Altintas, Mustafa Cabir; (2020) Worldviews and identity discernment of Turkish youth and the role of religious education: An investigation of imam-Hatip High Schools' senior students' meaning-making of the world in the 21st Century. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

The religious and cultural landscape in Turkey has been dramatically affected by modernization and secularization in the last 20 years. It is visible from the diverse forms of dress and the languages spoken on the street, secular Muslim subjectivities and modernist pious Muslim young people have shown around the cities. Alongside this increasing religious and cultural diversity is a growth in ‘secularism’, which creates challenges for social cohesion, policy and education in Turkey today. These new challenges force Turkish young people to find their place in a complex world and to seek satisfying ways of gaining a sense of meaning and belonging. Many young people search for individual meaning in dealing with the uncertainties of the world; they are relatively open to the spiritual dimension; questioning and exploring faith from a range of religious traditions and spiritual practices according to their own eclectic tastes and needs. In this respect, youth’s worldview becomes significant to understand their world and how they are making sense of the new world in the postmodern era. Thus, this study will explore the worldview of a particular group of Turkish youth, the religious dimension of their lived reality will be given serious consideration for it is a religiously-based value system, specifically Islam, that shapes their overall attitudes and identities. The Worldview Theory has been popular in the West, but has not yet found a proper place in the Turkish context. Therefore, the Worldview Theory has been chosen as a framework for this study, in an attempt to fill the existing gap in Turkish literature. As a qualitative research method, semi-structured and focus group interviews with Imam-Hatip High School’s students were conducted for our data, to explore how they negotiate and experience the changes in their lives between Western culture and Islamic culture; and the role of religious education while they negotiate the worldviews. Thus, the study presents young people’s worldviews and their outlook on life, with a special focus on their attitudes to religion and social changes in the context of Western secular and Muslim collective identity.

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