Demographics of Turkey are available for the Kurdish population, because the Turkish government has outlawed ethnic or racial censuses. An estimate by the CIA World Factbook places their proportion of the population at approximately 18%. Another estimate, according to Ibrahim Sirkeci, an ethnic Turk, in his book "The Environment of Insecurity in Turkey and the Emigration of Turkish Kurds to Germany", based on the 1990 Turkish Census and 1993 Turkish Demographic Health Survey, is 17.8%. Other estimates include 15.7% of the population according to the newspaper "Milliyet", and 23% by Kurdologist David McDowall. The Minority Rights Group report of 1985 (by Martin Short
Demographics of Turkey makes roughly 9.4% of the population. Religious groups according to estimates: The vast majority of the present-day Turkish people are Muslim and the most popular sect is the Hanafite school of Sunni Islam, which was officially espoused by the Ottoman Empire; according to the KONDA Research and Consultancy survey carried out throughout Turkey on 2007: Modern Turkey was founded by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk as secular ("Laiklik", Turkish adaptation of French "Laïcité"), i.e. without a state religion, or separate ethnic divisions/ identities. The concept of "minorities" has only been accepted by the Republic of Turkey as defined by the Treaty of