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Tag: headscarf

  • Headscarf conquers parliament

    Headscarf conquers parliament

    aynurbayram1Published on: Friday 20 May 2011, 14:55 by Fréderike Geerdink in Hoofdartikel, Politics, Religion, Stories, Women

    Published in: monthly magazine Opzij, June 2011

    The Turkish parliament has up to now been a forbidden area for women wearing a headscarf. And in the labour market women who cover their hair are discriminated against. Aynur Bayram tries to change that by standing as an independent candidate in the upcoming general elections.

    A hundred thousand votes. That’s how many votes Aynur Bayram (30) has to collect in one of the two districts in the Turkish capital of Ankara, a city of more than 5 million inhabitants. If she succeeds, she will take an oath a few weeks after the elections and become an MP. With headscarf. The first ever in the Turkish parliament. Bayram: ‘Many people say the time isn’t right for it yet. But when is the time right then? It only takes courage.’

    There is courage needed indeed. The last woman with a headscarf in Turkey who was elected as a representative, Merve Kavakci, was booed out of parliament before she got the chance to take the oath. That was in 1999, and since then no party has dared to put scarfed women on their candidates list. The courage to conquer the bastion of male power and strict secularism comes from one woman during the elections on June 12th.

    via Headscarf conquers parliament | Journalist in Turkey, background articles, news and weblog about Turkey and Istanbul.

  • Yes to Moustaches, No to Headscarves

    Yes to Moustaches, No to Headscarves

    By Ayla Albayrak

    AFP/Getty Images A Turkish woman with drawn moustache chants slogans during a 2009 protest.
    AFP/Getty Images A Turkish woman with drawn moustache chants slogans during a 2009 protest.

    A women’s group has been number-crunching party lists submitted this week for Turkey’s elections on June 12, to resolve the following question: Do you still need a moustache to enter parliament?

    Answer: It still helps.

    Ka-Der, a women’s organization posed the moustache question ahead of the last elections in 2007. They got famous women, ranging from entertainers to businesswomen, to pose wearing fake moustaches on the covers of Turkish newspapers to persuade political parties to put forward more female candidates.

    That time, only 48 women made it to Turkey’s 550-seat Parliament. As the next elections near, Ka-Der say the party lists suggest the number of women that make it into the legislature will nearly double — but still won’t get close to the 50% level the group believe would match Turkey’s claims to act as democratic role model for the Middle East.

    “We calculated that in the worst case scenario, 78 women will make it to the Parliament, and in the best case, that number would reach 110,” said Cigdem Aydin, the head of Ka-Der in a telephone interview. “We are angry because so many capable women were wasted. Men see the political arena as a means to power, and they don’t want to share that power with women.”

    Several Turkish women lead huge family business dynasties and have made it onto Forbes Magazine’s lists of the world’s richest and most powerful people. A woman, Umit Boyner, heads Turkey’s largest business lobby, TUSIAD. Moreover, almost half of university teaching staff in Turkey are women.

    Politics, however, remains a no-fly zone. One hurdle to getting women elected is that in rural areas in particular, many women vote according to their husbands wishes. Another, is that just as moustache is a plus in Turkish politics, an Islamic-style headscarf is a minus.

    Some 60% of Turkish women wear headscarves, but due to the staunchly secular character of the current constitution, women in state jobs are not allowed to cover their hair. That includes Parliament.

    A group of headscarf wearing women campaigned for the Islamic-leaning AK party to put them on its list of candidates for this election, using the slogan “No headscarves — no votes.” But even the AK party, which is expected to remove headscarf restrictions when it redrafts the constitution after the elections, didn’t want to tackle that taboo. It nominated just one candidate with a headscarf.

    That candidate is Gulderen Gultekin, a teacher from Antalya. The seaside city is secular territory, more famous for bikini-wearing tourists than headscarf-wearing women.

    “We don’t count her,” said Nesrin Semiz, who heads the campaign, because she can’t win and probably wouldn’t insist on wearing the headscarf even if she did. “She is a teacher and removes headscarf at work. She would remove in the parliament, too.”

    Perhaps the candidate with fewest hurdles to overcome is the famous folk-pop singer, Ibrahim Tatlises. He is hugely popular, close to the ruling AK party, and will run for election in his hometown of Urfa, in eastern Turkey.

    What’s more, he has a pretty impressive moustache.

    via Yes to Moustaches, No to Headscarves – Emerging Europe Real Time – WSJ.

  • Turkey: Religious Conservatives Confront Headscarf Dilemma as Election Looms

    Turkey: Religious Conservatives Confront Headscarf Dilemma as Election Looms

    Women take a tea and breakfast break in Sultanahmet Square while visiting Istanbul. Turkish women's groups are united behind an initiative to place women who wear headscarves high enough on electoral lists to be chosen in the upcoming Turkish parliamentary elections. (Photo: Dean C.K. Cox)
    Women take a tea and breakfast break in Sultanahmet Square while visiting Istanbul. Turkish women's groups are united behind an initiative to place women who wear headscarves high enough on electoral lists to be chosen in the upcoming Turkish parliamentary elections. (Photo: Dean C.K. Cox)

    A woman’s group is stirring controversy in Turkey with a campaign to elect headscarf-wearing women to parliament. Some of the fiercest opposition to the initiative is coming not from secularists, but from religious conservatives.

    With just over two months to go before Turkey’s parliamentary balloting, the country’s political leaders are starting to assemble party lists of candidates. The number of seats any given party wins is determined by the percentage of the vote it receives. The higher an individual candidate is on a party list, then, the better the odds of that person becoming a MP.

    Turkish women’s groups have been traditionally divided along ideological lines. But they are uniting behind the initiative, launched in March by a non-partisan group called Women Meet Halfway, to have women who wear headscarves placed high enough up on party lists so that they stand a decent chance of being elected.

    “No headscarves, no vote,” shouted sixty-odd women who gathered outside the parliament building in Ankara on April 8. “As it stands, our democracy is half-baked”, said the group’s spokeswoman, Nesrin Semiz. “Two-thirds of Turkish women cover their heads. Not one of them has a seat in parliament.”

    The campaign is generating an ambiguous reaction from an electoral constituency that, at least at first glance, would appear to be a natural ally: religiously conservative men.

    In general, the conservative press is trying to ignore the campaign. Those columnists who have addressed it have tended to be disparaging. A columnist in the mass-market conservative daily Zaman, Mehmet Kamis, has described the headscarf issue as “meaningless.”

    “These elections are a vital opportunity for Turkey to create the foundations of civilian democracy,” he wrote on April 2. “Why put that at risk with all this talk of headscarves.” Kamis was alluding to the main plank of the governing Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) election campaign: the promise of a new “civilian” constitution.

    The AKP has Islamist roots, and the wives of some top party leaders wear headscarves in public, but those same party leaders make no secret of wanting to win more than two-thirds of the seats in parliament. Such a total would allow the AKP to push through a new constitution on its own. Party leaders worry that strong backing for the headscarf issue could complicate their electoral goal. Yet, they also know that distancing themselves from the issue could create political problems.

    Fehmi Koru, an influential political commentator close to Turkish President Abdullah Gul, is perhaps representative of the AKP position of finessed support for the headscarf campaign. “People are no longer content with a democracy limited to visiting a polling booth,” he said. “They want to see deputies who live and think like them.”

    The headscarf issue has been a source of particular contention in Turkish politics in the recent past. In 1999, Merve Kavakci, the first deputy in Turkish history to enter parliament wearing a headscarf, was ejected by her colleagues amid an uproar. In 2008, the AKP’s attempt to lift a ban on headscarves at universities triggered a closure case against it.

    Supporters of Women Meet Halfway’s campaign think fears of a repeat of 2008 or 1999 are unfounded. The Constitutional Court, which narrowly voted against closing the AKP in 2008, has since been packed with justices sympathetic to the governing party, campaign member Hilal Kaplan points out.

    A secular party that lobbied hard for the court’s intervention against the AKP in 2008, meanwhile, has signaled that it will take no action, if women wearing headscarves are elected to parliament.

    In any case, says Fatma Bostan Unsal, a founding member of the AKP who wears a headscarf and has put her name forward as a candidate, there is nothing in parliamentary regulations about headscarves — only a requirement for women to wear “suits.” Turkish courts stripped Kavakci of her position in 1999 not because of her headwear, but because she had become a US citizen “without the permission of the Turkish authorities.”

    Unsal says she will run as an independent if the AKP doesn’t support headscarf-wearing candidates. With just under nine weeks to go until Turks go to the polls, she still doesn’t know what colors she will be presenting herself under: Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the arbiter of who rises and who falls in the AKP, is keeping his options wide open.

    But a ferocious attack last week on the headscarf campaign by one of Turkey’s most prominent Islamist intellectuals has led some women to wonder whether all the high-minded talk of the need to protect the AKP from a repeat of 2008 isn’t hiding something rather less savory. Writing in Zaman on April 2, Ali Bulac described the campaign’s leaders as “fifth columnists … working from the start to destroy the Islamist movement from within.”

    Supporting the use of the headscarf is “a religious obligation of every believing man and woman,” Bulac went on. But the campaigners “look down their noses at their own neighborhoods,” and “have stripped the headscarf of its religious significance, reducing it to a simple issue of human rights inspired by feminism.”

    Bulac’s article drew a sharp response from one of the campaign organizers. “Apparently the reverence some conservative men feel for their covered womenfolk is dependent on them [women] deferring to their husbands and betters, and minding their own business,” Hilal Kaplan wrote in the conservative daily Yeni Safak on April 4. “But if that is what they understand by [the Islamic concept of men’s duty to protect women] then, inevitably, they are going to end up being told ‘thanks, but no thanks.’”

    via Turkey: Religious Conservatives Confront Headscarf Dilemma as Election Looms | EurasiaNet.org.

  • The headscarf is not about freedom

    The headscarf is not about freedom

    ELDAR MAMEDOV

    As Turkey is struggling to lift the headscarf ban on university campuses, Islamic conservatives and some of their liberal allies are already calling for the end of all restrictions on the use of the garb in the public sphere, especially in the workplace.

    It sounds like an impeccably liberal demand: after all, if adult women are to be allowed to wear headscarves at universities, on what basis should they be denied the same right when they pursue their careers after graduation? And yet, there are concerns that setting the headscarf totally free would lead not to the liberalization of Turkish society but to its further Islamization, an outcome that would be greatly detrimental to a core liberal principle of gender equality.

    One of the reasons for such concerns has to do with the political context in Turkey, in which the headscarf debate is raging on. Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, the leader of Turkey’s main opposition party, the secularist Republican People’s Party, or CHP, in a major departure from the line of his predecessor Deniz Baykal, declared that the CHP was ready to solve the headscarf problem. To demonstrate the seriousness of his intentions, he entrusted respected liberal-minded academic Sencer Ayata with the task of coming out with concrete proposals to that end. However, instead of seizing on the opportunity to solve this highly divisive issue, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has chosen to keep using and abusing the headscarf in his tug of war with the secularists. Erdoğan lashed out at women who do not cover themselves for supposedly failing to empathize with those who do, willfully ignoring those uncovered women who were very vocal in defending the rights of pious women. The ruling Islam-rooted Justice and Development Party, or AKP’s, single-minded focus on headscarf freedom stands in sharp contrast to its neglect of other aspects of democratization, such as the rights of Kurds and Alevis. There is a growing realization that the AKP understands freedom as being chiefly about religious freedom. If so, the promotion of the headscarf should be seen not as a liberalizing move, but as part of ongoing efforts to nudge Turkish society in a more conservative, religiously observant direction.

    In this context, the potential effects of the spread of the headscarf in the workplace should not be underestimated. Currently their use is banned for public servants, but it is possible that in the future some restrictions will be relaxed. On the one hand, this will make public institutions more representative. On the other, in the context of the religious revivalism in Turkey it risks introducing conservative religious values and norms in the workplace at the expense of the principles of merit and competence. This would have especially pernicious effects on the situation of women. As American-Algerian sociologist Marnia Lazreg observes in her book “Questioning the Veil: Open Letters to Muslim Women” (it should be urgently translated into Turkish!), the spread of the headscarf in the workplace in countries like Algeria and Egypt has gradually led to sexually segregated delivery of services. She followed the trajectories of some professional women who took up the headscarf, succumbing to the wave of the newly assertive religiosity in these countries. She noticed that from that point on they ceased to be perceived by their male colleagues as competent workers and competitors for promotion. They have been relegated to the role of invisible helpers at best.

    It is, of course, possible that Turkey will prove to be different. Unlike in Algeria and Egypt, Turkey´s conservative Muslims have largely internalized the benefits of democracy and global markets. However, the softening of their hard-edged cultural and social conservatism is proceeding at a much slower pace. Therefore, one of the arguments advanced by those who favor the total and immediate liberalization of the headscarf is that, in the words of The Economist magazine, the headscarf provides a stamp of virtue that could convince conservative men to allow women to work outside home. But it is somewhat perverse to argue for female advancement while at the same time uncritically accepting the intrusive regulation of women’s bodies. Besides, as any Muslim woman would know, the headscarf is not only about the outer appearance, it also subjects a woman to a very rigid code of conduct. Would a headscarf-wearing woman be allowed to successfully compete in the workplace if that involves mixing with men, working long hours, traveling, attending receptions and other standard requirements of modern professional life? The empirical evidence suggests the answer is no. There are many success stories of professional women in the secular milieu, even though discrimination persists also there, but no corresponding stories in the Islamist camp. For example, the headscarf was never banned in conservative businesses. But women, with headscarf or without, are almost totally invisible there. Therefore, a strong case exists to limit the influence of religious values and interests in the workplace, be it in public institutions or private companies. Strict equality should prevail in all cases. But the headscarf, as Lazreg notes, symbolically diminishes the formal equality enjoyed by both genders in the workplace. It perpetuates the culture of gender inequality.

    Questioning the headscarf is not the same as advocating bans, or barring headscarf-wearing women from work. Bans are undemocratic and usually counterproductive. It is about coaxing women out of this highly questionable and harmful practice that hampers their social advancement and prevents them from enjoying their humanity fully, of which their bodies are an inextricable part. Eschewing the headscarf is not a strike against Islam or Turkish culture. It is about a woman’s desire for progress, freedom and achievement.

    *Eldar Mamedov is an international-relations analyst based in Brussels.

  • Political Islam has many faces in Turkey

    Political Islam has many faces in Turkey

    By Justin Vela

    ISTANBUL – During the now infamous Mavi Marmara crisis between Turkey and Israel last summer, a board member of the Insani Yardim Vakfi (IHH), the Turkish aid organization that sponsored the Free Gaza flotilla, was asked about the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP).

    Connections between the IHH, Turkey’s first and largest humanitarian organization, and the AKP were clear. Members of the AKP had even been planning to travel on the flotilla to Gaza, but canceled at the last minute. Yet the board member said, “Look, I do not vote for the AKP.” He was less clear about which political party he did support.

    Given the degree of the IHH’s religious conservativeness, it was likely that most members of the organization cast their vote for

    the Saadet Partisi (the Felicity Party), one of Turkey’s few still functioning Islamic political parties that received votes in local and national elections, though never enough to pass the 10% threshold to enter parliament

    Though the country’s opposition has accused them of possessing a secret, long-term plan to establish an Islamic state in Turkey, the AKP is officially a secular political party. In mass media they are usually described as “Islamic-rooted” or coming from an “Islamic background” or another variation of this vague categorization.

    Over the course of the AKP’s eight years in government, the power of the secular military and judiciary has decreased, the constitution has been reformed, and democracy has grown, all of which are in line with the demands of Turkey’s European Union accession process.

    While a recent European Commission report blasts declining press freedoms, the EU has lauded Turkey’s progress in revamping the economy and raising its level of democracy even as religion appears to be increasingly at the forefront. In many ways, this might be expected. Turkey is a 99% Muslim country. Yet it is experiencing an increased polarization between the secular and religious, a trend that will most likely increase in the lead-up to June 2011 parliamentary elections.

    This polarization is dangerous for a variety of reasons. On the one hand religion’s more obvious role in society proves an increased democratization in a country whose degree of devoutness has perhaps been underestimated. The secularists are also experiencing a shift from being the traditional power-holders to now seeing the more religious lower classes suddenly possessing more influence.

    On the back of a surprisingly strong victory in September’s referendum on controversial constitutional amendments, the AKP has brought the long-running headscarf issue to the forefront of the political discourse. This is likely the first attempt at invigorating voters before next year’s election.

    The headscarf is an issue Turkey is long overdue to settle and even main opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu, of the Republican People’s Party, or CHP, is signaling that a change to the laws surrounding the headscarf, which is currently banned in public institutions, including universities, must take place. This is despite the military boycotting this year’s National Day celebrations at Cankaya Palace in Ankara where First Lady Hayrunnisa Gul attended wearing a headscarf, a act that is technically illegal due to the headscarf being banned in public institutions.

    Since the founding of the modern Turkish republic in 1923, there has perhaps not been another time when Islam in Turkey has gone through such transformations, both in matters of presentation and style, and also importance. The AKP has supported traditionally practicing Muslims economically and politically more so than any previous government and has also changed and modernized what it means to be Islamic in Turkey.

    Yet the AKP does not enjoy the support of the openly Islamic Saadet Party and many more conservative Muslims in Turkey. There is indeed a deep rift between the groups, with members of Saadet believing the AKP to have been co-opted by Western powers, becoming a pawn of a global imperialism extending from these countries. The AKP’s neo-liberal trade policies are, also, condemned by Saadet as Turkey maintains high unemployment and uneven wealth distribution.

    The current head of Saadet, Necmettin Erbakan, recently lashed out at Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and President Abdullah Gul in an August 2010 interview with the German newspaper Die Welt. “Some foreign powers brought them into their current position. Zionist, imperialist and racist powers in the current world order. They are supporting a Western, Zionist world order unintentionally. Most of what they have done is wrong. They are making the Zionists richer with taxes and debts. Erdogan became the cashier of Zionism. He was my student before. Yet now, our aim is to knock him over.”

    Erbakan served as Turkey’s prime minister in a coalition government from 1995-1997, before being forced to step down by the military in what is called by some a “post-modern coup”. He was also vice prime minister between 1974-1978, in coalition with various right-wing secular parties, an especially strange twist to the practical steps often taken by those who desire power. Called the “hoca”, a term for a religious leader that is also sometimes used in Turkey to refer to university teachers, Erbakan had been a mentor to Erdogan and Gul when the two were members of his Refah Partisis (the Welfare Party) and Fazilet Partisis (the Virtue Party), which were banned in 1997 and 2001, respectively.

    Fazilet and Refah followed Erbakan’s numerous previous parties such as the Milli Selamet Partisi (The National Salvation Party) and Milli Nizam Partisi (National Order Party), and were closed by the judiciary for violating the secular principals of Turkey’s constitution. Erdogan and Gul, seeing that there was no way they could hold national power without becoming more moderate, founded the AKP in 2001. Erbakan was banned from politics in 1997 following the closure of Refah, but had his supporters founded Saadet, which continued to serve as the party of traditionally conservative Muslims.

    Due to the majority of their voters deciding to support the AKP, Saadet was never very popular. In 2009 local elections, the party polled only 5.16%. In 2007 national elections, they won 2.34% of votes. Saadet’s primary strength actually is likely to lay outside of Turkey, among Turks living abroad in Europe. For them, Saadet is the current leader of the “Milli Gorus” (National Vision) movement, which seeks to re-establish Islam as a leading force in Turkey and reportedly has 300,000 members throughout Europe.

    Like the shadowy Gulen movement, Milli Gorus, which takes its name from a manifesto Erbakan wrote in 1969, is a vast social network providing services and community as well as a political force. Not as powerful as the Gulen movement however, which is said to have pull within the Turkish government, to control the police force, and posses Islamic-turanistic tendencies, Milli Gorus is focused more on strengthening traditional Islam within Turkey.

    They also profess a desire to end Turkey’s alliance with Western countries, despite Erbakan, during his times in power, failing to significantly change any of Turkey’s core policies. Many of Turkey’s connections with the EU and trade policies were even strengthened during his time in power yet he maintained an anti-Western stance, especially when out of office.

    At 84 and needing assistance to walk, Erbakan was elected the head of Saadet in October 2010. The party was run since its inception by his close supporters until an April 2009 court decision allowed Erbakan to again directly participate in politics. Maintaining that the AKP is the product of a Western-Zionist conspiracy that aims to take over Turkey, Erbakan recently told the Turkish paper Taraf that “imperialism is doing new studies to polish AKP” for the 2011 elections.

    Although many members of his party welcomed Erbakan’s return, what appeared to be the establishment of a family dynasty within Saadet caused a new split. In October, Erbakan’s son, Fatih, daughter, Elif, and son-in law, Mehmet Altinoz, were elected to Saadet’s administration in a party congress that saw huge posters of Erbakan and Mustapha Kemal Attaturk, the republic’s founding father, together in the same hall.

    The move to establish a more prominent role for his family within Saadet was not taken kindly by Erbakan’s former confidant and the previous Saadet head, Numan Kurtulmus, who split off from Saadet and on November 1 founded the Voice of the People Party (HAS), the 67th political party in Turkey.

    HAS is expected to hold its first congress on November 28, where elections will be held to form its administrative bodies. Difficult to categorize, HAS united a number of politicians from different backgrounds. There are members of past Islamic political parties, as well as Kurtulmus’ supporters from Saadet. With him there are also people from leftist parties and right of center parties.

    Turkish United Workers’ Party leader Zeki Kilicaslan said that he joined HAS because “when Kurtulmus was introducing the HAS party to me, he said it would be a party that is against imperialism, neo-liberal policies and brutal exploitation policies. He also said the party would be the people’s party and not be based on religion or conservatism.”

    At least one commentator has said that HAS was positioning itself to stand somewhere between AKP and Saadet in ideology and seeking to appeal mostly to the victimized segment of Turkish society. As it includes some members of parties that voted “yes” to the constitutional amendments in September’s referendum, but did not support the AKP itself, HAS could provide an alternative during future elections. It also could become a possible coalition partner for the AKP should the scattered opposition organize itself enough to win a sizable amount of votes in a future election.

    All this is likely only to come after the AKP forms a single-party government following the parliamentary elections in June 2011. Then there will be the decidingly telling time during the writing of the new constitution. The AKP’s increasingly authoritarian bent will be exposed for what it is or isn’t. Following September’s referendum, Erdogan professed a desire to be inclusive during the writing of a new constitution. Yet what inclusive means in a Turkey that is more confident, perhaps even over-confident, in its importance on the global stage, is yet to be seen.

    Justin Vela is a freelance journalist based in Istanbul, Turkey.

    (Copyright 2010 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)

  • Politics aside, headscarves are making a comeback in Turkey

    Politics aside, headscarves are making a comeback in Turkey

    Once considered a faux pas in fashion and politics, fashionistas are now embracing Islamic clothing, spawning the development of upmarket Islamic fashion houses

    By Alexandra Hudson  /  Reuters, ISTANBUL, Turkey

    Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II, left, greets Hayrunnisa Gul, the wife of Turkish President Abdullah Gul, center, as former British prime minister John Major looks on during a ceremony and reception in Whitehall in central London on Tuesday. Photo: Reuters
    Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II, left, greets Hayrunnisa Gul, the wife of Turkish President Abdullah Gul, center, as former British prime minister John Major looks on during a ceremony and reception in Whitehall in central London on Tuesday. Photo: Reuters

    Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II, left, greets Hayrunnisa Gul, the wife of Turkish President Abdullah Gul, center, as former British prime minister John Major looks on during a ceremony and reception in Whitehall in central London on Tuesday.

    Photo: Reuters

    Along Istanbul’s busy Eminonu waterfront, women swathed in dark coats and scarves knotted once under the chin jostle past others clad in vivid colors and head coverings carefully sculpted around the face.

    Two decades ago such a polished, pious look scarcely existed in Turkey, but today it has the highest profile exponents in Turkish First Lady Hayrunnisa Gul and Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan’s wife Emine, and the brands behind it plan ambitious expansion.

    The headscarf remains one of Turkey’s most divisive issues. Everything from the way it is tied and accessorized, to the poise and demeanor of the wearer, is laden with meaning in this majority Muslim, but officially secular, country of 74 million.

    From a simple head covering, stigmatized in the early days of the Turkish Republic as backward and rural, it the last decades it has become a carefully crafted garment and highly marketable commodity, embodying the challenge of a new class of conservative Muslims to Turkey’s secularist elites.

    “It was hard to find anything chic for the covered women 10 years ago, but fashion for pious women has made huge progress in the last six to seven years,” said Alpaslan Akman, an executive in charge of production and marketing at Muslim fashion brand Armine.

    Armine is known for its high-impact campaigns. Huge posters have hung in the heart of Istanbul’s bar and nightclub district — the serene models contrasting with the commotion below.

    The brand teams colorful scarves with figure-skimming coats, pert collars, big buttons and ruffled sleeves.

    A coat typically sells for around 200 Turkish lira (US$143), while scarves retail for around 50 lira.

    “We are much luckier than -previous generations, we have more designs and colors of scarves to choose from,” said 30-year-old Filiz Albayrak, a sales assistant in an Istanbul scarf shop.

    Around 69 percent of Turkish women cover their heads in some form, with 16 percent using the more concealing and self-consciously stylish “turban” style scarf, which tightly covers the hair and neck, according to a 2007 study.

    via Politics aside, headscarves are making a comeback in Turkey – Taipei Times.