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The cover of the Turkish textbook |
Turkish activists in Iran launched a campaign called "Rising Hopes" and printed Turkish-language notebooks, which were distributed among children in Turkish-speaking regions.
According to information obtained by Voice of America, the "Rising Hopes" campaign, initiated by activists from the Qashqai community, raised funds through various means and printed notebooks that teach the Turkish alphabet in both Latin and Arabic scripts. These notebooks were distributed among children in the Qashqai, Azerbaijani, and Turkmen Sahra regions.
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The preparation of the booklet is considered a protest by Turkish activists against the removal of images of girls from newly published textbooks in Iran, as well as the absence of a symbol representing Turkish clothing.
The booklet was printed in approximately 2,000 copies, and its cover features children wearing Azerbaijani, Qashqai, and Turkmen national costumes playing around a tree. In the official Iranian school textbooks published this year, the images of girls were removed, and there was no symbol representing Turks among the country's ethnic groups, including Arabs, Baluchis, Kurds, Lurs, Persians, and Gilaks. This omission sparked protests from Turkish activists in Iran.
Following the removal of images of girls, the issue was widely covered in the media. Iran's Ministry of Education was forced to issue a statement, explaining that the previous cover was too crowded, and that the new design had fewer illustrations.
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| The images of girls have been removed from the covers of newly printed textbooks in Iran. |
Although there was no media coverage in Iran about the lack of representation of the Turkish ethnic group on the official textbook covers, Turkish activists protested this through the "Rising Hopes" campaign. Ibrahim Savalan, a resident of Iranian Azerbaijan, shared a photo of the booklet's cover on his Instagram page and wrote, "On the cover of this notebook, examples are written in Turkish using both the Latin and Arabic alphabets, so that Tehran’s crumbling fortress knows that women and language cannot be erased."
Last year, the governor of East Azerbaijan Province promised that Turkish-language textbooks would be published, but these promises were not fulfilled. However, the Iranian Ministry of Education’s announcement that children would be required to take a "Persian proficiency test" led to protests in Iranian Azerbaijan.
Link to the original text in Turkish on the Azerbaijani section of Voice of America:
İranda türk fəallar İran dərsliklərinə etiraz olaraq Türkcə kitabçalar paylaşıb