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Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to analyse the recent and noted effort to empower the religious framework in Turkish Cypriot education. The main argument of this paper concerns the question of whether this effort must be analysed as a new effort of 'Turkifying' the Turkish Cypriot community and not 'Islamifying' it. The term 'new' applies since the first procedure to 'Turkify' the community, according to the connotation of the term Turk that equates it to nation, is considered to have occurred in the late nineteenth century. Over a century later, the term Turk seems to also include the religious element, as opposed to the corresponding term after the creation of the modern Turkish nation. This change and the transition from the secular Turk to the Muslim Turk, a change that comes about in Turkey after the dominance of AKP, tries to penetrate the Turkish Cypriot community, turning the Turkish Cypriot into a Muslim Turk of Cyprus. However, what one should examine carefully are the peculiarities of the Turkish Cypriot community, especially in relation to religion, and, therefore, the difficulty to identify the average Turkish Cypriot with the term Muslim Turk of Cyprus.
Keywords: Turkish Cypriots, education system, religion and education, identity
The complexity of Cyprus' history, both before and after its independence, has been and still is the main difficulty in an effort to interpret the developments on a historical and political level. To add to this complexity, it appears that the educational system on the island, and the ideology or ideologies that influence it at times, is an even more complicated matter. Evidence of this complexity is the fact that in 1960, with the independence of Cyprus, a state was created that had no notion of a national educational system but was well acquainted with a communal system of education.1 A state was constructed which did not have a Ministry of Education and a unified educational system, but rather two separate systems under the supervision of the Community Assemblies, the Greek Communal Chamber and the Turkish Communal Chamber. In compliance with article 87 of the Constitution, each Community Assembly was responsible for all educational matters of the community.* 2 Therefore, in this framework, two different worlds were developed on the island...