Headscarves

(Armine ad from Turkish Fashion)

It is hard to write about current events in Turkey without writing about headscarves. The headscarf controversy has preoccupied the body politic for the past decade, in particular, and shows no signs of abating. Should observant Muslim girls and women be allowed to wear headscarves in public schools, universities, offices, congress and other state institutions? Or should they be required to remove the scarf, preserving public space as secular space?

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, founder of Modern Turkey, strongly adhered to the French idea of laicité, the understanding that the operations of the state--its defense of liberty, equality and fraternity, for the French--could only function if religion were entirely bracketed out and held apart. Kemal Atatürk believed that laicité must be strictly enforced to liberate Modern Turkey from what he understood to be the religious conservatism that had caused the Ottoman Empire to founder and fall behind the strong emerging nation-states of Western Europe.
Kemalist laicité was never a set of principles that fit easily with the customs of the Anatolian heartland, where a socially-conservative interpretation of Islam remained predominant. And the tension between laws governing the secular state and customs shaping everyday life has been part of Turkish life since the founding of Republic in 1923. 

The headscarf controversy itself is by no means new, but has been particularly intense in recent years, as observant Muslim women demand the right to cover their heads as students, public employees and public servants. This presents the Turkish state with a deep dilemma, as it forces a choice between guiding principles: laicité v. individual self-determination, the right to an education v. the need to preserves schools as a secular space. 

In practice, this has pitted a cosmopolitan middle-class that continues to uphold secular Kemalism as an absolute set of requirements against an emerging sector for whom a socially-conservative Muslim educational and employment network has itself been a means of economic ascension. For members of this emerging sector--often followers of the Turkish Muslim leader Fethullah Gülen (now living in Pennsylvania), public expression of that socially-conservative Islam is a necessary part of their public identity, not one they feel they can take off to go to school.

For Americans, accustomed both to a more lenient understanding of the separation of Church and State and to a higher expectation that the individual should be able to dress as she feels like, this may seem odd. But to vigilant Kemalists, the fear that conservative Islam could take over the operations of the state if not held at bay by laicité is very real.

I admit that I have lost track of the legal battle, which has raged in Turkish courts in past years. But I can tell you that in the streets of Istanbul headscarves are winning, and the scene is changing so quickly that both last year's fasion and last year's wisdom are outdated.

On the former, Muslim fashion is the fastest-growing subsector of the Turkish consumer market. Billboards showing beautiful young women in colorful headscarves and stern but stylish tesetür (a belted, slim trenchcoat like-look) are everywhere. 

On the latter, most Kemalists will insist that Turkish women simply don't wear niqab, the head-to-toe black covering that leaves only part of the face visible. Only visitors from the Arabic-speaking countries wear such regalia, I have heard. But twice in Istanbul I have crossed paths with niqab-clad women speaking Turkish, so evidently this has changed (either that or some Saudi tourists speak uncommonly good Turkish). (Side note: the sight of niqab-clad women taking selfies is one that can bring you up short at first, but quickly becomes routine around the great Ottoman mosques).

One can't help noticing that Turkish men of any religious disposition seem to face much lower sartorial requirements. It is not at all unusual to see clean-shaven Turkish gents in shorts and t-shirts walking the streets with women in headscarf and tesetur.

There never has been a single Istanbul norm and I doubt there ever will be. In Pera of cafés and bookstores one sees very few headscarves. In Emirgan Park, where families picnic on a Sunday afternoon, you see very few women without one. But even for someone who just got here it is obvious that headscarves are more common than they were a few years ago. And this is cosmopolitan Istanbul, many times more diverse than the Anatolian heartland (if never as exuberantly secular as "infidel Izmir"). The scene is changing almost before our eyes.

And now it is goodbye to Istanbul for now, and onto Ankara.