humourless individual whom I cordially loathed, as he did me. He provided all of those seeking confirmation with little booklets full of Bible readings, with an infantile commentary on each, which we were required to read, and then three-quarters of the way through the process of turning us into good , wayfaring Christians, we had to have individual interviews with him.
“Well, Harris,” he began, sitting back in his chair and looking at me with obvious dislike, “Have you been reading the booklets I gave you?”
“I’m afraid I haven’t, sir. I found them rather childish, so I have been reading ‘The Imitation of Christ’ by St Thomas a Kempis instead.” (I actually had been reading it — a bit.)
He at once became swollen with rage, but was of course in no position to express it.
‘Well, of course, that is very good, Harris. You must be a rather mature boy, so I shall give you some more advanced booklets.’ Which he did.
Once home, I glanced at the booklets and decided that they were just as infantile as the previous ones, and so didn’t bother reading them and threw them away.
After confirmation, during which I had been blaspheming in my mind and calling God every bad name I could think of before being called up for the laying on of hands and a brief, unintelligible burbling from the officiating priest, everything fell away, and I ceased going to church.
Some time later I bumped into the local rector as he was coming out of the rectory.
‘Oh, Tim,’ he exclaimed, ‘I haven’t seen you in church recently!’
‘Well, I’m afraid I don’t think I believe in God any more,’ I said as politely as I could.
“Oh, but it’s much the nicer hypothesis!’ he exclaimed. (He had been a teacher of mathematics in a previous life.)
The thought ‘I don’t want a bloody hypothesis’ sprang into my mind, but I refrained from uttering it, and mumbled a few more excuses before we parted.
And that was that, more or less.
I suppose the moral of that little tale is that religious education, etc at schools does not necessarily result in the production of fervent believers. Though I think a secular education, in which religion is brought into subjects like history, is a far better thing.
‘What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?’ Tertullian famously asked — by which he meant that Christians *know* the truth; and that the subtleties of philosophy, which he dismisses in its totality as superficial quibbling, are irrelevant to faith. Which is also why theology, despite the respect that the Roman Church pays to Aquinas and others, as well as to reason, is largely irrelevant to what is central to a religion that is based on faith (as other religions are not).
I should add that my unbelief does not prevent me from admiring the work of poets and writers like Dante, Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, Milton, Blake & David Jones; though I dislike what seems to me to be the mere religiosity of T.S. Eliot.
Pace Coel, if you wish to complain about religious worship, education, etc in state schools, as I think one should, then it is surely better and more responsible to criticise such practices with respect to all religions, and not to pick only on Islam. Then you would not be the victim of accusations of ‘Islamophobia’.