Between Turk and Muslim: children and the Qur’an courses after the 1928 Alphabet Law

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis paper examines how the religious education of Turkish children in the “old letters” became an area of everyday contestation between the state and families and communities in the late 1920s and 1930s. Since children were seen as the nation’s future, state authorities were adamant about teaching the new generation the new alphabet and were equally interested in preventing them from learning the old alphabet. While schools began using the new Turkish alphabet in the 1928–1929 academic year, the informal neighbourhood Qur’an courses held in mosques and private homes became a fiercely contested site between a state determined to socialise children into secular nationhood (partly) by preventing them from learning the Arabic letters, and families and imams who were committed to giving children religious education (necessitating the study of the Arabic alphabet so the Qur’an could be read in its original Arabic). Combining primary sources from previously untapped Ministry of the Interior documents concerning the monitoring in Anatolian towns of these informal courses with insights from the subaltern school on everyday forms of resistance, this article sheds light on a dimension of the 1928 alphabet reform that ties together questions of alphabet change, national and religious identities, education, and childhood.