DAR AL ISLAM - TURKEY: ISLAM IS NOT TAKING ROOT IN TURKEY, ISLAM IS ONLY GETTING NEW RE-GROWTH IN TURKEY BECAUSE THERE IS NO ONE PRUNING IT BACK

Islam taking root in Turkey's bureaucracy
By Sabrina Tavernise

DENIZLI, Turkey: The little red prayer book was handed out in a public primary school here in western Turkey earlier this month. It was small enough to fit in a pocket, but it carried a big message: Pray in the Muslim way. Get others to pray, too.

"The message was clear to me," said a retired civil servant, whose 13-year-old son, a student at the Yesilkoy Ibrahim Cengiz school, received the book. "This is not something that should be distributed in schools."

This leafy, liberal city would seem like one of the least likely places to allow Islam to permeate public life. But for some residents, the book is part of a subtle shift toward increasingly public religiosity that has gone hand-in-hand with the ascent of the party of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The phenomenon is complex: The party has not ordered changes, but sets examples through a growing network of observant teachers and public servants who have been hired since it came to power in 2002.

The shift goes to the heart of the question that has gripped this country for the past two months: As the party settles more deeply into the bureaucracy, will it bring Islam with it? Or will it keep its roots in the past, and leave the public sphere as nonreligious as before?

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