Diyanet continues anti-secularism fight under new management

The head of Turkey's top official religious body, the Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet), has recently been changed by the government, but it seems that the change has not had any effect on the institution's anti-secularism stance.

"We should work more than ever to convey the eternal call of Allah and his prophet… to the humanity which struggles desperately in the claws of secularism and deny all values," Ali Erbaş, who replaced Mehmet Görmez as the head of the Diyanet, said in his first message as the country's top imam.

"[Diyanet] will continue to secure the religious safety of all citizens by keeping common sense alive against all belief, thought and brain occupiers," Erbaş also said, outlining the targets of his term. We have all the reasons to believe that "all citizens" here refers only to the Sunnis in the country.

Erbaş's words were not much different than his predecessor's, who suggested on Dec. 14, 2015 that the suffering we see today is the result of an evil created by so-called revolutionaries in France in 1789.

"Humanity way set on a different quest with the French Revolution. It envisaged building a more secular world separate from religion. But secularism sent the world into total war by exceeding the amount of violence that stemmed from religions," said Görmez, who headed the institution from November 2010 to until recently, when he lost support of the ruling party circles reportedly for "weakness in the fight against Gülenists."

Diyanet is a constitutional institution, whose head is a public employee. The budget of the institution is given by the state, from taxes collected from each and every citizen in the country.

The last time I checked, the article in the Turkish constitution...