Codes of Turkey’s Culture Wars in Historical Perspective: The Headscarf Controversy
Sener Akturk is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He is currently writing a dissertation on the "Regimes of Ethnicity and a Theory of Ethnic Regime Change in Germany, Soviet Union and post-Communist Russia, and Turkey."Sabrina Tavernise’s “Youthful Voice Stirs Challenge to Secular Turks” traces a development that can no longer be seen as marginal or exceptional, as I would be inclined to interpret it in the earlier periods of the Turkish Republic: Women from secular families who choose to wear the headscarf in contrast to the practice of their parents and others in their social milieu. The opposite has been the norm for most of the 20th century: Millions of women since the founding of the Republic, in part voluntarily and in part forcefully, gave up the headscarf as they sought education and employment in non-agricultural jobs.
The process has been intimately intertwined with the process of urbanization—and also perceived as such: Peasant family moves from the village—where all family members worked the land and raised animals, and all female members of the family wore the headscarf upon reaching adolescence—into the city—where they were employed or self-employed, legally or illegally, in a wide spectrum of jobs typical of urban life, and where the post-peasant family does not anymore have women wearing the headscarf in the second generation.
To begin with, let me amend, or rather enrich, this typical story that otherwise accurately reflects the trajectory of the 20th century social change, in three significant ways.
First, I would note that Turkey has been unusually rural and unusually peasant until late into the 20th century. The percentage of Turkey’s population living in villages has been greater not only than its neighbors in the Balkans (Greece and Bulgaria) and the Caucasus (Soviet Union, and later, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan), but also greater than its neighbors to the East (Iran) and South (Syria and Iraq). Hence, we are looking at an unusually agricultural society even in the second half of the 20th century. A personal aside to bring this story closer home: I was able to spend summers in my grandparents’ village, eating fresh vegetables, fruits, eggs, and homemade butter and cheese. Because of the unusually large (both in proportional and absolute terms) size of the peasant population, migration into the cities throughout the 20th century did not deplete, so to say, the reservoir of peasants who are, almost by definition, religiously observant Muslims. So the headscarf did not entirely “disappear” through urbanization, because there were and still are many people who live in the villages, despite mass migration since the 1950s.
Second, if the first generation city-dwellers were married, as they usually were, and at an early age, and were not employed and remained housewives, then they did not have any compulsion to abandon the headscarf, except perhaps for social censure in exceptionally secular neighborhoods, because they were not affected by the official prohibition on wearing the headscarf in public employment and education. However, given the very patriarchal structure of the Turkish family, in many cases I suspect housewives’ choices were more or less an extension of their husbands’ will. If a man did not want his wife to wear the headscarf, either because it would harm his career prospects, social status, or out of personal preference, his wife would have to abandon the headscarf. Vice versa is of course also the case.
Third, since Turks love to be self-employed in small shops and family businesses, a preference that they share with many Arabs, Americans, and others around the world, they could employ female members of their extended family and friends (e.g., from the village) in their private businesses, even if they were wearing the headscarf.
I do not bring up these three reasons to suggest that women did not or do not wear the headscarf out of religious conviction; many if not most (or perhaps almost all) of them do. But in an environment where not wearing the headscarf constitutes the officially hegemonic position, these three reasons, in part, explain the persistence of this practice as a sociological phenomenon, despite the unfavorable odds. The odds were unfavorable, so to say, but not insurmountable.
Apart from remaining in the village, being a housewife in a religious household in the city, or being employed in the private business of entrepreneurs who employed women wearing headscarves, there was a fourth way in which urban Muslim women could wear the headscarf: In the sectors and spaces where it was prohibited to wear the headscarf, as a form of protest and resistance against the secular state. This is the group of educated urban women who adopted the headscarf, and it is the category that Sabrina Tavernise focuses on. This pithy summary encapsulates the radically different nature of this fourth category from the other three: “So Ms. Yilmaz dropped out of school. Her parents were angry. Her classmates stopped calling her.” Wearing a headscarf, not to conform, or out of habit, but as a form of protest, is still rare.
Until the 1990s, women who occupied this fourth category were always incomparably smaller than the other three categories I discussed above. But their numbers were bound to increase, and indeed they did. A key factor here was the neoliberal transformation of the Turkish economy under Prime Minister Turgut Ozal, a good comrade (pun intended) of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. A development unheard of until that time became widespread: Some people, who became rich and educated, retained the headscarf, or stranger still, daughters of already secularized, “headscarf-free” families adopted the headscarf. (“Ms. Yilmaz, now 21, is more observant than her parents.”) “What is wrong with them,” people started asked. Observers were shocked, scared, terrified, amazed, impressed, or even jealous—depending on where they stood. This movement indicated that secularization, in contrast to the taken-for-granted assumption in Turkey, was not a one-way street: Already secularized families could be de-secularized.
When I was teaching at Bogazici University, interestingly, many of the female students in my classes wore headscarves. Perhaps that was in part because they somehow knew I was not opposed to or in any way prejudiced against women wearing headscarves. However, many academics in Turkey interpret and oppose the headscarf as a symbol of political Islam rather than welcoming it as a reflection of personal religiosity. I also understand the fears of many girls from conservative, poor, and patriarchal families that are themselves first-generation city-dwellers, and who may be coerced by their families or pressured in their social milieu to wear the headscarf. Therefore, lifting the ban on the headscarf has to be accompanied by a very concerted effort to shelter women from exactly this kind of pressure, perhaps including a comprehensive law criminalizing coercive pressure on women to wear the headscarf as well as administrative and other measures to protect women from violence and harassment on the basis of their dress code.
In many ways, some of the young women who choose to wear the headscarf already overcame the barriers imposed by the prohibition, thanks to Turkey’s vibrant economy, which is by far the largest economy in the Islamic world, despite Turkey’s lack of any significant oil or gas reserves. For an observer of Turkish and American political history like myself, spectacles of women wearing headscarves not being allowed to enter university campuses and some other public buildings might conjure up eerie parallels with the images of Blacks being denied services in certain places under Segregation in the South. And this is exactly how the issue was taken up one day by a major Turkish daily newspaper supporting the lifting of the ban on wearing the headscarf in universities. Similarly, it was not without a reason that an entirely new discourse of “White Turks” vs. “Black Turks” emerged in the process of debates, confrontations, and socio-political polarization over the place of religiosity and religious freedom in the public sphere.
Finally, there is an unmistakable economic class dimension to the emergence of the headscarf as a focal symbol of political polarization. The image of a domestic servant in a wealthy Istanbul household or even a custodian in a public facility wearing the headscarf would not and did not create a controversy in this highly stratified society demarcated by status symbols. Headscarf as a symbol of the lower classes was an acceptable feature of the urban landscape. But what has been distressing for some members of the old elites in Turkey has been the appearance of women wearing the headscarf in bourgeois circles, in upper class neighborhoods, and in the world of conspicuous consumption. While this development is also criticized by some pious Muslims themselves who castigate the embourgeoisement of upwardly mobile people from traditional, Islamic backgrounds, the reaction of the more established secular bourgeoisie to the appearance of a more religiously oriented bourgeoisie overshadowed the criticisms launched from an Islamic point of view emphasizing values of modest a life-style and moderation in consumption.
In short, just as the abortion debate in the United States appears unfathomable and enigmatic for those not acquainted with the codes of “culture wars” in this country, the appearance of the “headscarf controversy” as the no.1 issue of recent Turkish political history, it seems, will continue to perplex and baffle outside observers while serving as a proxy for many underlying cultural, political, and socio-economic contradictions of Turkish modernity.
The process has been intimately intertwined with the process of urbanization—and also perceived as such: Peasant family moves from the village—where all family members worked the land and raised animals, and all female members of the family wore the headscarf upon reaching adolescence—into the city—where they were employed or self-employed, legally or illegally, in a wide spectrum of jobs typical of urban life, and where the post-peasant family does not anymore have women wearing the headscarf in the second generation.
To begin with, let me amend, or rather enrich, this typical story that otherwise accurately reflects the trajectory of the 20th century social change, in three significant ways.
First, I would note that Turkey has been unusually rural and unusually peasant until late into the 20th century. The percentage of Turkey’s population living in villages has been greater not only than its neighbors in the Balkans (Greece and Bulgaria) and the Caucasus (Soviet Union, and later, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan), but also greater than its neighbors to the East (Iran) and South (Syria and Iraq). Hence, we are looking at an unusually agricultural society even in the second half of the 20th century. A personal aside to bring this story closer home: I was able to spend summers in my grandparents’ village, eating fresh vegetables, fruits, eggs, and homemade butter and cheese. Because of the unusually large (both in proportional and absolute terms) size of the peasant population, migration into the cities throughout the 20th century did not deplete, so to say, the reservoir of peasants who are, almost by definition, religiously observant Muslims. So the headscarf did not entirely “disappear” through urbanization, because there were and still are many people who live in the villages, despite mass migration since the 1950s.
Second, if the first generation city-dwellers were married, as they usually were, and at an early age, and were not employed and remained housewives, then they did not have any compulsion to abandon the headscarf, except perhaps for social censure in exceptionally secular neighborhoods, because they were not affected by the official prohibition on wearing the headscarf in public employment and education. However, given the very patriarchal structure of the Turkish family, in many cases I suspect housewives’ choices were more or less an extension of their husbands’ will. If a man did not want his wife to wear the headscarf, either because it would harm his career prospects, social status, or out of personal preference, his wife would have to abandon the headscarf. Vice versa is of course also the case.
Third, since Turks love to be self-employed in small shops and family businesses, a preference that they share with many Arabs, Americans, and others around the world, they could employ female members of their extended family and friends (e.g., from the village) in their private businesses, even if they were wearing the headscarf.
I do not bring up these three reasons to suggest that women did not or do not wear the headscarf out of religious conviction; many if not most (or perhaps almost all) of them do. But in an environment where not wearing the headscarf constitutes the officially hegemonic position, these three reasons, in part, explain the persistence of this practice as a sociological phenomenon, despite the unfavorable odds. The odds were unfavorable, so to say, but not insurmountable.
Apart from remaining in the village, being a housewife in a religious household in the city, or being employed in the private business of entrepreneurs who employed women wearing headscarves, there was a fourth way in which urban Muslim women could wear the headscarf: In the sectors and spaces where it was prohibited to wear the headscarf, as a form of protest and resistance against the secular state. This is the group of educated urban women who adopted the headscarf, and it is the category that Sabrina Tavernise focuses on. This pithy summary encapsulates the radically different nature of this fourth category from the other three: “So Ms. Yilmaz dropped out of school. Her parents were angry. Her classmates stopped calling her.” Wearing a headscarf, not to conform, or out of habit, but as a form of protest, is still rare.
Until the 1990s, women who occupied this fourth category were always incomparably smaller than the other three categories I discussed above. But their numbers were bound to increase, and indeed they did. A key factor here was the neoliberal transformation of the Turkish economy under Prime Minister Turgut Ozal, a good comrade (pun intended) of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. A development unheard of until that time became widespread: Some people, who became rich and educated, retained the headscarf, or stranger still, daughters of already secularized, “headscarf-free” families adopted the headscarf. (“Ms. Yilmaz, now 21, is more observant than her parents.”) “What is wrong with them,” people started asked. Observers were shocked, scared, terrified, amazed, impressed, or even jealous—depending on where they stood. This movement indicated that secularization, in contrast to the taken-for-granted assumption in Turkey, was not a one-way street: Already secularized families could be de-secularized.
When I was teaching at Bogazici University, interestingly, many of the female students in my classes wore headscarves. Perhaps that was in part because they somehow knew I was not opposed to or in any way prejudiced against women wearing headscarves. However, many academics in Turkey interpret and oppose the headscarf as a symbol of political Islam rather than welcoming it as a reflection of personal religiosity. I also understand the fears of many girls from conservative, poor, and patriarchal families that are themselves first-generation city-dwellers, and who may be coerced by their families or pressured in their social milieu to wear the headscarf. Therefore, lifting the ban on the headscarf has to be accompanied by a very concerted effort to shelter women from exactly this kind of pressure, perhaps including a comprehensive law criminalizing coercive pressure on women to wear the headscarf as well as administrative and other measures to protect women from violence and harassment on the basis of their dress code.
In many ways, some of the young women who choose to wear the headscarf already overcame the barriers imposed by the prohibition, thanks to Turkey’s vibrant economy, which is by far the largest economy in the Islamic world, despite Turkey’s lack of any significant oil or gas reserves. For an observer of Turkish and American political history like myself, spectacles of women wearing headscarves not being allowed to enter university campuses and some other public buildings might conjure up eerie parallels with the images of Blacks being denied services in certain places under Segregation in the South. And this is exactly how the issue was taken up one day by a major Turkish daily newspaper supporting the lifting of the ban on wearing the headscarf in universities. Similarly, it was not without a reason that an entirely new discourse of “White Turks” vs. “Black Turks” emerged in the process of debates, confrontations, and socio-political polarization over the place of religiosity and religious freedom in the public sphere.
Finally, there is an unmistakable economic class dimension to the emergence of the headscarf as a focal symbol of political polarization. The image of a domestic servant in a wealthy Istanbul household or even a custodian in a public facility wearing the headscarf would not and did not create a controversy in this highly stratified society demarcated by status symbols. Headscarf as a symbol of the lower classes was an acceptable feature of the urban landscape. But what has been distressing for some members of the old elites in Turkey has been the appearance of women wearing the headscarf in bourgeois circles, in upper class neighborhoods, and in the world of conspicuous consumption. While this development is also criticized by some pious Muslims themselves who castigate the embourgeoisement of upwardly mobile people from traditional, Islamic backgrounds, the reaction of the more established secular bourgeoisie to the appearance of a more religiously oriented bourgeoisie overshadowed the criticisms launched from an Islamic point of view emphasizing values of modest a life-style and moderation in consumption.
In short, just as the abortion debate in the United States appears unfathomable and enigmatic for those not acquainted with the codes of “culture wars” in this country, the appearance of the “headscarf controversy” as the no.1 issue of recent Turkish political history, it seems, will continue to perplex and baffle outside observers while serving as a proxy for many underlying cultural, political, and socio-economic contradictions of Turkish modernity.
