Apr 16, 2018

On April 10, at the Turkish parliament in Ankara, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan did something unusual during his usual weekly address to the deputies of his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). He suddenly paused during his address and called the national education minister, Ismet Yilmaz, to the podium. The two men then murmured for about half a minute in front of the huge audience. Muted microphones did not catch the whole conversation, but the minister was heard speaking about "the report on deism" and “the thoughts of our youth about this.” “No,” Erdogan was heard saying in a definitive tone. “That is wrong.”

The report in question, which was discussed at a workshop by the Ministry of Education branch in Konya, a conservative Anatolian town, had made the news in early April. Titled “The Youth is Sliding to Deism,” the document shared surprising observations about the very young people that Turkish society often expects to be the most religious: the students of the state-sponsored religious “imam hatip” schools. The report says that because archaic interpretations of Islam cannot persuade the new generation on issues such as the “problem of evil” (why God allows evil to take place), some imam hatip students have begun questioning the faith. Instead of adopting atheism, the report added, these post-Islamic youths embrace the milder alternative: “deism,” or the belief in God but without religion.

The report surprised and also angered Turkey’s conservative establishment. Devlet Bahceli, the leader of the Nationalist Action Party, which is supposed to be an opposition party but has lately become a staunch Erdogan ally, lashed out against those who prepared the report, for “putting on the Turkish youth the stain of deism, which is one stop before atheism.” A few days later, Turkey’s top cleric, the head of the Directorate of Religious Affairs, also spoke on the deism controversy. Explaining that the term implies “a philosophy that denies prophethood,” the theologian hopefully added that once they really understand what deism is, “no member of [the] nation will accept such a deviant thought.”

In fact, the deism controversy has been on Turkey’s agenda even before these recent outbursts by prominent figures. One of the first intellectuals to draw attention to this issue was Mustafa Ozturk, a progressive Islamic theologian who writes a column in the daily Karar. In an April 2017 piece titled “The Footsteps of Deism,” Ozturk argued that despite the conviction among religious conservatives that they are in the midst of a golden age, something very fundamental is slipping out of their hands, as “the new generations are getting indifferent, even distant, to the Islamic worldview.” Most of the people who claim to represent Islam in Turkey offer a very archaic, dogmatic notion of religion, Ozturk explained, and this leads to secularization among the more cosmopolitan, questioning youths.

Since then, the erosion of Islam among young people has been an oft-repeated theme in the Turkish public sphere. At a conference in March, a conservative academic at Istanbul’s Medeniyet University said he has students who wear the Islamic headscarf because of their family environment, but “who confess in private that they are not even deists but atheists.” In the past several months, dozens of articles in the press discussed the “deism plague,” and even TV shows highlighted the issue. Yet there is no data on how many Turks have abandoned Islam to jump on the “deism” bandwagon, though plenty of anecdotal evidence suggests that this is no imaginary matter.