TURKISH THEOLOGICAL SCHOOLS FLOURISHING AS RESTRICTIONS RELAX ON RELIGIOUS EXPRESSION
EurasiaNet.org
May 19 2010
Skull-caps on their heads, five students aged between 18 and
40 hunch over a text in Arabic in the southeastern Turkish town
NorÅ~_in. In front of them, legs folded like a yogi, a copy of the
same leather-bound book open on a low wooden lectern, an elderly
teacher declaims in sing-song Kurdish.
Strictly speaking, this gathering is forbidden under Turkish law. But
since the Islamic-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP) came
to power in 2002, restrictions on religious expression have relaxed
slightly. This easing has opened the way for a minor local renaissance
in Turkey of one of the Muslim world’s oldest institutions — the
medrese, or theological school.
For half a century after 1880, the village of NorÅ~_in was arguably the
most important centre of religious learning in Kurdish areas of what
is now Turkey and Iraq. Students called it the Al-Azhar of the East,
after Cairo’s famous university, and came from hundreds of miles away
to attend.
But the founding of the Turkish Republic in 1923 dealt NorÅ~_in
a double blow. First, medrese were closed in the name of unified,
state-run education. Then, in 1925, unnerved by a major Kurdish revolt
led by the leader of a religious brotherhood, Turkey’s new leaders
clamped down on Sufi lodges too.
A member of the same, influential Nakshibendi brotherhood as the
rebel leader, Norsin’s sheikh had nothing to do with the rebellion. It
didn’t stop him being sent into internal exile, along with his family.
By the late 1970s, after decades spent in a semi-clandestine existence,
Norsin’s medrese had closed its doors.
Three decades on, the village has three medrese capable of educating
60 students at any one time. Construction on a fourth is nearing
completion, as NorÅ~_in moves to take advantage of a re-awakening of
interest that has seen theological schools across the region become
more active.
"Radical Islam collapsed because it was a product of the Cold War,"
said Mufit Yuksel, a prominent sociologist of Islam who studied at
NorÅ~_in. "Today there is a return to the traditional Islam symbolized
by NorÅ~_in. The whole Islamic world has understood that religion is
a tradition, not an ideology."
While Norsin’s renaissance dates back to the late 1980s, the AKP,
led by a politician, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, seems more
aware than earlier governments of its potential symbolic power,
both for the religious-minded and for Kurds. Erdogan in his youth
was close to an Istanbul branch of the Nakshibendi.
Last August, as the government launched a concerted effort to end a
25-year Kurdish rebellion, President Abdullah Gul traveled to the town,
which is still officially known as Guroymak. But during the visit Gul
called it by its Kurdish (or, as at least one etymologist mischievously
suggested, Armenian) name of NorÅ~_in. It marked the first time since
the Turkification of place names began in the 1930s that a senior
official had publicly preferred a non-Turkish name. Many observers
interpreted the move as being part of a policy aimed at undermining
former Marxist Kurdish rebels by emphasizing Turkish-Kurdish Islamic
brotherhood.
As Gul spoke, Turkish workmen paid for by Ankara, continued
restoration work on the tomb of the founder of the Turkish branch of
the Nakshibendi sect in the Syrian capital of Damascus.
"Sayyid Qutb is losing ground to… Mevlana," says Kurdish Islamist
intellectual Serdar Bulent Yilmaz, referring to the Egyptian-born
founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, a 20th century political Islamist
movement, and the 13th century Sufi mystic and poet who died in the
Turkish city of Konya. "Islam is supposed to go beyond the national,
but Turkey’s Muslims are rediscovering local symbols and local
identity."
In Norsin itself, members of the family that has provided sheikhs
for the local Sufi brotherhood for over 150 years take a harder-nosed
view of their village’s sudden return to prominence, as well as the
rejuvenation of its medrese.
In the past, said Baha Mutlu, nephew of the current family head,
NorÅ~_in used to boast of educating future religious teachers
"knowledgeable in the twelve sciences," a term used to describe
everything from natural philosophy through logic to shar’ia, or
religious law. Today, few students get beyond learning Arabic and a
good grounding in the Koran.
"The Republican period brought great trauma to the functioning of
medrese," Mutlu explains. "With the risk of a military police raid
at any moment, you have to pare the syllabus down, cut it down to
the bare minimum."
While older Kurds still remain attached to the religion of their
forefathers, the world view of younger generations has been affected
both by obligatory secular education and the charisma of gun-toting
Marxists in the mountains. In his early 50s now, Mutlu as a child
went to the village primary school in the morning and the medrese in
the afternoon. He can read Ottoman, an Arabic- and Farsi-tinged form
of Turkish that is written in Arabic script as easily as he can read
modern Turkish.
His nephew Ruknettin Mutlu, who studied public administration at
university and now teaches democracy and human rights at the high
school just down the hill from NorÅ~_in, is much more at home in modern
Turkish. "Our uncle is not a sheikh in the traditional sense of the
word," says Ruknettin’s older brother Omer Mutlu, referring to the
need for new Nakshibendi sheikhs to receive authorization from their
superiors before beginning to practice. "NorÅ~_in is an institution
and he took up leadership of it to tide things over. If he had not,
it would have disappeared for ever."
Sitting outside NorÅ~_in’s original medrese building, a simple white
turban – or shapik – on his head, Sheikh Nurettin has no cause for
complaint. He gestures behind him at cherry trees blossoming early
after an unusually mild winter. "This past winter has been so beautiful
that we have forgotten the bitter winters of the past," he says.
Five more students filed past him on their way to Arabic lessons with
the elderly professor, cross-legged behind his lectern.
They could get a similar education at one of Turkey’s official
religious schools. But Turkey’s official religious schools don’t teach
Kurdish. Nor, unlike NorÅ~_in, have they produced arguably the most
important Islamic thinker in 20th century Turkish history, Said-i
Nursi, rebellious Kurd in his youth, Koran exegete in his prime,
revered by millions as a near-saint after his death.
"Everybody who comes here dreams of being the new Said," says Sheikh
Nurettin.
Editor’s note: Nicolas Birch specializes in Turkey, Iran and the
Middle East.