“The nearest Buddhist temple is 2,000 kilometers (1,243 miles) away. I cannot pray during my lunch break. So please build a temple on campus.” This was one of the messages a student at Istanbul Technical University (ITU) wrote for an online petition.

Surely the number of Buddhists in Turkey do not warrant such a request. So what drives the overwhelmingly Muslim student body to demand a Buddhist temple on their university campus?

To understand the students' request we need to look at what happened in the run-up to the launch of their online protest. On Nov. 21, 2014, Mehmet Gormez, the head of the Directorate of Religious Affairs, made a public announcement that one of the directorate's goals is “a mosque for each college campus." Gormez said, “The construction of 80 mosques is in progress. We will open 15 in 2014 and the rest in 2015.”

In 2002, there were 75,941 mosques in Turkey, and by 2014 the number increased to 84,684. Mosques outnumber schools and hospitals combined, and employees of the Directorate of Religious Affairs outnumber doctors in Turkey. Figures from 2011 show that there is one doctor for every 900 people versus one religious official for every 780 people.