Islam in Türkiye

A Turkish Minaret (مئذنة)
on the streets of Side
By M. C. Dutt

Islam in Türkiye |
Friday – August 6, 2026

Is Islam on the decline in Türkiye (frm. Turkey)? Are the Madrasa (مدرسة) being suppressed by the state? First of all, we must consider the modern Turkish language and compare it with the old Ottoman Turkish language, read "Kemalism", for it is the case that Kemalism lead by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk advocated the complete overhaul and Europeanization of the Ottoman Turkish (Ottoman-Turkish) language: where in the past Arabic had filled the gaps of meaning and provided form to the Turkish language, today the Latin alphabet in true European fashion has replaced Arabic, for better and for worse. Of course, most young people here in Türkiye still appear to prefer to refer to the country in English as Turkey, in my experience—even though one could argue that President Erdoğan has designated the name Türkiye in honour of Atatürk, an honour that I am not so sure he would appreciate—and I suppose that young people tend to be more found of liberal idealism even in the Near East, with some great and fundamental exceptions of course, read "My Views on Fundamentalism". But again, the fact that Turkish has become europeanized is a point that may not be overlooked if one attempts to actually understand Islam here in Türkiye, and of course as the language goes so does meaning tend to go, and it would be fear to assume, mostly from conjecture, that indeed Türkiye of today, 2026 a.d., is a far more liberal place that the old Ottoman Empire, and for the most part that assumption would not be wrong, but it would be somewhat misguided, for all sorts of deviatations did still occur in the Ottoman Empire, deviations that indeed would lead to the final collapse of that once great empire, and like all other empires that came before it, once the collapse happened, it all seemed inevitable, for the modern age had come upon Türkiye, or what would become Tütkiye, and the Turkish people; in a cosmic sense, it seems to me that the turks really had no other choice but to embrace modernity, read "Modern Civilization".

    It is a kind of inevitability for sure and this is the whole point of "The End of History", and it would be foolish to assume that anyone could escape this fate, which again brings me back the the interesting circumstance of the Turkish language: some scholars (linguists) would of course claim that the latin Alphabet has brought a greater linguistic fidelity to the Turkish language, because Republican Turkish is better able to capture each "quirk" of the Turkish language better*, something that the old adage of relying on the Arabic script struggled to do, and while this may be true, we must also consider what the Turkish language has lost as a result of this severing the ties with the Arabic language. See, without Arabic, the Turkish language is also much further away from Islam and the East, which has served to create a certain tension between the Turks and their history, a kind of failure to pick up information where it must be embraced; for you see, languages are far more than a mere tool for communication, or rather communication goes far beyond the purview of merely establishing "contact": language tells a story of its own, and without the depth of Ottoman Turkish, there is now, at least this appears to be the case, a great deal of sorrow and confusion around the true history of the Ottoman Empire as not only one of Moslem concurers, but one bearing the gifts of civilization to many people beyond Asia minor and the gates of Constantinople, even though the Ottomans certainly failed to put down some tribes, particularly on the Arabian peninsula, read "Notes on Reading". Of course, this Ottoman Civilization peaked somewhere in the late 15th century, followed by many centuries of decline and eventual collapse; just like China, the infiltration and pressure of the Western powers became too much to bear.

    So, was it reasonable to discard the Arabic script and Ottoman Turkish in favour of Western conceptions of language? Yes, to the extent that we only concern ourselves with the technical and mechanistic application of the language, if we only care for the fact that children may have an easier time adopting the newly packaged language, read "Mechanical Procedures", but the answer is hard no if we consider the need to preserve true knowledge, and this lack of being able to carry knowledge was something that certain European monks noted a long time ago about the latin script. Of course, the problem here is that most moderns do not consider true knowledge, and because of this they do not know of the value in the old language, in this case Ottoman Turkish. Now, I should also add that the same moderns would not even understand what carrying knowledge means without immediately attempting to superimpose their mechanical view of things on language, read "Qualification", or else they might also confuse the purpose of language as the carrier of meaning with their mission to gather in some kind of "swaggy" and "sweet" harambe in order to overturn the established order, in true Bolshevik style, as if this is the whole purpose of meaning, read as well "Sorcery & Mysticism". Now, this all ties into the fact that yes, for the most part there is and there has been a sustained drift away from Islam and the East here in Türkiye, and this is partly due to pressure from the state but also because of pressures from the culture, particularly Americanism. In many ways it would be true to say that you are more likely to run into Moslems observing the Sharia (شَرِيعَة) in parts of Europe, read "The Problem of Immigration", than you would here in Türkiye, at least in many parts of Türkiye, and this can be seen in how very few women wear the Hijab (حجاب). Women and young people, of course, seem more likely these days to want to abandon tradition, because they think that they will be liberated from their place in the world, from their obligations and in the end from themselves. This delustion may only end in complete intrapersonal disintegration, read "What is Mental Illness?" and "Transhumanism". And indeed, none of this is less true for Türkiye.

Reginald Drax (AKA, M. C. Dutt) – August 7, 2026.

Footnote(s)

* I have decided on my own to divide the Turkish language into two categories, the first one of them already a recognized label: namely, Ottoman Turkish (pre-Republican Turkish), and Republican Turkish (post-Ottoman Turkish. You may or may not find any use in this particular device.