control and sexuality

Turkeynow turns to investigate how such dynamics, in particular in relation to zina, have beenreflected and reinforced legally. Adultery in Turkey is no longer a crime. Even when it usedto entail criminal liability, it was but a minor offence, devoid of any religious reference. Thesubsequent analysis, however, shows how legislative and societal misconceptions of thisact have allowed for its extrajudicial ‘punishment’, within a broader misogynous conceptof ‘honour’ crimes, to thrive.Domestic Legal SystemThe discourse of ‘reformism’, as one of six mainstays of the Kemalist ideology, 8 remainsa salient feature of Turkish legal politics, which produces an impression – by and largefallacious – of an audacious national legal system, perpetually striving to respond to theexigencies of the ‘modern’ Turkish nation. Mustafa Kemal’s legal reforms were carefullydesigned to provide a solid script for “a project of state that is cut free from a past ofdegeneracy and corruption” (Meeker 2001: xviii) and that would ultimately ‘liberate’ allthose under the yoke of the dying empire, including women. This purported ‘liberation’,however, was mainly imposed from the top of the centralist state apparatus and, hence,often resisted or only formally accepted at the grass-roots level, particularly in the ruralareas. The reforms that ensued after the proclamation of the republic seemed radical andfar-reaching, indeed. The new republican legal façade resembled very much the WesternEuropean liberalist coulisses of the time: all laws were quite straightforwardly copiedfrom the Swiss, Italian, French and other ‘modern’ legislation, including that allowing forfemale suffrage, an equitable access to workforce, marriage and divorce ‘free’ from pastinequalities, even a Romanised instead of an Arabic script. Women and men were to getrid of their traditional clothes and to embrace ‘European’ fashion; religious titles (hacı, hafiz,hoca and the alike) were forbidden; even the Muslim call to prayer (ezan; adhan) was heard,until 1947, in Turkish (Zürcher & van der Linden 2004: 106; Koçak 2010: 244). All this wasregulated by law, which was gradually expurgated from all direct references to Islam. 9 Thetwo fields of reformers’ intervention were particularly accentuated: a laicist character ofthe new state and women’s equal rights to those of men. While the first construct (laicity)was largely achieved through legal reforms, although by means of an autocratic systemthat still preferred to control rather than simply ‘de-politicise’ the religious spheres, thesecond promise (women’s rights) was from the very start hypocritical and largely “basedon premises of male privilege and women’s sexual subordination” (İlkkaracan 2008: 52).They are both further scrutinised below.8 It is one of the so called ‘Six Arrows’, declared by the Kemalist ideologues to be the foundationalprinciples of the new Turkish Republic. The ‘Six Arrows’ are: populism, republicanism, statism,laicism, reformism and nationalism (Kanra 2009: 72).9 For instance, in 1928, Sections 2 and 16 of the 1924 Constitution, providing that the “religionof the Turkish State is Islam” and that the National assembly is “to apply the Shari’a Law”, weredeleted (Koçak 2010: 243). Obviously, the reforms like those were introduced gradually, makingsure that the societal shock they were causing was controllable.191