HVK Archives: Young Turks : Fundamentalists in training?
Young Turks : Fundamentalists in training? - The Pioneer
Richard Boudreaux (Los Angeles Times Staff Writer)
()
27 May 1997
Title : Young Turks : Fundamentalists in training?
Author : Richard Boudreaux (Los Angeles Times Staff Writer)
Publication : The Pioneer
Date : May 27, 1997
Mukaddes Erzeren's parents threw a party to celebrate her enrolment
last fall at the super-competitive Tevfik Ileri junior high - but
not because attending the school would be a smart career move for
an aspiring engineer.
"They rejoiced because I could become a good Muslim and cover my
head," said the gangly 12-year-old, her bespectacled face framed by
a tight white scarf identical to those of her classmates. "This
scarf is part of my religion."
The junior high is one of 610 Islamic academics that have sprouted
across Turkey to meet a growing demand for religious education and
freedom in the West Asia's most rigidly secular Muslim society -
where public-school girls and female civil servants are barred by
law from covering up.
In recent weeks, the academies have become targets of the Turkish
military, which calls them breeders of Islamic fundamentalism and
wants to slash their enrolments. The accusation has fueled a crisis
that could bring down modern Turkey's first Islamist-led
government, which refuses to curb the schools.
So divisive is the conflict between supporters of Prime Minister
Necmettin Erbakan's 10-month-old coalition and secularists backed
by the army that children as young as Mukaddes feel caught up in
it.
"They're so scared of us," she said during a break at the school's
concrete campus in Ankara, the Turkish capital. "But they will
never have the power to shut us down."
Twice this year the five generals on Turkey's National Security
Council have pressed for specific steps to roll back Islamic
influences not only in education but in foreign policy,
broadcasting and other areas of public life. Rumors of an imminent
coup have swept the country for weeks.
Militant secularists, most of them women who fear that scarves or
veils will eventually be imposed on them, have marched in Ankara in
the first mass protests against Erbakan's government. And in a
recent counterdemonstration in Istanbul, hundreds of thousands of
people chanted verses from the Koran to protest the military's
moves against the schools.
The struggle is being watched closely throughout the Islamic world,
where Turkey has been a model for moderate leaders. Kemal Ataturk,
Turkey's ruler after World War I, abolished the Islamic caliphate
and declared a secular, democratic and European state.
Turkey's armed forces, self-appointed guardians of that identity,
have seized power three times since 1960, but their latest
ultimatums have been largely ignored. While he withdrew a bill to
lift the 52-year-old restriction on religious head coverings,
Erbakan has stood firm on other points and held together his
coalition with the secular True Path Party of former Prime Minister
Tansu Ciller.
The generals make clear in private that "secularism means more to
them than democracy,' said a diplomat in Ankara, noting their fear
that Turkey could become a theocratic state like neighbouring Iran.
"They hope they will not have to intervene ... but they cannot
allow this standoff to continue."
Erbakan, whose Welfare Party won 21 percent of the vote in December
1995, the last elections, has backed away from campaign pledges to
quit the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and break with Israel.
Those ties are valued by the military commanders. But he is
courting the regimes in the Muslim countries of Iran, Iraq and
Libya.
The military's first open challenge came in February after the
mayor from Erbakan's party in Sin(:an, an Ankara suburb, invited
the Iranian ambassador to a rally and both men called for a Turkey
ruled by Islamic law. The mayor went to jail, the ambassador went
home under an expulsion threat, and tanks rolled in the suburb's
streets.
Many Turks were stunned by the mayor's outburst of radicalism. In
its search for the reason, the military singled out the Islamic
academies, which started in the 1950s to train boys from the sixth
grade and up to lead prayers in mosques.
In a report this month, the office of the armed forces chief of
staff noted that these imamhatip vocational academies, which are
administered by the state, have evolved since the 1980s into prep
schools as well as places for religious training and that they now
admit girls.
The academies, the report asserted, are producing an Islamist
electoral base. They are growing so fast, it warned, that academy
graduates coupled with those finishing evening or summer courses in
the Koran, the Muslim holy book - would be enough to produce a
landslide in the 2005 elections, enabling Islamists to rule without
restraint by secularist allies.
"Our educational system is producing two mind-sets. One is loyal to
secularism. The other takes a different view of the world, one that
looks to the East and uses the Koran as a reference," said Sedat
Ergin, Ankara representative of Hurriyet, one of Turkey's largest
newspapers. "We are entering a period when secular values can no
longer be taken for granted."
The Islamic academies have an enrolment of about half a million
junior high and high school students in a country of 64 million
people. Financed by parents and private donors as well as by the
state, the academies often are better equipped and staffed than
Turkey's underfunded secular schools. And because of religious
discipline, they are freer of drugs, gang fights and other
distracting social problems, parents and teachers say. Their
graduates score higher on university entrance exams.
Some Islamic academies turn away 80 percent of all applicants for
lack of room. Others have expanded with municipal funds after
demonstrations by parents demanding enrolment for their children.
"Secular forces have themselves to blame," said former Prime
Minister Bulent Ecevit, a socialist. "For decades, the state has
left a vacuum in the educational field that is now being filled by
radical Islamic groups with ample financial means.
The military is demanding a law that would raise the mandatory
period of secular education from five years to eight, thus
abolishing the academies' junior high sections. Erbakan has
resisted the change.,
"The secularism they preach here is like atheism," said Abdullah
Gul, one of Erbakan's ministers of state. "I want my son to know
something about his religion. If you demand this fundamental
right, you are branded a fundamentalist."
The Islamic junior high option is especially important for
religiously observant Muslim girls. The Koran teaches females who
have reached puberty to cover themselves in public so as not to
arouse men.
Girls interviewed at two Islamic academics, in Ankara and Istanbul,
said being allowed to wear a scarf was a big factor in their choice
of schools - all insisted that their parents left the decision to
them along with the chance to prepare for a secular profession
while studying Arabic, the Koran, Islamic law and the prophet
Muhammad's teachings.
Supporters and critics of the system agree on one thing: Religious
training has a bigger impact in junior high than it does later.
"After a kid reaches puberty, it's harder to put him in a room and
make him memorize the Koran," admitted one Islamic scholar.
Students and administrators espouse tolerance for the rights of
less-observant Muslims, including the many teachers allowed to give
non-religious instruction at the schools without wearing scarves.
"We're part of the system. We respect the system," said Hamit
Karadeniz, principal of the 6,000-student Tevfik Ileri school here.
"None of our graduates has ever thrown a bomb or shot a policeman.
If they shut us down, they're likely to start a movement of
underground schools that will really confront the system."
But his classrooms and others are full of children bent on changing
the system from within.
During a discussion at the Kadikoy school about careers, Guzeya
Cebeci, 17, announced plans to enter law school, even though a
lawyer may not cover her head in a Turkish court. She does not
plan to remove her scarf.
"It will be years before I graduate, and the country is changing,"
she said:
"Maybe ..."
(c) 1997, Los Angeles Times. Distributed by the Los Angeles
Times Syndicate
Back
Top
|
