That question always begs an answer, but it is especially considerable nowadays, at a time when Turkey is haunted once again by the fear and contempt that its secularist elite feels toward the Muslim headscarf. Mrs. Hayrünnisa Gül, who is very likely to be Turkey's next First Lady, wears it, and that simple fact makes many “modern” Turks extremely anxious.

Of course such Turks offer justifications for their zeal. The most common one was summarized by fellow TDN columnist Yusuf Kanlı two days ago. “Threat is not the headscarf itself,” Mr. Kanlı argued, “it is what it symbolizes: Political Islam.”

But how do we know that headscarf symbolizes “political Islam?” Do the women who wear it say so? No, not at all. Just ask any lady in Turkey who covers her hair tightly why she does so, and she will tell you that she believes this is what God ordained in the Koran. Indeed academic studies carried out by liberal Turkish think tanks such as TESEV confirm that when women in headscarves are asked about their motives, they always show religious reasons, not political causes.

In other words, those who loathe the headscarf do so by ascribing it a meaning that they themselves fabricate — the same method used throughout history to launch all kinds of witch hunts.

Rational Concerns vs. Irrational Fears

That's why I don't buy into the Turkish urban legend that “political Islam” explains the origin of the headscarf. I rather think that headscarvo-phobia needs an explanation, and I find it in something deeper: Islamophobia – the irrational fear of Islam and Islamic practice.

Islamophobia, a term that has become common in the recent years, is used to refer to the categorical hatred or fear felt toward Muslims. While I think that the term corresponds to a real problem, I should add that it is sometimes misused by some Muslim groups in order to counter valid doubts and criticisms. If some people are blowing themselves up to kill innocent civilians and do this in the name of Islam, you have to face it and explain why it happens. You just can't make it go away by blaming Islamophobia.

Similarly not all Turks who have reservations about the political aspirations of the country's more observant Muslims — which includes some fanatics, to be sure — deserve to be called Islamophobic. But what I am telling you is something beyond that. There are people in this country who believe that observant Muslims are a threat to the regime, and they won't change their mind no matter what. When they are pushed to face facts that rebut their fears — such as social studies that show that Turkey's Muslims are undergoing a massive modernization — they start to argue that these very facts must have been cunningly produced by Islamist conspirators and their allies. Their fears are simply unbreachable — and that's why Islamophobia would be an appropriate term to define their mindset.

Classic and Modern

At this point, let me introduce the difference between classic and modern Islamophobia — something that I just made up, but for good reason, and with inspiration from the case of anti-Semitism. Historians who study this pathological hatred of the Jews make a distinction between its “classic” and “modern” versions. The classic one mainly refers to the Jew-hating in medieval Europe, which was driven by religious reasons. Modern anti-Semitism, on the other hand, was based mostly on racial, i.e., secular bigotry.

I think we can speak of classical and modern versions of Islamophobia, too. The former one, like classical anti-Semitism, was a product of Medieval Europe, in which Muslims were depicted as devil-worshipping “Mahometans” and evil-doing “Terrible Turks.” (This classical version is still around among some marginal Christian groups, who believe in nonsense such as that Muslims worship a “moon God” or that Prophet Mohammed was an avowed anti-Christ.)

Modern Islamophobia is a secular feeling, though. It arose toward the end of the 19th century, thanks, indirectly, to the works of Europe's atheist philosophers – such as Auguste Comte, Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, Herbert Spencer, Sigmund Freud, and many more – who argued that religion was a myth in its last throes. These were all Western thinkers and their main enemy was Christianity, but there were also ones, such as the French thinker Joseph Ernest Renan, who specifically targeted Islam and defined it as an inherently irrational faith that Eastern nations needed to get rid of.

It didn't take much time for some — not all — Ottoman intellectuals to be fascinated by this grand narrative of radical secularist modernity. Soon, they became the ones who applied it to the Islamic world, and of course, Turkey itself. From the late 1920s on, they became the political and social elites of Turkish society. And they built a very rigid secularist ideology and an Islamophobic psychology, about which I will write more in my next column.