Taming Islam: Studying Religion in Secular Turkey (Social THOUGHT & Commentary) (Viewpoint Essay‪)‬

It is hard to overemphasize how politically sensitive religious education is in Turkish society. The debate over religious education, along with a few other touchstone issues, reveals much about how official conceptions of religion clash with the beliefs and practices of many religiously observant Turkish citizens. This clash became particularly clear to me as I became involved in an independent and unauthorized women's Koran course in Sincan, a suburb of Ankara. I participated in this course in order to understand conservative religious lifestyles in Turkey, and to gain insight into the view of secularism that many pious Muslims held in Turkish society soon after the collapse of the Islamist-leaning government in 1997. The involvement in the Koran course certainly allowed me to carry out this research, but also gave me an interesting perspective from which to examine the politicization of religious knowledge and education at a rather turbulent time in Turkey's economic and political history. To appreciate the political importance and sensitivity of religious instruction, it is necessary to understand the nature of secularism in Turkey and most especially the relationship between the Turkish state and religion. The Turkish population is overwhelmingly Muslim, but especially since the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the foundation of the modern Turkish republic in 1923, Turkey's government and major social institutions have been staunchly secular. The early Republican government, led by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, saw secularization as essential to the creation of a truly modern nation-state. Indeed, Kemalism (the ideology based on the doctrines of Mustafa Kemal) promotes what ir considers to be secularism, along with nationalism, economic development and Westernization, as the ideological basis of the modern Turkish Republic. Many aspects of Turkish society--from education and governance to the organization of daily life--were officially secularized over a relatively short period of time.