نظر نویسنده

We believe the government’s top-down education program for raising religious youth is inherently flawed on various grounds. First and foremost, the aim of raising a youth with a certain mindset contradicts the very meaning of democracy, since the project aims to create one nation with only one perspective, hence not grant any choice to choose among multiplicity of perspectives for its people. Democracies call for open and civilised discussions of all viewpoints and do not aim to indoctrinate all the other opinions, depending on what is deemed to be the right one by the government.

Second, Turkey has already witnessed the discriminatory outcomes of compulsory religious education, which is largely informed by the Hanefi school of Sunni Islam. Non-Muslim students are exempt from these classes, whereas the same right (to be exempt from classes)is not granted to Alevis and non-believers on the grounds that the class is about “world civilisations” and not about religion. Having gone through the Turkish education system myself (Funda), I always believed excluding the Jewish and Christian students in our class, just created an “us versus them” attitude and implicitly gave them the feeling that they could never be in the “us” group Third, we strongly believe that “everyone should be free to choose how to live their own lives, so long as it does not prevent others from doing the same” (see the introduction to P7). An attempt to raise a religious youth contradicts our ability to freely choose to believe or not believe in a religion, hence our basic human right: the right to believe. Fourth, the argument that being religious makes one moral, and being non-religious immoral, is a highly reductionist one that is far from the truth. What makes an individual moral is much more complex than this. And lastly, it is puzzling that Erdoğan, who continuously calls for secularisation in the other Islamic countries, especially the turmoil-laden Middle East, is openly favouring a particular religious perspective and announcing his desire to expand this mindset to the general Turkish youth.

Given the existing tensions between non-religiousness, belonging to a minority religious group and the majority Sunni Islam in Turkey, we believe that even the desire to “raise a religious youth” is problematic. Political parties might have certain views on religion, but even if they win sufficient votes to become the majority government in a country, this does not give them the right to turn their beliefs/opinions/perspectives into a social engineering project to make everyone the same

- İrem Kök & Funda Üstek