by Alev Scott
The commercial competition between various dershanes can be vicious. The average Turkish town in the run-up to September will have several large billboards advertising the top students of a particular dershane, their photographs emblazoned with exam percentiles and names alongside: local teenage superstars arranged in first, second and third place like Olympic champions. In Istanbul and Ankara, the adverts might have a clutch of names followed by famous American universities to show off the number of students who achieved the Holy Grail of parental ambition thanks to the efforts of this particular dershane. Every July when results come out, newspapers and television channels descend like vultures on the top few students in the country and conduct interviews with these rather dazed child prodigies. If the struggle for university places is a war, then the dershane is a form of warfare, and the war will continue until more university places are created.
The Turkish Education Ministry says it cannot afford the extra teachers and examiners necessary to reduce class sizes and broaden the national examinations, given the volume of applicants. One of the attractions of the national university application system is that it is actually very fair, because it is based entirely on multiple-choice questions, the answers to which are either right or wrong: clinical and dry, perhaps, but straightforwardly quantifiable, unlike arbitrary essay marking. Turkish students are graded and placed within a national percentile which determines which universities will accept them. The scheme is totally anonymous, so no one knows who you or your parents are, as opposed to the system in Britain and America, where personalised applications – including personal statements and interviews – give the admissions department an accurate estimation of your socio-economic status, whether they use that information or not. Ivy League universities are notorious for accepting a handful of average students whose parents have been generous to the school’s coffers, justified by what they call the ‘legacy’ system of favouring the children of alumni. This arrangement ensures future donations to the school, which are used for the benefit of all students. There are pros and cons of this system, but it is not something that Turkish universities engage in, at least on an official level. If you are clever, that is reflected in the calibre of the university which accepts you in a relatively uncomplicated way.
The Turkish system of assessment, while technically fair, does not encourage or reward critical thought. Some of my brightest friends from school and university in England would probably be classed as simpletons if they took the national exam, because while they can write brilliant essays on the imagery of James Joyce, their knowledge of simple algebra is lost in the mists of time, thanks to the British system allowing subject specialisation from the age of sixteen. It gives one food for thought – thousands of high-school dropouts in Turkey may be stuffing kebab buns as they ruminate on Rumi, literary geniuses thwarted by their own one-sided intelligence and bumped off the conveyor belt of Fact to make room for duller, more mouldable students. Given this background, one can see how İbrahim the Shakespearean eccentric was such a unique individual. He was not cleverer, but merely more independent-minded than his peers, and that made all the difference to his approach to life.
A question remains: why are Turks so obsessed with doing well in exams? On a material level, entry to a high-ranking university will lead to a good degree and a well-paid job, which everyone wants. But beyond that, there is an acute concern with the status that comes with all of that. The top five per cent of students in Turkey study electrical or industrial engineering as a matter of course, simply because it is considered the most demanding subject. Even if a top-grade student has an intellectual appetite for architecture, literature or psychology, they would be extremely unlikely to choose any of these courses because they would be passing up the opportunity to be recognised as the best of the best. Their family would be horrified, for one thing.
In Turkey you do not study for yourself or for the subject itself, you study for the respect and money it will earn you. Young professionals follow the dictates of their milieu when it comes to education, but this crowd-pleasing instinct is true across Turkish society – in commerce and social attitudes as well as education, as I will discuss in the next chapter. It is a very dangerous thing when it comes to education. It means that there is a lack of outstanding professionals in sectors like mental health and architecture, because these careers are considered secondary to engineering and conventional medicine.
On a brighter note, careers in the arts are gradually getting more popular in Turkey. I talked to an arts management director who has worked in Turkey for thirty years, and who was very excited that school-leavers in Turkey are increasingly enrolling in graphic design and music colleges, defying the limits of mainstream education, and opening up galleries or starting film companies. There is a significant underground music scene in Istanbul, with a particularly large French following who come for particular DJ nights at niche electro clubs. It is not really fair to compare Istanbul to London or New York on the arts front, because it is simply not such a well-established cultural capital. The fact that it is even considered in the same class is a huge compliment given that, until recently, it was the biggest and most problematic city of a turbulent country beset by huge economic problems. Now it is catch-up time, and many curators and festival organisers I have spoken to predict that Istanbul will soon be able to contend with major international cities for genuinely cutting-edge arts and design. Turkish artists like Cannes Grand Prix winner Nuri Bilge Ceylan, artist Tracey Emin and Nobel Literature Prize-winner Orhan Pamuk – to name a few of the über famous – are in some cases more famous abroad than in Turkey. Emin, for example, who is half Turkish Cypriot and grew up in Britain, would never have gained the prominence she currently has if she had pursued her career in Turkey, or indeed Northern Cyprus. Whatever you may think of unmade beds and sketches of anthropomorphic genitalia, they represent a kind of art more warmly received in Britain than in Turkey. Perhaps, with a growing number of brave young artists, this is set to change.
While criticising the herd-like mentality of the average Turkish classroom, it would be wrong not to mention the incredibly brave individuals who protested on university campuses against the suppression of freedom of thought, long before the Gezi protests swept the country. Turkey has the highest number of imprisoned journalists in the world, and it is notoriously dangerous to have any kind of link to anything in the manner of Kurdish rights or leftist-sympathising groups – the mildest of connections to either of these is construed as sinister ‘anti-Turkish activity’. While I taught at Boğaziçi, there were several protests on campus, but the most memorable was that stemming from the arrest of a female student who was discovered by police to have made a job application to a leftist thinktank. Her boyfriend organised a protest against her arrest, collecting signatures from his fellow students to petition for her release. As I arrived for work one Wednesday, banners demanding ‘Free Özge!’ were being strung up outside the undergraduate common room by her friends. On Friday, Özge’s boyfriend was arrested and this was duly protested against by the friends who remained, in a sad cycle of futility.
Students who dare to question state university fees are equally at risk; fees are low by British standards, but cause much controversy. In June 2012, two undergraduates, Berna Yılmaz and Ferhat Tüzer, were sentenced to eight and a half years each for unfurling a banner which read ‘We want free education and we will get it’ in front of a building in which Prime Minister Erdoğan was holding a meeting. Initially held for eighteen months in custody during the trial, the two were finally convicted of membership of a terrorist organisation. This organisation was not, to my knowledge, identified by the court, probably because there was no such membership. Yılmaz, a student of archaeology and Tüzer, an engineer, are in prison as I write. When they are released they will be in their early thirties, without the degrees they started ten years earlier.
In July 2013 Erdoğan announced that police would be replacing private security at state
universities. This came in response to the Gezi protests where, according to Erdoğan, young protesters were wandering around ‘with Molotov cocktails, machetes and whatnot’. The image of Boğaziçi University’s leafy campus dotted with armed police is a terrifying one and prompts the question: whom exactly will police be protecting, the students or the state?
Terrorist links and ‘insulting Turkishness’ have always been convenient excuses to lock up troublemaking students and intellectuals, and the desire to avoid these charges has greatly influenced the development of academia. Broadly speaking, leftist-leaning academics are vilified, while dons who write papers along acceptable nationalist lines are promoted – in the eighties, for example, professors were sacked because they refused to shave their bohemian (and therefore leftist) beards off. This is changing now as nationalism becomes less de rigeur under the current government. Schools, too, are getting less nationalistic, though not by European standards. Most Turkish schoolchildren still take a regular oath of national allegiance; they learn in great detail about the life and teachings of Atatürk and his face is on every wall. A primary-school teacher I spoke to told me that she gets her children to write letters to Atatürk thanking him for his life’s work, to personalise their Turkish history lessons. This teacher told me with pride that one child expressed her regret that Atatürk’s mother never lived to see his full achievements. Another letter contained a paragraph dedicated to the beauty of his blue eyes. This is more than a little strange for a European who comes from a country with no equivalent background of hero worship – when it comes to the Turks’ relationship with Atatürk I often feel like I am intruding on a private relationship that is, in fact, confusingly public. The Atatürk-centred education of Turks does not stop at school. In the first term of every university degree, no matter what it is, there is a mandatory course on the founding father of modern Turkey.
A strong nationalist and secular bent has characterised Turkish schools since the 1920s, but in the past few decades this has been quietly but insistently challenged from the sidelines by various religious organisations, some of them the Sunday-school equivalents of local mosques. The most influential and far-reaching of these religious organisations is the Gülen movement, which runs a thousand schools offering an unobtrusively religious education in Turkey and abroad, as well as many of the dershanes which supplement Turkish schools. The Gülen movement, known as Hizmet or ‘The Service’ to its followers, was set up by the Turkish Islamic cleric Fethullah Gülen in the 1970s and now runs schools in 140 countries, as well as several media companies including Zaman, a popular Turkish newspaper. Quite often its workings are not officially linked to Gülen, but his influence is unmistakable. There is something of the Freemasons about the movement, but it is much less fussy and exclusive – it casts the recruitment net far and wide. Gülenists refer to themselves as the cemaat (‘gathering of the faithful’), and there is a sense that once you’re in, you’re in a supportive environment for life. As cults go, it is definitely on the benign end of the spectrum, but lots of people feel uncomfortable about the extent of its influence and the simple fact that it is an Islamic organisation, moderate or otherwise. The cemaat mentality extends to business circles too, and is not specific to the Gülen movement, although Gülenists are notable businessmen. In many circles in Istanbul and cities in the middle of Anatolia, pious individuals gather to perform charitable works, and in the process, they build social networks which give their members an advantage in business. These are not intentionally exclusive communities, but in effect, a sole businessman can get nowhere until he has paid his respects to the leader of the local cemaat. If you are willing to do that, you have immediate contacts and channels open to you, because you are a trusted member of the community. If not, you might be rather stuck.
Fethullah Gülen himself is a rather mysterious figure, despite his faux-modest personal website. He is an ex-imam turned Islamic scholar who would use tears to great effect when addressing his Izmir-based congregation, generating the kind of emotional hero worship not common for Turkish imams. He is heavily influenced by the relatively mystical branch of Islam, Sufism, which encourages a personal relationship with God, and is revered by his millions of followers across the globe, who call him Hoca Efendi, ‘Master Teacher’. He reminds me slightly of Sai Baba, the controversial Indian mystic-guru who was adored by millions but became dogged by rumour towards the end of his life, leaving behind hundreds of ashrams, schools and a legacy of near-divine status in India and abroad, as well as a great many critics. Gülen is a decidedly more mainstream figurehead, promoting the kind of moderate and responsibly organised Islam which many see as preferable to the fanatic fringe groups springing up over the Middle East, and indeed the West.
Gülen is still too religious for many people’s tastes, including the previous Turkish government’s. In 1999 he fled to the US and in 2000 was tried in absentia for plotting to overthrow the government. As he left, he entrusted the schools he had started to his key followers, telling them to ‘be vigilant’. He used to be very friendly with the current AKP government, and was in fact acquitted of the state charges against him in 2008, a few years after the AKP came to power. However, Gülen is still in self-imposed exile in a gated compound in Pennsylvania and chooses to remain there, despite Erdoğan making a public call for his return in 2012. There is a very intriguing power balance between the two men.
Gülen’s souring relationship with the AKP belies his claims that religion has no place in politics. It is widely accepted that Gülenists hold many of the most influential positions in the judiciary and police forces in Turkey, and that Erdoğan used Gülen’s help to curb the power of the military in the first decade of AKP rule. Since then, the power vacuum left by the military has led to wrangling between Gülenists and the AKP. This is all conjecture among journalists and academics, because Gülen’s public announcements are about peace and harmony and there is little to go on beyond significant events like his rejection of Erdoğan’s appeal to return to Turkey, and unexpected shakings-up in governmental positions. It is difficult to get to the bottom of things, particularly when most Gülenists put complete trust in ‘The Service’ and refuse to countenance the idea of any untoward political goings-on.
Either way, schools are the real root of the Gülenist movement. The interesting thing is that most of them have no explicitly religious teaching, and schools in the US, Africa, Japan and elsewhere have a wide range of students of various ethnic and religious backgrounds. Having said that, there is a strong Islamic ethos nurtured by Gülen’s personal rhetoric, and the schools instil incredible loyalty in their students. Many of the Turkish students come from poor, religious backgrounds, and therefore feel they owe everything to the Gülenist school which made it possible for them to go on to university and have subsequent successful careers. Ex-Gülenist students typically give back a portion of their earnings to the movement, similar to the charitable donations (zekat) required by Islamic law. This payback scheme generates a cycle of loyalty and commitment, and this has led to accusations that the whole movement is a profit-seeking one: critics say that Gülenists poach clever children, train them up to get high-paying jobs and then plough the ‘gratitude money’ back into the organisation. Other people are convinced that Gülen is working with the CIA (how else would a religious scholar have access to billions of dollars?) and that the extensive network of Gülen loyalists working within the judiciary and police are in fact serving an American agenda of keeping Erdoğan’s power in check while promoting moderate rather than extreme Islam in Turkey, a key ally of America in the Middle East. Frustrated by never-ending conspiracy theories, I tried to find someone to talk to who actually had dealings with a Gülen organisation.
I interviewed a philosophy teacher at Fatih University in Istanbul, a very conservative university that has ties with Gülen but is not officially affiliated. He told me that the content of his course is entirely up to him, and his teaching of Descartes’s questioning of God i
s totally unmonitored by the university authorities, as is the course taught by a colleague on Sexual Deviancy. Other, more religious teachers teach their own way. Sometimes this is confusing for students, particularly when they are taught the same subject by two different professors. One student in a sociology class questioned a teacher who called himself a member of the cemaat, asking him about a definition he had given of ‘family’ which contradicted that given by an evidently secular teacher. ‘Ah,’ said the Gülenist. ‘That is a Western formulation. It is different from ours.’ There was no attempt made to dictate a ‘superior’ definition, but a subtle point was made. This subtlety seems to define the Gülenist modus operandi.
Undergraduates at Fatih University often come from Gülenist schools in Africa or the Balkans and are, according to the philosophy professor, very bright, fluent in English and much more analytically minded than the average Turkish student, because the Gülen method is not shackled by the nationalist bent of conventional Turkish education. Having said that, I am sure it places its own subtle parameters on its private curriculum; I have noticed, for example, that in the Gülenist newspaper Zaman, certain events like gay rights parades are never mentioned, and a couple of columnists have been dropped for veering from the editor’s line: nothing too overt, but enough to catch the eye.
Many people praise Gülenist institutions because they are actually very inclusive. They welcome female students both with headscarves and without, stressing the importance of study above the issue of religious practicalities. Institutions like Fatih University provide girls-only dormitories so that religious girls can come and study with the blessing of their families. There is nothing ostensibly wrong with the Gülenist movement, and a great deal of apparent benefit: a high standard of education is provided to children who might otherwise not get it, girls from religious backgrounds are encouraged to study and a tolerant, moderate form of Islam is promoted in a world where fanatical Islam is becoming more and more of a problem. These are all good things, but there is still something that makes me uneasy about a schooling system that has at its heart a highly opinionated figurehead with a mysterious involvement with politics. There is something about the movement that is shifty, particularly its method of attracting teenagers from non-religious backgrounds via a network of abiler and ablalar – ‘big brothers’ and ‘big sisters’ – young Gülenists typically in their early twenties who befriend the teenagers before introducing them to the movement. Perhaps it is all for the good, but it is underhand.