TURKEY:The headscarf furore is part of a plan to keep the nation divided, say two outspoken Sunni women
WEARING THE headscarves typical of religious Turkish women, Neslihan Akbulut and Hilal Kaplan look unlikely revolutionaries. But, with government efforts to end university headscarf bans only further polarising this divided country, many see their press release as evidence some good may come from the chaos.
"We will not be happy going to university with our heads covered," the February 12th communique reads, until Turkey addresses its Kurdish problem, abandons discrimination against non-Muslims and non-Sunni Muslim minorities, and liberalises its universities.
Several prominent public figures are among 1,300 head-scarved women who have signed the text, and its authors have spent the last fortnight making their case on television.
Akbulut confesses surprise at the publicity. Her aim, she says, was essentially "to attack the prejudice that girls like us are only interested in our headwear". Her new notoriety comes as male politicians continue days of bitter verbal jousting. Tensions have increased since February 22nd, when constitutional changes aimed at lifting the ban received presidential approval. When Turkey's Higher Education Authority head ordered universities to let headscarf-wearing students in, most rectors refused to obey.
Yesterday, the Constitutional Court began examining a secular opposition party's demands that the changes be blocked. Many expect it to uphold the case.
"With sensitive handling, this headscarf issue might just have faded away," says sociologist Ayse Oncu. "Now solving it looks almost impossible." Akbulut and Kaplan say they support the AKP government in power since 2002. But their communique is implicitly critical of this conservative party whose early reformist zeal appears increasingly compromised.
AKP has always described lifting the headscarf ban as a matter of freedom of religion. The same justification was used by two members of Turkey's large heterodox Alevi minority battling for their children to be exempt from compulsory religious classes. Yet when the High Court upheld their case on March 3rd, the Minister of Education rejected the decision as "impossible to apply". For Kaplan, the existence of compulsory religious lessons is just one reason why debates about threats facing Turkish secularism miss the point.
"Sunni propaganda imposed on non-Sunni Muslims? Strange secularism," she jokes, pointing out the de facto ban on non-Muslims being civil servants, and the state's refusal to recognise Alevi places of worship.
"It's divide and rule," she says. "These strategies enable the state to turn different groups against each other." For Akbulut, criticism of the system's paradoxes has been slowed by Turks' traditional stateism. "The Ottoman Sultan is gone, but Turks still behave like his subjects: instead of equality they look for privileged relationships."
Some groups are beginning to break with that tendency. Faced in the 1990s with rising Islamism, Alevis - whose heterodox beliefs are coloured by Shia Islam - at first turned to the state to uphold secularism. Now, growing numbers are calling for the state department that propagates Sunni Islam to be abolished.
"Alevis used to shout, 'Turkey is secular and will stay secular'," says Ali Murat Irat, an Alevi intellectual. "The slogan I hear more often these days is, 'Turkey isn't secular, but it will be'." What makes Akbulut and Kaplan's critical stance unusual is that they are Sunni Muslims.
"Because we are a majority, Sunni have traditionally considered themselves Turkey's owners," says Ayhan Bilgen, former head of a Muslim human rights organisation. For him, the military intervention against an Islamist government in 1997 could have been a turning point for Sunni conservatives, showing them not only that the state did not tolerate them, but also the need for a civilianised Islam extracted from state control.
"AKP failed to do this because it returned to the old statist view of Islam," says Bilgen. "We defend the state and the state defends us."
For Akbulut and Kaplan, meanwhile, nothing shows the loyalty of traditional Sunni Turks to the status quo more clearly than their failure to join growing criticisms of Turkey's 25-year war in the Kurdish southeast.
"Think of it," Akbulut says. "If an army officer wants to get married in the officers' mess, his mother can't attend because she wears a headscarf. If he's killed, they call him a martyr for religion, and come and kiss her hands."
Ali Murat Irat sums up the reasons for Sunni quiescence more bluntly. "Why rebel if the state is feeding you?" he asks. Yet he thinks that if anybody is to break the Sunni mould it's likely to be headscarved girls, whose careers are ruined by bans.
Arguments over headscarves, he points out, strengthen the status quo - impeding democracy by entrenching the divisions of those who fear Sharia or feel crushed by secularism.
"The more headscarved girls who stand up and say what [ Kaplan and Akbulut] have said, the more the two sides in the debate will have to start reflecting on the basic justification for their existence," Irat says.
"This press release may one day be seen as a turning point."