Islamicizing Turkish Children

"Do you expect that a [political] party with a conservative, democratic identity would raise an atheist youth?"
"You may have such an aim, but we [Turkey's governing Justice and Development Party] don't."
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey speaks with supporters in Ankara. (Murat Cetinmuhurdar/AP)

"The [controversially violent demons] film teaches [vulnerable young students that] if you renounce your faith you will have this horror [visited upon you as punishment from on high]."
"They [the current government] are stealing the children's future."
Erdogan Delioglu, Istanbul parent

"....Turkish officials have broken with decades of precedent in what is still, at least nominally, a secular republic: they have begun describing the country’s military deployment in Syria as 'jihad.' During the first two days of the operation, which began on Jan. 20, the government’s Directorate of Religious Affairs ordered all of Turkey’s nearly 90,000 mosques to broadcast the 'Al-Fath' verse from the Koran — 'the prayer of conquest' — through the loudspeakers on their minarets. Mainstreaming jihad, which sanctions violence against those who “offend Islam,” is a crucial step in draping the sheath of sharia over a society. Sadly, Turkey seems to be slowly moving along that path."
"In recent years, the government led by Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been limiting individual freedoms, as well as sanctioning individuals who “insult Islam” or neglect Islamic practices. Since November 2017, the national police — controlled by the central government — has been monitoring online commentary on religion and suppressing freedom of expression when they find such commentary 'offensive to Islam'."

"Education is a prime pillar in Erdogan’s efforts to throw a membrane of sharia over the country. Turkey’s education system, like the police, falls under control of the central government, and the Ministry of Education has been pressuring citizens to conform to conservative Islamic practices in public schools."

"The government is formally inserting religious practices into the public education system by requiring all newly-built schools in Turkey to house Islamic prayer rooms. Recently, for instance, a local education official in Istanbul demanded that teachers bring pupils to attend morning prayers at local mosques."

Soner Cagaptay, senior fellow, Washington Institute for Near East Policy

'The bottom line is: generations who ask questions, that's what the government fears'

REUTERS/Umit Bektas

There can be little doubt that Recep Tayyip Erdogan was disappointed in the results of the last election when his Islamist party lost clout in their majority status, and so did he, which he made up for by attaining a majority government only with the aid of an alliance with another Turkish Islamist party, but acting as though the people of Turkey had given him and his party carte blanche to completely change Turkey's traditional secularist, democratic politics from the Kemalist model to the new, vibrant and triumphant Erdogan model.

Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, historically the hero of Turkey who turned his country away from Islamic backwardness to face Europe and constitutionally adapt to democracy is now a has-been model, with Erdogan's vision of a Sharia-based Islamist Turkey in the ascendancy. The country remains locked in the national emergency situation that Erdogan imposed on it in the wake of the unsuccessful attempt at removing him and his government through a military coup. Tens of thousands of Turkish police, justices, lawyers, journalists, teachers, unionists, military and others accused of plotting to overthrow his government have been imprisoned.

  
Public schools are being closed without warning, replaced by religious schools. Presidential diktat has scrapped exams, and tens of thousands of public teachers have been dismissed while religious groups have been enabled without teaching certificates to teach in schools completely lacking parental consent. Erdogan's June 24 re-election gives him the confidence to continue apace with his plan to continue the state of emergency and institute wholesale changes in the nation's constitution; its political, social, educational and religious character.

His indomitable will to completely remake Turkey in his own image, and his steady transfer of authority into his own hands now unchallenged sees him moving forward to that end, to create a population steeped in religious devotion from an early academic stage to his fundamentalist view of Islam and its place in every aspect of Turkish life. Leading parents around the country to protest his changes, while doing whatever they can to find schools of their choice to entrust the future of their children with in a standard, Western-style curriculum.

Turkey is destined to become Erdogan's private republic in homage to Islamist ideals. He intends to "raise a pious generation", claiming that religious schools represent a democratization of education, reversing "discrimination" that prevailed under the secular republic. It should be pointed out that the main presidential challenger, Muharrem Ince himself, sought to make the issue of religious schools his own, considering them to be important to the nation, but that attendance should be optional, in hopes of uniting the electorate in his favour.

Imam Hatip religious schools are now replacing secular public schools. While they make use of the national curriculum, half of the educational courses are religious in nature, core classes remain the Quran and Arabic. All of which more than explains just how and why it is that Muslim countries remain backward, failing to advance socially, educationally, technologically, with an emphasis on basic human rights and equality. Under Erdogan these religious schools have expanded from the 450 that existed fifteen years ago to the 4,500 that currently exist nationwide.

Among the aspiring middle class of Istanbul and other major Turkish cities parents complain of Erdogan's aggressive agenda to push religious instruction for their children, identifying that very instruction as deceptive, and damaging to normal educational standards. As a result, parents withdraw their children from religious schools to send them to private schools or alternately make do with technical and vocational schools. And according to the Education Ministry, 69 percent of places in Imam Hatip schools are unfilled, yet the schools keep proliferating.

A class of twelve-year-olds was exposed to a film in the Imam Hatip school so violent and frightening, with an abundance of punishing demons that parents said their children had nightmares. Despite the complaints, the film remains on the curriculum ostensibly to 'teach' children the punishment that demons mete out to insufficiently pious children failing to take their Koranic lessons seriously enough.

Protestors march with placards reading "enough! Don't turn our schools to Imam Hatips" in Kadikoy in Istanbul (AFP)

Saudi Arabia invested in madrassas, religious schools built with vast oil reserve profits all over the Muslim world to teach impressionable young Muslims Islamist values. Often in a language they could neither speak nor understand; Arabic. But these schools' alumnae formed the basis for the jihadi groups later formed to torment the world as terrorist groups, from al-Qaeda to the Taliban, Al Shabab to Islamic State. Turkey is planning on its own home-made jihadi graduates to spread the word of Islam and glorify it.