In Turkey, demography is a brake on Islamisation

Source:the Economist Date:02Jul2019

The Economist article verifes numerous research on declicing  religiousity in Turkey. It also explains why AKP’s share of the youth vote may have dropped to as low as 20%.   Efforts to Islamize an urban society are creating unintended consequenes, creating a middle class bound by economic interests, rather than  divided by Moslem vs Secularism.

According to a study by KONDA, a local polling company, between 2008 and 2018 the share of Turks who define themselves as religious dipped from 55% to 51%. The number of women who wear the Islamic headscarf barely budged, from 52% a decade ago to 53%, and the share of those who fast regularly decreased from 77% to 65%. Meanwhile, the number of atheists has risen from 1% to 3%.

In spite of the money the government has poured into imam hatip schools, which combine a standard education with hours of study of Islam, supply continues to outstrip demand. At the high-school level, imam hatips filled only 52% of available places last year, compared with 95% for regular schools. Such schools are also much less successful than others. Imam hatip students are at least twice as unlikely to enrol in a university as students at regular or private schools.