By Burak Bekdil
One way the rise of Islamist authoritarianism in a
country can be seen is by the rise in the number of mosques, religious schools
and prisons -- coupled with a sharp decline in the quality of education. Turkey
is no exception.Most recently, the Turkish government said that it would build
174 new prisons, increasing capacity by 100,000 convicts...Before that,
Turkey's government released nearly 40,000 convicted criminals, in order to
make space for tens of thousands of suspects, including journalists,
businessmen and academics, detained after the failed coup of July 15… The other type of trendy building in Turkey is the
mosque. Turkey's state-funded Directorate for Religious Affairs (Diyanet) has
proudly announced that nearly 9,000 new mosques were built across the country
between 2005 and 2015. The number of mosques in Turkey is estimated at around
90,000, or one mosque per 866 people... Turkey's president, Recep Tayyip
Erdogan, has not only been building mosques and prisons to further Islamize the
country. He has also passionately been building religious schools [from which
he once graduated]. He boasts that during his term as prime minister and
president (since November 2002), the number of students enrolled at religious
schools, officially called "imam schools," has risen from 60,000 to
more than 1.2 million -- a 20-fold increase.
