Religion in Turkey

Religion in Turkey (2016)

Islam is the largest religion in Turkey according to the state, with 99.8% of the population being automatically registered by the state as Muslim, for anyone whose parents are not of any other officially recognised religion. Due to the nature of this method, the official number of Muslims include people with no religion; converted Christians/Judaists; people who are of a different religion than Islam, Christianity or Judaism; and anyone who is of a different religion than their parents, but has not applied for a change of their individual records. The state currently does not allow the individual records to be changed to anything other than Islam, Christianity or Judaism, and the latter two are only accepted with a document of recognition released by an officially recognised church or synagogue. According to the latest sources by Ipsos, in 2016 Islam was the major religion in Turkey comprising only 82% of the total population, followed by the unaffiliated people who comprised 10% of the population, and Christianity with 5%.

Recent independent polls show lower percentages, with 9.4% to 13% being not religious at all. The same studies show that roughly 90% of irreligious people are younger than the age of 35.

Most Muslims in Turkey are Sunnis forming about 65%, and Shia denominations form about 4% of the Muslim population. Among Shia Muslim presence in Turkey there is a small but considerable minority of Muslims with Ismaili heritage and affiliation.Christians (Oriental Orthodoxy, Greek Orthodox and Armenian Apostolic) and Jews (Sephardi), who comprise the non-Muslim religious population, make up 4% of the total.

Turkey is officially a secular country with no official religion since the constitutional amendment in 1924 and later strengthened by Atatürk's Reforms and the appliance of laïcité by the country's founder and first president Mustafa Kemal Atatürk at the end of 1937. However, currently all public schools from elementary to high school hold mandatory religion classes which mostly focus on the Sunni sect of Islam. In these classes, children are required to learn prayers and other religious practices which belong specifically to Sunnism. Thus, although Turkey is officially a secular state, the teaching of religious practices in public grade schools has been controversial. Its application to join the European Union divided existing members, some of which questioned whether a Muslim country could fit in. Turkish politicians have accused the country's EU opponents of favouring a "Christian club".

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Wikipedia