Cultural products that evoke the social East\u2013West (or religious\u2013secular) contradiction\u2014the most salient theme of early Turkish literature\u2014are in vogue today. In terms of mass reach, the television series industry is now the primary carrier of cultural narratives. Contemporary series draw on the fertile ground created by this social contradiction, the very one that led Samuel Huntington to place T\u00fcrkiye in the category of a \u201ctorn country.\u201d In his series \u201cDo\u011fu,\u201d where he recounts his own journey, Do\u011fu Demirkol reflects this tension within his family. Viewers will recall a scene about Qur\u2019an memorization (haf\u0131zl\u0131k). The mother of the child receiving this instruction, when asked \u201cwhat advantages does becoming a haf\u0131z have,\u201d replies that one is granted the right to intercede for two people and bring them into paradise. The child answers the follow-up question \u201cwhom would you take with you?\u201d with \u201cKendall Jenner and Dua Lipa.\u201d Frankly, I did not recognize these names while watching; later, when I looked them up online, I saw they were foreign women\u2014a model and a singer. The joke here lies in the contradiction that the child, whom his family has sent to become a haf\u0131z, wants to take into heaven ultra-profane foreign female model-singers. This scene is a brief vignette of the cultural hybridization of younger generations in today\u2019s T\u00fcrkiye, despite the older generations\u2019 efforts\u2014aligned with political power\u2014to preserve tradition.<\/p>\n
A similar situation was observed, this time in the real world, in the debate over \u201cminiskirted Imam-Hatip students\u201d sparked by a post on X by Abdurrahim Dilipak. Dilipak shared a photograph taken at the graduation ceremony of the Adana H\u00fcmeyra \u00d6kten Girls\u2019 Project Imam-Hatip with the caption \u201cminiskirted theologians are coming.\u201d Some agreed with his reaction, while others objected to policing the skirt length of girls. One user, criticizing the prejudice involved, responded by sharing a video of the girls reciting the poem \u201cKardan Ayd\u0131nl\u0131k\u201d at the very ceremony where the photo was taken. It can be called an intriguing snapshot and social-media exchange in many respects. The image, Dilipak\u2019s reaction, and the responses it elicited prompted me to write this piece.<\/p>\n
For some time now, the cultural hybridization and social dialectic (synthesis) taking place in T\u00fcrkiye has been drawing my attention. Social dialectic, roughly speaking, posits that a new social composition will be reached as a result of a society\u2019s internal contradictions and conflicts. In this vein, even at my own university I know more than one theology academic who, in recent years, has taken off her headscarf. From the perspective of the conservative-Islamic elites who hold power, this points to something not going as planned. In this piece, without delving deeply into the broader matter of social transformation, I will confine myself to an assessment in the context of Imam-Hatip Schools (\u0130HO; middle and high schools). Before proceeding, I would like to make a few conceptual clarifications. First, in the text I will use \u201cthe miniskirt\u201d as a metaphorical expression representing an outward manifestation of secularization. And when I speak of secular individuals, I will take this as a matter not of faith (iman) but of practice (amel)\u2014that is, I mean people who do not take religious precepts as a determining element in their daily lives; this lifestyle can be adopted by believers and non-believers alike.<\/p>\n
Given my age and my family\u2019s socio-political stance, among my earliest political memories are my elders\u2019 demonstrations against the pressure directed at Imam-Hatip schools during the February 28 process. In my child\u2019s mind, some \u201cbad\u201d men who had seized the \u201cstate\u201d\u2014which was, in essence, a good thing\u2014were tormenting \u201cgood\u201d people. Even looking only from the vantage point of \u0130HO, when one considers where we stand today, the transformation we have experienced over the last twenty years is dizzying. The number of \u0130HO increased rapidly\u2014an expansion in breadth\u2014and their quality was raised through the Project Imam-Hatip High Schools, which were afforded substantial material means. Beyond the Project Imam-Hatips, these schools also, via various channels, came to enjoy better opportunities than many of their peer institutions. Ever since it was discovered that formal education, as an ideological apparatus of the state, can serve as a tool capable of producing outcomes upon the social fabric, the desire to command education and steer its content has become an arena of ideological struggle. And because \u0130HOs are among the most important instruments of the current ruling elite bloc in T\u00fcrkiye on this front, they have been the object of special attention.<\/p>\n
The sense of belonging felt by the person and cadre who have served as trailblazers of the transformation and growth in Imam-Hatip Schools (\u0130HO), and their appetite to engineer from the top down a youth who will build the future in accordance with the image in their minds, have loaded these schools with missions their shoulders will struggle to bear. The government that has ruled the country for the last twenty-three years, owing to its ideological commitments, has expanded and carried forward tasks imposed upon \u0130HO far beyond their original function\u2014originally designed, in a kind of \u201cvocational high school\u201d format, to train religious personnel in place of the madrasas that the Republic\u2019s traditional elites had in effect shut down. Although \u0130HO undertook its first serious expansion starting with the status change it underwent in the 1970s, with the consolidation of the conservative historical bloc\u2019s power the contraction that came with February 28 was overcome, and the schools embarked on a quantitative and qualitative expansion unprecedented until then. In this process, \u0130HO did not merely expand horizontally and vertically; with boarding options and comprehensive educational programs, it turned into a holistic project of forming the human being.<\/p>\n
Preservation of Values<\/b><\/p>\n
The first of the missions we have mentioned concerns the formidable secularizing potential produced in young minds by globalization, digitalization, and, as a consequence, instant horizontal access to information. Hierarchical modes of acquiring religious or other kinds of knowledge are losing their weight. In particular, the desire of conservative mothers and fathers to isolate their children from these effects being fulfilled by the state has become an important mission assigned to these schools. Within this way of thinking, students\u2019 \u201cnon-religious\u201d vocational and academic choices are secondary; indeed, one can even say that, at times, Islamic specialization itself is placed on the back burner. What is desired is not that the children become Islamic scholars, but that\u2014albeit even with a certain superficiality of religious instruction\u2014the existing way of life, culture, and manners be preserved. Within this mission, the social demand for \u0130HO is a vehicle for existing with religious values within worldly life and passing this on to future generations. Academic studies tell us that, in the process of determining the overwhelming majority of children\u2019s choice to attend \u0130HO, the greatest influence is the guidance of parents or the extended family. Moreover, although the number of male students nationwide is higher, the fact that the proportion of female students is greater in \u0130HO can be read as a projection of the traditional and protectionist family expectations we have been discussing. The ontological anxiety created by the possibility that their children will not continue their own cultural story leads parents to see these schools as a refuge that will at least limit presumed negative effects. Elements such as the desire to transmit their own religious and moral values to their children through formal education, and the absence of coeducation, likewise appear as reflections of this concern for the preservation of values.<\/p>\n
In President Erdo\u011fan\u2019s words, \u0130HO has the mission of raising a generation \u201cattached to its national and spiritual values, whose foreheads touch the ground in prostration, who know their history and ancestors very well.\u201d When the anxieties of parents with conservative values overlap with the political and cultural agenda of the empowered conservative elites\u2014who themselves were educated in the same tradition and carry these concerns (even if, for class reasons, they no longer send their own children to these schools much)\u2014the sociological and political pillar of the \u201cgrand \u0130HO strategy\u201d stands completed. To this we may add the politician\u2019s desire to meet social demand under the pressure of being re-elected. Theoretically, this is in fact a perfect match. But do the students\u2014the children upon whom projects are developed in order to \u201ccreate them in one\u2019s own image\u201d\u2014fit this picture with the same perfection? It is precisely from the ambiguity in the answer to this question that the matter of the \u201cminiskirted Imam-Hatip students\u201d arises. In carrying out this first task assigned to them, the malfunction emerges on the student side of the issue. For as horizontal expansion increases, creating or maintaining a student body composed only of the desired model becomes exceedingly difficult. At this point, quantity inevitably demands compromises in quality. Consequently, it becomes unavoidable that those who look with sympathy upon the grand \u0130HO strategy encounter situations\u2014such as in the most recent example\u2014that they read within their own world as \u201cdegeneration,\u201d which are products of the social dialectic. The logic of Gresham\u2019s law (\u201cbad money drives out good\u201d) will operate in \u0130HO as well, and in the end the possibility that this protective function will disappear could, in this respect, drive the project toward failure.<\/p>\n
The Incubator of the Cause<\/b><\/p>\n
Another mission loaded onto \u0130HO is that these schools are seen as incubation centers of the Islamic \u201ccause.\u201d Although \u0130HO originally emerged as one of the state\u2019s ideological apparatuses to regulate the republic\u2019s religious sphere, it has been evaluated as the incubator of the Islamic movement and a sacred halo has been formed around it. The role assigned to \u0130HO within the Islamic cause is to form a \u201cvanguard\u201d class on behalf of society. To this end, many foundations and associations have been established in the name of \u0130HO alumni, and the development of these schools has been regarded as a sacred cause. For attachment to these schools derives not only from a nostalgic sense of belonging toward the educational institutions people graduated from, but also from their being the most widespread institutional vehicle for the ideological human formation sought to be cultivated for T\u00fcrkiye\u2019s future. The concepts of the Imam-Hatip \u201cgeneration,\u201d \u201cmentality,\u201d and \u201ccause\u201d point to a commonality not found in Anatolian or Science High Schools. The recitation at \u0130HO\u2014nationwide, almost like an anthem\u2014of the poem \u201cKardan Ayd\u0131nl\u0131k,\u201d which, though written by a Nationalist (\u00dclk\u00fcc\u00fc), has come to belong more to the Islamist community, points to this role of a \u201cschool of the cause.\u201d Likewise, in the trailer of the series of the same name to be broadcast on TRT\u2019s online platform Tabii, which tells the life story of Mahmut Celalettin \u00d6kten, the first principal of an imam-hatip high school in T\u00fcrkiye, it is made clear that \u0130HO is more than a high school\u2014indeed, a matter of a \u201ccause.\u201d Accordingly, behaviors deemed contrary to the expected human formation and to acceptable performances of Imam-Hatip-ness on the part of students studying here are perceived as \u201cacts that harm the cause\u201d and elicit reactions.<\/p>\n
It is at this point that the contradiction between an \u0130HO burdened with a \u201ccause\u201d duty and the \u201cminiskirt\u201d begins. A miniskirt image within \u0130HO is an indication of moving away from the point sought to be reached with the \u201ccause.\u201d For according to this understanding, the miniskirt or other manifestations of secularism are not merely an individual preference, but a manifestation of a polarized worldview, human formation, and political choices. The existence or emergence of such \u201cproducts\u201d from within \u0130HO means the cause is being undermined, emptied out, or conquered from within. What facilitates the appearance, in the \u201cincubator of the men of the cause,\u201d of this style of dress\u2014deemed political because it is perceived as a representation of secularism\u2014is the ideal of spreading \u0130HO. The realization of this ideal is a situation that makes difficult the mission assigned to \u0130HOs of training a vanguard class. Even if bringing the cause to the masses is counted as a quantitative success, it also carries, due to the necessity of encompassing differences, the meaning of a \u201cdeviation.\u201d The contradictory situation here can be surmounted with the notion that such students are shown forbearance by being treated as \u201cm\u00fcellefe-i kul\u00fbb\u201d (those whose hearts are to be reconciled). However, the possibility that the manifestations of worldliness will increase quantitatively and deepen qualitatively in \u0130HOs may also lead to the cause collapsing in on itself (implode), thereby creating a constant ontological unease and causing the \u201cIslamic\u201d reactions, as in the Dilipak example, to multiply. In this state of massification, it likewise amply carries the potential of diverging from the course of raising the cause\u2019s vanguard or intellectual elites with the \u201cessence\u201d preserved.<\/p>\n
The Conservative Middle Class<\/b><\/p>\n
Another mission of \u0130HO is to train the future conservative, urbanized middle class and elites. In T\u00fcrkiye, free and high-quality public education has for years constituted the most important pillar of social mobility. Many who today make up the elite stratum of the conservative bloc in T\u00fcrkiye attained their positions as products of the very Republican institutions they criticize. As part of the Republic\u2019s educational network, \u0130HO likewise contributed to this vertical mobility to the extent of its capacity. Today, one of the aims sought especially through the Project \u0130HOs is to educate, within the Islamic ecosystem and with quality instruction, candidates for the conservative elite of the future who come from the socioeconomically lower-middle strata of society. An important task for \u0130HO is to minimize the risk that students who, by virtue of their personal abilities, have the potential to climb to the upper rungs of the social hierarchy will be sacrificed to secularism in the Anatolian and Science High Schools into which they have been admitted. For these youth will constitute the human resource that will, in the future, bring to completion the political goals that the current conservative political elites may depart this world without having fulfilled.<\/p>\n
The gaining of visibility and normalization by miniskirted or non-religious \u0130HO students entails threats that the future conservative elites will lose their essence, shed their asabiyya (group solidarity), or \u201cchange neighborhoods\u201d (i.e., defect to another social camp). What is expected of an \u0130HO is that it not present an image of conduct or a lifestyle contrary to the bodily manifestations of the piety anticipated from it. Since the most visible of these manifestations are the headscarf and attire, the brunt has once again fallen first upon female students. For \u0130HO is regarded not as an ordinary school system, but as an indoctrinatory institution aiming to produce a human formation that will serve as an alternative to what the \u201csecular Republic\u201d envisaged. However, the horizontal expansion I mentioned earlier\u2014massifying this education rather than cultivating Islamic elites with a relatively narrow and select cadre\u2014creates the condition of plurality that multiplicity so often, and inevitably, brings about. Whatever the average of society is, so too will be the students in these schools. This, inevitably, brings them face to face with, from their own perspective, the problem of the \u201cminiskirted,\u201d the \u201cnot wearing the headscarf,\u201d the \u201cnot praying,\u201d the \u201cdrinking alcohol,\u201d and the like, Imam-Hatip student.<\/p>\n
Tefrika-i Tedrisat (Fragmentation of Education)<\/b><\/p>\n
Another mission loaded onto \u0130HO is the goal of opening a breach in the Tevhid-i Tedrisat (the Law on the Unification of Education) so as to blunt the presumed \u201charmful\u201d effects of an unsatisfactory Turkish modernization experience. During the monarchical period, Turkish modernization was a phenomenon attempted to be implemented from the top down, guided particularly by \u201cavant-garde\u201d sultans such as Selim III and Mahmud II and later by bureaucratic elites. Because it was initially impossible to uproot the traditional institutions that formed the backbone of the Ottoman established order, modern institutions were constructed in parallel to those traditional structures, and gradually these \u201ccedid\u201d (new) institutions expanded at the expense of the traditional ones. This produced a dualistic institutionalization and social fabric. The Ottoman search for synthesis in the legal realm, crystallized in the Mecelle, is a product of this. Education, too, received more than its share from this situation, with a split into modern and religious. The Tevhid-i Tedrisat aimed to put an end to this dualistic condition that generated negative outcomes. However, the fact that this unification favored modern-secular education was, naturally, a negative and even destructive development for the other side of the duality.<\/p>\n
Although \u0130HO was initially conceived as a vocational educational institution corresponding to the madrasas, as its raison d\u2019\u00eatre evolved into the missions mentioned above, it became a line of resistance for the conservative bloc against the dominant modern-secular educational order. With the long AK Party experience and the conservative bloc\u2019s gaining broad control over public authority, it has become possible for the modern institutional order in education to be encircled by a religiously inflected educational network. The creation of \u201cAnatolian \u0130HO\u201d as a counterpart to Anatolian High Schools, and Imam-Hatip \u201cScience and Social Sciences Project Schools\u201d as counterparts to Science and Social Sciences High Schools, are practices that can be regarded as the construction of a parallel educational order. In the spread of \u0130HO, one can discern the aim of opening a breach in the \u201cunification\u201d that had been carried out in favor of modern-secularism in education. That said, we should also add that especially in the project schools the curriculum is largely weighted toward scientific subjects (approximately 75 percent scientific, 25 percent religious). My guess is that if an \u201cinternal\u201d objection to this \u201cmodern\u201d emphasis in the project \u0130HO curriculum has not yet emerged\u2014just as in the \u201cminiskirt\u201d metaphor\u2014it will, under the notion of \u201closing the fortress from within,\u201d arrive before long.<\/p>\n
Should Imam-Hatip Schools Be Shut Down?<\/b><\/p>\n
Young people from the secular camp sometimes repeat, half-jokingly, the slogan \u201cShut down the Imam-Hatip schools.\u201d So what, in fact, should become of the Imam-Hatip schools? At this point, the elites of the conservative bloc who wield public authority need to take stock of these schools\u2019 mission. If these schools carry the mission of raising \u201cpious generations\u201d by encompassing as many students as possible, then one must face the fact that \u201cminiskirted Imam-Hatip students\u201d exist and that their numbers may even increase in the future and change the sociology of the schools. If the issue is for the whole of society\u2014even if secular\u2014to be raised as individuals who at least know their religion (as Kenan Evren said when defending the Religion and Ethics course: \u201cA person should at least know how to perform two rak\u2018ahs of prayer\u201d), then the move should be not toward a quantitative increase in \u0130HO but toward changes in curricula across formal education in general. However, in that case it would be a contradiction for the Islamist elites\u2014who love to speak, when criticizing the \u201cKemalist regime,\u201d about how a top-down social-engineering project fails\u2014to think that applying the same method this time will yield positive results. If the devout shielded their children from what they saw as the \u201charmful effects\u201d of a formal education unified in favor of modernity and secularity, the secular can do the same\u2014indeed, far more easily\u2014with the ample assistance of globalization and digitalization. If the matter is the continuation of the \u201ccause,\u201d this does not require the massification of \u0130HO. On the contrary, it points to a structure composed of a small cadre of genuinely \u201cbelieving\u201d students. As for social demand, what needs to be emphasized here is the extent to which, at today\u2019s level of technology, these schools in their widespread form can fulfill the duty of preserving the desired values\u2014and even how much they backfire due to compulsory enrollments.<\/p>\n
My view is that \u0130HO should remain at a quantity sufficient to train high-caliber Islamic scholars who can also guide the Islamic world (and to provide the conditions for original and critical thought necessary for this to be possible) and to meet the country\u2019s need for imams and theologians. If the conservative bloc massifies \u0130HO by loading it with sociological missions such as being an instrument of social transformation or preservation, confronting the malfunctions mentioned above will be inevitable. One might reason along the lines of \u201cIf there were no social demand, we wouldn\u2019t need this many schools anyway.\u201d At this point, however, the special attention shown to \u0130HO by public authority, the investments that enhance its appeal, and the quantitative increase in its supply can naturally generate their own demand. This makes the state of quantitative increase and\u2014seen from the conservative perspective\u2014\u201cqualitative decline\u201d unavoidable. On the other hand, the country\u2019s most successful students who attend other schools such as Science and Anatolian High Schools, perceiving that the state treats \u0130HO favorably, may feel like \u201csecond-class citizens\u201d and be seized by the urge to head abroad at the first opportunity.<\/p>\n
So what if the order continues in this way? I do not think the sociology of today\u2019s globalized and digitalized world will much permit the engineering of the \u201cpious generation\u201d envisioned by administrators. Alongside globalization, digitalization, and easy access to information, reversing the flow of the river is very difficult due to the transformative effect of social dialectics. If, in the face of the flow of history and sociology, \u0130HO is regarded as merely a dam, another question arises: how long can it withstand the force of the current? Hence, the Islamist elites\u2019 producing \u0130HO in greatly increased numbers and capacities seems, in a sense, to amount to a Pyrrhic victory. Yes, the devout may become elites in class, intellectual, and bureaucratic terms; but I am doubtful whether a \u201cgeneration\u201d will emerge from this. Moreover, with the emphasis on scientific courses in the project \u0130HO curricula and the addition of new electives on religious sciences to the curricula of other peer schools, the education in these schools is converging. In my opinion, as in society at large, the gears of social dialectics will turn for \u0130HO students as well, and neither the pious generation dreamt of by the Islamist elite nor a community entirely indifferent to religion will come into being. Looking specifically at widespread \u0130HO, the overwhelming majority of students who will be raised there will, as a new composite, constitute a worldly group of people who nevertheless possess religious knowledge or learning. Still, ending with a projection about the future, and so as not to be swept away by the tendency of social dialectics toward excess in its historical determinism, let us place the final verdict in a fitting register: Allahu a\u2018lem!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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