From the Head Fellow: New Owners, New Spirit, New Optimism
By Charles R. Eisendrath ’75
Charles R. Eisendrath ’75
Two days after the Knight-Wallace Fellows met with Turkish Army generals in Ankara, President Abdullah Gül marched troops into northern Iraq against Kurdish militants. That same day he dropped a bomb of another sort inside Turkey by approving a constitutional amendment ordering the nation’s universities to permit female students to wear headscarves.
If that sounds like a commendable exercise of civil liberties, as indeed the Freedom and Justice Party (AKP) claimed, (Gül is a founder) that’s understandable. In the U.S., it would be. But like so many things in the Middle East, the image here is its mirror opposite there. AKP is the party of Islam. That makes its imposition of a religious practice the more contentious. A Turkish government opening the way for “the wearing of the scarf,” as the Turks put it, is far more serious than the Bush administration, with its own ties to fundamentalist religion, obtaining a mandate for prayer in public schools. Religion is to Turkish politics what race is to American politics. Government-imposed university tolerance of the scarf is more akin to Washington dictating a national okay for campus enemies of integration to wear Confederate flag t-shirts.
Yes, the scarf is religious and the Confederate flag political, but sometimes comparing apples and oranges makes good sense. The flag symbolizes the side that lost the Civil War and resistance to racial integration. The scarf in this sense represents the Islamic society that lost out in Turkey’s forced shift toward secularism.
The AKP enjoys an absolute parliamentary majority and constitutes the first administration of Islamic piety since 1923, when General Mustafa Kemal seized power and threw out the occupying English and French and the invading Armenians and Greeks. The grateful new Turkish Republic dubbed him “Atatürk” (Father of the Turks) and in short order he changed nearly everything. The alphabet would be no longer Arabic, but Latin. Legal and educational systems would be Western. No more fezes for men, and veils went out of fashion. The ban on scarves in state-sponsored entities followed in 1989, part of another wave of secularism.
A new national consensus helped Turkey become a serious candidate for entry into the European Union. Success is far less likely if Turkey begins to be perceived as an Islamic society. Failure of its EU candidacy, however, alarms most Turks far less than the prospect of sliding back into an Islamist society. All around them in “our bad neighborhood,” as many Turks call the Middle East, are examples of nations where religion rules and tight strictures bind the female half of the population.
If you had been with KWF asking academics, politicians, journalists, generals and feminists about Turkish life and policies, you would have learned of yet another level of complexity. The very “Islamic” AKP administration feared as possibly shredding the country’s secular consensus has brought spectacular secular achievements. It has shaped the EU campaign and brought a tripling of GNP in the last six years.
So, you might wonder, are the fears about AKP’s being a “Trojan Horse” concealing the armies of religious fundamentalists simply those of an old elite facing challenges from the newly-empowered? That’s what AKP claims, and, after two lengthy sessions with Gül during KWF visits, I have no doubts about his talent and suave mastery of Western discourse. Much is made of his wife wearing the scarf. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s daughter’s attending Indiana University. According to some, this is because they could not get a good education at home without compromising piety. I don’t buy it. Nobody minds the scarf in non-official contexts, several private universities allow the scarf and ambitious Turkish students (including Gül) have routinely burnished résumés with Western schooling.
You would also have learned exactly what a head scarf is, beginning with what it is not: “Head scarf ” does not refer to the piece of cloth but to how it is worn. This is so easy to miss that even after four KWF trips and dozens of conversations I needed a demonstration. Tied under the chin (which often hides most of a hairdo and much of the neck) it is not “the scarf.” But the same bandana—plain wool or Givenchy silk, the material and shape makes no difference—tied in a way that hides all hair and the entire neck broadcasts Islamic piety and, to many, constitutes a serious provocation.
At this writing serious tremors shake a society justly famous for melding East and West and shaping a form of Islam tolerant of secular values. Gül’s headscarf decision has been appealed and the constitutional court has accepted cases outlawing the AKP and banning Gül and Erdogan from politics. By the time you read this there will doubtless have been further aftershocks.
Can an administration rooted in Islam defend secular values while re-introducing explosive symbols of battles many hoped were resolved for good? Many Turks, perhaps most, don’t want to find out. I don’t blame them.
