11 October 2010 / TODAY’S ZAMAN, İSTANBUL
The Pir Sultan Abdal Culture Foundation, an Alevi organization, staged a 24-hour sit-in protest in the Turkish capital on Saturday in order to express their opposition to compulsory religion courses in Turkey’s schools. Some other Alevi organizations and many from the Alevi community also participated in the protest. The sit-in continued through yesterday.
Alevis are a religious minority in Turkey and are believed to have somewhere between 6-12 million adherents in Turkey. They have long complained that compelling students to attend religion courses, which mainly focus on Sunni Islam, in state schools is against their cultural and religious rights. “Forcing Alevi children to attend compulsory religion courses at school is unacceptable. Our children are assimilated through those courses,” said Fevzi Gümüş, the chairman of the Pir Sultan Abdal Culture Foundation. The head of the Alevi-Bektaşi Federation, Ali Balkız, also said there are millions of Alevis in Turkey and that their children have been subjected to these compulsory religion courses for the past 30 years.Religious education was made compulsory in Turkish primary and secondary schools after the 1980 coup d’état. The Alevi community has filed a number of lawsuits against Turkey with the European Court of Human Rights due to the compulsory religion courses in Turkish schools. Alevi leaders also assert that their cultural and religious rights are often denied in Turkey. In 2008, the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) government shaped a new initiative to produce solutions to problems faced by Turkey’s Alevi citizens. State Minister Faruk Çelik on Sunday voiced opposition to the abolishment of compulsory religious courses. He said the content of the lessons could be discussed, but getting rid of them entirely was out of the question. “What’s the problem with religious courses? We can discuss whether the curriculum is adequate or not. Let me put it straight. We, as the government, are not warm to the proposal of the abolishment of religious courses,” he noted.
