When Soner Akbal dropped his daughter at school last month, he had no idea he would become the center of a heated controversy over religious influence within Turkey’s secular education system.
A 40-year-old forklift driver who lives in the northwestern city of Kocaeli, Akbal was just about to leave when the school bell sounded and he realized it had been replaced by a Muslim religious chant.
So he went straight up to the head teacher in the playground to protest.
“You can’t choose a bell like that and upset the children!” he told the principal, later sharing a video of the exchange on WhatsApp.
The switch happened after the education ministry instructed schools to organize activities around the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan, such as visits to mosques, decorating classrooms and having children show photographs of their family’s fast-breaking iftar meal.
The move has sparked a backlash from the defenders of secularism.
Akbal’s exchange with the principal was widely shared on social media, drawing the ire of Turkey’s pro-government media and of the country’s Islamo-conservative president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
“Why does it bother you that our children learn about prayer and fasting, or that they put up Ramadan decorations and sing religious songs together?” Erdoğan said.
“If anyone is disturbed by this, they should ask themselves whether they truly feel they belong in this country.”
At issue is the nature of the education system in Turkey, a Muslim-majority nation of 86 million which is officially a secular country under its constitution.
Erdoğan and his ruling Islamic-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP) have been accused of undermining the secular pillars of the modern Turkish Republic, which was founded by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in 1923.
The president, an Islamist who has repeatedly sought to inculcate deeper religious observance within society, has defended the activities as being in line with the constitution and “entirely based on voluntary participation.”
But Akbal said he thought replacing the normal school bell with a religious chant would discriminate against children from non-religious families.
“I have social-democratic and secular values. I opposed this because I thought it could lead to discrimination and upset the children,” he told Agence France-Presse.
That evening, he was arrested for “incitement to hatred” and “invasion of privacy.”
‘Don’t fast and go to hell?’
Kemal Irmak, head of the Egitim-Sen teachers’ union said the directive “requests photos and reports about these activities so the idea that participation is genuinely voluntary exists only on paper.”
“Many schools have put up signs saying that only those who fast will be able to go to paradise. That’s putting pressure on pupils and creates fear among children, because you’re teaching them that those who don’t fast will go to hell,” said Irmak, whose union has demanded the circular be withdrawn.
Although parents can ask that their children be exempt from these activities, this exposes them to the risk of being ostracized, explained Ömer Yılmaz, head of the Veli Der parents’ association, which has filed a complaint against the education minister for “violating the principle of secularism.”
The creeping footprint of religious activities within schools has been going on for years, he said, pointing to a course on “religious culture and morality” that is mandatory for all children over the age of nine.
And these are effectively religious instruction classes, complained lawyer Cenk Yiğiter, who moved his daughter to another school in Ankara after a teacher asked them to bring in prayer beads.
“This year we had our daughter exempted from the religion class. To do that, you have to declare that you are either Christian or Jewish in the official records,” he explained.
Despite Erdoğan’s hardline stance, the protests have forced him to back down slightly, with the religious chant at the Kocaeli school quickly being replaced by the normal school bell.
But for Akbal, who was released under judicial supervision a day after his arrest, things have not gone back to normal.
Deeply shaken by the incident, he has not been able to work nor has he dared to send his daughter back to school for fear she will be “picked on” by other children.
“I just hope the charges against me will be dropped because I was only defending my rights,” he told AFP.
© Agence France-Presse