ISTANBUL, Turkey – In a few weeks, Turkey’s most powerful leader is expected to appear on the highest hilltop in Istanbul, the country’s largest city, to mark the official opening of the country’s most enormous mosque.
The Çamlıca Mosque, named after its location, is larger than any of the marvelous houses of worship the Ottoman sultans used to build throughout a Turk-led Islamic empire that lasted four centuries.
Occupying an area of 15,000 square meters, Çamlıca is boasted to be able to accommodate as many as 60,000 people. The height of its sixth minarets outsize those of the Prophet Mohammed’s mosque in Medina.
Who could build such an immense mosque in a country as secular as Turkey?
No one except President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, an iron-fisted leader who has ruled the country for a decade as prime minister and wants to stay in power for another decade as president.
Erdogan wants the mosque to be seen “everywhere in the city”. It is perhaps the most visible symbol of Erdogan’s abilities and power over Turkey. It shows how much attention this man pays to religion in a secular country, where religion had long been a personal matter with little role to play in the political sphere.
“This shows that political Islam or political conservatism is the dominant ideology in Turkey, maybe [an] alternative to Kemalism,” says Ufuk Uras, a prominent Turkish writer and former lawmaker for the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP).
“Although they say that we have no problem with Kemalism, we can be sure about that secularism is declining.”
Kemalism is the ideology attributed to the founder of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who continues to be regarded by most Turks as the hero who led the war against the west on whose model he built a modern nation state.
However, the Ataturk ideology no longer controls Turkey. The ideology could not prevent Erdogan from amending the constitution so that women can wear hijabs in public places like universities and parliament.
It has failed to prevent state money from being allocated for the construction of thousands of mosques in the country. According to data gathered by the Turkish government, 13,000 mosques have been built since Erdogan took office. There are 90,000 mosques in Turkey. By comparison there are 61,000 schools.
“There are more mosques and more people with scarves [in the city],” Uras, who has lived in Istanbul for decades, adding that he supported the notion that in a democracy everyone should be free to choose what they wear including hijab.
These days, cranes are working day and night to realize an old dream of the country’s leader. When he was mayor of Istanbul in 1998, Erdogan proposed the construction of a mosque near Taksim Square. The plan infuriated the city’s secular community, who blocked it because the square is one of the prominent symbols of Kemalism. They regarded the construction of a mosque near the square as a threat to secularism.
Erdogan unsuccessfully proposed the project once again when he became prime minister. But Erdogan doesn’t give up easily. Last year, he made a third attempt to build the mosque near Taksim Square. No one could prevent him this time.
“A big change has been made in Istanbul due to the conservative rule of the ruling party in the country which is heading to be even more conservative. The characters in the city have changed from secular to conservative, and the city is getting increasingly overcrowded. The city is overwhelmed with new concrete buildings. Green land has substantially decreased and no more new parks are being built,” Zeynep Tanbay, a political activist who is mostly known for her ballet dancing art.
Not everyone is against building mosques though. Eminönü, a neighborhood in Istanbul’s European side, is a home to more conservative population who overwhelmingly voted for Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) in the last election. AKP supporters say that they see building mosques as a response to the increased need of a growing population rather than as a threat to secularism.
Nurcan Dersi, a resident of Eminönü, said: “there weren’t that many people in our country at that time, and there were still Muslims. Islam and secularism will stay together.”
She dismissed fears that Turkey was abandoning secularism in order to become a theocracy like Iran. “We are very different from Iran,” Dersi said, “No one imposes any thing on you in Turkey,” she said.
During the past 11 years, the population of Turkey has increased by 13 percent and the number of mosques has increased by 15 percent.
Ilyas Demirok, an artist living in Istanbul, said he supports the construction of the Turkey’s largest biggest. “I am proud of this. It is a very nice project, which will send a message to the world that we are a country of freedom.”
“There is no connection between building a mosque and an Islamic state. Turkey is a secular state. Our republic is represented by secularism,” he added.
In a meeting of the Turkish parliament in February, Erdogan’s speech was received with Islamic slogans. It’s a far cry from the time he was imprisoned for four months in 1998 because of reciting a religious poem dating back to the Ottoman time.
Activist Tanbay said: “The reason behind building this mosque is not only peoples’ need for more mosques. Behind this mosque is the AK Party’s counter-revolution policy. When the AK Party builds a new mosque, they don’t care about whether or not people from the area need the mosque. They want to show the people that they can build mosques wherever they want. They say they have suffered a lot in this country and have been treated as second-class citizens. This is a counter-revolution movement.”
In September 2017, Erdogan was on a hilltop in Turkey to open a school in which he took religious classes 50 years ago. It was a small school back then. He has now enlarged it and even his name has been written on the school as: Recep Tayyip Erdoğan Imam Hatip High School.
In Turkey’s 2018 budget, more than $1.5 billion has been dedicated to building 178 religious schools. Nowadays, more money is being spent on students studying in religious schools than on secular schools.
Religious schools were opened for mid-school students for the first time in 2012. Some people view this as a dangerous effort made by the AK Party to change Turkish society.
The former HDP MP said: “The biggest problem in Turkey is the education system. The education system was secular in Turkey. But nowadays, nearly half of the schools are Imam Hatip religious schools. If they could change the education system completely from a secular one to religious, then we can then say there is a big danger facing future generations.”
In 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini uprooted Iran’s secular system overnight through a revolution and established an Islamic republic. If Erdogan has the intention to build an Islamic state, then he has taken a much slower and more systematic path where mosques and religious schools play a central role.
Erdogan is busy making fans and supporters for himself and his party in these religious schools, just like the first Sultan Ozjani who built an army called Inkishari because of doubt in the country’s official army.
According to information leaked by a media outlet hostile to the AK Party, the Sahadat company for defense services was established by Erdogan advisor Adnan Tanrifardi so that the youth affiliated with the AK Party could get military training in these schools.
Before Tanrifardi was picked as an advisor to the president he was investigated by the Turkish parliament after it was alleged the company was responsible for unrest in Turkey’s Kurdish region and the military training of ISIS fighters.
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