According to the independent website Ahval, which focuses on Turkey, more than 790 new Islamic religious schools have opened in the country over the past year, with these types of schools, called “İmam Hatip”, serving a total of 1.3 million pupils.
With the addition of 798 İmam Hatip schools in the 2018-2019 academic year, Turkey now has 5,138 of the schools, Ahval quotes the news site T24 as reporting on Saturday.
Additionally, the report states that under the 17-year rule of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, himself an İmam Hatip graduate, the number of these schools has skyrocketed from 450 to over 5,000 today.
Erdoğan also increased the budget for Islamic religious education in 2018 by 68 percent, to USD 1.5 billion.