Newsweek, Alexander Christie-Miller

When Hasan Erol and other parents learned that their children’s school would be converted to specialise in Islamic education, they hit the streets. Yeşilbahar Middle School is among five in Istanbul’s staunchly secular district of Kadıköy to have been earmarked for conversion into imam-hatips, religious schools in which 20% to one-third of hours are dedicated to Sunni Islamic study. “They want to transform this area into something else,” says Erol, whose 13-year-old son goes to the school. “They want to make it more conservative by bringing imam-hatips here.” Yeşilbahar was spared. Authorities relented in the face of protests and a petition and, for now, it remains a general middle school. There have been drawbacks, however. This year, no new students have been registered. In a meeting with officials, Erol claimed, the regional education director threatened to stop enrolling students altogether so that, in time, “they will have no parents to deal with”. Read More

The New York Times, Ceylan Yeginsu
When Semra dropped off her 13-year-old daughter for the first day of high school, she had to fight back tears as she entered the dimly lit basement classroom, brightened by the red of the girls’ head scarves and the walls emblazoned with Quranic verses written in Arabic script. Read More

Financial Times, Daniel Dombey
The girls’ imam hatip high school in Istanbul’s lower-middle class district of Bayrampasha does not seem like a front in Turkey’s bitter culture wars. Read More

The National, David Lapeska
On a brilliantly sunny afternoon in September, dozens of pre-teens kicked footballs and chased each other across a concrete playground in front of the 60th Year School in Sancaktepe, a working- class district on Istanbul’s Asian side.

Among a group of mothers keeping watch, some had recently protested against the school’s colonisation by a religion-focused middle school, known in Turkey as an imam hatip school. Last year, as a pilot project, the imam hatip school commandeered nine classrooms and welcomed 300 students. This year it has 20 classrooms and 750 students. Read More

Lauren Williams, Al Jazeera
New student allocation system based on exam scores and geography has placed non-religious students in religious schools. Read More

New York Times, Ayşegül Sert
The term “New Turkey,” meticulously coined and methodically delivered by the government to penetrate the public psyche, and reiterated during the campaign for Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s bid for the presidency, continues to reverberate long after he has won. Read More

Agence France-Presse
Parents, educators and civil society groups have decried a move by the Islamic-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP) of assigning students to religious schools as another attack on Turkey’s secular principles. Read More

Financial Times, Daniel Dombey
Recep Tayyip Erdogan is making his mark as Turkey’s first directly elected president barely a week after taking the oath of office. The former prime minister is already shifting Turkey away from customs acquired over the nine decades since the end of the Ottoman Empire, a period in which largely secularist elites held sway. Read More