Shaped by the pantheistic ideology of the founders, Türkiye has used its national education curriculum as an instrument of social engineering

Abstract

Despite centuries of conservative ideology inspired by Islam, the rapid economic development and consecutive millitary victories of the West had caused within the ranks of the Ottoman elite an inferiority complex generating a wave of admiration resulting in the emulation of European values. Emerging with reinforced positivist doctrines after being deeply influenced by the French revolution, this admiration turned into an irreligious political ideology creating a decentralizing effect on the ruling sultanate of the Ottoman state. After the Republic was founded in 1923, the Kemalist state ideology was imposed onto Turkish society in the form of an aggregation of materialism, social Darwinism, positivism, secularism, and Turkish nationalism. To socially engineer a modern, secular, temporal and materially prosperous nation, this ideology would in most ways carry manifestations of the very character and lifestyles of the Republic’s founders. To maintain this ideology, assertive secularism was adopted as a security measure to prevent both the re-emergence of Islamic conservatism and any other nationalist or political ideology. While the visual aspects of Islamic society were transformed into a uniform Western society through mandatory reforms, the intellectual shift from East to West was realised by means of social engineering and religious inculturation through the education curriculum. This article will portray how the founders’ belligerent belief towards Eastern-Islamic tradition motivated them towards a new Western looking secular order and how these ideas have been imposed through school textbooks.