Could the elections really have been about one woman’s headscarf?
If you happened to follow last Sunday’s general election in Turkey, most likely you will agree with me that according to the majority of reports in the international press, it looked like the whole process got rolling just because of one woman’s headscarf. Time after time, in articles on the subject, in the section devoted to an obligatory summing up of recent political events, I would read that the military had rejected Erdogan’s proposal to elect Gul as Turkey’s president because his wife covered her hair. Had it been true that the whole political crisis was caused by Mrs Gul’s dressing habits her headscarf could have been compared to Cleopatra’s nose. However, we all know that the situation in Turkey is much more complicated than that.
To start with, there exists a much deeper definition of the conflict between the generals and Erdogan’s AKP, in the words of one English language Turkish paper described as “the divide between those who exalt French type of laicism that denies all reference to religion in public life and the others who seek to achieve Anglo-Saxon secularism that is more permissive towards expressions of different beliefs systems”. Sic!
And secondly, as if to contradict those who accuse the AKP of having a secret agenda and aiming to transform the country into an Islamic state with sharia as its ruling law, last Sunday the party happened to have the highest number of women candidates on its electoral lists (11 per cent, up from six per cent in 2002, compared with CHP – 10 per cent and MHP – six). Even more importantly, none of the AKP’s female candidates covered their heads.
Of course, there are at least a couple of reasons for that: a) in Turkey there is a ban on Muslim headscarves in parliament (which is part of a wider ban also affecting universities and public buildings) so having such candidates would make no sense; b) since the main bone of contention seemed to be Mrs Gul’s scarf it is obvious that the message the party would like to send out would be just the opposite. Nevertheless, even if the message was just an electoral trick, it didn’t change the fact that in a country where for years there has been a battle going on between the secular state and young Muslim women banned from universities because of their head covers it was received last Sunday with more applause than calls to preserve the values of the long dead creator of the Turkish nation. Especially that (I don’t think the fact influenced the election results but still), according to majority of Ataturk’s biographers, in spite of championing women’s emancipation publicly, he himself felt much more comfortable with women less eager to have their own opinions than his wife Latife whom he divorced in 1925. For years before and after the divorce poor Latife was said to express a wish to do something with her life. She wanted to stand for parliament, become a teacher or at least get a job as a secretary but, apparently, her husband or then ex-husband kept on disagreeing. So in a way, her situation was similar to that of these Turkish girls who claim to be oppressed and not able to get certain kinds of work because they wear a headscarf. Only in their case it is the policy of the state and not beliefs of men in their families that stands between them and a career.
Somehow, at least on the surface, it seems, quite in contradiction to Voltaire’s “I don’t agree with what you have to say but I will fight to the death for your rights to say it”. It is also a contradiction to simple common sense. How on earth anybody plans to empower Turkish women if it seems about half of them (at least hypothetically since the AKP got 46 per cent) are not allowed to acquire a higher education?
But, of course, as with everything else in Turkey, there is a double bottom to this story. In one of the books that I am reading on the subject, a young female secular academic told her interviewer how once, faithful to the ideals of the French philosopher, she was trying to protect a student wearing a headscarf from being expelled from university. The student came afterwards to her to thank for support.
“I told her I sometimes like going out with my friends and occasionally have some raki,” continued the teacher. “I asked her whether if such a time came she would defend me as well. She looked at me and said with total conviction: ‘That won’t be necessary. You will change’.”
So now I would like to make a postulate: Voltaire for everybody, even though I really dislike headscarves.
??
??
??
??
