AFP/Istanbul

Turkish students know Albert Einstein but can’t name any Muslim scientists or scholars, president Recep Tayyip Erdogan complained yesterday as he called for a new curriculum in schools.
“If you ask them who Einstein is, every young person has something to say about him. If you ask who Ibn Sina is, you see the child has never heard about him,” Erdogan told a teachers’ forum in the southern city of Antalya.
Ibn Sina, more commonly known in as Avicenna, was an 11th century Islamic philosopher, doctor and scientist. The Persian polymath is considered one of the most remarkable thinkers of the Islamic Golden Age, during the Middle Ages, when Islamic caliphates propounded scientific advances.
Erdogan, who took over Turkey’s presidency in August after serving as prime minister for more a decade, has sought to reinforce the image of Islam in his nation. His increasingly strident campaign has detractors fearing he aims to overturn Turkey’s longstanding secular principles.
Erodgan last month stirred bemusement by declaring that Muslims travelled to the Americas nearly three centuries before Christopher Columbus.
Although the claim was mocked at home and abroad, the president hit back by saying that the Muslim “discovery” should be taught in Turkish schools and that his domestic critics were guilty of an “ego complex” for denying his assertion.
Erdogan said Turkish students should know about Turkish musicians as much as they do know about foreign composers.
“Our students should also learn about, know and listen to Itri and Dede Efendi, the same as they know about Beethoven,” he said, making references to Ottoman-era classical composers alongside the German composer.
“Our students should know about their own language and the words, works and art of their ancestors without any complex, as much as they learn other cultures and languages,” he added.
“We should not forget that whoever imitates or goes after (others) will stand one step behind.”
Turkey has seen a sharp rise in religious schooling under reforms that president Tayyip Erdogan casts as a defence against moral decay, but which opponents see as an unwanted drive to shape a more Islamic nation.
Almost a million students are enrolled in “imam hatip” schools this year, up from just 65,000 in 2002 when Erdogan’s Islamist-rooted AK Party first came to power, he told the opening of one of the schools in Ankara last month.
The schools teach boys and girls separately, and give around 13 hours a week of Islamic instruction on top of the regular curriculum, including study of Arabic, the Koran and the life of the Prophet Mohammad.
“When there is no such thing as religious culture and moral education, serious social problems such as drug addiction and racism fill the gap,” Erdogan told a symposium on drug policy and public health earlier this year.
But in the drive to create more imam hatip places, parts of schools have been requisitioned, prompting protests from parents who want secular education for their children.
“We are against the governance of education by religious rules,” said Ilknur Birol, spokeswoman for the ‘Don’t Touch My School’ initiative, an umbrella grouping for angry parents.  “This system is not rooted in youth with a forward-looking perspective enlightened by science, but in a generation that values obedience.”
Filiz Gurlu, a parent at the Kadir Rezan Has school in Istanbul where one of two buildings was converted to imam hatip facilities, said primary students were now cramped in a single building.
“The library, laboratory, computer and music rooms were in the confiscated part, so the kids don’t have access anymore,” she said. “Some classrooms have barely enough space ... This is an unplanned move, kids just can’t simply fit in.”
The debate over education straddles a faultline in Turkish society dating back to the 1920s, when Mustafa Kemal Ataturk forged a secular republic from the ruins of an Ottoman theocracy, banishing Islam from public life, replacing Arabic with Latin script and promoting Western dress.
Erdogan has cast himself as a champion of the rights of the pious, redressing the balance after decades of Kemalism.
“If during their education our youths become alienated from their language, history, ancestors, culture and civilisation, it means there is a very serious educational problem there,” he told a national education convention.
Huseyin Korkut, head of the imam hatip alumni association, said there was strong demand for imam hatip schools, but his assertion was based on surveys in just three regions, the broadly conservative Kayseri, Konya and Erzurum provinces.
He said the body had urged the government in vain to conduct a nationwide survey.
“Changes in school types were decided by local bureaucrats in a rather arbitrary manner,” said Isik Tuzun, a coordinator at the Education Reform Initiative, a think-tank at Istanbul’s Sabanci University. “(It) has definitely been rushed.”
The government maintains the changes are driven by demand. Education minister Nabi Avci said in November that demand for imam hatip places rose this school year and last.
Reforms under the AK Party have aimed to redress the balance after decades of secularist rule. Religious middle schools were shut in 1997 under pressure from the secularist military after an Islamist-led government was pushed from power.
A secularist government later tried to undermine religious schools by tweaking university entrance exam grading to make it more difficult for their pupils to gain access.
“Those were truly hurtful days. I hope God never makes us live through days like those again,” Erdogan told the school opening last month.
Primary school students no longer recite a deeply nationalistic vow at the start of each week beginning with the words “I am Turk”, a legacy of Ataturk.
University entrance grading was revised in 2011 so imam hatip pupils were no longer disadvantaged.






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