Throughout most of March, President Erdogan continued to misinform the Turkish public as to the severity, and likely duration, of the disease. When he assured the nation that the spread of the virus would end in two to three weeks, he was overlooking the conclusions of his own medical experts that, far from ending, the virus would spread ever more rapidly. Some infectious disease specialists have claimed that up to 60% of the Turkish population would become infected unless drastic measures – including the quarantining of whole cities – were taken. So far, Erdogan has not done so, though he has cancelled all international travel and, inside Turkey, banned travel among 30 major cities, including the three largest, Istanbul, Ankara, and Izmir.
He appears to be listening more closely now to medical experts than he did when the outbreak first occurred and he refused to impose a quarantine on pilgrims returning from Mecca.
The Turkish response has been better – swifter, and sterner– than in neighboring Iran, where the government has been erratic, confused, and conspiracy-minded. But Erdogan needs to do more; he needs to emulate the Chinese, whose complete lockdown of Wuhan has apparently turned the tide in that country, with a dramatic drop in the number of new cases of coronavirus being reported.
On television, religious scholars rather than scientists dominated coverage of the coronavirus, explaining the role of “extramarital relations, adultery, homosexuality, and anal relations” in the spread of the virus. The coronavirus emergency is showing the country just how the secular foundations of the education system have been eroded.
Instead of scientists explaining what measures individuals should take to slow down the spread of the coronavirus – social distancing, handwashing, wearing of PPE (Personal Protective Equipment), avoiding all gatherings of more than a handful of people – the Turkish television devotes much of its broadcasting time to religious scholars, who provide no useful information as to how to deal with the coronavirus, but instead offer their incessant moralizing as to why it has spread. Many of these religious scholars attribute the spread of the virus to what they consider to be the immoral behavior of those afflicted. In their view, it is Allah’s way of punishing a population of Muslims who either engage in, or tolerate, “extramarital relations, adultery, homosexuality, and anal relations.” This might lead the credulous to believe that if they refrain from such sexual behavior, they will remain immune to the virus, and need not self-isolate but can go out and about, including visits to the mosque. Such behavior would be devastating. People need to be told, rather, that the virus makes no distinction between the good and the bad, the Believer and the Unbeliever. Saint or sinner, wash your hands, keep your distance, stay away from crowds. It’s the only way.
Turkey’s economy was already in poor shape as the pandemic approached, and its health-care system is utterly unprepared for the challenge it faces. So it’s no wonder that the authorities have been unable to produce a serious, well-thought-out response. Religious officials have stepped into the gap — announcing, for example, that mosque loudspeakers would broadcast prayers every night.
A credulous population may believe that the broadcasting of prayers every night will have some effect in warding off the disease. The Turkish medical authorities know that such measures have no efficacy and are harmful, for they get in the way of a coherent response to the epidemic, based on science and not superstition. The health officials recognize that those who put their faith totally in Allah, and not in science, will be less inclined to accept the need to wash their hands repeatedly, to observe social distancing, to wear masks. .
The Directorate of Religious Affairs is a huge and powerful institution. In 2019, it received five times more funding from the budget than the intelligence community. Its staff outnumbers the number of doctors in the country; Turkey has more mosques than hospitals.
Under Erdogan the Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) has greatly expanded; he has also built tens of thousands of new mosques and of Imam Hatip religious schools. He has expanded the training of Muslim clerics.This is part of his systematic effort at re-islamizing the country. Many of these newly- empowered clerics, who would have been quickly silenced under Ataturk, offer their own religion-based interpretations of the coronavirus crisis: that it is Allah’s punishment for being imperfect Muslims, and Muslims can halt the spread of the virus not through social distancing, wearing masks, and self-isolating, but only by becoming better – i.e., deeply devout – Muslims.
By obstructing science and misallocating vital resources, political Islam in Turkey has become a direct threat to the health of the nation. Turks now find themselves fighting the virus even as they confront the ignorance that leads to bad policy.
Turks need to understand that there are no conspiracies behind this crisis; the disease was not created by any group of humans to contaminate any other group; it seems to have been spread first from bats to humans in Wuhan, China, and then those humans who were coming and going in Wuhan became the vectors for the spread of the virus to other people, elsewhere in China and around the world. That is why bans on travel into and out of any country, and similar bans on travel within a country, are so important in containing the virus.
The continuing power of the religious establishment is evident in the fact that while communal daily prayers, and Friday Prayers, are no longer to be held, mosques in Turkey have still not yet been closed completely but remain open for individual worshippers. As there is no regulation of how many individuals may enter a mosque at any one time, the danger of the infection spreading through visits to the mosques remains. The Diyanet should play no role from now on in the government’s continuing response to the coronavirus, not on when quarantines should either be imposed or lifted, and on what populations, not on how long the general shutdown of stores, restaurants, sports events, and other crowd-attracting venues, should remain in place, and especially not have any say on when, and to what extent, mosques can be reopened for communal and Friday Prayers. Science, not Religion, will get the Turks – just like everyone else – through this.