European Journal of Scientific Research - EuroJournals

384 Nazenin Ruso
will be free to do so. The university won’t be able to forbid such girls’ entrance to classes after joining
to European Union.
On the other hand, there were some very pessimistic Imams who thought that our religious
values will be affected negatively if we join to European Union. Those Imams suggested that the youth
have already lost their religious values so they might even become Christians when we join to
European Union. Apart from these, there were also some Imams who did not make any contributions
for this question and just wrote “time will show us everything”…
The Effect of European Union on Educational Values
Another question directed to Imams was what will happen to our educational values if we join to
European Union. The interpretation of the data reveals that the majority of Imams believe that our
educational values will be affected positively if we join to European Union. They suggested that the
quality of education will increase because we will be able to integrate technology into education more,
we will have more observations, experiences, more chances for improving our science and research
skills. The education standards will be higher like in European countries and new horizons will be
opened for our people. After observing how intellectual the Europeans are, Muslim people will be
more motivated towards education. They will be more motivated to learn foreign languages, especially
English to be able to communicate with the people around them. The education will be more serious.
One Imam said that Europeans learned science from our ancestors in past but we as a Muslim society
could not improve ourselves within years whereas the Europeans did. The same Imam added that when
Galileo said the world is turning around its axis, this was already indicated within our holy book 1450
years before Galileo. According to verse Neml 85 in Koran, it says: “Although you think that
mountains do not move, like the clouds they move continuously”. This verse implies that the world is
turning continuously. Our prophet Muhammad also encouraged us to study science. During the war,
Muhammad said that “if a prisoner of war teaches how to read and write to a Muslim, that prisoner of
war will be free” and he implemented what he said. A hadith interpreted by Tirmizi says that science is
the lost possession of the Muslim, so wherever he/she finds science, he/she should take that back”.
These also show the importance given to education and science by our religion.
Only a few Imams feel that our educational values will be affected negatively if we join to
European Union claiming that European Union will prevent us from studying our own culture, history
and religion. Rather we might start to study European cultural studies if we join to European Union.
Discussion
To start with, the data reveals that Imams value education a lot. Education is not seen as a factor for
loosing religious values. Imams have written too many comments to highlight the importance of
education for a person. Their reaction to the question “Do you think university and above education is
causing people to move away from religion” is a very supportive indication of this. Some Imams wrote
“this is a very stupid questionnaire, it is obvious that whoever prepared this questionnaire is not
definitely aware of Islam and Koran” ☺I am not taking this too personal. Most of them repeated that
the first requirement of our prophet Mohammad was to “read”. Majority of Imams themselves are
young and educated from religious schools such as “Imam Hatip” and “Theology Faculty”. This might
be another reason why they value education too much. Before conducting this research, I was thinking
that all Imams are about 40 and 50 years old, but I found out that there are a lot of very young Imams
at about 27-30 years old.
From all Imams’ perspectives, the value given to education is not enough on the island. For
them, we are not technologically developed due to our ignorance. One Imam pointed out that according
to a research he read recently, each Japanese reads approximately 70 books a year and each American
reads about 60 books a year whereas each Turk reads about 4 books a year. He concludes that this