Turkey's Battle for Secularism

Published: 07/05/2007

Battle of the Hijab
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown
Two countries sharing a border are currently in tumult over hair, yes hair, female hair, nefarious female hair. Each hails from conquering ancient civilizations that mastered ruthless politics and the soft skills of religious accommodation and achieved greatness mixing the divine and sensual in architecture, writing, art and poetry. I am talking about Turkey and Iran, distant cousins living through similar internal upheavals at this point. Clashes inside both are coalescing around the headscarf and its implications. Both are also having to confront outsider enemies loaded with prejudices and malign intent. As Turkey pushes to become a legitimate member of the EU club, it becomes a ‘problem’ and is seen as an enemy within. Meanwhile George Bush’s war-mongering cabal is getting itchy to go bomb Iran.

In Turkey, supporters of the hijab are in revolt against the constitution that forbids religious symbols in public workplaces. Opponents of the hijabis will kill and die to protect the secular constitution, bestowed by Mustapha Kemel Attaturk, father of the modern Turkish nation. He adroitly separated state and faith in perpetuity. People forget that in Europe, Turkey ( so far) is more adamantly secular even than France. The topography may be transfigured as the ominous crack widens that could break the nation. Violence loiters, waiting for an opportunistic moment to strike. The army is poised to protect Attaturk’s legacy; millions have been taking to the streets; friends and families are busting up.

In 2002 AK, the identifiably Islamic party won electoral power. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan turned out not to be a beardless Ayatollah. He has not rescinded the constitution and has worked hard to win international respect. His wife, though, wears the unconstitutional headscarf. Now comes a vital presidential election ( on May 16th) and his party has put up the foreign minister, Abdullah Gul, urbane, intelligent, persuasive but like Erdongan, steeped in conservative Islamic dogma. His wife too is a hijabi.

Secularists, disturbed by this visible demonstration of Islamicisation now fear a clandestine cultural coup d’etat. They see this happening globally. Nilufer Narli, a Turkish sociology professor explained why the vehement reaction against a piece of cloth :’ People think if the First Lady wears a headscarf then many things will change, threatening our whole secular system and forcing it on all women…This is not just a political crisis, it is a war about style of life. All my friends are tense and angry and worried about the future of their daughters.’ Feza, my English student way back in 1979, now a gynaecologist wrote to me recently from Izmir: ‘ We will never let this happen. These ninjas will make us into Saudi Arabia and Iran. I would kill my own daughters before they have to live in that hell. You in the UK have let them take control too. I come and see small girls with their bodies covered up and wearing scarves. Why didn’t anyone protect them? You want to become like Iran?’

In Iran, where this modern Cromwellian Islam arrived with Ayatollah Khomeni in 1979, women and girls are being subjected to yet another cycle of personal terror. The 21st of March, the first day of spring, heralds in the new year in Iran- sunshine, flowers, fragrance and joy. This year it brought a winter of extra hard repression. Morality police are busily rounding up ‘badly’ covered up females- teachers, journalists, lawyers and activists. They kick and slap the victims, stuff them into
( black curtained) minibuses and take them off to prisons where blindfolded they are confined in full black invisibility, interrogated and ‘corrected’.

According to reliable figures, 150,000 are locked up in dreadful conditions. Some are raped for being an affront to Islam. A stray, wayward wisp of hair apparently drives men to dirty thoughts and unholy acts for which they cannot then be blamed. Ahmedinajad, like Erdogan, was elected by a rapturous majority from the working classes, many rural people who have swollen towns and cities. Their fear of women and loathing of modernity combines to make a potent linctus, a cure they believe for social ills and global political disempowerment. The influx brings conservative attitudes repellent to urban citizens who have found themselves rendered voiceless. (Ahmedinajad fell victim to the pernicious rules himself. Last week, the sick men of Iran tore into him for kissing the gloved hand of an elderly, female teacher) Once these urbanites welcomed the revolution and volunteered to cover up as an act of political defiance against the Shah’s regime. That was their choice. Now they have no choice not to.

The first optimistic chapter of the Iranian Revolution has turned out to be a perilous road to perdition. Freedom and the human spirit were nationalised, ground down and almost extinguished. Women in Iraq too were once equal to men and able to dress as they wished. Blair’s gift of democracy has rendered them silent and invisible. Yet from Canada to Australia, Muslim women are being encouraged ( and many forced) into hijab, jilbab, niqab and full burkha. Like the sceptical Turks, I see what comes next. A choice quickly settles to become a convention, then a tradition, then an injunction, then blackmail used against ‘lesser’ believers, then an oppressive weapon to control the young and resisters. Cultural fluidity hardens. I feel the same disquiet over the increasingly strident manifestations of other politicised religious identities. Pretty young boys with skull caps and keski, Sikh under turbans in school playgrounds have made no choices nor have they been given any sense that as they grow older they have the right to say no to the symbols.

These misgivings can easily turn to iron. I have to be wary of not becoming as intransigent as people who wish to regulate Islam and get states to succumb to their power. An unbeatably bright young woman, Ms Akhtar, is working with me at the moment, helping to build up a new organisation- British Muslims for Secular Democracy ( BMSD). Our mission states we believe in a religiously neutral state. Akhtar, wears a headscarf, and was one of eight shortlisted applicants and the best. She understands how one day today’s liberally elected cultural practices could tomorrow imprison us all.

Our universities do nothing as Muslim women are compelled or pulled into wearing head and body covers. We do not defend our secular state. They do in Turkey, though some with unwarranted viciousness which is self defeating. I hope they can save their country’s political pillars being lent on with such strength by Islamicists. They still have a chance and can avoid, I hope, the charms of the Iranian Islamic idyll. We must too.

In We are Iran, by Nasrin Alavi, a riveting collection of observations by young Iranians, one young man writes: ’Europe struggled for five centuries to banish religion and superstition from political and social life, making a lot of sacrifices along the way. We must make this hard and hazardous journey ourselves. There are no chains harder than the chains of religion and tradition…’ Just as Turks want to push towards the Islamic republic, refugees from the Iranian Islamic republic are trying to reach the embrace of secularism. I hope they meet.

Published in The Independent