Ankara imam offers Turkey’s only English sermons
Turkish imam Mehmet Akif Koc has been giving sermons in English for the past five years.
From a mosque in the capital’s Cankaya district, Mehmet Akif Koc gives biweekly sermons in English — a unique practice in Turkey. Even without his interest in the writings of Noam Chomsky, the Ankara-based imam and professor would have a claim to be one of Turkey’s more unorthodox Islamic scholars and preachers.
Apart from the Arabic of the Quran, there is no record of a non-native language being used on a regular basis in any of Turkey's other 80,000-plus mosques.
In the heart of Ankara’s embassy district, Hasan Tanik mosque has come to cater to diplomats and students since Koc began giving the Friday sermon, or hutbe, in English five years ago.
Koc, a professor of divinity at Ankara University, told Al-Monitor that around one in five members of the Friday congregation, around 1,000 worshippers that flock to the squat stone mosque, are non-Turkish speakers.
