Global policies, media, law and the future of the family

Serious perceptions of threat to Turkey's family structure, and the social change we are living through, cause ever greater concern as they are reflected in the figures. The figures concern rising divorce rates, the number of people living alone, the steadily rising age of marriage, our becoming an aging population, and, most recently drawing greater attention, falling fertility rates. There is no doubt that these rates are symptoms of the shaking of our "family structure," which we point to as a great source of pride. That is why the Presidency declared the current year the Year of the Family. The most important result of declaring a Year of the Family is the mobilization of the experts in the field to think about the family and to create awareness about it.

Scientists, universities, demographers and theologians should each, from a separate angle or putting their heads together, take part in a national campaign to first establish where the family is heading, to diagnose its problems if there are any, and to think of remedies. Of course, if the matter concerned only the groups we have mentioned and were limited to their efforts, it would be easy. Frankly, the developments we are exposed to regarding the family require a total mobilization of all social institutions and segments.

Last Tuesday in Ankara, Diyanet-Sen organized a one-day Family Workshop. The workshop, held under the title "Global Policies, Media, Law and the Future of the Family," demonstrated the will of the union side of the Diyanet community to put its hand under the stone and take responsibility on this issue. At the workshop, attended also by Memur-Sen President Ali Yalçın and Diyanet-Sen President Ali Yıldız, the opening lecture by Prof. Dr. Saffet Köse, known for his lifelong work on the family, outlined many dimensions of the problem from a Muslim perspective. In the panel that followed, Ergun Yıldırım, Emir Kaya, Deputy President of Religious Affairs Burhan İşleyen and Sibel Eraslan, and in the next session Mahmet Baki Öztürk, Celal Türer, Ülfet Görgülü, Adnan Bülent Baloğlu, Şaban Kondi, Miyase Yavuz Altıntaş, Hülya Yılmaz and Samiye Korkmaz, offered assessments of the threats we face in our family life in the context of globalization, social change and law.

The arguments that Sibel Eraslan tried to build around the phrase "First There Was the Home," which she pointed to as the title of one of Ergun Yıldırım's books, formed, frankly, a very cautionary and solid foundation for the Muslim family. According to Yıldırım, the "house" in the Qur'an refers to the first house established for people in Mecca, the Kaaba, that is, Bayt Allah, the House of God, and is at the same time a command pointing to the ontological necessity of the house, and therefore of the family, for human existence. Hence, the journey from the primitive family to the agrarian family, from there to the industrial and now to the postmodern family is not an evolution or fate that we can accept for the family, but a development that we can only meet with the concept of deviation.

One side of the change the family is exposed to is undoubtedly related to the policies we carry out in this country, but many important parts of it are related to global developments. When we look at globalization, the factors that threaten the family in general are finding and eroding not only the Turkish family but the institution of the family as a whole. In a sociological study I conducted in the USA in 2001, I had found remarkable and recorded the motivations underlying the Mormons' passionate attachment to family life in particular. Recently, when I looked at the present state of the Mormons in order to update my old study, I found that among them too there is an erosion no less than ours, especially in divorce rates and fertility. Moreover, the Mormons have very strong religious motivations encouraging fertility.

In Turkey, as we have said before, in addition to global factors negatively affecting family life, the policies being implemented also have very serious effects. Excessive universitization and compulsory 12-year education postpone participation in employment and family life to later ages and seriously damage the institution of the family.

On the other hand, it is not hard to see that policies put forward in the name of protecting women, far from protecting women, shatter the roles of masculinity and femininity, pushing the individual into unpredictable behavior and opening the doors to violence even wider. This is of course not a matter that can be understood and solved with a feminist approach. We have accumulated a great deal of experience on the grave legal and sociological consequences of taking a woman's statement as the basis in the name of protecting women.

Among the speakers, Prof. Dr. Emir Kaya's observations on our legal alienation, starting from the Swiss Civil Code and extending to the Istanbul Convention, were very important. Making assessments of the current legislation that has turned the issue of divorce, with its alimony and the asymmetric oppression applied to men, into a bleeding social wound, Kara also pointed to the potential for solutions that institutionalizing a Qur'anic principle I too have long been thinking about could offer in marriages. The relevant verse, Surah An-Nisa, verse 35, is as follows:

"If you fear a breach between the two of them, send an arbiter from his family and an arbiter from her family. If the two sides truly want reconciliation, God will bring them together. Surely God is All-Knowing, All-Aware."

The verse, which proposes appointing two arbiters (mediators) from within the family when a marriage is in danger of dissolving, commands that divorce be regarded as a last resort and that paths of reconciliation be exhausted first, while preventing every disagreement between the parties from being immediately taken to the police station, opening from there a door of irreversible grudge and hatred. Yet today matters easily reach this point, which ends in the removal of the man, and it is not even taken into account that a woman too may use violence or slander. Yet family elders who know both sides can bring disputes to a conclusion in a far more humane, far more responsible and far more beneficial way.

Truly, beyond these, the first institutional measure to be taken in order to strengthen the family is to review universitization policies, to lower the age of participation in employment and the family by strengthening vocational education instead of 12-year compulsory education, and to increase motivation regarding fertility.

At this point the question to be asked is this: What will motivate us to be a strong family? What will be the motivation for being the guardian, bearer and servant of a strong family? If we are going to see the matter within the context and limits of a natural happy family home, then too bad; sociology has eroded that happy family with hedonism, selfishness and the global culture of distraction and consumption.

Whatever motivates the Gazan to have more children, today the Muslim society too has no alternative but to cling to the reasons that motivate a stronger and wider family. If the Muslim society is under occupation, the work starts with the family, and resistance too must start from the family. The way to resist this occupation is to take an initiative for a strong and large family, to be willing to bear its hardship, to love that hardship, that concern, and to aspire to it.