The Place and Functions of the Figure of the Prophet in Turkish School Textbooks and General Religious Teaching

Abstract

The involvement of the Turkish state in religious teaching has a complex history, shaped by its particular relationship with secularism. The foundation of the Turkish Republic was based on a transfer of the prerogatives of şeyhülislam to the institutions of the new republican state, as part of a movement towards institutional secularisation, understood as a transfer to the state of authority over religious affairs. Religious education in public primary and secondary schools already existed at the end of the Ottoman Empire, and was maintained when the Turkish Republic was founded in 1923, but its extent varied in the subsequent decades. By the beginning of the 1930s religious instruction had almost disappeared from public schools, but its rehabilitation began at the end of the 1940s, brought about by politicians who used the importance of religion in national culture and its benefits in the forming of citizens to justify its gradual return; its indirect status as an Islamic reference point in the general education system fits in with the nationalistic politics of the Turkish state during and since the 1940s. In recent years, as a result of a movement that began during the early 1980s, courses in religious culture have become generalised throughout public education, both primary and secondary. In this context the place occupied by the Prophet in the disciplines concerned relates not only to his centrality as messenger, historic figure, and receiver of the revelation, but to concepts of republican citizenship.