Turkey: Is a head scarf a symbol of freedom—or oppression?

Is Turkey going Islamist? asked Qatar’s The Peninsula in an editorial. The Islamist-leaning government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has announced that it plans to change the constitution to allow women to wear Muslim head scarves while attending

Is Turkey going Islamist? asked Qatar’s The Peninsula in an editorial. The Islamist-leaning government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has announced that it plans to change the constitution to allow women to wear Muslim head scarves while attending classes at universities. Erdogan has the necessary votes in parliament to get his amendments passed, and the proposal has Turkey in an uproar. The head scarf is not just a “symbol of Islamic modesty” but also a symbol of the “existential paradox of modern Turkey.” When Mustafa Kemal Ataturk founded Turkey on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire in 1923, he was determined that the new country be secular and Western-oriented. He banned the wearing of the fez by men and discouraged that of head scarves by women, and these dress codes have become key symbols of the secular state. Yet it would be far too simple to say that an Islamist government is trying to destroy Ataturk’s principle of secularism. After all, let’s not forget that “it is the most observant citizens of Turkey who have been its most active democrats, while its staunchly secular old guard—the military and the judiciary—has run things by court order and coup.”

The head scarf issue does, however, show where the government’s priorities lie, said Muharrem Sarikaya in Turkey’s Sabah. Turkey still needs to make crucial reforms to its penal code if it hopes one day to enter the European Union. You’d think that would be at the top of the agenda of any government. Yet Erdogan chose instead to focus his energy on making sure that devout Muslim girls could wear head scarves at university. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that he wanted “to stir things up and make the issue political fodder.”

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