Dilemmas of Religious Education, Freedom of Religion and Education in Cyprus

Dilek Latif

doi:10.3390/rel13020096

Abstract

The boundaries between secularism, democracy, pluralism, and religious diversity cannot easily be demarcated. Bringing democratic and secular values together with religious pluralism, accommodating different religious communities, and acknowledging individual rights is a great challenge for many societies. In parallel, religious education (RE) in state schools has been a controversial and unresolved issue. On both sides of Cyprus, RE is organized in a mono-confessional way: while the Christian Orthodox content of RE is linked with Greek national identity in the Greek Cypriot South, Sunni Islamic RE is linked with the Turkish national identity in the Turkish Cypriot North. On both sides of the island, the compulsory and mono-confessional characters of RE, as well as the national curricula and textbooks that are used, are a source of conflict. Within this context, this article explores the way RE (Orthodox Christian, Sunni Islamic) is organized in Cyprus and to what extent this may lead to an infringement of the freedom of religion and freedom of education.

Highlights

Many democratic and liberal societies that have adopted secularism restricted the role of religion in the public sphere
This article implies that only the state provides religious education, and there can be no after school or extracurricular religious instruction such as Qur’an courses (Hendrich 2015; Latif 2014)
This article examines how religious education is organized in Cypriot state schools, and to what extent this may lead to an infringement of the freedom of religion and freedom of education

Summary

Introduction

Many democratic and liberal societies that have adopted secularism restricted the role of religion in the public sphere. This article implies that only the state provides religious education, and there can be no after school or extracurricular religious instruction such as Qur’an courses (Hendrich 2015; Latif 2014) On both sides of Cyprus, ‘religious education’ is organized in a mono-confessional way, with Orthodox Christian religious education in the South and Sunni Islam religious education in the North. The place and content of RE in state schools is a source of conflict both in the Turkish Cypriot North and the Greek Cypriot South (Zembylas and Loukaidis 2018; Latif 2019) Against this background, this article examines how religious education is organized in Cypriot state schools, and to what extent this may lead to an infringement of the freedom of religion and freedom of education. The main objectives of this study are threefold: (1) to provide a detailed description of the nature and purpose of religious education in public schools, (2) to demonstrate how obligatory and mono-confessional religious education violates religious freedom in education (Russo 2015), and (3) to reflect on policy discourses on the subject of religious education

Education System in Cyprus

RE in Greek Cypriot Schools

RE in Turkish Cypriot Schools

Entanglements of Freedom of Religion and Education

Conclusions