Turkey According to the CIA World Factbook,

Turkey

According to the CIA World Factbook, 99.8% of Turkey's population is Muslim, the overwhelming majority of those being Sunni. The minorities include ancient communities of Christians and Jews, some from ethnic minorities. Beneath this veneer of homogeneity, however, Turkey does face some religious conflict. Much of this conflict arises from divisions within Islam, but there is also a significant conflict between the country's secular Muslims and its religious ones.

Turkish Sunni Muslims typically belong to the Hanafi school, while Kurdish Sunnis follow the Shafil school. As many as one-third of Kurds in Turkey actually belong to the Alevi school of Shia Islam, despite statistics that indicate this group is Sunni. There are many Sufi brotherhoods that are active in Turkey as well. The Turkish city of Konya -- one of the most conservative cities in the country -- is the home of Sufism, as this is where Mevlana Rumi lived and gained influence in the 13th century (No author, 2012). There are also minority Kurdish religions that blend a variety of different influence, and religion may play a role in the conflict between Turks and Armenians, the latter group lacking anything more than nominal representation in the country.

Among the majority Turkish population, the main point of religious conflict is between those who are devout and those who are secular. Kemal Ataturk made secularism a core part of his vision of a modern Turkey. In part, this was a reaction to the Ottoman rulers, who were caliphs, or God's representatives on Earth. Thus, the authority of the Ottomans was derived from Islam, but the Ottomans lost Turkey to foreign powers in the First World War. Ataturk therefore mandated that secularism would be a guiding principle in Turkey. In recent years, however, this stance has come under attack from more strongly religious elements of Turkish society (Garda, 2007). Unwilling to adopt the more Western-style reforms of Turkey, they soon became economically marginalized, as tends to happen when one sits on the sidelines of economic growth.

These religious elements, in an attempt to win power, have positioned the secular Turkish state as oppressive entity. While the stance ignores economic reality, it has proved to resonate with many religious Turks, and the result is growing pressure on the secular state to become more Islamic. This conflict belies the fact that being a secular state has given Turkey not only a strong economy compared with its neighbors, but has also given the country considerable political power as a bridge between Europe and Asia.

Turkey is a democracy, which means that the conflict between secular Turks and strongly religious ones has become a demographic issue. The government must contend with large conservative voting blocks that seek to impose their religious way of life on the millions of Turks who have no interest in that lifestyle. This situation has gone the other way as well, as the Turkish military in enforcing secularism has banned headscarves and passed other laws that restrict the free practice of the Islamic religion (Jones, 2010).

Overall, this dominant conflict in Turkey is not one between religions, but between the devout religious and the secular. There are internal divisions between Turks and Kurds, but these conflicts are more ethnic in nature than they are religious, despite the different religious interpretations of the two groups. The influence of secularism in Turkey, and the challenges that the religious community is bringing to the Turkish state, could cause more open conflict in the future and re-shape the nature of the Turkish state.