Over the Bodies of the T-Girls: The Headscarf Ban as a Secular Effort to Monopolize Islam in Turkey

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Notes

This article is a revised version of a paper presented at The Center for Comparative Research, Yale University, on February 21, 2007. I am grateful to Julia Adams, Tabitha Decker, Philip Gorski, Andrew Junker and the members of the workshop for their helpful comments. I also would like to thank Mary Bernstein, Davita Glasberg, Stacy Missari, Nancy Naples and Bandana Purkayastha for their invaluable criticisms on earlier drafts.

¹ Turkey's Parliament lift scarf ban, New York Times, February 10, 2008.

² Call it a coup, Newsweek, March 31, 2008. On 30 July 2008, The Constitutional Court decided not to ban the Party albeit six members of the Court voted for the closure (one vote short to impose the ban).

³ Headscarf debate intensifies in Turkey, New York Times, January 19, 2008.

⁴ Saban Kardas (2008) The Turkish Constitutional Court and Civil Liberties: Question of Ideology and Accountability (Ankara: SETA), p. 1.

⁶ The headscarf case on March 7, 1989, no. 1989/12. Quoted in Ahmet Kuru (2009) Secularism and State Policies toward Religion in the United States, France and Turkey (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press), pp. 189–190.

⁵ In this article, I employ the terms ‘Republican elite,’ ‘secular elite,’ ‘secularists’ and ‘Kemalists’ interchangeably when referring to the same analytical category of the power elite that consists of the military and the bureaucratic elite, academia, the professional upper class, leading media outlets and the capitalist elite. My conceptualization of the power elite in Turkish politics, thus, follows Şerif Mardin's center-periphery approach. See Ş. Mardin (1973) Center-periphery relations: A key to Turkish politics? Daedalus 102, pp. 169–196.

⁷ The Turkish Council of State's ruling on December 13, 1984, no. 1984/1574. Quoted in Kuru, Secularism, p. 188.

⁸ See, for example, Susan Moller Okin (1999) Is multiculturalism bad for women, in: Joshua Cohen, Matthew Howard & Martha Nussbaum (eds) Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).

⁹ Maureen Ramsay (1997) What's Wrong with Liberalism (London: Leicester University Press), p. 55.

¹⁰ Lila Abu-Lughod (2002) Do Muslim women really need saving? Anthropological reflections on cultural relativism and its others, American Anthropologist 104, pp. 783–790.

¹¹ See, for example, Nilufer Göle (1996). The Forbidden Modern: Civilization and Veiling (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press); (2002) Islam in public: New visibilities and new imaginaries, Public Culture 14, pp. 173–190; (2003a) Contemporary Islamist movements and new sources for religious tolerance, Journal of Human Rights, 2, pp. 17–31; (2003b) The voluntary adoption of Islamic stigma symbols, Social Research, 70, pp. 809–828; Ibrahim Kaya (2000) Modernity and veiled women, European Journal of Social Theory, 3, pp. 195–214; and Jenny White (2002) Islamist Mobilization in Turkey: A Study in Vernacular Politics (Seattle: University of Washington Press).

¹² See further Benedict Anderson (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London and New York: Verso).

¹³ For pejorative representations of veiled women in Turkish secularist media, see Hakkı Taş and Meral Uğur, Roads ‘drawn’ to modernity: Religion and secularism in contemporary Turkey, Political Science & Politics, 40, pp. 311–314.

¹⁴ See further Göle, The Forbidden Modern.

¹⁵ See Elisabeth Ozdalga (1998) The Veiling Issue, Official Secularism, and Popular Islam in Modern Turkey (Richmond: Curzon).

¹⁶ Ahmet T. Kuru, Passive and assertive secularism: Historical conditions, ideological struggles, and state policies toward religion, World Politics, 59, p. 570.

¹⁷ Mustafa Erdogan (1999) Religious freedom in the Turkish Constitution, The Muslim World, 89, p. 380.

¹⁸ Andrew Davison (2003) Turkey, a ‘secular’ state? The challenge of description, South Atlantic Quarterly, 102, p. 341.

¹⁹ For the dilemma of Westernization and the paradox of state elites in the developing world, see Partha Chatterjee (1993) The Nation and Its Fragments (Princeton: Princeton University Press).

²⁰ Turban-headscarf dispute continues, Milliyet, July 22, 1984. For a detailed work on the media controversy at the time, see E. A. Olson (1985) Muslim identity and secularism in contemporary Turkey: The headscarf dispute, Anthropological Quarterly, 58, pp. 161–171.

²¹ Ersin Kalaycioglu (2006) The mystery of the Türban: Participation or revolt? in: Ali Carkoglu and Barry Rubin (eds) Religion and Politics in Turkey (London: Routledge), p. 92.

²² Ozdalga, The Veiling Issue, pp. 41–47.

²³ All of the university presidents in Turkey, including private universities, have been appointed by the Turkish president upon the YÖK's recommendation since the 1980 coup.

²⁴ Ozdalga, The Veiling Issue, p. 46.

²⁵ Ozdalga, The Veiling Issue, p. 46

²⁶ Quoted in George Gruen (1999) Defining limits on religious expression in public institutions: The Turkish crisis over headscarves, The Jerusalem Letter February 1999 (CIAO, Columbia International Affairs Online:). Available at: < http://www.ciaonet.org/pbei-2/jcpa/grg01.html>, accessed 3 May 2007.

²⁷ BBC, Tabitha Morgan (2004) Scarf conundrum grips Turkey, February 25, 2004. Available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3513259.stm, accessed 8 May 2007

²⁸ Sibel Eraslan (2002) Uğultular … Siluetler …, in: Aksu Bora and Asena Gunal (eds) 90larda Türkiye'de Feminizm (Istanbul: Iletisim), p. 261.

²⁹ Unfortunately, there is no scientific study to date on the headscarf-ban protest movements. For a useful source on first-hand accounts of the 1998 protests, see Nazife Sisman (2002) Başörtüsü Mağdurlarından Anlatılmamış Öyküler (Istanbul: Iz).

³⁰ Eraslan, Uğultular … Siluetler …, p. 262.

³¹ Turkey: Amnesty for university students, New York Times, February 24, 2005. Sources estimated that 677,000 students would potentially benefit from this new law, ‘a small minority’ of whom were expelled under the headscarf ban. See BBC, Jonny Dymond (2005) Turkey grants student amnesties, February 23, 2005. Available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4292771.stm, accessed May 8, 2007). Eraslan's study estimates that more than 30,000 students in total were convicted of violating the headscarf ban. See Eraslan, Uğultular … Siluetler …, p. 260.

³² Hasan Kosebalaban (2007) The rise of Anatolian cities and the failure of the modernization paradigm, Middle East Critique, 16, p. 232. See also Hakan Yavuz (2003) Islamic Political Identity in Turkey (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

³³ Hakan Yavuz (2000) Cleansing Islam from the public sphere and the February 28 process, Journal of International Affairs, 54, pp. 21–42. The term, ‘black Turks,’ suggests a center-periphery approach to Turkish politics. According to Şerif Mardin, a prominent Turkish sociologist, Turkish politics only can be conceptualized by identifying two forces that date back to the late Ottoman modernization period: (1) the center, which is composed of the civil-bureaucratic elite, and (2) the periphery, which represents the ordinary modern citizen. For Mardin, the Turkish modernization process provided the conditions for the estrangement of the periphery from the center and, therefore, the peripheral forces at an increasing rate began to define themselves with religious rituals and identities. Technological developments and neoliberal economic policies led to better penetration of the center into the periphery; however, the peripheral forces have been excluded from the control mechanisms of the center. See further Mardin, Center-periphery relations. In his later writings, Mardin argues that the center-periphery duality remained the basic duality into the Republican period and still remains very influential in shaping current Turkish politics; see, for example, Ş. Mardin (2005) Turkish Islamic exceptionalism yesterday and today: Continuity, rupture and reconstruction in operational codes,” Turkish Studies, 6, pp. 145–165.

³⁴ See, for example, Ziya Onis (1997) The political economy of Islamic resurgence in Turkey: The rise of the Welfare Party in perspective, Third World Quarterly, 18, pp. 743–766; and Cihan Tugal (2006) The appeal of Islamic politics: Ritual and dialogue in a poor district of Turkey, Sociological Quarterly, 47, pp. 245–273.

³⁵ Yavuz, Islamic Political Identity, p. 277.

³⁶ Barry Buzan, Ole Waever and Jaap de Wilde (1998) Security: A New Framework for Analysis (Boulder: Lynne Rienner), pp. 23–24.

³⁷ The concept ‘deep state’ refers to illegal enterprises within the state, which is an important aspect of Turkish politics. The Susurluk accident in 1996 revealed illegal organizations operating in the name of the state, and taking considerable help and support from civil and military bureaucrats. These organizations have justified their presence by claiming that they are protecting ‘ state interests’ or ‘national interests.’ The emerging threat of the Kurdistan Worker's Party (PKK), a Kurdish armed organization, in the 1980s, further legitimized the presence of some forces that carry out illegal operations in the name of the state. Christopher de Bellaigue in The New York Review of Books noted that ‘some members of the armed forces, afraid of losing the prestige, political autonomy, and big budgets that they have enjoyed since the PKK rebellion gained momentum in the late 1980s, do not want peace at all … The relative freedom with which Ocalan's (the captured leader of the PKK) lawyers have been able to pass on his messages has led some to suspect that he is cooperating with his captors—that he has defected, in effect, to the “deep state”’. See C. Bellaigue (2007) The uncontainable Kurds, The New York Review of Books, 54, p. 3.

³⁸ Ferdinand de Saussure (1960) Course in General Linguistics (London: Peter Owen), p. 68.

³⁹ See further Eraslan, Uğultular.

⁴⁰ For pressures from the Nationalist Action Party, see Bahceli: Meclis Krizle Baslamamali, Hürriyet, May 1, 1999.

⁴¹ Göle, Islam in Public, p. 178.

⁴² An historic warning against headscarves in the Parliament, Hürriyet, May 3, 1999; and Turban abotage, Milliyet, May 3, 1999.

⁴³ YSK'ya Göre Vekil, Zaman, May 4, 1999. In my interview with Merve Kavakçı, I learned that, right after her removal from Parliament, she was locked up in a room in the Turkish National Assembly building during the day. Therefore, the possibility of her reappearance in the Parliament was seen as a big ‘threat’ to secularism. Kavakçı told me about a rumor circulating among politicians that military intervention would occur if she wore her headscarf in the Parliament. Personal interview with Merve Kavakçı, Storrs, CT, March 24, 2008.

⁴⁴ “Türban Siyasi Bir Simgedir, Sabah, May 5, 1999.

⁴⁵ Merve'ye Jet Soruşturma, Hürriyet, May 4, 1999.

⁴⁶ Bare your head, Economist, May 15, 1999.

⁴⁷ Fazilet: Kan Emici Vampirler, Sabah, May 8, 1999.

⁴⁸ Asli Aydintasbas (1999) Secular Turks threaten democracy too, Wall Street Journal Europe, May 26, 1999.

⁴⁹ Malatya'da Türbana 161 Tutuklu, Hürriyet, May 13, 1999. During the Kavakçı crisis, strict impositions on headscarves in the universities were arbitrarily extended to include other so-called ‘public’ sites. For instance, in Selçuk University of Konya, students wearing headscarves were banned from entering dining halls after May 12; as a consequence, university officials announced that 300 students were expelled due to their resistance to the ban. See, Turbanli 300 Ogrenciye Uzaklastirma, Hürriyet, 13 May 1999.

⁵⁰ Türban Eylemleri Örgütlüymüş, Radikal, June 2, 1999.

⁵¹ Protestors Face Death Penalty, Islamic Human Rights Commission Report, Wembley, June 23, 1999. Available at: http://www.inminds.co.uk/hijab-ban/huda-kaya-trial.html, accessed July 9, 2007. Hüda Kaya and her daughters were imprisoned for differing periods from 20 months to 30 months, and became the vanguards of Islamic resistance in the eyes of the National Outlook movement supporters. See, Nurulhak Saatçioğlu: İnancımızın Bedelleriyle Sınanıyoruz, Haksöz Dergisi, May–June 2004. Available at: http://www.haksoz.net/index.php?name = News&file = article&sid = 2807, accessed July 9, 2007.

⁵² İşte Dostları, Sabah, May 9, 1999; and Kara Desteğe Öfke, Hürriyet, May 10, 1999.

⁵³ İran'a Tavır Alınmıştır, Hürriyet, May 11, 1999.

⁵⁴ İran: Türkiye Dış Bağlantı Arıyor, Hürriyet, May 12, 1999; Iran Times, May 21, 1999.

⁵⁵ Hürriyet, May 10, 1999.

⁵⁶ Hürriyet, May 11, 1999.

⁵⁷ İrtica Savaşını Kurtuluş Savaşı gibi Kazanmalıyız! Hürriyet, May 13, 1999.

⁵⁸ Amerikalı Merve İçin Kader Haftası, Hürriyet, 10 May 1999.

⁵⁹ İpliği Pazara Çıktı, Hürriyet, May 13, 1999.

⁶⁰ Merve'ye Sınırdışı, Sabah, May 13, 1999. I would like to thank one of the anonymous reviewers, who suggested noting that the decision to strip Merve of Turkish citizenship was ironic given that the Turkish state promotes double citizenship for Turks living abroad.

⁶¹ Merve Gururumuz, Hürriyet, May 14, 1999.

⁶² Molla Türkiye'yi Bağnazlıkla Suçladı! Hürriyet, May 15, 1999.

⁶³ Hürriyet, May 16, 1999. On September 20, 1999, Turkey's highest administrative court stripped Merve Kavakçı of her Turkish citizenship. In April 2007, the European Court of Human Rights ruled against Turkey for violating the rights of former Virtue Party (FP) deputies, including Merve Kavakçı. At the hearing held in Strasbourg on October 13, 2005, Kavakçı asserted that the decision to close the FP was anti-democratic and the political ban imposed on her targeted all headscarf-wearing women in Turkey. See, European Court condemns Turkey for violating Kavakçı's rights, Todays Zaman, April 6, 2007.

⁶⁴ Göle, Islam in public, p. 186.

⁶⁵ For the term, symbolic capital, see Pierre Bourdieu (1998) Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action (Stanford: Stanford University Press).

⁶⁶ Kuru, Secularism, p. 194.

⁶⁷ Talal Asad (2003) Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press), p. 201. Quoted in Alev Cinar (2008) Subversion and subjugation in the public sphere: Secularism and Islamic headscarf, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 33, p. 896.

⁶⁸ The expression ‘moral conformism’ belongs to Emile Durkheim, but it was Bourdieu who incorporated the concept into the theory of the state. See Bourdieu, Practical Reason, p. 53.

⁶⁹ Ironically, the inconsistency was evident in the state's own institution for religious affairs, Diyanet, which, in 1980, officially declared that wearing headscarves was a religious duty, and many of the headscarf-adopting students tried to fulfill this duty. For details on the Diyanet (Higher Council for Religious Affairs) decision of December 30, 1980, no. 77, see Kuru, Secularism, pp. 189–190.

⁷⁰ Bourdieu, Practical Reason, p. 47.

⁷¹ Göle, Islam in Public, p. 185.

⁷² The most well-known account of the relationship between the headscarf practice and the Kemalist civilizational project is Göle's seminal work, Forbidden Modern. For Göle, the secularist project envisioned the ideal unveiled Turkish woman as the touchstone of Westernization (see pp. 27–57). The transition to a modern dress code has been successful in Turkey; however, the project of creating an ideal unveiled woman seems to have failed as a majority of Turkish women (63 percent), including considerable numbers of college graduates, still don some sort of headscarf. See, TESEV's survey in Ali Carkoglu and Binnaz Toprak (2006) Değişen Türkiye'de Din, Toplum ve Siyaset (Istanbul: TESEV), p. 66.

⁷³ Bourdieu, Practical Reason, p. 53.

⁷⁴ Cinar, Subversion and subjugation, p. 904.

⁷⁵ Friedrich Nietzsche (1996) On the genealogy of morals, in: David Wootton (ed.). Modern Political Thought: Readings from Machiavelli to Nietzsche (Indianapolis: Hackett), p. 932.

⁷⁶ Bourdieu argues that the recognition of legitimacy is not ‘a free act of clear conscience.’ Instead, ‘it is rooted in the immediate, prereflexive agreement between objective structures and embodied structures, now turned unconscious (such as those that organize temporal rhythms: for instance, the quite arbitrary divisions of school time into periods).’ See Bourdieu, Practical Reason, pp. 55–56.

⁷⁷ Zeynep Akbulut Kuru and Ahmet T. Kuru (2008) Apolitical interpretation of Islam: Said Nursi's faith-Based activism in comparison with political Islamism and Sufism, Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations, 19, pp. 99–111.

⁷⁸ See Kalaycioglu, The Mystery of the Türban, p. 103.

⁷⁹ Yavuz, Islamic Political Identity, p. 100.

⁸⁰ Bourdieu, Practical Reason, p. 59.

⁸¹ u, Practical Reason, p. 59, pp. 58–59.

⁸² Pierre Bourdieu (1993) The Field of Cultural Production (New York: Columbia University Press), p. 78.

⁸³ Peruklu Diye Okula Kaydını Yaptırmadılar, Zaman, July 6, 2006.

⁸⁴ Türban Sorunu Tırmanıyor, Radikal, 10 February 2006.

⁸⁵ Volkan Aytar (2006) Recasting a Vital Balance in Difficult Times: How to Increase the Visibility in Turkey of the new European Values and Processes of Security and Human Rights (Istanbul: TESEV).

⁸⁶ See, for example, Boyner: Türkiye Çankaya'da Başörtüsüne Hazır Değil, Milliyet, May 3, 2007; Özyürek: Türban, Çankaya'ya Çıktıktan Sonra Diğer Yerlerde Yasaklanamaz, Milliyet, October 7, 2007.

⁸⁷ Yilmaz Colak (2008) The headscarf issue, women and the public sphere in Turkey, Global South, 4–5, pp. 10–16.

⁸⁸ A vigilant observer might argue that the debate started two years before the election; yet, as the election date got closer, symbolic politics were increasingly apparent. See, for example, Baykal: Türban Çankaya'ya Çıkarsa Başı Açık Gezilemez, Sabah, June 13, 2005.

⁸⁹ Jeffrey Alexander and Jason Mast (2006) Symbolic action in theory and practice: The cultural pragmatics of symbolic action, in: Jeffrey Alexander, Bernhard Giesen & Jason Mast (eds) Social Performance: Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics and Ritual (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 4.

⁹⁰ Indexical character of the headscarf as an identity symbol is undertheorized in the current literature. For a detailed criticism, see Mustafa Gurbuz & Gulsum Gurbuz-Kucuksari (2009) Between sacred codes and secular consumer society: Practice of headscarf adoption among American college girls, Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, 25(3), pp. 405–417.

⁹¹ Two important works on this point are John R. Bowen (2007) Why the French Don't Like Headscarves: Islam, the State, and Public Space (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), and Joan W. Scott (2007) The Politics of the Veil (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). For a comparative review of these books, see my review (2009) in British Journal of Sociology, 60.