Now Lifted, Headscarf Ban for University Students Still Controversial

By Jon Gorvett


	Thousands of Turks gather at Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s mausoleum in Ankara Feb. 2 to protest the government’s plant to lift its ban on wearing the Islamic headscarf in universities. Leading Turkish academics warned that the country’s secular system was under “serious threat” (AFP photo/Adem Altan).

BACK IN THE LATE 1990s, many of Turkey’s university campuses often were the venues for violent confrontations between tear gas- and baton-wielding riot police and headscarf-wearing student wannabes.

The largely female protesters were incensed that, because they wore a head covering, they were not allowed to attend university, go to school, or work for the state.

This February, however, the much more peaceful protests around campus and elsewhere have been by those incensed that the government has now moved to end this prohibition.

According to some estimates, more than 100,000 people supporting the ban converged one Sunday on the most sacred shrine of Turkish secularism—Ataturk’s mausoleum in Ankara.

“We won’t allow the headscarf!” they chanted, while also calling for the downfall of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government.

Clearly, then, much has changed recently in the Turkey Mustafa Kemal Ataturk founded back in 1923.

At that time, Islamic societies represented a clear and present danger to Ataturk’s plans for a “modernizing” secular state. Islamic tarikats—sufi orders—were banned, while a great deal of effort was put into convincing citizens that religious beliefs were reactionary, backward obstacles to the “attainment of the level of contemporary civilization”—the key goal of Ataturk’s new regime.

The republic, in contrast to the Ottoman Empire that preceded it, was 99 percent Muslim, with the vast majority of citizens being ethnic Turks. Turkish nationalism was the new state’s religion, supplanting pan-Islamic ideas of affinity with the Arab or Central Asian worlds with an idea of affinity with the secular West.

Given that this drive away from religion was such a fundamental component of the Turkish Republic’s whole establishment, contemporary secularists are naturally deeply troubled by any move that seems to undermine this original notion of the state.

To question the idea of secularism put forward back then, some argue, is to question the very nature of modern Turkey, and even the nature of what it is to be Turkish. In the highly charged catalogue of symbols that constitute affiliation in Turkey—a catalogue that also features types of moustaches, beards, hand signals, portraits of Ataturk, Qur’anic sayings and, above all, the flag—nothing is more contentious than the headscarf.

Thus when in February the Turkish parliament voted in favor of lifting the ban on wearing headscarves—the symbol of political Islam par excellence for many secularists—some saw it as a subversion of the nation itself.

“What is being freed now is not the traditional headscarf of Anatolian women,” claimed Deniz Baykal, leader of Turkey’s main secular opposition party, the Republican People’s Party (CHP), founded by Ataturk, “but a product of Abbasid-Umayyad-Wahabi type of Islamic interpretation, imposed on Turkey as a foreign, political uniform.”

Baykal was referring to the difference between the loosely knotted bashortusu scarf and the tightly wrapped-around headscarf, or hijab. The first is commonly worn by women in rural Turkey out of modesty and as a protection against the elements, while the second is often seen as a profession of Islamic beliefs and, by many secularists, of political Islam. In total, around two-thirds of all Turkish women wear a headscarf of some variety.

Changing the law to allow university students to wear either type, however, was nothing short of apocalyptic for some.

“We are concerned that universities will plunge into a chaotic environment,” Professor Mustafa Akaydin, chairman of the oversight board at Ankara’s Middle East Technical University, told Reuters ahead of the parliamentary vote. “Opposing groups will start clashing with each other.”

Yet others argue that all this is very much an over-reaction to a simple choice of dress.

The bill passed in parliament approaches the issue from that of the right to an education, arguing that banning the headscarf effectively prohibits those who wear it from receiving tuition.

The ban, opponents argue, is thus hardly a modernizing move, since it discriminates against female students (while there are rules as well about Islamic-style beards, these are much less common). Since the sociology of the headscarf also tends to suggest that in Turkey it is worn predominantly by women from lower income groups—although the relation is far from exact—it can also be charged with effective class discrimination.

The ban has long been a flash point politically as well. The protests by female students expelled from university for refusing to take their headscarves off—the ban, on the books since 1989, has not been strictly enforced since 1997—were a regular source of tension in the lead up to the AKP’s election victory in 2002. Since the AKP has Islamist roots, many of the protesters ceased demonstrating, adopting a wait-and-see attitude in the expectation that the AKP would change the rules.

Many years and one more general election victory later, it now has. Why it took so long is largely due to the generally cautious philosophy of the AKP—a fundamentally conservative party. But the change also has been long in coming because the presidency of the republic was until last year in the hands of a staunch secularist, who would doubtless have vetoed any move to drop the ban. Now, however, the president is Abdullah Gul, an AKP stalwart. Similarly, the AKP has now managed via presidential powers of appointment to gain a majority on the university governing body, YOK.

However, some suggest, another factor here is the Kurdish issue. Last year saw a complicated game played between the AKP and the military, traditionally the country’s strongest defenders of the secular order, over what stance to take against resurgent Kurdish nationalist militancy. The AKP certainly appears to have granted ground to the military over that, while the military perhaps returned the favor by refusing to comment when the parliament voted to lift the university headscarf ban.

Secularists fear that this is not the end of the story, though. At the most extreme are those who feel this is just one more step towards the introduction of shariah law in Turkey. Others see it as more of a day-to-day threat to established patterns of patronage and privilege within the secular state. Certainly, if the majority of the country’s women are ruled out of government jobs and university places in advance, this holds considerable benefits for some.

Another worry is that, regardless of intentions, the lifting of the ban may have detrimental effects on women who do not wear the headscarf, exposing them to allegations of immodesty or even immorality. This will drive more women into covering, the argument goes, with the unspoken suggestion that they will also thus become more Islamic in overall outlook and Islamist in political orientation. This latter point does not necessarily follow, of course, since there is little conclusive evidence that headscarf wearing is growing or declining overall in Turkey.

Nonetheless, the lifting of the ban in universities seems likely to be followed at some later stage by a lifting of the ban in government jobs and schools, which are far more society-wide issues. The government thus may be testing the water with universities, and it remains to be seen how much further it will now go—although, in any case, it is unlikely to go quickly.

Jon Gorvett is a free-lance journalist based in Istanbul.