Herald Tribune, May 2007
DENIZLI, Turkey: The little red prayer book was handed out in a public primary school here in western Turkey earlier this month. It was small enough to fit in a pocket, but it carried a big message: Pray in the Muslim way. Get others to pray, too.
"The message was clear to me," said a retired civil servant, whose 13-year-old son, a student at the Yesilkoy Ibrahim Cengiz school, received the book. "This is not something that should be distributed in schools."
This leafy, liberal city would seem like one of the least likely places to allow Islam to permeate public life. But for some residents, the book is part of a subtle shift toward increasingly public religiosity that has gone hand-in-hand with the ascent of the party of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan ...
The party has not ordered changes, but sets examples through a growing network of observant teachers and public servants who have been hired since it came to power in 2002.
... secular residents say that they see changes, and that they are the inevitable outcome of several decades of economic transformation. "In a very quiet, deep way, you can sense an Islamization," said Bedrettin Usanmaz, a jewelry shop owner in Denizli. "They're not after rapid change. They're investing for 50 years ahead."
At the heart of the issue is a debate about the fundamental nature of Islam and its role in the building of an equitable society.
... secular Turks argue that Islam will always seek more space in people's lives, and therefore should be reined in. They look to the military as secularism's final defender.
"Islam is not like other religions," said Kadim Yildirim, a history teacher in Denizli from an opposition labor union. "It influences every part of your life, even your bedroom."
Yildirim is part of a number of concerned teachers who say that the new teachers hired in recent years, often from conservative backgrounds, are adding up to a change in the education system.
Last month, the Education Ministry relaxed requirements for appointing new school principals.
... 836 people from the government's Religious Affairs Directorate have been transferred to the ministry's offices during Erdogan's tenure. That has also led to lifestyle changes in the bureaucracy: In Denizli, during the month of fasting in Ramadan, the lunchroom in the Ministry of Education no longer serves food, in an assumption that all workers are religious, employees said ...
"They are coming to power, and it scares the hell out of the established elite," said Baskin Oran, a professor of international relations at Ankara University. The two groups "have nothing in common," he said ...
One of the country's primary eighth-grade science books, for example, "Science Knowledge," has lost its detailed description of Darwin's theory of natural selection, and gained a reference to a theory that holds that living beings did not evolve but came into being exactly as they are today ...
All education material, once vetted centrally, is now checked in a far looser fashion ... The red prayer book, illustrated with pictures of small children praying, would probably not have been distributed in past years ...
More: Herald Tribune, Winds of Jihad
