A Ministry Built to Replace the Sheikh ul-Islam

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The Presidency of Religious Affairs, known as the Diyanet, is the Turkish state authority over Sunni Islamic affairs, established on 3 May 1924 by the new Turkish Republic under Mustafa Kemal Ataturk as a successor to the abolished Ottoman office of Sheikh ul-Islam. Its creation was part of a wider set of reforms that abolished the caliphate itself and replaced the old religious-legal order with a new secular constitutional structure, so the Diyanet's founding was not a religious institution's own initiative but a deliberate act of state design carried out in the same reform wave that ended thirteen centuries of caliphal authority.

The Diyanet administers mosques, pays the salaries of imams, issues religious rulings and oversees religious education across Turkey, functioning as a deliberate instrument of state control over religion within a constitutionally secular republic rather than as an independent religious authority answerable only to its own clergy. That structure, a state body directing Sunni religious life rather than a religious body operating independently of the state, has remained the Diyanet's defining feature across the century since its founding, distinguishing it sharply from the religious authorities of most other Muslim majority countries.