From a purely clerical school, it grew into a major university with branches all over the country.
The number of imam hatip (Sunni Islamic clerical training) schools has doubled in five years, and pupils who fail the new exam to get into their first choice have been pushed into imam hatip schools instead.
It would help if, for now, he turns a deaf ear to pious constituents' demands to relax bans on the headscarf and to ease university entrance for graduates of Islamic clerical training schools.
Mr Kotil denies this and maintains that only six of the company's entire staff are graduates of the Islamic clerical training schools known as imam hatips.Yet a newly Islamist spirit was undeniably on display when a group of employees sacrificed a camel near a runway at Istanbul airport last December and then distributed its meat to co-workers to celebrate the modernisation of the THY fleet.
He has overseen a revision of textbooks to promote creationism and the recruitment, as teachers, of hundreds of graduates of imam hatip, Islamic clerical-training schools.
It is true that, in deference to his party's grassroots, Mr Erdogan has sometimes touted a few overtly religious measures: the criminalisation of adultery, new privileges for imam hatip clerical-training schools, an Islamist as head of the central bank.
Optimistic translation: a new mandate for reformists to encroach on clerical domination of schools on the valid pretext that a seventh century core curriculum does not satisfy market needs.
Hunter needed office help, and soon Cory and her best friend, Maggy Rogow--a senior at a private school that made "internships" a prerequisite for graduation--were doing after-school clerical work for Hunter two days a week.
Recruitment in many European countries corresponded to the national educational systems: the highest class of civil servants entered service after graduation from a university, the executive class after full completion of secondary school, the clerical class after the intermediate school examination.
To supplement the income, Mrs. Ellis works as a clerical aide in school and as a weekend hairdresser.
