Does this constitute cheating?
When I started writing this article in January it had a slightly more optimistic tone. On February 9, 2008, the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), consistent with the promises that got them elected by a landslide last August, passed a constitutional change to the law that banned headscarves in universities, despite a great deal of outrage from the secularist-Kemalist front, including the oppositional Republican People’s Party, the Constitutional Court, the Council of Higher Institutions, and -of course- the Turkish Army. What followed was so ugly that even the liberal intellectuals who criticized the AKP for moving too hastily with the amendment were speechless. Public debate created new binaries explaining public space in the possessive terms of “ours” and “theirs.” Student groups in almost all the leading universities immediately formed groups and declared: We don’t want people wearing the türban (the term used to distinguish the traditional headscarf from the one perceived as a political symbol) in our schools.” Schools, courts, government offices were claimed as the property of secularists, who, within an unofficial coalition described above, have been ruling the country since its founding in 1923.
Yet, despite these depressing and equally dumbfounding responses given by the country’s secular elite, the future looked bright enough. It is understandable that “powerful institutions do not forsake their positions willingly, and less tangibly, the culture which they have helped to create and which in turn reinforces and sustains their authority does not find expressions of resistance easily,” as Emma Sinclair-Webb writes in an article on the Turkish military and its influence. That the AKP got 47% of the vote in the elections which followed an “e-coup” (never heard of a military threatening the government on their official website on a Friday night? I’m happy for you) was precisely the expression of a resistance. It looked like the age of military coups was over (Turkey has had four in its relatively short history), the government was taking Turkey’s EU bid seriously for the first time in a long time, giving way to broader human and civic rights to marginalized groups, and a majority of people clearly demanded a militarization-free democracy.
But when I took a break from writing, the Chief Prosecutor of the Constitutional Court filed a law suit to shut down the AKP and ban its 74 members from politics, including Turkey’s prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and president Abdullah Gül, who can not be associated with any political parties since being elected. The prosecutor, who has been “collecting evidence for the last 4 years” claims that the AKP’s real agenda is to overthrow the secular regime and install an Islamic one. Now instead of pushing for the EU reforms, for women’s rights, for Kurdish language rights, instead of passing educational and environmental reforms, instead of investigating the recently uncovered scandal of Ergenekon (the Turkish “deep state” similar to the Gladio in Italy), the AKP has to prepare for this trial and concentrate on not being shut down. Great news for the country, don’t you think?
It is clear that the real issue at stake is not whether women can wear their headscarves to class or not. Islamists (the real, sharia-loving ones) of the male gender have been attending universities for a long time, and the country has yet to experience an Islamic revolution. The real issue at stake is power, as it usually is; political power, social/cultural influence, and most importantly, the power over economic resources. In the meantime, the general public is fed all sorts of propaganda that is causing an ever growing hysteria and paranoia that Turkey is going to be the next Iran. And more and more people are led to believe that a military coup and/or a political and economic crisis is a reasonable price to pay to prevent that. Let me illustrate my point.
I was my friend’s place in Istanbul when her mom caught me in the hallway, waving a caricature cut out from a newspaper at me, and saying “I heard you are on their side, too.” The caricature depicted four women in hijabs and their husband in common standing next to them. “Their side” was the side of the undercover reactionary Islamists. Not that she thought I was an Islamist, but in her –and thousands like her- mode of thinking, blind sighted Turkish liberals who are naive enough to look at the matter from a “universal right to education” perspective are the reactionaries’ “useful idiots.”
Well, what can you say to your friend’s mom? That she is hugely mistaken? No, not really. I was only 21 at the time and my culture does not look sympathetically upon youths who correct their elders’ political opinions. Whatever I wanted to say in response, I had to save to myself. So she kept going towards the kitchen while I kept walking backwards towards the opposite direction, and all the while she was bombarding me with numerous reasons why allowing “these” into universities would leave Turkey helpless in the hands of radical Islam: it would be an insult to Kemal Ataturk - “the poor guy fought so much for women’s liberation” - and how the headscarf is nothing but a humiliating symbol of female subordination, and how on earth could I support patriarchy. As I am trying to walk away from this incredibly awkward situation, muttering something along the lines of “but education should be a universal right” I am wondering if she really thinks I was going to have an epiphany right then and there in that corridor and agree with her. Frankly, I was not that upset, even though irritation with my country’s elite has become a fixture of my emotional state (can you tell?). I thought to myself, the people have spoken, the government was elected for a second time gaining the vote of 47% of the country, practicing Muslim women have been marginalized long enough, and whatever complaints this lady had, she would just have to get over them. The possibility that Turkey will produce an Islamist revolution is unthinkable and “white Turks” will eventually have to stop indulging in the paranoia that Turkey will become a “Middle Eastern” country.
The opposition’s fear that society is getting more pious – in a politicized way- might not be baseless. More and more young women are taking up the veil, despite the disadvantages it would bring them in the public sphere. I would argue that, for many women the veil has turned into a symbol of resistance. It is a reaction to super-imposed westernization by the country’s secular elite, that is found in policies, rhetoric, commercials and music videos that attempt to transmit “European” tastes and attitudes but clash with more traditional way of living and thinking.
The secular elite, however, fail to acknowledge these dynamics, and hysterically explain Turkey’s increasing public religiosity as a conspiracy fostered by misogynistic fundamentalists aiming to undermine everything Mustafa Kemal Ataturk accomplished. In the process they refuse to admit that women have any agency, firmly asserting that there is no way a woman would take up the veil out of her own will. They see the veil as a woman’s imprisonment in the darkness of patriarchy, as “the biggest humiliation,” as my friend’s mom says.
Many who support headscarf bans wish that religiosity and socio-economic status would once again become coterminous and that the country’s religiously observant would be returned to their natural position at the bottom of the economic ladder. Many openly express disgust when they see veiled women in “fashionable” clothing, driving luxurious cars or dining in upscale restaurants. But the trend is clearly on the rise as well is the propensity for Kemalist-elitist to misinterpret piety and proclaim the hypocrisy of veiled women to wear “so much” make-up, or worse, walk on the street hand-in-hand with their boyfriends. These are privileges that the Kemalists think only secularists are suited for as the modernized and the enlightened part of the society. Within the same logic, a veiled woman has no logical reason to want to attend university unless she is a subversive hoping to overthrow the state. The university stands for enlightenment; the veil stands for an evil blend of dogma and darkness.
A very large segment of the urban population today has moved to the city from rural areas. As in most developing capitalist countries, these communities are not integrated into the urban lifestyle itself, but rather get glimpses of it through the media, and in the public space. For these first and second-generation migrants a dual sense of distrust for the country’s elite as well as a feeling of displacement or normlessness leads them towards religious identity. However, 80 years of adamant secularism and the absence of earlier theocratic rule (even though the Ottoman sultans were also symbolic religious leaders of the Muslim world), together with Turkey’s relatively successful integration into a global network of cultural, political and economic affairs ensures that an Islamic revolution is not on its way.
The ascendancy of an Islamist party has revived the debate about Turkey’s identity. However, the favored line of the Kemalist elite is a predictable distortion. The choice that Turkey faces is not between secularism and theocracy but between authoritarianism and democracy. The AKP has so far respected the division of religion and state, but also allowed people an expanded freedom to express their own faith. It aims to give religious people a greater role in Turkey’s democratic institutions not to subvert them. Additionally, since 2002, the party has been a leading advocate of Turkey’s admission into the EU which would require the transfer of power from state institutions such as the military, the foreign ministry, the National Security Council, and the Constitutional Court (the final two were created after a military coup in order to curtail the power of civilian governments) to elected representatives.
Banning the AKP would hurt Turkey’s chances for admission into the European Union which only allows its members to forbid parties which advocate or commit acts violence—both of which the AKP does not do. The country does not have any alternative political formations that could conceivably take over the government if these 74 politicians in question are banned. A full economic and political crisis would ensure, possibly leading to far more serious repercussions considering the fragile relations with the still not accommodated Kurdish population and northern Iraq. If the military or another department of the Turkish state intervenes against the AKP in a coup, whether this coups involves tanks or not, Turkey will have a decisively abandoned democracy and become an authoritarian state frightened by the decisions and beliefs of its own people. A coup will always dramatically alter the trajectory of political Islam in Turkey. Now the country is headed towards a very tense time over this law suit. In the meantime, the struggle over power will continue.
