Tension Grows in Turkey Over Education Bill

When Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan flies to the United States next month for his son Bilal’s graduation from Harvard University, he may well be reminded of his mounting troubles back home.

Bilal went to Harvard, Erdogan said, because he couldn’t get into a good school in Turkey.

“Bilal’s first choice was not to study in the United States,” Erdogan said in a recent interview. “Both he and my two daughters were forced to go to America because of unjust and discriminatory education laws in Turkey.”

Erdogan moved to overturn those laws this month, sparking one of the most acrimonious debates over the role of religion in public life since his Islam-rooted Justice and Development Party, or AKP, took power 18 months ago. At the core of the dispute is an education reform bill approved by the AKP-dominated parliament that makes it easier for graduates of state-run Islamic religious high schools to enter secular public or private universities.

National education has long been a battleground for overtly pious Turks and their pro-secular adversaries, who fear that the bill is designed to let religious school graduates rise to positions of influence in the government and the judiciary, which they would use to reverse more than 80 years of determinedly secularist rule introduced by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey.

Erdogan and his four children graduated from the Islamic schools called imam hatips, where imams and preachers are trained. Entrance exam results from such schools are weighted in a way that makes it difficult for graduates to compete with those from secular schools for admission to Turkish universities.

Tensions grew when Gen. Hilmi Ozkok, chief of the country’s ardently pro-secular armed forces, issued a statement May 6 warning of the dangers posed by the proposed reforms. Just hours later, parliament approved the legislation, marking the first time Erdogan had dared to challenge the country’s powerful generals so openly.

President Ahmet Necdet Sezer is widely expected to veto the bill within days. Should parliament return the bill to him untouched, Sezer could appeal to the constitutional court for its annulment. That could touch off a fresh bout of controversy in which secularists would be likely to challenge Erdogan’s claims that he no longer believed in mixing religion with politics.

That may, in turn, jeopardize the government’s chances of persuading European Union leaders to set a date to launch membership talks with Turkey when they meet in December. One of the conditions set by the EU for considering Turkey’s accession is that the military, which has seized power three times in the last four decades, stop meddling in internal politics.

“If Erdogan doesn’t back down, the generals will keep talking, and that won’t be helpful,” said a European diplomat, who requested anonymity.

Some observers say Erdogan may have been bowing to pressure from his party’s right flank. Led by parliament speaker Bulent Arinc, the conservatives have been expressing dissatisfaction over Erdogan’s failure to deliver on preelection pledges -- among them vows to ease bans on Islamic-style head scarves at government institutions and universities. Others speculate that Erdogan, buoyed by his party’s victory in mayoral elections in March and by praise from Western leaders over sweeping democratic reforms enacted by his government, may simply have grown overconfident.

Erdogan dismisses the claims. “This law has nothing to do with symbolizing a new [Islamic] era. It is a matter of correcting an injustice,” he said.

The “injustice” he is referring to goes back to 1997, when the army forced the country’s first Islamist-led government to step down on thinly supported charges that it was seeking to impose religious rule. The generals then forced the new pro-secular leaders to introduce a grading system for religious school graduates that in effect barred them from admission to colleges other than theological faculties. In a bid to appease conservative voters, the government applied the same rules to thousands of state-run vocational schools.

The reform bill would level the playing field for vocational school graduates in all subjects, while doing so for an estimated 70,000 imam hatip students only in a restricted number of arts and humanities subjects such as philosophy and literature.

More crucially, says Turkey’s education minister, Huseyin Celik, the bill would marginalize the role of a body devised by the military in the 1980s to dictate education policy and the appointments of all university staff.

“It is those who fear democracy who stand to lose power that are kicking up a storm,” Celik said last week, as pro-secular students waving pictures of Ataturk gathered outside his office to protest the changes.

These students say there is no need for so many religious schools, because Turkey needs only 5,000 new imams a year. Many parents say they send their children not to become imams, a profession closed to women, but because of the schools’ environment.

“Sure, I wanted my daughter to learn more about Islam, but I also wanted to protect her from drugs and premature intimacy with boys,” said Binnaz Aslan, a chef in Ankara, whose daughter recently graduated from the Tevfik Ileri imam hatip.

Tevfik Ileri, in downtown Ankara, has little to distinguish it from secular schools. Portraits of Ataturk hang on the walls of classrooms where boys and girls study the same subjects taught in secular schools. Girls are allowed to cover their heads only during religious lessons. “We tell kids that our holy prophet was opposed to all forms of violence. We teach them to respect all faiths, to be rational and modern,” said Tevfik Ileri’s principal, Rami Ozalan, an imam hatip graduate.

A shy ninth-grader who identified herself only as Zehra said: “I want to become a veterinarian because I really love animals, but I also want to learn how to read the Koran. The idea that we are being trained as some sort of Islamic terrorists makes me laugh. By denying us a future, it’s almost as if that is what they would have us be.”