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NY Times, June 24 2017
Turkey Drops Evolution From Curriculum, Angering Secularists
By PATRICK KINGSLEY
ISTANBUL — Turkey has removed the concept of evolution from its high
school curriculum, in what critics fear is the latest attempt by
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government to erode the country’s
secular character.
Starting in September, a chapter on evolution will no longer appear in
ninth graders’ textbooks because it is considered too “controversial” an
idea, an official announced this week.
“Our students don’t have the necessary scientific background and
information-based context needed to comprehend” the debate about
evolution, said the official, Alpaslan Durmus, the chairman of the
Education Ministry’s Education and Discipline Board, which decides the
curriculum, in a video posted on the ministry’s website.
The news has deepened concerns among Mr. Erdogan’s critics that the
president, a conservative Muslim, wants to radically change the identity
of a country that was founded in 1923 along staunchly secular lines.
“The last crumbs of secular scientific education have been removed,”
said Feray Aytekin Aydogan, the head of Egitim-Sen, a union of
secular-minded teachers. Ms. Aydogan also scoffed at the notion that
evolution was too complex for teenagers to understand.
“Forget high school, you can comfortably explain it in preschool,” she
said in a telephone interview. “This is one of the basic topics you need
to understand living beings, life and nature.”
Over the past five years, analysts have noted how Mr. Erdogan’s
government has steadily increased references to Islam in the curriculum
and removed some references to the ideas of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk,
Turkey’s founder. It has also increased the number of religious schools,
known as imam hatip schools, and spoken of Mr. Erdogan’s desire to raise
“a pious generation” of young Turks.
Mr. Erdogan has also moved gradually to reduce restrictions on the
wearing of Islamic dress. In 2011, he removed a ban on head scarves in
universities, and in 2013, scrapped a similar ban in the civil service.
This year, he did the same for women in the army, an institution
previously regarded as the last bastion of hard-line secularism.
For some, these changes simply constitute a progressive attempt to open
up public space and discourse to the pious sections of the population
that for decades were marginalized by the country’s secular and military
elite.
“It’s not true that Turkey is becoming less secular,” said Ezgi Yagmur
Kucuk, 20, a trainee anesthetist who does not wear a veil. “Everyone can
believe whatever they like.”
Others, however, see an attempt not just to promote freedom of religion,
but to ensure its primacy. According to Kerem Oktem, the author of
“Angry Nation,” a history of contemporary Turkey, the country is “not
continuing along a process of secularization — it’s going into a
post-secular context.”
Still, Turkey is not considered likely to morph into a second Iran. The
country’s vexed relationship with secularism also predates Mr. Erdogan’s
tenure.
Technically, mosque and state were never completely separated in Turkey,
even during the days of Ataturk. Instead, religion was placed under the
control of the state. The process of legitimizing Islamic thought was in
part begun during the rule of Kenan Evren, the army general who took
power in a coup in 1980 and who viewed Islam as a potential buffer
against communism.
To add to the complexity, Mr. Erdogan’s party — the Justice and
Development Party, or A.K.P. — has a confusing relationship with
Islamism, or the belief in a society governed according to Islamic law.
It does not call for the application of Shariah law.
Its leaders have historically denied they are Islamists, preferring
instead to be known as conservatives. Unlike the political wing of
Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, a group to which the A.K.P. has sometimes
been compared, several of its female lawmakers are unveiled.
One of Mr. Erdogan’s best-known supporters, Cem Kucuk, an outspoken
commentator, has even called for hard-line Islamists to be expelled from
the party.
It “uses religion to get votes,” said Jenny White, an expert on the
changing role of Islam and secularism within Turkey. “But they do not
have a coherent theological, religious ideology.”
The party and Turkish politics in general are best viewed through an
authoritarian lens rather than an Islamist one, said Ms. White, the
author of “Muslim Nationalism and the New Turks,” a book about identity
in contemporary Turkey.
“The A.K.P. is all about staying in power — and whatever it has to do to
stay in power, it will do,” she said.
Any further attempts to “Islamize” Turkish society is likely to be met
with resistance, Mr. Oktem said. Despite Mr. Erdogan’s increasing
authoritarianism, roughly half the country still voted against plans to
give him more power in a recent referendum.
“Most of these people are those who don’t think religion should have
such a central place in society,” Mr. Oktem said.
He added, “Turkey is still not a deeply Islamic society, and much of the
public visibility of Islam doesn’t necessarily have a very deep basis.”
But for Ms. Aydogan, the teachers’ union leader, the outlook for
secularism in the education sector is already bleak.
Removing evolution from the curriculum, Ms. Aydogan said, puts Turkey in
the same league as ultraconservative Saudi Arabia, where the concept is
briefly mentioned in the curriculum but strongly criticized.
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