twentieth-century history. After nationalizing and secularizing all education
from 1924 onwards, the founder of the modern Republic of Turkey, Atatürk,
secularized and expanded higher education. Without entering into the details
of the subsequent history, in the 1990s changes in attitude towards religion
in general and Islam in particular brought about a rapid growth in new
departments or faculties of theology (ilahiyat fakültesi). Today, there are at
least twenty-three. The faculty of divinity at Istanbul University was founded
in 1996, although its history goes back to 1870—or allegedly even to the
conquest of Constantinople by Mehmet the Conqueror in 1453. Its English
homepage presents its aims while revealing the context within which these aims
have been carved in the late twentieth century:The aim of the Faculty of Divinity is to get students to understand
Islam better and to be able to make comparisons between it and other
religions. The main principle of the Faculty is to train individuals who are
tolerant, respectful of humans, and devoted to universal values and the
principles and reforms of Atatürk. Nevertheless, we also aim to train our
students to think on the Coran, to unify Islam with science, and to present
Islamic culture to them in its purified form, devoid of superstitions.Dokuz Eylül University in Izmir was founded in 1982 as a consortium of
several older institutions. Like the faculty at Istanbul, its faculty of theology
offers fundamental Islamic sciences (temel islam belimleri), philosophical and
religious sciences (felsefe ve din bilimleri), and the history and arts of Islam
(islam tarihi ve sanatları). (Istanbul also offers world religious cultures [dünya
dinleri kültürü].) The department of philosophy and religious sciences at Dokuz
Eylül has distinct programs in the philosophy, sociology, psychology, and
history of religion, as well as in religious education, the philosophy of Islam,
logic, and the history of philosophy. The first six programs fall within the
academic study of religions. A very similar configuration of programs also exists
at the University of Harran, founded in 1987, which started its own faculty
of theology in 1992 at the same time as that of Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart
University. Ankara University combines what is available at Istanbul University
with the same six programs as the universities at Izmir, Harran, and Çanakkale.
The composition of the faculty at these universities is telling. Of the twenty-
eight members of the faculty of theology with doctorates at Harran, only five
are trained outside of Turkey (La Sorbonne, France; St Andrews, Scotland;
University of Texas, USA; and two at Manchester University, England). The
composition of the faculty thus points to a near self-sufficiency in the
production of doctorates in the modern academic study of religions in Turkey.
This relatively new development coincides with the rapid growth in the number
of universities, which is itself a response to an ever-increasing demand due to
an earlier demographic explosion that has now come of university age.96
PATRICE BRODEUR