In Turkey

Turkey

Turkey , known officially as the Republic of Turkey , is a Eurasian country located in Western Asia and in East Thrace in Southeastern Europe...

, an Imam Hatip school ' onMouseout='HidePop("55380")' href="/topics/Arabic_language">Arabic

Arabic language

Arabic is a name applied to the descendants of the Classical Arabic language of the 6th century AD, used most prominently in the Quran, the Islamic Holy Book...

 'khatib', meaning the one who delivers the "khutba" (Friday sermon)) is a secondary education

Secondary education

Secondary education is the stage of education following primary education. Secondary education includes the final stage of compulsory education and in many countries it is entirely compulsory. The next stage of education is usually college or university...

 institution. As the name suggests, they were originally founded in lieu of a vocational school

Vocational school

A vocational school , providing vocational education, is a school in which students are taught the skills needed to perform a particular job...

 to train government employed imam

Imam

An imam is an Islamic leadership position, often the worship leader of a mosque and the Muslim community. Similar to spiritual leaders, the imam is the one who leads Islamic worship services. More often, the community turns to the mosque imam if they have a religious question...

s; after madrasas in Turkey were abolished by the Unification of Education Act as a part of Atatürk's reforms

Atatürk's Reforms

Atatürk's Reforms were a series of political, legal, cultural, social and economic reforms that were designed to modernize the new Republic of Turkey into a democratic and secular nation-state...

.

However unlike other vocational schools their curricula contained just as much arts and science classes as normal high schools. They were single-sex schools until this was made illegal in the late 1990s. In time they had grown popular among the conservative families who wanted their children to be educated alongside children of other families with a religious inclination. Current prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan

Recep Tayyip Erdogan

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been Prime Minister of Turkey since 2003 and is chairman of the ruling Justice and Development Party , which holds a majority of the seats in the Grand National Assembly of Turkey. Erdoğan served as Mayor of Istanbul from 1994 to 1998. He graduated in 1981 from Marmara...

 graduated from one of these schools.

Originally alumni were able to go on to study in any faculty of Turkish universities, but in 1999 the rules were changed to restrict Imam Hatip graduates to faculties of Divinity alone. This caused a steep decline in their popularity.

Notable alumni

• Ahmet Hakan Coşkun
  Ahmet Hakan Coskun
  Ahmet Hakan Coşkun is a columnist for the Turkish daily, Hürriyet. Before that, he was a news anchor for Kanal 7. He is one of the most popular Turkish celebrities on the social networking site, Twitter with approximately 175,613 followers. He tweets 20-30 times per minutes. This is also a record...
  
   - Journalist
• Recep Tayyip Erdoğan
  Recep Tayyip Erdogan
  Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been Prime Minister of Turkey since 2003 and is chairman of the ruling Justice and Development Party , which holds a majority of the seats in the Grand National Assembly of Turkey. Erdoğan served as Mayor of Istanbul from 1994 to 1998. He graduated in 1981 from Marmara...
  
   - Prime Minister of Turkey, Leader of AKP, Former Mayor of İstanbul
• Cemal Çavdarlı
  Cemal Çavdarlı
  Cemal Çavdarlı, born in Emirdağ on 15 March 1966, is a binational Turkish-Belgian politician, formerly active in the Socialist Party – Differently , since May 2010 in the Lijst Dedecker , a conservative liberal party and since April 2011 in the Islamic conservative Justice and Development Party ...
  
   - Former (2003-2007) Belgian MP

External links

• Imam Hatip Schools Alumni Association
• İmam Hatip Okulları Genelgesi, Hürriyet
  Hürriyet
  -External links:* * ** * *...
  
  (30 September 2003)