Alcohol and Polygamy Make Headlines in Secular Turkey

By Ayla Albayrak

Election campaigns come and go, but Turkey’s culture wars, between social liberals and religious conservatives, never die.

On Wednesday, one of Turkey’s highest courts, the Council of State, struck down a government regulation banning alcohol sales at rock concerts, university festivals and other events for people under 24 years of age. The decision delighted critics who saw the regulation, which came into force in January, as overly strict or as proof that the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) has an Islamist worldview.

The court also struck down another part of the regulation, which had banned the sale of small 20 centiliter bottles and cans of alcohol in grocery stores, because of their easy availability to youth.

The government had said the new regulation was needed to protect the nation’s youth from the dangers of alcohol – a rationale that skeptics questioned. Unlike many other European nations, Turkey does not have a significant binge drinking problem among its youngsters. The Council of State reasoned that as Turkish law gives people over age 18 the right to drink, the regulation “restricted the legal right of people over 18 to buy and consume alcohol.”

Meanwhile, a female life coach and family advisor has caused a stir after she said in a newspaper interview that polygamy should be legalized. Sibel Uresin had been giving seminars on the family for several of Istanbul’s more conservative municipalities.

Uresin’s argument was that 85% of men are unfaithful to their wives, so it made sense to legalize their mistresses. According to a study published recently by Hacettepe University in Ankara, 187,000 women in Turkey are in de-facto polygamous marriages. The problem, said Uresin, is that second, third and fourth wives — Islam allows a man to have four – can be too easily abandoned, without legal rights. All a man has to do to divorce a wife under Islamic law is to say “I divorce you” three times.

“Men run to women who are more flirtatious and who laugh more, and women who satisfy them sexually. If I were a man, I would be polygamous,” Uresin told the Turkish newspaper HaberTurk in an interview published Tuesday. She said she told her own husband he could take more wives if he wanted to, but he hadn’t taken her up on it.

Uresin’s words caused an uproar. Women’s organizations across the country said her views were backward and conflicted with international conventions that Turkey has signed. Modern Turkey’s founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk banned polygamy in 1926, as a part of his Westernizing reforms. Still, multiple marriages, approved by an Imam, but not legally registered, remain relatively commonplace in Turkey’s South East in particular.

The Islamic-leaning AKP has not suggested legalizing polygamy and seemed unhappy about the furore just weeks before June 12 elections. While the party’s headquarters was silent, a spokesman for the AKP-run Eyup Municipality in Istanbul said Uresin had once held a seminar for the municipality about “interfamily communication,” but they were upset about her polygamy comments.

“She offered to give that seminar free of charge, but we will never consider having her speak here again,” the spokesman said.

via Alcohol and Polygamy Make Headlines in Secular Turkey – Emerging Europe Real Time – WSJ.