Turkish Children Steered Toward Religious Education - Al-Monitor: The Middle Eastʼs leading independent news source since 2012

Tulin Daloglu

Tulin Daloglu

Aug 19, 2013

The original matryoshka doll set from 1892, carved by Vasily Zvyozdochkin using a design by Sergey Malyutin, as seen in the year 2000. — Sergiev Posad Museum of Toys, Russia

Turkish students up in arms over Islamization of education

Sukru Kucuksahin

Students of Tevfik Ileri Imam Hatip School eat and chat during a break in Ankara November 18, 2014. Turkey has seen a sharp rise in religious schooling under reforms which President Tayyip Erdogan casts as a defence against moral decay, but which opponents see as an unwanted drive to shape a more Islamic nation. Almost a million students are enrolled in "imam hatip" schools this year, up from just 65,000 in 2002 when Erdogan's Islamist-rooted AK Party first came to power, he told the opening of one of the s

Erdogan Islamizes education system to raise 'devout youth'

Kadri Gürsel

Turkish girls attend a class at the Kazim Karabekir Girls' Imam-Hatip School in Istanbul February 10, 2010. The imam-hatip network is a far cry from the western stereotype of the madrassa as an institution that teaches the Koran by rote and little else. Originally founded to educate Muslim religious functionaries in the 1920s, the imam-hatip syllabus devotes only around 40 percent of study to religious subjects like Arabic, Islamic jurisprudence and rhetoric. The rest is given over to secular topics. To ma

Erdogan's reforms meant to educate 'pious generation'

Orhan Kemal Cengiz

Orhan Kemal Cengiz

A woman walks in a hallway at Sehit Duran primary school in Adana, Turkey, March 18, 2019.

Turkey’s conservatives tighten grip on schools as imams appointed ‘spiritual counselors’

Nazlan Ertan

In Izmir, reporting on culture