Middle East

The origins of the conflict regarding headscarves (hijab or tesettur) have their roots in the very beginning of modern Turkish history. In the uproar following the end of the first world war, the scene in the Near East was changing; the end of the war saw the fall of the once mighty Ottoman empire, it's territories divided up in 1920 in the Treaty of Sevres. By 1923, resulting from the Turkish War for Independence, a new treaty allowed for the establishment of modern Turkey (Smith, 2008). The first Turkish president, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, believed that modernization and an adaptation of Western-style culture was necessary to prevent the imperialist spread of the West. The Soviet Union was attempting much the same thing, though Turkey held an economic platform of state capitalism where the USSR was implementing socialism (Hirst, 2013). Both countries saw the eradication of religious cultural practices, particularly the unveiling of Muslim women, as a major visible step towards establishing a modern, “western” nation; the USSR turned its attention to the women of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan (Hirst, 2013), and Kemal supported diminishing the influence of Islamic culture in all aspects of life (Women and the Veil, 2002). To wear the headscarf was to go against the will of the government. This marked the beginning of the symbolic nature of the headscarf in the political sphere.

 

The significance of Turkey's strides towards Western modernity are significant largely due to the state's central geographic and geopolitical location. Turkey is located at the crossroads of the Eurasian continent, a bridge between Europe, Asia, and the Middle East (Held, 2014). As a result, Turkey is geographically intertwined with most international conflicts. Though managing to maintain neutrality for much of World War II, Turkey's proximity to Italy, and an invitation to join the United Nations, finally influenced its alliance with the Allied powers in 1945 (Hirst, 2013). This association continued after the end of WWII, supplanting most all associations with the USSR. By the time the Cold War had fully coalesced, Turkey's economic and political ties were entirely with the United States and Western Europe. By the 1970s, Turkey had become the most Westernized country in the region (Women and the Veil, 2002).

 

Islamist politicians began to gain popular following in the 1980s, as they developed more moderate stances in the face of the mainstream secular Turkish government (Held, 2014). By the mid 1990s popular sentiments were shifting towards moderation, and restrictions on Islamic cultural expression experienced a brief reprieve. In 1995, Necmettin Erbakan of the Islamic Welfare Party managed to secure 20% of the popular vote-- enough to put him in office as the first non-secular Turkish President (Women and the Veil, 2002). In 1997, in what became known as a “soft coup”, the Turkish military ousted Erbakan and his party from office (Shively, 2005). 1998 and 1999 saw student protests in favor of religious expression, and women being ejected from their university classrooms due to their continued wearing of the headscarf (Women and the Veil, 2002). In the most publicly representational incident of Turkey's anti-headscarf campaign, Parliamentarian-elect Merve Kavakci was ejected from her swearing in, due to her refusal to unveil for the proceedings.

 

In her article “Religious Bodies and the Secular State: The Merve Kavacki Affair”, Kim Shively states that “...the Turkish political establishment and media tend to treat women's appearance, whether in Muslim veils or in Western-style clothing, as an indication of the nature of the Turkish nation, whether it is Middle Eastern (underdeveloped, theocratic, despotic) or Western (industrialized, secular, liberal)” (p.48). In the case of the abrupt end to Kavakci's political career, the headscarf represented an affront to the secularist ideology of the government; but from Kavakci's perspective, the decision to wear the scarf to Parliament was not an overt political statement, but simply a personal choice (Shively, 2005). As Kavakci herself wrote in a brief article published by Foreign Policy in 2004, there was no dress code in Parliament that denied her the right to wear her headscarf, simply the cultural strictures of those others present. The headscarf became powerful as a symbol, only in as much as the Turkish government gave it power.

 

While I understand the origins of the policies regarding Islamic cultural practices in the early years of the Turkish state, I don't believe it's possible for a country to truly claim to be a modern enlightened state while denying the religious freedom of it's people. For much of the last century, Turkey has been fighting to stand among the economic and cultural world leaders. If there exists a Turkish crisis of identity, it exists in the disparity between the internal ideal of Turkey as a forerunner for modernity, and the reality of the denial of religious cultural identity to a significant portion of its population. In the case of the USSR, unveiling campaigns were ultimately useless as cultures which felt oppressed by the socialist state adopted the veil as a sign of resistance. In Turkey, the veil was much less a sign of resistance, more along the lines of evidence of the divide between the secular perspective of the government and the religious aspects of the daily lives of many Turkish people.

 

 Works Cited:

 

-Held, Colbert C. and Cummings, John T. (2014). Middle East Patterns: Places, Peoples, and Politics. Colorado: Westview Press.

 

-Smith, Dan (2008). The State of the Middle East: An Atlas of Conflict and Resolution. California: University of California Press.

 

-Hirst, Samuel J. (2013). Anti-Westernism on the European Periphery: The Meaning of Soviet-Turkish Convergence in the 1930s. Slavic Review. 72. 1, pp.32-53.

 

-Shively, Kim. (2005). Religious Bodies and the Secular State: The Merve Kavakci Affair. Journal of Middle East Women's Studies. Indiana University Press. 1. 3, pp.46-72.

 

-Kavakci, Merve. (2002). Turkey's Fashion Police. Foreign Policy. Washingtonpost. Newsweek Interactive LLC. 145. pp. 16-17.

 

-PBS Frontline (Producer). (2002). Women and the Veil (documentary news segment). PBS News.