Tag: headscarf ban

ISTANBUL (Reuters) – Freshman Busra Gungor won’t have to wear a wig to cover her Islamic headscarf, as many pious relatives and friends did to avoid getting kicked off campus.

In a landmark decision, Turkey’s Higher Education Board earlier this month ordered Istanbul University, one of the country’s biggest, to stop teachers from expelling from classrooms female students who do not comply with a ban on the headscarf.

It was the latest twist in a long political and legal tussle in Turkey between those who see the garment as a symbol of their Muslim faith and those who view it as a challenge to the country’s secular constitution.

“I was ready to wear the wig, just like my cousin did,” said Gungor, a 18-year-old student wearing a pastel-colored headscarf. “This is about my freedom. I don’t see why my headscarf should be seen as a threat to anybody.”

The debate is not unique to Turkey — France and Kosovo, for example, ban headscarves in public schools, and parts of Germany bar teachers from wearing them.

But it goes to the heart of national identity in this country of 75 million Muslims whose modern state was founded as a radical secular republic after World War One.

Disputes over the headscarf and other public symbols of Islam are part of a wider debate over how to reconcile modernity and tradition as Turkey tries to achieve its decades-old ambition to join the European Union.

Together with the courts, Turkey’s army — which has a long history of intervening in politics and has ousted four elected governments — has long seen itself as a bulwark against any roll back toward Islamization. Easing Turkey’s secular laws would have been unthinkable a few years ago.

But reforms aimed at bringing Turkey closer to the EU have clipped the generals’ power. In a sign of how influence and attitudes are shifting, the latest change on headscarves happened with more of a whimper than a bang.

“This is the same fight Turkey has had for 80 years over the secular-pious issue,” writer Mehmet Ali Birand commented in an article entitled “Let them dress the way they want.”

“The world has changed. Turkey has changed. Let’s close those old books and look into the future,” Birand said.

NEW CLASS

A bid by the ruling AK party to lift the headscarf ban three years ago sparked a major political crisis and almost led to the party being closed by the Constitutional Court for anti-secular activities.

But the rise of a new class of observant Muslims to form the backbone of the AKP, which has its roots in political Islam and has held power since 2002, is challenging old notions.

Opponents of the headscarf ban — in place since a 1982 military coup — say it is a violation of individual freedoms and incompatible with a modern democracy. Supporters say the prohibition is necessary precisely to defend Turkey’s democratic values.

“Turkey needs to find a new relationship between state and religion,” Ergun Ozbudun, an constitutional expert, said at a recent lunch with EU ambassadors and journalists.

Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, who comfortably won a referendum last month on government-sponsored constitutional reforms, has declared plans for a brand new basic law.

Seen as clear favorite in 2011 elections, the AKP is widely expected to try again to remove the headscarf ban. Among reforms approved in last month’s referendum were an overhaul of the Constitutional Court, traditionally dominated by secularist judges.

TURNING TIDE

Until the decision by the Higher Education Board, girls from religiously conservative families say they had to wear hats or wigs to conceal their headscarves in order to attend classes. Others decided to stay at home.

As the tide turns, some secularists fear growing social conservatism and “neighborhood pressure” will force them to change their lifestyle and adopt the headscarf.

“I don’t think we will feel pressure to cover here in Istanbul, but I believe there could be a risk in most universities in Anatolian cities,” said 18-year-old Begum Yildiz, a female student smoking a cigarette outside the university’s entrance.

Another student who did not give her name was less sanguine: “I don’t want the ban to be lifted. I know many girls whose families force them to wear the headscarf and they take it off at college. University has been a place for them to feel free.”

Pinar Gedik, a student of Arabic who wears a pink headscarf, said the ban was still being enforced in some faculties.

“I can attend classes with my headscarf now, but it’s still banned in many departments. The pressure is still there.”

Although symbols of Islam are now more common in the public sphere, sensibilities are still raw. The talk of the town these days is whether generals and secularist politicians will attend a October 29 reception at the presidential palace on National Day.

President Abdullah Gul, whose wife wears a headscarf as does Erdogan’s, traditionally hosts two separate receptions for guests with covered and uncovered wives. This year he plans to hold one ball.

Muharrem Ince, a senior MP from the secularist Republican People’s Party, has said his party will boycott the ceremony.

“The president is changing the tradition of double receptions. This is because the AKP want to impose the headscarf not only at universities but from top to bottom,” he said.

Source: Asharq Alawsat

By MARC CHAMPION

ISTANBUL—Turkey is quietly resolving an issue that has come to symbolize the country’s bitter divisions and nearly toppled its government two years ago: Slowly, women are being allowed to wear Islamic headscarves on university campuses.

The head of Turkey’s Higher Education Board confirmed this week that he ordered Istanbul University, one of the nation’s biggest, to stop its professors from kicking students out of their classes for any reason. The directive followed a complaint from a student who was sent out of class last November for wearing a hat, worn by some students as a headscarf stand-in.

“Let alone a hat, we are against anybody being sent out of the classroom for any way of dressing,” said education-board president Yusuf Ozcan, in comments to Turkey’s NTV television channel. “We notified this [to Istanbul University]. If it is needed, we will notify other universities as well.”

Istanbul University students say faculty members told them last month that headscarves would be permitted. Some women have started wearing them, but the ban’s status remains confusing and differs widely between universities.

Turkey’s de facto prohibition of student headscarves, strictly enforced after 1997, has become a talismanic issue in the country’s so-called culture wars. Secularists, including many academics, support the ban out of fear that any dilution of Turkey’s secular laws will open floodgates to the country’s Islamization.

Religious conservatives and many liberals, meanwhile, say the rule is an abuse of individual rights that shouldn’t be tolerated in a nation negotiating to join the European Union. The ruling Justice and Development Party, which has roots in political Islam, has long pushed to lift it.

In a sign of how power is shifting here, the Republican People’s Party, or CHP, the main party of secularist opposition, has said in recent weeks that it, too, would support ending the ban in universities. The party of modern Turkey’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, says it still wants to limit the style of headscarf that would be permitted.

Passions remain high. Bekir Kocazeybek, the Istanbul University clinical microbiology lecturer who sent the hat-wearing student out of his class in November, declined Tuesday to talk about his reasoning. Speaking in his university office, he produced a clutch of e-mail printouts, one of which cursed himself and his Izmir ancestors in colorful terms. He said he had received numerous threats, including death threats, since a TV station made his name public this week.

A 19-year-old classmate of the girl who was sent out of class, meanwhile, says she was among about 20 conservative women in a class of 120 who had begun wearing hats last year and have now started wearing headscarves. “I want to be a doctor, to save lives,” she said. “There’s no politics involved here.”

The headscarf ban is being enforced in a patchwork across the country, at the whim of university rectors, faculty heads and individual professors, said Ozge Genc, head of the Religion-State and Society project at Tesev, a liberal-leaning Istanbul think tank. “The university ban for women is being removed silently, but this is not enough,” she said, adding that women remain under pressure not to cover their heads.

“I take my headscarf off when I go to class but put it on when I go outside,” said 18-year-old medical student Seher, who sat outside the Istanbul University medical faculty with her head covered. “I’m afraid it would cause problems if I kept it on.”

Once the students leave university, they are excluded from working in the public sector so long as they wear a headscarf. The choice also constrains job prospects for women in Turkey in private-sector companies, according to a study about to be released by Tesev. Head coverings are often considered a liability for public-sector contracts or an embarrassment in front of outside clients, the study says.

But secularists say that public servants no longer get promotions to senior appointments unless their wives do cover their heads, a claim difficult to verify.

A headscarf ban has long been in place for public servants in Turkey, a legacy of Ataturk’s belief that they were symbols of backwardness. He famously ordered Turks to wear Western-style hats instead of the Fez and turban.

But the university ban is specified nowhere in Turkey’s constitution or laws. It was introduced after a military coup in 1980, and became strictly enforced only after 1997, when a coalition government headed by the Islamic Welfare party was forced from power. When the Justice and Development Party, formed by moderates from the Welfare party, took power in 2002, lifting the ban was a priority.

Parliament passed legislation to lift the ban in 2008. The law was struck down by Turkey’s top court on grounds that it conflicted with the constitution’s secular guarantees. The court then came within a single vote of banning the AKP as a threat to Turkey’s secular foundations.

That, however, is unlikely to be repeated. In a referendum last month, the government succeeded in driving through amendments to the constitution that will radically change the make-up of the Constitutional Court, likely ending its dominance by secularists. Turkey’s Higher Education Board, too, was once a bastion of secularism. It is now dominated by government appointees, analysts say.

Write to Marc Champion at marc.champion@wsj.com

Source: The Wall Street Journal