page_title: Religion in Turkey
section_title: Secularism
hierarchical_section_title: Religion in Turkey / Secularism
caption_attribution_description: English: Diyanet's Budget in 2013 - Source&#160;: TBMM, Turkish Parliament, 2013.
context_page_description: 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 and the remaining 0.2% are Christians or adherents of other officially recognised religions.
  Due to the nature of this method, the official number of Muslims include people with no religion; converted Christians/Jews; 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.
  Turkey is officially a secular country with no official religion since the constitutional amendment in 1928 and later strengthened by Atatürk's Reforms and the appliance of laicism by the country's founder and first president Mustafa Kemal Atatürk on 5 February 1937.
context_section_description: Turkey has a secular constitution, with no official state religion. Over the course of the 20th century, it developed a strong tradition of secularism similar to the French model of laïcité, with the main distinction being that the Turkish state "openly and publicly controls Islam through its State Directorate of Religious Affairs". The constitution recognizes the freedom of religion for individuals, whereas the religious communities are placed under the protection and jurisdiction of the state and cannot become involved in the political process (e.g. by forming a religious party) or establish faith-based schools. No political party can claim that it represents a form of religious belief; nevertheless, religious sensibilities are generally represented through conservative parties. For decades, the wearing of religious headcover and similar theopolitical symbolic garments was prohibited in universities and other public contexts such as military or police service. As a specific incarnation of an otherwise abstract principle, it accrued symbolic importance among both proponents and opponents of secularism and became the subject of various legal challenges before being dismantled in a series of legislative acts from 2010 to 2017.
  Separation between mosque and state was established in Turkey soon after its founding in 1923, with an amendment to the Turkish constitution that mandated that Turkey had no official state religion and that the government and the state were to be free of religious influence. The modernizing reforms undertaken by President Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in the 1920s and 1930s further established secularism in Turkey.
  Despite its official secularism, the Turkish government includes the state agency of the Presidency of Religious Affairs (Turkish: Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı), whose purpose is stated by law "to execute the works concerning the beliefs, worship, and ethics of Islam, enlighten the public about their religion, and administer the sacred worshiping places". The institution, commonly known simply as Diyanet, operates 77,500 mosques, builds new ones, pays the salaries of imams, and approves all sermons given in mosques in Turkey. The Presidency of Religious Affairs finances only Sunni Muslim worship in Turkey. For example, Alevi, Câferî (mostly Azeris), and Bektashi Muslims (mostly Turkmen) participate in the financing of the mosques and the salaries of Sunni imams by paying taxes to the state, while their places of worship, which are not officially recognized, do not receive any state funding. The Presidency of Religious Affairs' budget rose from US$0.9 billion for the year 2006 to $2.5 billion in 2012.
  Beginning in the 1980s, the role of religion in the state has been a divisive issue, as influential religious factions challenged the complete secularization called for by Kemalism and the observance of Islamic practices experienced a substantial revival. In the early 2000s (decade), Islamic groups challenged the concept of a secular state with increasing vigor after Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP) came into power in 2002.
  Turkey, through the Treaty of Lausanne (1923), recognizes the civil, political, and cultural rights of non-Muslim minorities. In practice, Turkey only recognizes Greek, Armenian, and Jewish religious minorities. Alevi, Bektashi, and Câferî Muslims among other Muslim sects, as well as Latin Catholics and Protestants, are not recognized officially. In 2013, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Turkey had discriminated against the religious freedom of Alevis.
  With more than 100,000 employees, the Presidency of Religious Affairs has been described as state within the state. Its budget is compared with the budgets of other state departments as such:
caption: Diyanet's Budget in 2013 - Source : TBMM, Turkish Parliament, 2013.[55]
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