Turkish Youth and the Future

[Null/Void]

People have been predicting conservative/religious victories due to birth rates in various places for ages. In Turkey, despite a generation of controlling the organs of state and institutions and favourable birth rates, the AKP has lost the youth.

The Turkish religious plant the seeds, the secular reap the harvest.

-https://www.unz.com/comments/all/?commenterfilter=Hyperborean

In the survey released on Monday, the Konda polling company compared the opinions of Turkish citizens between the ages of 15 to 29 from 2008 to data taken last year [article is from 2019]. Over 1,700 people were interviewed.

According to the survey, the number of Turkish youth who consider themselves to be religious has dropped from by 7 percent to 15 percent overall. Young people who describe themselves as “modern” also increased to 43 percent from 34 percent in 2008.

Volkan Ertit, a scholar at Aksaray University who researches secularization in Turkey, told Middle East Eye that the survey only confirms other recent academic work that have shown similar trends, including studies on the increase in sex before marriage.

“In all honesty, this is not about Erdogan,” said Ertit. “If you had Turkish opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu or late Islamic-oriented leader Necmettin Erbakan as the president, the results would have been the same.

“You cannot control the trajectory of society. You get secularization if you have these three components: urbanisation, capitalism and science. We have them.”

The poll found significant shifts in how young people practice their religion with the number of those who fast dropping 16 percent to 58 percent total. There was also a three percent fall among those who pray daily to 24 percent.

Ertit said it’s now clear that opening Imam-Hatip schools has not helped the government deliver the pious generation Erdogan spoke about.

“Different studies show students at those schools increasingly having the same lifestyle [as] non-religious school students. It changes everything if you have smartphones, and the internet. Talk to a Imam-Hatip student. They would tell you that they have flirting in their school,” he said.

Erdogan last year was taped as he reprimanded then-minister of education, Ismet Yilmaz, about a survey conducted by the ministry’s local branch in the city of Konya, which showed that many Imam-Hatip students believed in God but had a disdain for established religion.

“It can’t be!” Erdogan told the minister in comments captured by an open mic.

The poll also indicates that young people are becoming more tolerant. The respondents who say they can have a son-in-law or daughter-in-law with different religious beliefs increased by 17 percent to 64 percent. Interviewees who said they would be okay if their children had different sexual orientations than them rose 9 percent to 21 percent.
Even the once reliable conservative ethnic Turkish hinterland is also quickly converging with the birth rates of the more liberal and secular areas.





Of course Turkey is only one country, but as a large country and a relatively successful country by regional standards (at least until Erdogan’s recent mismanagement) without being dependent on finite oil demand, it is a useful barometre. If it can happen to Turkey, what prevents other countries from following the same route?

In this light might not your triumphalism appear as hubris?

 

[Null/Void]

@Kaptaan @Nein @T-123456 @Nilgiri

 

[rainmaker]

Its a natural process for people to get less religious with increasing levels of education and income. However, it is a stretch to think that citizens of any country will give up its religious identity. Such a thing has never happened anywhere in the world to the best of my knowledge, no matter how secular the population has become.

 

[Nilgiri]

Of course Turkey is only one country, but as a large country and a relatively successful country by regional standards (at least until Erdogan’s recent mismanagement) without being dependent on finite oil demand, it is a useful barometre. If it can happen to Turkey, what prevents other countries from following the same route?

Rule of law and sound meritocracy toward developing intellectualism + industrialisation (or whatever the productive activity of the era is).

These create breakout points in an economy and society and what works and what doesnt work is better understood.

Without concentration of this, the energy of development is dissipated (whatever intent there may be among whomever) and nothing really changes in say a lifetime or even two.

So the lack of these prevent other countries from naturally gaining solid development basis...and the country becomes mostly driftwood riding the larger currents of the world and never realising enough potential.

There thus needs to be enough concentration of enough enlightened people in enough institutions and levers of power (with enough enlightened ideas) and they need to stay the course (i.e interest of long term) rather than fight each other too much in power wars...or be beset by unhealthy stasis of paranoia from other power centres outside.

Generally the crucial time is some major revolution or struggle that set lot of the intial conditions, memories, identity consolidation and narrative promotion within the society etc.