Pro-Kurdish lawmaker slams Turkey for excluding Kurdish in Friday sermon transcripts

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - A pro-Kurdish member of the Turkish parliament on Monday slammed the country’s directorate of religious affairs for excluding Kurdish from the list of languages the Friday prayer sermons’ transcripts are published in, on the government’s digital gateway.

Turkey’s directorate of religious affairs on Friday started publishing transcripts of Friday and Eid prayer sermons on the country’s digital e-government gateway, (e-devlet in Turkish) in eight languages including English, Spanish, Russian, and French, but not Kurdish, which is the mother tongue of millions in the country.

Friday prayer sermons in Turkey are written and distributed to clerics by the country’s directorate of religious affairs, in order to ensure a single unified sermon is read to citizens across the country.

Omer Faruk Gergerlioglu, MP of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party (DEM Party) told Rudaw English on Monday that excluding the use of Kurdish is the continuation of the directorate of religious affairs’ years-long tendency to turn a blind eye on the existence of the Kurdish language.

“This is an indication of the government and ruling parties' long-standing practice of turning a blind eye, not wanting to see, or more precisely, not wanting to acknowledge Kurdish, or rather, attempting to bury Kurdish, or more precisely, desiring assimilation,” said Gergerlioglu.

The DEM Party MP pointed out that Turkish clerics do not read the sermons in Arabic, but in Turkish, in order for followers to understand, but reading sermons in Turkish to millions of Kurds who cannot speak the language will lead to a “false understanding of their religion”. 

“Without Kurdish, people will not understand their religion. Or when it is explained in Turkish, they will learn the religion incompletely and misunderstand it,” he said.

“However you look at it, this is a very racist, discriminatory, exclusionary approach,” he added.

The exclusion of Kurdish from the list of languages the sermons are published in online has drawn the ire of political parties and figures across Turkey. DEM Party released a statement on Saturday accusing the directorate of religious affairs of “denying the verses of God” and “hypocrisy”, especially in light of the fact that the Friday prayer sermon delivered across Turkey on December 1 was opened with a Quranic verse highlighting the diversity among human beings, and their equality in the eyes of God.

“The racist attitude implemented by the religious affairs directorate yesterday ignores this verse itself. This racist attitude that the Kurds are exposed to in their homeland primarily denies and rejects the principle that ‘the ummah [muslim nation] is brother and equal,’” read the DEM Party statement, adding that the directorate had previously published Kurdish translations of the Quran during the election campaigns, which it labeled as “hypocrisy”.

Ahmet Davutoglu, the leader of the opposition’s Future Party  also slammed the decision in a speech delivered at the party’s congress in Istanbul on Saturday.

“This country cannot have an understanding of religion that fears  the use of its citizens’ native language,” Davutoglu said.

Gergerlioglu said that his party MPs will bring the issue to the Turkish parliament, stressing that they have previously confronted the representatives of the directorate of religious affairs in parliament about the matter.

“We told them to not sell the words of God at a cheap price. They got really mad at that. But they are selling the words of God only for the sake of the ruling parties,” he said.

The Kurdish language cannot be used in public settings in Turkey. The government provides some services in Arabic for Syrian refugees but millions of Kurds are prohibited from speaking in their mother tongue in public places. 

Last year, Turkish authorities put an information board at the entrance of the Great Mosque of Diyarbakir in English, Turkish, Russian, and Arabic. The absence of Kurdish angered Kurds.

Turkey’s current constitution, ratified after the 1980 military coup, stipulates that the country’s only official language is Turkish. While it does not entirely prohibit the use of Kurdish, but successive Turkish governments have cracked down on its use.

When President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in 2002, it toyed with increasing Kurdish cultural and linguistic freedoms ruled out by previous cabinets. However, 21 years later, the use of Kurdish in official settings remains a taboo.