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Pillars
of Turkey's Islamization: Schools, Mosques, and Prisons
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Originally published under the title "Turkey: Land of
Mosques, Prisons and the Uneducated."
President
Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Islamization of Turkey depends on religious
schools, mosques, and prisons.
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One way the rise of Islamist authoritarianism in a country can be seen
is by the rise in the number of mosques, religious schools and prisons --
coupled with a sharp decline in the quality of education. Turkey is no
exception.
Most recently, the Turkish government said that it would build 174 new prisons, increasing capacity by 100,000
convicts. This is Turkey's reply to complaints that six convicts must
share a cell built for three. Convicts say they must sleep in turns in
their bunk beds.
Before that, Turkey's government released nearly 40,000 convicted criminals, in order
to make space for tens of thousands of suspects, including journalists,
businessmen and academics, detained after the failed coup of July 15.
The other type of trendy building in Turkey is the mosque. Turkey's
state-funded Directorate for Religious Affairs (Diyanet) has
proudly announced that nearly 9,000 new mosques were built
across the country between 2005 and 2015.
Turkey has roughly twice as many
mosques per capita as Iran.
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The number of mosques in Turkey is estimated at around 90,000, or one
mosque per 866 people. Iran, with a similar population to Turkey's
[nearly 78 million] boasts just 48,000 mosques. In other words, Turkey
has twice as many mosques as the Islamic Republic of
Iran, for roughly the same population. Egypt, which has a population --
nearly 90 million -- bigger than Turkey's, has 67,000 mosques.
Turkey's president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has not only been building
mosques and prisons to further Islamize the country. He has also
passionately been building religious schools [from which he once
graduated]. He boasts that during his term as prime minister and
president (since November 2002), the number of students enrolled at
religious schools, officially called "imam schools," has risen from 60,000 to more than 1.2 million -- a
20-fold increase. In his study, "The Islamization of Turkey: Erdogan's Education Reforms,"
Svante E. Cornell wrote that:
The growing efforts at Islamization of
Turkish society have largely gone unnoticed. For many years, Islamization
was the dog that did not bark: in spite of dire predictions by
secularists, the [ruling] AKP did not introduce conspicuous efforts to
Islamize Turkey. But since 2011, this has changed. The main exhibit is
the education sector, which President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has remodeled
to instill considerably more Islamic content, in line with his stated
purpose to raise "pious generations". Ultimately, the Islamic
overhaul of the education system is bound to have implications for
Turkey's civilizational identity, and on the choices it will make on
where it belongs politically.
In 2012, Erdogan's government introduced a contentious 12-year
compulsory education system, paving the way for religious middle schools.
In 2014, it introduced a scheme which forcibly enrolled about 40,000
students at imam schools. In some districts, imam schools were suddenly
the only option for parents who could not afford private
schooling. Also in 2014, the government granted permission for girls as
young as 10 to wear Islamic headscarves in class.
So, where does Turkey's increasingly Islamist education stand after
all those efforts? According to a report released this month by the
Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Turkey is
one of the countries with the lowest spending per student. Turkey's
public spending for primary and secondary school education, and its
spending per university student, were all below the OECD average. The
OECD study also found that 43% of Turkish women aged between 15 and 29
were neither working nor receiving education. The OECD average for that
group is 17%.
But it is not just about the quantitative findings; qualitative
findings also point to an alarming education deficit in Turkey. In 2016,
more than two million Turkish high school graduates took the annual
national test to enroll at a post-secondary institution. According to the
nationwide test results, the students scored an average 4.6 out of 40
questions in mathematics; 7.8 in science and 10.7 in humanities.
Ironically, the test results show that the Turkish students do not
even have adequate skills in their own language. The average score in
Turkish was 19.1 out of 40.
This is the inevitable outcome of systematic Islamization of society
in general, and of education in particular, over the past 14 years. The
next 14 years will doubtless be far bleaker.
Burak Bekdil is an Ankara-based
columnist for the Turkish newspaper Hürriyet Daily News and a fellow at the
Middle East Forum.
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