How did the CHP reopen the Imam-Hatip schools it closed?

The "pious/atheist generation" debate between Prime Minister Erdoğan and CHP leader Kılıçdaroğlu has extended into the history of the Imam-Hatip schools (İHO). In response to Erdoğan's accusations, Kılıçdaroğlu "reminded" that the İHOs had been established by themselves, in order to prove that the CHP has never lagged behind the AK Parti in raising a pious generation.

Of course, the CHP also expressed its difference from right-wing conservative parties in raising this pious generation as "not making it a matter of exploitation." Politicians may use the notion of "exploitation" against one another as much as they like, but such accusations have no analytical value whatsoever. There is no objective criterion for proving who does what with how much conviction, even by looking at the political benefit someone obtained from what he did. Since political action is at its core aimed at securing a benefit, making the benefit secured a subject of accusation expresses, at best, a superficiality about the nature of politics. If you like, let us go beyond this superficiality and look at whether the background of the CHP's opening the İHOs was really to raise a "pious generation," or what other kind of calculation there was.

Indeed, as Kılıçdaroğlu said, it was the CHP administration that established the İHOs, and also the first of the Faculties of Theology, whose number has now reached 30, in 1949. But these schools were not established out of nothing. These schools already existed and were closed in 1933 by the very same CHP administration. When we look closely at why the CHP closed these schools and how it decided to reopen them, it is clearly seen that the CHP never had a positive approach to the field of religion.

Frankly, the CHP's strategic goal in its religion policy was the complete erasure of religion from social life, and for religion, which would be withdrawn into spheres of individual life (between God and the servant, that is, the sphere of "conscience"), to lose its influence entirely over time. When this assessment is made today, it sounds as if a heavy accusation is being made against the CHP, but let us not forget that during the years the CHP was in power, a positivist ideology prevailed in the world and the CHP cadres adopted this ideology as it was. This ideology regarded religion as consisting entirely of superstition and fabricated beliefs and imagined that it would have no branch left to hold on to in the face of the development of science. Helping the departure of religion, which in the face of the "enlightened development" of science would sooner or later withdraw from life anyway, was the policy the CHP adopted. To help this, it was necessary to weaken the institutional presence of religion. And the first way to do this was to give way to "the official/institutional presence of the cadres representing religion."

In the meantime, references made as if in praise of "our religion's discourses that value reason and logic, oppose superstition, and have no clergy class" were included only to facilitate this policy. By 1933 the alphabet reform had already been carried out, the social position of the ulema had been discredited to the extreme, all the fields of duty in which the ulema could work had been destroyed through the Unification of Education policy and the changes in the judicial field, and the field of religion had been completely pushed out of life with excessive emphasis on positivist discourses. Before the Theology faculties and the İHOs were officially closed, they had been discredited to a degree that no student could show interest in them. All that remained was to put a lock on their doors.

That is, it was the CHP that deemed fit for Turkey an environment in which there was no religious education for a full 20 years. Why did the same CHP decide in 1949 to reopen these schools? We can find the answer to this question at the 7th CHP congress in 1947. At this congress, the CHP, which in the multi-party life entered in 1946 had for the first time, and of necessity, thought of listening to the voice of the people, perceived the approaching popular will as a threat. The reopening of these schools was only one item in the bundle of measures the CHP put into effect against the danger of the approaching popular revolution.

One factor that convinced the CHP in this threat perception was seeing the fact that the field of religion, instead of disappearing as in the positivist projections, had grown stronger by withdrawing into opposition. Because among the people an alarmingly large field of religion that was increasingly "uncontrollable" and interpreted religion in its own way had formed. The people were raising their own cadres to meet their own needs, but this was a serious problem for the young nation-state anxious to control everything. That is why the CHP also persuaded the elements within itself that resisted reopening these schools by expressing the purpose as "raising enlightened clergymen."

This "enlightened clergyman," as expressed both in the Congress minutes and in the TBMM minutes, was in fact going to be "sociologists or philosophers of religion" who would continue to see religion as a superstition and would enlighten the people about the truth of religion.

In practice, the CHP was in fact saying amen to a prayer that would not be answered, because it understood neither the nature of religion nor society. Indeed, after that, the development of both these schools and the Diyanet began to be subject to a dialectical rule between the demands of the people and the supply of a state that had, for better or worse, moved to democracy. Today there is no way to read either these schools or the Diyanet independently of this dialectic.

Meanwhile, what Prime Minister Erdoğan said in this debate about "raising a pious generation" requires a separate assessment.

It must be said up front that a democratic state cannot have such a mission. Because those you speak of raising are not your own children but the children of parents who may have other preferences. The mission of a democratic state is to offer these opportunities and freedoms to its citizens who want to raise their children as pious (or otherwise). If the people are pious and want to, they will choose to raise their own children as pious; if not, they will not. The duty of the state can be to facilitate the people's choices in this direction.

Otherwise, it would not differ much from what the CHP did, and when another government comes to power tomorrow, it would try in the same way to raise our children as it wishes. This order would thus continue to go on as it came. Yet is not what needs to be done to change it?