Changes in school religious education fail to resolve fundamental problems

Children across Turkey are preparing to return to school on 19 September. For the first time, the official textbooks for use in all but the few ethnic minority schools for non-Muslims will include not only teaching of Sunni Islam, but also on Alevi and Caferi traditions, both widely shared movements within Islam in Turkey. The Education Ministry's General Directorate of Religious Education confirmed that the textbooks for the compulsory Religious Culture and Knowledge of Ethics (RCKE) lessons have been amended to include additions agreed with representatives of these two communities, though the textbooks are not yet publicly available to verify this.

Religious Culture and Knowledge of Ethics classes, for between one and two hours a week, are compulsory in almost all primary and secondary schools. Lessons have up till now been heavily based on the Sunni branch of Islam, and the textbooks are prepared and published by the Education Ministry.

RCKE classes have not always been compulsory in Turkey. Because the military leadership of 1980 saw the value of a certain form of "restrained religion" as a unifying factor for the nation and as a preventative tool against what it considered marginal movements, a provision was inserted into Article 24 of the Turkish Constitution making RCKE classes compulsory in primary and secondary education. The same provision goes on to say that "education and instruction in religion and ethics shall be conducted under state supervision and control", explicitly demonstrating the state's strong interest in imposing its control.

The Chair of the Association of Protestant Churches, Zekai Tanyar, thinks it is unrealistic to expect that there will be no religion classes in Turkey. He views the current practice as the teaching of a certain denomination within Islam, and hence students should have the possibility of exemption. The important thing, as he sees it, is the consequence of the RCKE lessons: because of the narrow focus of the content, students are raised with a narrow view of religion and tend to see members of other religions or traditions as "the other".
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