Interview with Ridvan Cakir, President of DITIB

Today’s meeting with Ridvan Cakir went quite well.  He didn’t have a lot of time to spare, but we still spent a solid 45 minutes discussing DITIB, integration, and Islamic sermons.  Mr. Cakir definitely helped answer my key questions, but I also came away puzzled about some things.

When I showed up at the mosque and asked if Mr. Cakir had arrived, no one else knew he was coming.  Luckily I ran into the imam who showed me into the offices of the religious attache, where we chatted until Mr. Cakir arrived.  It turns out that Mr. Cakir had some business at the Turkish embassy and was just dropping by the mosque in Kreuzberg for an informal visit.

In fact, Mr. Cakir is the adviser on religious affairs and education (those are two separate departments) at the Turkish embassy.  He was elected by DITIB members to serve as their president back in 2003, but his official position is with the embassy.

Centralized Sermons

I won’t go into all the details of our conversation, but one puzzling thing that stands out is his description of the centralized sermons policy in Turkey.  The way he described it, the sermons produced by the Directorate of Religious Affairs (DIB) in Turkey were meant only to be examples for the imams throughout Turkey.  The imams could modify the sermons or even prepare their own as they saw fit.

I’ll admit that I’ve heard different interpretations of this policy, but this was by far the loosest.  Given this description, and knowing that the centralized sermon policy was discontinued in June of this year (more on that some other time), I had to ask what the difference would be, in practice, if imams were always free to write and deliver their own sermons.  The answer surprised me.  Basically, imams can no longer free-ride.

Now that imams can’t rely on the government to provide them with sermons, they’ll have to put in time preparing their own.  The supposed benefit is that imams will be encouraged to stay fresh in their study of scripture and theology, which should result in higher quality sermons and perhaps better (more orthodox?) counsel for those who consult the imam on religious matters.

If anyone should know about this issue it’s Mr. Cakir; before coming to Germany he worked as an assistant to the president of the DIB for 15 years.  All the same, sorting out this sermon policy and why there are such varying accounts of it is going to be one of my top priorities when I visit the DIB in Ankara this August.