ORHAN KEMAL CENGİZ: I became a father late in life. I am 47 years old. My older son Cem is two years old and my younger son Can is just 40-something days old.

When I went to the census office to get their identity cards, the officer asked me which religion my sons belonged to. I told him to leave that part empty. When I was doing this, I had a few thoughts in my mind. To be honest, I am not a religious person; I do not define myself as Muslim, even though I was born into a family which had a Muslim background. Even if I had defined myself in a specific way, I would have preferred to leave this religion part on their identity cards blank because I believe it is their choice to define themselves under any religious or nonreligious title.

However, there was another reason urging me to give importance to the “emptiness” of this religious section on my sons’ identity cards: I hoped to save them from mandatory religious lessons when they enroll in school. I thought if it is not written in their identity cards that they are Muslim or that their religion is Islam, then no one can force them to attend religious lessons. I was wrong, however.

We have a very complicated story about mandatory religious lessons. Religious lessons became mandatory in Turkey after the Sept. 12, 1980 military coup. However, even in the ‘80s the exemption procedure was much easier than today. I, for example, was easily exempted from religious lessons in those years when I went to high school. My family just delivered a petition and no one asked why or on what grounds we wanted to get that exemption.

In today’s Turkey, after the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) came to power it became more and more difficult to be exempted from mandatory religious lessons. For example, Alevi students cannot get exemptions because the AK Party regards Alevis as Muslims and does not recognize their different sect. Because of this, Turkey has been condemned by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) two times — in 2007 and 2014 — in two different cases brought by Alevi citizens of Turkey challenging mandatory religious lessons. The ECtHR concluded that these are not neutral lessons but are tools of indoctrination about Sunni Islam. After the last condemnation of the ECtHR, both President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu showed their unwillingness to remove these lessons from the curriculum or even to turn them into optional lessons.

From the Hurriyet daily’s news I have learnt that the Ministry of Education has just sent a circular to all schools across the country to give more instructions about who should be subjected to the mandatory lessons. In the circular the ministry said that those on whose identity cards the religion section is empty should be registered in religious lessons. The circular further said that everyone except Jews and Christians should be registered in these lessons.

I made an inquiry and learnt that if you declare that your child is Jewish or Christian you are required to get a document from the church, synagogue or other official religious institution. Well, against this fascistic understanding of education, which sees itself as even above parental rights and preferences, I will have to seek documents from a church or a synagogue when I get to register my sons in school.

My sons will be “Christian” or “Jewish” at least on paper to escape from the propaganda machine of the state.
I hope I will get help from my non-Muslim friends to overcome one of the oppressive barriers in Turkey.