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September 20, 2007
Why Are We a Nation Obsessed with the Headscarf?
[Originally published in Turkish Daily News]
To most outside observers the scene must be looking pretty bizarre: Thousands of otherwise reasonable men and women in this country, who make up much of the social elite, are having panic attacks in the face of the possibility that Turkish universities might tolerate their students wearing the Islamic headscarf. Virtually everyday, bureaucrats, pundits and even university rectors lash out against the proposed article in the proposed constitution to set the headscarf free. "This will be the end of the secular republic," they passionately claim, without realizing that a secular republic that doesn't respect the rights and liberties of its citizens is called a secular tyranny.
I have repeatedly said what I think about this prohibition on the headscarf: It is a violation of human rights, and it is a shame on our democracy. I also have made a suggestion to make things more fair if this ban is going to last: The citizens who wear the headscarf should pay less taxes. They obviously don't get anything from Turkey's education system, and they should not be required to take a share in its finance. If they are second-class citizens, why should they pay the same rates with the folks in the first class?
Anyway, tyrannies are tyrannies and they don't bother about such details. And the story of our homegrown one is too broad a topic to discuss in a single column. That's why I rather want to focus on the origins of the obsession with the headscarf. While other Islamic practices such as the Ramadan fast is not a problem in Turkey, why is this one a huge bone of contention?
Remembering the hat revolution
To find an answer, we have to go back to the Ottoman Empire, which underlies much of modern Turkey. In this multi-ethnic and multi-religious state, headgear was an important symbol because it specified a person's religious and thus legal identity. For a long time, the three “nations” of the empire — the Muslims, the Jews and the Christians — had their own distinct turbans. What you put on your head also said who you are.
The person who changed that was Sultan Mahmud II, who, during his reign (1808-1839), brought in many modern concepts such as the rule of law, the limits of the state's powers and the idea of equal citizenship. Under Mahmud, Jews and Christians were granted equal rights with Muslims, and all of them were introduced to a new headgear called the “fez.” This red cylindrical cap was a novelty, which some conservatives did not like, but soon all Ottoman citizens, regardless of their creed, accepted it.
Yet the real revolution would come about a century after Mahmud II, and this time the goal was not “Ottomanization” as he had aimed, but rather de-Ottomanization. Mustafa Kemal, Turkey's Westernist founder, took that bold step as early as 1925 with this famous “hat revolution.” For him, the fez symbolized everything that he wanted to save the Turks from, and the bowler hat represented everything that he wanted to turn them into. He showed up in the conservative city of Kastamonu in August 1925 with a bowler on this head. “This is called a hat gentlemen,” he said, “from now on, we will wear this.”
Soon came the hat law, which outlawed all religious turbans and made it compulsory for civil servants to wear the “headgear of the civilized peoples.” Atatürk did not touch women's veils, but he systematically promoted the ideal “modern Turkish woman,” who was supposed to wear all the trendy clothes including those vintage swimsuits of the ‘30s.
Atatürk and his followers were very enthusiastic about the bowler hats, and, at a time when much of the war-stricken Turkish society was in total destitute, they did not refrain from spending great sums of money to import them from various European countries. Yet not everybody was a great fan of this compulsory fashion. For many devout Muslims, the hat represented the Christian West and they perceived its imposition onto Muslim society as an act of forced self-denial. They saw in the bowlers even an implicit message of disobedience to God. It was impossible to wear this rimmed hat during the daily Muslim prayer, in which the believers put their foreheads to the ground as a sign of submission to the Almighty. So putting on the hat, for them, looked like abandoning worship.
The victims of the bowler hat
Hence came the reactions to the hat revolution. In the northeastern coastal town of Rize the whole populace rejected the idea, sparking a rebellion that led Ankara to send the giant warship Hamidiye to the shores of the city in order to be persuasive. In Erzurum a group of 30 protestors were fired upon by the gendarmerie and several of them, including a woman, were shot.
The most notorious episode would be the case of İskilipli Atıf, a “hodja,” i.e., a religious scholar, who wrote a treatise titled “The Hat and the Imitation of the Franks,” in which he objected to the idea by arguing that it would amount to the abandonment of Muslim culture. Although he had written that 32-page tract before the revolution, at a time when the word was around but the law was not in practice, he was arrested by the authorities charged with treason. Soon he was tried by one of the “Independence Courts,” which were arbitrary revolutionary tribunals similar to the ones established by the French revolutionaries and later the Bolsheviks in order to eliminate the “enemies of the people.” In his defense, İskilipli Atıf said that he stood behind his views, and the court cold-bloodedly sentenced him to death. The old man was executed by hanging on Feb. 4, 1925. “Don't cry my child,” he said in his last hours to his daughter who was in tears. “Just recite the Koran for my soul.”
İskilipli Atıf was only one of the many victims of the hat revolution. Eight others were executed in Rize, seven in Maraş and four in Erzurum. According to the Turkish version of Encyclopedie Larousse, the number of people killed by the regime was as high as 78. Moreover, many others were sentenced to 10 to 15 years of imprisonment.
Permanent revolution
More than 80 years have passed since the hat revolution and its victims. Yet the mindset of the revolutionaries has changed very little, if at all. Nobody wears hats anymore, and the male headgear is a non-issue. But now the focus is on the female headdress. The revolutionaries still want to do the same thing: They want to eradicate all traditional Islamic clothes. They would love to do it by employing revolutionary guards on the streets to rip the veils off, but that is not feasible. So they rather prefer to contain the veiled women by pushing them out of the “public square” and denying them the right to education. The ultimate aim is to make all of them “modern” by using coercive powers of the state.
What these revolutionaries fail to understand is that in the modern world, states have no right to interfere with the dress codes of their citizens, and that individuals have the right to live in whatever manner they choose. Actually if there is any version of “modernity” that they resemble, that is the way of Chairman Mao, whose Cultural Revolution traumatized a whole nation during the late ‘60s. Turkey's cultural revolution has been much less radical, thank God, but unlike Mao's now defunct tyranny, it still goes on.
Posted by Mustafa Akyol at September 20, 2007 11:02 AM
You claim that secularists "would love to do it by employing revolutionary guards on the streets to rip the veils off, but that is not feasible"
No, it is not, chiefly because, they would not be able to find any one citizen to fill the job positions! No one in Turkey has ever done that, for money or for ideology. On the other hand there are women who have been harrassed for wearing bikinis, restaurant owners who have been pressured into not selling alcoholic drinks and university students who have been beaten in their school canteen for not fasting during Ramadan.
Check your facts before you rant about 'secular oppression and intolerance'.
Posted by: ece cenker at September 20, 2007 4:03 PM
It is simple, if Turkish women want freedom to wear a headscarf, they can go to University in Greece, Armenia or Bulgaria, where one can see Moslem women every day in univeristies wearing head scarves.
It is a compound irony, they all have in their history as much baggage, both incorrect prejudice and the history of being second class citizens in the Ottoman Empire due to religion. Yet they have overcome their prejudices and don't seem to have as much of a fit about head scarves!
Posted by: Deniz at September 20, 2007 4:16 PM
Posted by: blue at September 21, 2007 12:01 PM
It is a fair comment to say that much of anti-hijab policies are most vigorously defended by women. I have witnessed from many self-proclaimed modern Turkish women the belittlement of women wearing hijab. They sometimes criticize them with such venom and hostility that you could believe for a moment that covered women discriminated against the non-covered ones, that is was them that are being discriminated against by the secularist state and its supporters. This is obviously not the case so I therefore ask myself what are the reasons behind this aggressive and intolerant stance.
It is far too simple to say that these women are scared of being forced into wearing the hijab. As muslims we know there is no compulsion in religion and the majority Turkish Muslims have never shown characteristics of one day trying to engage in compulsion. There are many conservative practicing Muslims whose wives choose not to wear a headscarf, and it is their human as well as Muslim right to do so.
What is behind all of this? Why do our self-proclaimed modern and western clothed women talk about covered women as though they are inferior and should not benefit from the same rights unless they become ‘western’ or ‘modern’?
I suggest that these women have an inferiority complex. When a hijab is worn out of choice by a woman, it says a few things about her. She is pious and has religious ideals. The sous-entendu of this is that she has strong moral standing and lives by a code of conduct. It also shows at least a part rejection of materialism and vanity. This is mostly seen as positive, and many men long for wives with such characteristics.
These characteristics can obviously be found in plenty of women who do not wear the headscarf. You don’t need a hijab to possess values. Maybe the anti-hijab women, including the military wives, do not see it that way. Their simplistic minds and powers of reflection might tell themselves ‘if covered women represent morality, what do we represent?’ Are they not confident in the western lifestyle they have adopted? Maybe they have doubts about their revealing clothing and glasses of wine. They might tell themselves ‘but this is what a modern woman is like, is it not?’ This would explain the anger at the covered women who demonstrate forwardness and modernity through education and successful careers but did not have to reject their Turkish Muslim past and customs in the process, hence the necessity to stop them doing so. They have proved that modernity is not just a dress code or an eating habit. So if you can be modern without being revealing or drinking, be modern even whilst maintaining one’s religious practice and tradition, how do the anti-hijab women perceive themselves?
These anti-hijab women have found a way to temporarily remedy their complex by advocating a ban on conservative dress. The tools they have been using are their men as this cannot be achieved without their support. Without the hijabs of Turkey exposed to them, they can more easily convince themselves that they are the norm (not the 70% of covered women) and not ask themselves the painful and disillusioning questions they might do otherwise. Instead of dealing with their complex internally which takes a lot of strength and courage, they rather make sure that the covered women suffer for simply existing and pushing such thoughts to the front of their minds.
In order to appease the secularist fears, we must learn how to appease secularist women. We must make it clear to them that lifting the ban on hijab does not mean that they will be considered morally inferior women. They must first be confident in their hearts and minds and rid themselves of the insecurity that they might have ‘sold out’. They have an equal place in our nation but not a superior one. They are different but remain women, the back-bone of a family and society, hijab or no hijab. Since the problem is not with the majority of the country who are Muslim, it is logically with them. Therefore the solution depends on the evolution and modernizing of their mentality.
Posted by: Ceyhan at September 24, 2007 12:54 PM