Imam-Hatip High Schools in their 100th year

Amid the dust cloud raised by the prep-school debate, which has spread so as to reduce visibility considerably, an international symposium was held this past weekend addressing the Imam-Hatip High Schools in all their dimensions.

The occasion for the symposium was that we are marking the 100th anniversary of the first opening of the schools. The first Imam-Hatip schools were opened exactly 100 years ago, that is, before the Ottoman State had even collapsed.

The two-day symposium was held on Yıldız Technical University's Davutpaşa Campus, in cooperation with the civil society organizations that have, so to speak, made the Imam-Hatips their cause: the Ensar Foundation, the Association for Spreading Knowledge, the Foundation for Spreading Knowledge, the Turkey Youth and Education Service Foundation (TÜRGEV) and the Association of Imam Hatip Graduates and Members (ÖNDER), together with the Values Education Center.

As a distinctive educational experience, the Imam-Hatip schools have certainly been on the country's agenda in very different contexts at very different stages of this century-long process. The need felt for the founding of these schools in the last stages of the Ottoman Empire, the form they took together with the Law on the Unification of Education, then their closure only 6 years later, then the decision to reopen them in 1949 by the very CHP that had closed them, and so on. Each of these stages sufficiently shows that the Imam-Hatip schools in Turkey could never remain entirely removed from politics.

Why did the will that closed them want to close them? What did the CHP, which decided to reopen them, hope for from this decision in the late forties? The Imam-Hatips opened with this decision evidently failed to meet the CHP's expectations, for in all the periods after that, the most suspicious, even threatening, politics toward these schools came from the CHP.

The CHP's closing of the Imam-Hatips in 1930 under the pretext of "no students" was merely a consistent step in its program on religious education in Turkey in general. In this program there was no place for religious education, nor in fact for religion. In this program of the CHP there was not the slightest sign that the state had preferred Sunnism over Alevism.

On the contrary, the religious policy envisaged for Turkey conformed, within a positivist framework, to the expectation that religion would disappear entirely.

That is, if the religious policy of the state conceived by the CHP had a religious preference, it was a religion that would be functional for the society being built, consistent with the functionalism of the French sociologist Emile Durkheim, even if it was believed to be fabricated. In line with this wish, an attempt was made to extract a Protestantism from Islam, the call to prayer was Turkified, and the script of the Mushaf was Latinized. What could the future envisaged for so many arrangements be? To what extent can these policies be said to be Sunni? There is nothing Islamic in these policies, so how could they be Sunni?

By contrast, from the moment the transition to multi-party life was made, the need to have these policies approved by the people arose for the first time, and from that point on the unsustainability of these policies was realized. That is why the CHP's 7th Congress turned into a confrontation in which a series of debates took place about how the distance from the people had opened up because of its religious policies. The most important outcome of this congress was the recognition of the need to reopen the IHLs and the faculties of theology.

Even so, after the IHLs and the Faculties of Theology were established in 1949, on the basis of these outcomes, only in limited numbers and on the condition of "training enlightened clergy," the rest was to be left to the people. Because as the democratic process worked itself out, it would be impossible to prevent the people's demands from influencing both the number and the form of the IHLs. For that reason, we can say with ease that whatever the CHP hoped for from the opening of the IHLs and the Faculties of Theology, it did not find what it hoped for.

But did what the people wanted, which was influential in deciding the number and form of these schools, exactly reflect itself in these schools? Did everything turn out as the people wanted?

Without a doubt, it is not possible to say this either. Neither did the state run by the CHP find what it hoped for from the IHLs, nor was the people able to shape the IHLs exactly as it wished, entirely independent of the state's interventions.

Besides, by the nature of things it could not have been otherwise. In the end, it would be more accurate to say that the current form of the IHLs is the result of a kind of compromise. But this compromise, in this form, has constituted an extremely original model that deserves many studies and debates.

These schools, whose 100th anniversary we are marking today, as a social phenomenon have caused many effects, many formations and many social consequences. The IHL phenomenon is the result of a social change. But it is itself a movement that has led to a series of social changes and, with the sphere of influence it has reached to date, has also been the cause of important waves of social change. Perhaps the easiest way of positioning the Imam-Hatip high schools in the context of social change is to note this. Which social changes were the Imam-Hatip high schools the result of, and what kinds of changes have they led to?

Perhaps, since we have asked this question, we can continue to dwell on it. But of course later...