© Murad Sezer / Reuters
Couples are advised to "refrain from flirting, living together, staying together tete-a-tete in a way that could give rise to gossip, holding hands and other behaviors that are not endorsed by Islam."
The agency was responding to the question: "Is it appropriate for those who are engaged to be married to be able to see each other?"
"There is no harm in engaged couples meeting to get to know each other, as long as they follow the rules of privacy," the agency responded.
Diyanet is a state-funded religious agency. It recently gained press attention for issuing a fatwa okaying the use of toilet paper for Muslims.
As Turkey is officially a secular nation, the statements published by the agency carry no legal weight. However, while some parts of the country like Istanbul are more secular, large areas of the country still remain very conservative.
Turkish parents have been complaining that it is increasingly difficult to find non-religious schools to send their children to after education reform greatly expanded the religious content of regular academic high schools.
While the perceived gradual Islamization of Turkey has faced some criticism, the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan insists that authorities are only trying to provide more religious freedom to devout Muslims.
I tried to read the Koran once. I tried to read the Bible once. I did it because I wanted to try to understand what could possibly be in those books which others find so interesting and important.
The only thing I found in either of these books, which is of any real significance, is that they both contain linguistic codes for programing patterns of thought the same as a worm and virus do a computers' software. Not that the evidence does not speak for itself, because it does.
Only a monster would chose to indoctrinate their own child with mind control programs, and only a State run by monsters would support organizations which feed off the blood of people whose minds had been hijacked by these texts. We need to tax these religious institutions because they are in business and their business is story telling for
which they expect a 10% or larger profit margin and who also get tax free property and other benefits while corrupting the fabric of human nature. We could start there and work towards their eventual extinction which would do a lot more good than these supposed voices of God have ever done.