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 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.”

That’s why we need to get this issue resolved quickly, said Isamail Kucukkaya in Turkey’s Aksam. “The head scarf issue has become an implement to be used against secularists. As long as it remains unresolved, it helps the people described as Islamists.” Groups from many different views and factions have united under the banner of the head scarf issue, giving the Islamists more power than they would otherwise have. People who oppose Islamism but believe in freedom of expression, for example, support lifting the head scarf ban. And frankly, they have a point.

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Even the army, notoriously adamant about defending Turkish secularism, is staying out of this one, said Susanne Güsten in Germany’s Stuttgarter Nachrichten. Military housing and military hospitals don’t bar women wearing head scarves, and the military sees no point in making the universities more secular than the barracks. Letting women wear head scarves at school will not lead to the imposition of strict Islamic sharia law, contrary to what the most hysterical secularists say. A huge majority of Turks supports lifting the head scarf ban, while just 10 percent want to live under sharia. “The freedom to wear head scarves is coming to Turkey”—and soon. Opponents will just have to get used to it.