Over the past 15 years, two major educational reforms were carried out in Turkey. Both of these impacted the entire education system, but their real target was the Imam-Hatip schools, a type of Islamic vocational school established in 1924 with the purpose of training prayer leaders and preachers. The first of these reforms was imposed by the military in 1998 during the 28 February process, which began with the National Security Council meeting on 28 February 1997 and ultimately caused the collapse of the coalition government led by the Islamist Welfare Party. In the meeting, the military issued a list of measures to the government aimed at opposing the Islamic threat, one of which was to close the middle school sections of the Imam-Hatip schools. In the second reform of 2012, the AKP retaliated by reopening the middle school sections. What makes these schools so significant that both the Kemalist secularists and the Islamist parties transformed the entire education system in Turkey just to impact them?
Since their establishment, Imam-Hatip schools have been a subject of political controversy and contestation. Few studies dealing with them have been able to rise above the equally biased views of Kemalists and Islamists in order to provide important insights. With this book—the product of excellent scholarship and meticulous research—Iren Özgür provides such a study. The most important aspect of the book is the author's placing the Imam-Hatip schools, and religious education in general, within a complex network of social and political actors and relations. We are therefore able to understand not only the workings of the schools and the different kinds of relations and meanings they provide to students and their families, but also the schools’ social and political functions and consequences.
Since the beginning of the multiparty period in 1930, Imam-Hatip schools have gained strength, prestige, and influence over society and politics parallel to the advance of the Islamic movement. In fact, they play a role in the powerful position that political Islam and religious conservatism enjoy today in Turkey. Understanding the relationship between the schools and political Islam illuminates a crucial dynamic in Turkish politics and society. However, it is important not to reproduce the Kemalist-secularist view that Imam-Hatip schools create religious militancy by brainwashing their students to oppose the secular character of the Republic. This view, as Özgür shows, has at best reduced the schools to their supposed political function while ignoring the differences among them. Özgür invites us to acknowledge these differences without losing sight of the political and social consequences of religious education in Turkey. The ethnographic method she uses in her research is crucial for overcoming a secularist bias and reductionism in understanding and explaining the meaning of these schools for students.
The first chapter of the book provides an historical account of Imam-Hatip schools and describes changes over time in the relations between the schools and the state. The schools were established as institutions of Kemalist secularism aimed to control and regulate Islamic knowledge and practice within the parameters of Republican ideology and, I should add, religious orthodoxy. Yet, as Özgür points out, the nature and scope of Imam-Hatip schools has transformed over time, and they became “one of the key institutions from which Turkey's Islamic movement in general, and the ruling AKP in particular, draw their strength and resilience” (p. 4).
In the following chapter, Özgür focuses on the learning process in Imam-Hatip schools, showing how students acquire Islamic knowledge, norms, and practices. To do so, she uses Bourdieu's concept of habitus, which refers to “everything that students learn and internalize informally or passively through their interactions with peers, teachers, and the powerful aesthetics and normative environment that surrounds them” (p. 67). The author offers comprehensive information on and insight into Imam-Hatip schools by combining different aspects of the experience of education that they provide. In addition to explaining the formal curriculum, she shows how social aesthetics and informal relations with peers and teachers contribute to students’ accumulation of Islamic knowledge, norms, and practices. By detailing the dynamic interaction of formal and informal aspects of education in Imam-Hatip schools, Özgür successfully illustrates the shared experience that students gain in them. She also shows, however, the significant variety that exists among different Imam-Hatip schools, contrary to the secularist claim that these schools produce supporters of political Islam with a monolithic mindset. One of the main conclusions she reaches is that students acquire Islamic norms and values in Imam-Hatip schools and then continue to follow them in their private and professional lives. Yet Özgür emphasizes that, “there is little to suggest that an Imam-Hatip school education and experience play a direct and concerted role in shaping the political outlooks and inclinations of students” (p. 106).
To explain the politicization process, Özgür instead looks to family, local religious authorities, such as imams and private tutors, leaders of religious orders and communities, and peers in youth organizations. She demonstrates how these agents have played a significant and direct role in the political socialization of students. In her analysis, the author explains Imam-Hatip schools in terms of their interactions and communications within a larger social and political network, which includes the AKP and Islamic civil society organizations together with other agents of politicization. Through these relations, the Imam-Hatip community contributes to and benefits from the Islamic movement. Özgür shows that the AKP is biased toward the Imam-Hatip community, and has distributed public resources based on this bias both at the municipal and national levels. With these examples, the reader sees that since the ascendancy of political Islam to power the identity and solidarity built around the Imam-Hatip community have caused unfair consequences for the rest of society.
In the last chapter, Özgür posits international interest in Turkish political Islam as well as in Imam Hatip schools as successful examples of reconciliation between Islam and secularism. Contrary to the Kemalist-secularist view, international observers see Imam-Hatip schools as a source of moderate Islam and an arena of struggle against radical extremism. The author also agrees with this assessment. Yet, one can take issue with the meaning of “moderation” as presented in the book, which seems to mean having, on the one hand, a positive attitude toward the secular character of the political system, and, on the other hand, a lack of radical extremism. Although Özgür counters the Kemalist-secularist view about Imam-Hatip schools, she echoes it in questions she poses about the school's relation to the secular character of the political system. Answers to these questions do not necessarily explain the schools’ consequences for a liberal democratic system.
Recent discussions of secularism have shown that there is a plurality of secularisms rather than one universal model. Secularism can be part of a democratic political trajectory as well as an authoritarian one, as in the Kemalist case. Neither secularism nor lack of radical extremism necessarily implies commitment to democratic and liberal ideas and principles. Reflecting on democracy and liberalism, the author could have included a discussion of the attitudes and views of the Imam-Hatip community toward societal differences and plurality, and specifically whether its religious sensitivity, identity, and solidarity entail exclusionary consequences for heterodoxy in Islam, non-Muslims, secularists, atheists, and so on. This question has become more critical than ever given the fact that the AKP has increased its political power as the ruling party since 2002. The important point is that religious extremism is not the only form that a religious actor, institution, party, or movement can take to be undemocratic and illiberal. The book successfully explains the existence of solidarity within the Imam-Hatip school community, yet less clear is what the political and social consequences of these schools would be if this solidarity is coupled with discrimination, exclusion, and suppression of differences in society.
The great value of this book lies not only in the information and critical insights it provides, but also in its structure and lucid style, which makes it accessible to a wide range of readers. As Özgür promises, the book “deepens understanding of the multiplicity of actors involved in Islamic movements and their employment of educational institutions to promote social and political reform” (p. 7).
