No-one inside the school would have you believe this combination of Islamic and western influences demonstrates potential to serve as a 'moderate' educational antidote to radical Islam.
But there is fresh outside interest in schools like this, which belong to the network known as imam-hatip.
Some people, particularly officials from Afghanistan and Pakistan, have suggested the Turkish system can light the way to a less extremist religious education for their young Muslims.
The interest is understandable. 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.
The network has incubated the elite of the Islamist-rooted AK party which came to power in Turkeyin 2002. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan -- who went on to study economics -- and around one third of his party's MPs attended imam-hatip schools.
For Turks, however, it's ironic that a system which for over a decade has been suppressed by the military enforcers of secularism could be seen to champion any institutional accommodation between the Islamic and the secular.
A revised system of university credits introduced in the late 1990s puts imam-hatip students seeking to study non-religious subjects at university at a disadvantage.
"It's very interesting that these schools that are so controversial in our own country have become role models elsewhere," said Iren Ozgur, a Turkish-American academic at New York University who has studied the imam-hatip system.
In his office close to the Golden Horn inlet of the Bosphorus, former imam-hatip pupil Huseyin Korkut believes the schools could work abroad if they remain true to "Islamic values." But he bristles at the idea of the network being pigeonholed into helping solve international security problems.
"We are disturbed by this understanding that these schools would educate 'soft' Muslims that could easily adapt to the needs and requirements of the international authorities," said the moustachioed economist. Calling himself a typical graduate of the system, Korkut works at Kirklareli University and is general director of the imam-hatip alumnae association.
Current students like Kerem Fazil Cinar, an 18-year-old final year pupil at Beyoglu Anadolu imam-hatip School, see the system as a refuge from the perils of the outside world.
"In the regular school would be the danger of meeting dangerous friends who have not inherited religious values," said the earnest, bespectacled teenager, the beginnings of a beard sprouting from his chin.
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