Black Turks, White Turks: On the Three ... - Insight Turkey

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MÜCAHİT BİLİCİ Turkish secularism in practice amounts to control and suppression of nonstate Islam. The binary opposition that dominates most of the literature on Turkish secularism therefore pits “political Islam” against “the secular state.” Yet this is surely a misnomer. In contemporary Turkey, the two competing currents should rightly be identified as state Islam versus civil Islam—or simply as state elites representing a nineteenth century authoritarian ideology versus the masses who demand the new standards of liberal democracy. It is not an opposition between tradition and modernity, or between Islam and secularism. Rather it is between an old conception of modernity (as a top-down authoritarian process) and a newer one (bottom-up grassroots democracy). The inherent contradiction in Turkish modernization is that it has included both currents of top-down modernization and bottom-up democratic participation. Arguably, today the top-down modernization has reached a limit where its claims to progress are in conflict with its promises of democracy. How else can we explain the paradoxical situation where the most enthusiastic supporters of the EU are not conventional modernizers (the Kemalists) but the very victims of the Kemalist project, among them the Kurds and religious people? Black Turks II: Religious Women (and Men) Today the most contentious violation of the human and citizenship rights of religious people is the ban on the headscarf. A survey conducted by Bogazici University and the Open Society Foundation revealed that 93 percent of Turkish people have no problem with the headscarf (Zaman, March 11, 2006). A majority of people in fact consider themselves “religiously conservative” but ask for change and more political liberties. Many Turkish women, rural and urban, wear headscarves. Yet the notorious ban on the headscarf has persisted since the last military coup in 1997, when the military ordered public institutions to deny access to students and public servants who wear them. (Strange as it may seem, the Turkish prime minister’s daughter does not have right to go to university in Turkey.) The ban on the headscarf has been so strict that efforts to get around it have been countered by increasingly drastic measures. Not only students who wear the headscarf but also those who wear wigs in an effort to accommodate official demands while still covering their hair are in some cases prevented from attending university. One of the victims of discrimination against headscarf-wearing students, Leyla Sahin, took her case to the ECHR and argued that her right to education had been violated. The ECHR decided that the Turkish state’s ban on the headscarf was not a violation of her right to education. Accepting all assertions of the Turkish 32
Black Turks, White Turks: On the Three Requirements of Turkish Citizenship state at face value, the court granted the Turkish state the right to restrict rights to religious expression and education. Independent organizations such as Human Rights Watch (HRW) expressed their disappointment over the ECHR decision. Jonathan Sugden of HRW wrote that the decision “was disappointing for HRW, but much more disappointing for the thousands of women who face the choice of being denied higher education under Turkey’s headscarf ban, or having to go through higher education dressed in a manner that offends their conscience… Reading yesterday’s decision one is struck by the judges’ reluctance to really tease out the issues, their too ready willingness to accept the government’s assertions, and the presence of some rather glaring internal contradictions.” People usually criticize the European discourse of human rights for claiming universalism and seek to opt out of its jurisdiction. In this case, however, it was the ECHR that betrayed its own claims to universalism by exempting discrimination against headscarf-wearing students from its jurisdiction. The European court’s attitude toward religious Turks stands in stark contrast to its attitude toward the Kurds. Violations of the rights of religious people—and the headscarf issue in particular—have been largely ignored in EU progress reports on Turkey’s accession. Turkey may be an equal opportunity oppressor, but the European institutions certainly have not proved an equal opportunity liberator for excluded groups. To say that official ideology is against the headscarf is not entirely true. There is one form of headscarf that is acceptable for the Turkish state: Grandma’s headscarf. Religious women wearing the headscarf often hear the argument “my grandma also wears a headscarf but yours is different.” The young women’s choice to wear the headscarf is seen as offensive and antithetical to enlightenment and modernity. To be more precise, there are only two modes of wearing a headscarf that are considered legitimate: grandma’s and the servant’s. In the teleological progression of Turkish modernity, both of them are not only accepted as legitimate figures but deemed necessary to mark what has been left behind temporally (grandma) and spatially (the peasant domestic servant). The grandmother symbolizes a tradition we respectfully part ways with. She naturally and compassionately fades into the sunset. The servant represents a miserable tradition that has been abandoned; her continuing presence on the margins serves to remind us of how far we have come on the road to modernity. Not surprisingly, a university student’s conscious and individualistic decision to articulate a different way of being or an alternate trajectory of progress is perceived as a threat. It is as though those who believed that they have been marching along toward an imaginary destination have no assurance of their progress but a backwards glimpse of their distant starting point. 33
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Black Turks, White Turks: On the Three ... - Insight Turkey

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