Welcome to the new 'Advanced Islamist' Turkish State.

Welcome to the new 'Advanced Islamist' Turkish State. (TheNational).By David Lepeska.

On a brilliantly sunny afternoon in September, dozens of pre-teens kicked footballs and chased each other across a concrete playground in front of the 60th Year School in Sancaktepe, a working- class district on Istanbul’s Asian side.

Among a group of mothers keeping watch, some had recently protested against the school’s colonisation by a religion-focused middle school, known in Turkey as an imam hatip school. Last year, as a pilot project, the imam hatip school commandeered nine classrooms and welcomed 300 students. This year it has 20 classrooms and 750 students.

The mothers were bothered less by the religious curriculum and taxed classroom space than by a lack of equity: every imam hatip student gets a tablet computer and digital lessons (while the ­normal middle-school students lug around heavy textbooks); their bus to school is half-price; and their classrooms come decked out with smartboards, projection tools and better laboratory ­facilities.

“My son sees all this and asks me, ‘Does the state not like me?’” said Nihal Ozturk, who has two sons, one a 13-year-old at 60th Year Middle School. “I’m worried he’s getting a worse education. This new school is telling him and his classmates: the more religious you are, the more the state will love you, the more advantages you will have.”

But it has, in recent years, largely remade the nation in its own image, creating a “new Turkey”, as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and other officials like to call it, where a majoritarian state embraces conservatives, moral codes are prescribed if not strictly enforced and Islam informs policy decisions at home and abroad.

“The goal of Islamists is the ­Islamisation of society, in thought and practice, and in the standards that people hold themselves to,” Shadi Hamid, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, writes in his 2014 book,Temptations of Power.

Few societies in modern times have been so thoroughly cleansed of religion in such a short time as that of the early Republic of Turkey. In seeking to build a modern, secular state, Atatürk abolished the Ottoman sultanate and ended the caliphate, rubbished the newly created Sharia Council and adopted European legal codes. He fired Islamic judges, forbade the headscarf in government buildings and made Friday, the day of Muslim prayer, a workday.

“He is a weak ruler who needs religion to uphold his government,” Atatürk said a few years after he founded the republic, in 1923. “It is as if he would catch his people in a trap.”

In September, the European Court of Human Rights was ­unanimous in its decision that that Turkey violates basic education rights by forcing students to attend compulsory classes while failing to ensure respect for parents’ convictions.

The list goes on. The Diyanet intends to transform an Istanbul university into an Islamic academy to rival Egypt’s famed centre of Muslim learning, Al Azhar. Images of human genitalia in some grade 6 textbooks have been replaced with photos of prancing animals. And with classes on Islam recently added to its academies, religious education has crept into Turkey’s bastion of secular nationalism: the military.

“There’s a long game being played here,” Hamid said. “Promoting certain religious values through the education system is important because that’s how you change hearts and minds. Ten, 20 years down the road we’ll see how this plays out in society, with all these students who have gone through a different kind of Islamic schooling.”

The AKP pairs this domestic long game with a neo-Ottoman foreign policy that supports Sunni causes, defends Islam against the imperialist West and seeks to position Turkey as an arbiter of Muslim affairs, potentially displacing Saudi Arabia as the global Sunni leader.

“There’s a very clear reluctance on the part of Turkish authorities to move against jihadists,” said Halil Karaveli, a Stockholm-based senior fellow with the Turkey Initiative at Johns Hopkins University’s Central Asia-Caucasus Institute. “If anything I think Turkish complicity, the fact that Turkey tolerates ISIS [ISIL], has become more clear.” Hmmm.......The new Islamist Turkey..."EinVolk, En Ummah Ein Fuhrer". Read the full story here.