Monday, May 18, 2015

The Diyanet: Turkey's 'Islamist state' within.

Source Quote.

The Diyanet: Turkey's 'Islamist state' within. (FA).

A year after founding modern Turkey in 1923, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk abolished the caliphate and created a government directorate of religious affairs, or the Diyanet.

Through the management of mosques and religious education, the new body would make Islam subservient to the state to secure the republic’s ostensibly secular identity.

Today, the Diyanet has largely been turned on its head. In the lead-up to June parliamentary elections, Western news outlets have fretted about Erdogan’s crackdown on free speech and his broader authoritarian drift. Meanwhile, his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), in power since 2002, has wielded a beefed-up Diyanet to promote a conservative lifestyle at home and, increasingly, to project Turkish Islam abroad.

Since 2006, the Diyanet’s budget has leapt fourfold, to 5.4 billion lira (just over $2 billion). Its share of government spending has increased by about a third and its staff has doubled, to nearly 150,000. It budget allocation this year is 40 percent more than the Ministry of the Interior’s and equal to those of the Foreign, Energy, and Culture and Tourism ministries combined.

Recent Diyanet-issued fatwas have condemned as haram the celebration of the Gregorian New Year, playing the lottery, tattoos, and abortions.

It is impossible to say whether the Diyanet issues these at AKP’s request, but the measures do jibe with AKP social policy. Further, the AKP seems to have little compunction about using the Diyanet for political ends. At Erdogan’s behest, the directorate is building a massive mosque on top of a hill overlooking the Bosporus in Istanbul. And after the government briefly shut down Twitter last year, the Diyanet’s Friday sermon reminded Turks that “freedom requires responsibility,” which many interpreted as a religious stamp of approval on the ban.

Just last week, Davutoglu said that Turkish Islam could be “an antidote” to the Islamic State of Syria and Iraq (ISIS) and that he had assigned the Diyanet the “mission” to battle the Middle East’s sectarian conflicts.

Today the Turkish-Islamic Union of Religious Affairs (DITIB) is one of Germany’s most influential Muslim organizations. The Diyanet’s French arm, established in 2003, now ranks among the country’s most prominent Muslim groups, even though Turkish-origin Muslims represent just 8­–10 percent of France’s seven million Muslims. In the Netherlands, the Diyanet pays the salaries of the Dutch Islamic Foundation, which oversees some 140 mosques. It also maintains a sizable Belgian arm.

It publishes Diyanet Avrupa, a slick monthly magazine on its work in Europe. Perhaps most important, it has helped build and rebuild dozens of Balkan mosques. “Turkey is now the most influential Muslim country in the [Balkan] region,” Oktem writes.

And on a recent visit to Mecca, the Diyanet head Mehmet Gormez announced plans for an Islamic university in Istanbul, arguing that highly regarded institutions such as al-Azhar University in Cairo and Saudi Arabia’s Medina Islamic University had failed to stem the conflict and violence vexing the Muslim world.

The new university is expected to open next year, with instruction in Turkish, Arabic, and English. Ankara expects it to burnish the country’s bona fides in Islamic theology. In 2013, the Diyanet published a seven-volume modern-day reinterpretation of the hadith, a collection of thousands of reported sayings from the Prophet Muhammad that, as the second most sacred text in Islam, largely dictate Islamic law.

Until recently, the Diyanet’s expanded scope and ambition had met with little complaint within Turkey, mainly because Turkish law stipulates that a political party that questions whether the Diyanet should exist can be dissolved. In 2013, Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag, in charge of religious affairs at the time, said that those who complain that the Diyanet’s budget is too high are “against the presence of the institution itself.”

Citing the AKP’s coziness with Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, an article at the Clarion Project said the Maryland mosque is “the next step in Erdogan’s desire to increase the Islamist influence in America.”

But it could have the opposite effect. A January study by Bertelsmann Stiftung found that 46 percent of the population of North Rhine–Westphalia, home to a third of Germany’s Muslims and many Diyanet-run mosques, view Islam as a threat. In Saxony, which has a tiny Muslim population, 70 percent do. Hmmmmm........Erdogan: "Thank God i'm a servant of Sharia". Read the full story here.


 Related: 'Islamist' Turkey's Directorate of Religious Affairs budget alone is greater than those of 10 ministries put together.

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