The Cutting Edge, DC
Jan 11 2008
Inside the Islamic World:
Turkey’s Imperils Religious Freedom for Christians, Greek Orthodox
and Others
Joseph Griebowski January 11th 2008
Turkish President Abdullah Gul met President George W. Bush on
January 8, marking Gul’s first visit to Washington as president.
The official agenda included a laundry list of issues central to
US-Turkish relations: joint efforts to counter the Kurdish rebel
group PKK; to promote stability in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and the
broader Middle East; and to advance Turkey’s European Union accession
goals.
In his second inaugural address, President Bush stated that, `The
survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success
of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is
the expansion of freedom in all the world.’
While each of the issues that is currently on the agenda is a
priority issue, each also touches on a broader question which remains
off the agenda: freedom of religion and belief in Turkey itself.
A significant problem facing religious groups in Turkey is the
nation’s biased religious registration laws. Registration is required
for religious leaders and institutions to serve the spiritual needs
of their constituents. Currently, the Sunni branch of Islam is the
only `state-sanctioned’ form of religion.
The Alevi Islamic Community is not recognized as a separate religious
group and is instead considered to be a defacto group within Sunni
Islam. This lack of distinct recognition severely limits their
ability to form their own houses of worship and leaves them suspect
to the laws of the state that pertain to Sunnis. The Shi’a community
is not recognized as a separate legal entity either.
The Armenian Orthodox, Greek Orthodox, and Jewish communities are
recognized as having `a special legal minority status.’ However, this
only applies to the individuals within these communities and not to
their religious institutions, which severely hinders the ability of
these groups to perform a wide range of functions necessary to
maintaining and serving the needs of their respective adherents.
All other religious groups, including the Roman Catholic Church,
mainline Protestant and Evangelical groups, have no official legal
status within the Republic of Turkey.
Religious education is another significantly contentious religious
freedom issue in Turkey. Two aspects of religious education are
particularly troublesome: the first is that Turkey requires a
majority of its population to take state-mandated religious education
classes; the second problem is the current restrictions that
religious groups face in properly educating their clergy.
Turkey currently requires all Muslims in the country, regardless of
their sectarian affiliation, to partake in religious education
classes. Minority religious groups are exempted from these religious
classes. The Alevis, and other Turkish Muslim minority groups, claim
that these classes teach only the Sunni form of Islam that advances
religious beliefs that are in conflict with their own religious
teachings. These groups also complain that many of these mandatory
classes actually demean and dismiss their beliefs.
Many other minority religious communities in Turkey face serious
problems in educating their believers. In 1971, the Turkish
government closed all university-level religious schools, both Muslim
and Christian. Numerous restrictions hinder the ability of these
institutions to reopen their doors, such as a requirement that all
students be Turkish citizens, a very serious problem for Greek
Orthodox clergy. The government argues that these restrictions are
necessary to prevent radical Islamic groups from opening their own
religious schools that could spread a violent and extremist form of
Islam. These restrictions disproportionately burden the nation’s
religious minorities.
The Greek Orthodox population has fallen to approximately 3000 people
over the past several decades. They do not have a large enough
population to maintain the primary Greek Orthodox seminary in Turkey
– the Halki Monastery. Halki Monastery was among those
university-level religious institutions closed by the government, and
it faces numerous restrictions to reopening. The Turkish Government
will currently not allow any foreign students to be educated at
Halki. Without foreign students, there are not enough Turkish Greek
Orthodox seminarians to maintain an official seminary. In addition,
due to legal restrictions mentioned above, this Monastery cannot call
upon foreign seminarians to travel to Turkey to train the students of
the Monastery. In approximately a generation, the Greek Orthodox
population will no longer have the capacity to train new theological
leaders.
Furthermore, due to legal restrictions that any religious leader in
Turkey must be a citizen and be educated in Turkey, within a few
years there will be no one that is eligible to be the new Patriarch
of Constantinople. As a result, this religious group will have no way
of practicing its faith or continuing its traditions. Without the
ability to practice their faith or continue their traditions, the
Greek Orthodox community will slowly disappear to the pages of
history. The continued closure of Halki threatens the very survival
of Turkey’s ancient Greek Orthodox minority and the `primus inter
pares’ of Orthodoxy, the Patriarch of Constantinople. Turkey’s Greek
Orthodox community is a victim of a silent genocide as their
population, religion, and way of life are eroded over the years by
actions taken by the Turkish government.
What’s more, the Government periodically meddles in the internal
functioning of religious communities. The Higher Court of Appeals
recently ruled in favor of the Government in a purely linguistic
dispute with the Greek Orthodox Patriarch. The government refused to
recognize the use of the term `ecumenical’ in reference to the
Patriarch. This means that the Turkish government refuses to
recognize the Patriarch as leader of anything more than the country’s
small Greek Orthodox community, in contrast with the esteemed
position that the Patriarch holds amongst other Orthodox communities
worldwide. As the government only allows Turkish citizens to be
members of the Orthodox Church hierarchy, this condition places a
great strain on such a small population.
Another cause for concern in Turkey is the recent string of attacks
against Christians. In January 2007, a protestant church in Samsun
was severely vandalized. In April, three workers at a Bible house in
the city of Malatya were viciously murdered. The victims’ throats
were slashed, and a fourth person inside the building was attempted
to escape by jumping out of a window and was severely wounded. It is
imperative that the international community pressure Turkey into
prosecuting those responsible to the fullest extent of the law. Every
community of faith needs the freedom to practice their religion
without worrying about either themselves or their religious
institutions being physically harmed.
Joe Griebowski is President of the Institute on Religion and Public
Policy and Secretary General, Interparliamentary Conference on Human
Rights and Religious Freedom. He can be reached at
http://www. thecuttingedgenews.com/index.php?article=287