Turkey seeks an exit strategy from headscarf crisis

16/06/2008

After his election victory last year, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan pledged to become a "prime minister of all Turkey", but opponents accuse him of spearheading an Islamic agenda rather than moving on broadly supported liberal reforms. As the controversy threatens to engulf Turkish politics, some are urging a new consensus.

By Ayhan Simsek for Southeast European Times -- 13/06/08

Turkey's prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, could face a ban from politics. [Getty Images]

Turkey has entered into a deep political crisis, following the Constitutional Court's ruling earlier this month against amendments pioneered by the Islamist rooted ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) to allow headscarves at universities.

The ruling delivered a major blow to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and the decision is likely to increase the chance that the Court will also ban Erdogan's AKP for allegedly undermining the secular character of the state.

Turkey's chief prosecutor has asked the Court to ban AKP and exclude 71 of its leaders from politics for five years. In his indictment, he described the headscarf amendment as one of the main elements showing that the party has a "hidden Islamist agenda". A court ruling is expected in July.

The demand for the right to wear headscarves at universities has been a controversial issue in Turkey for decades. While some Muslim women interpret the Koran as not obliging them to cover their hair, others use various types of headscarf. The strictest version, covering the whole hair, is seen in Turkey as the symbol of political Islam.

Generally, Turkish women are free to wear or not to wear headscarves. But they are forbidden for public servants and also for students. Proponents of lifting the ban argue that freedom of expression is at stake, while opponents feel political Islam is driving the issue.

The debate came to a highly sensitive point last week. On a TV news programme, a young woman with a headscarf said that she and her friends "admire Khomeini", the leader of Iran's Islamic revolution, and believe that Mustafa Kemal Ataturk -- the founder of the secular Turkish Republic – "betrayed the Islamic nation".

A woman stands under a line of Turkish flags during a protest in Istanbul against a decision by Turkey's top court to annul a law enabling women to wear Islamic headscarves at universities. The June 5th ruling was seen as a bellwether for a pending closure case brought against the ruling Justice and Development Party. [Getty Images]

Ergun Ozbudun, a prominent liberal professor who earlier led the preparations for a new civil constitution, has criticised the Constitutional Court's latest ruling against headscarves, saying the judges exceeded their power. "Also, the Court makes a very rigid, illiberal interpretation of secularism, which we don't see in any Western democracy today -- even in France, which is very strict on secularism," he told Kanal D television.

According to Ozbudun, those who really want an Islamic state in Turkey amount to below 10% of the population, so the threat is slight. A recent survey found that the majority of Turks respect the separation of state and religion, while 76% also want headscarves to be allowed at universities.

Not all Turkish intellectuals agree with Ozbudun, however. Gülsüm Bilgehan, a politician from the Republican People’s Party (CHP) and a respected former member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, warns that under the AKP Turkish women are in danger of losing their rights.

"Political Islamist groups are carrying on systematic efforts to Islamize the country, and today we are seeing even young primary school girls being forced to wear headscarves in some parts of the country," she said.

Criticizing what she described as the "freedom rhetoric" of the AKP, Bilgehan said more and more women were being excluded from the public sphere and assigned the traditional role of stay-at-home mother. According to statistics, female participation in the work force has indeed dropped from over 34% in 1990 to just over 22% at the end of 2007.

Only 25 out of the AKP's 340 deputies are women, and there is only one female minister in Erdogan's cabinet.

A prominent Turkish writer, Soner Yalçın, investigated the families of AKP leaders in his recent popular book "Who are you fooling?" He concluded that most of the women in these families decided to wear headscarves after getting married, and that while the majority had a university education, they sought no job after marriage and decided to stay at home.

According to Yalçın, the traditional conservatism among political Islamists kept them out of the public sphere.

While Turkey’s intellectuals and politicians may be divided over headscarf ban, there is a near-consensus that Erdogan has mismanaged the issue following his decisive election victory last July.

Thousands of Turks visit Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's mausoleum in Ankara in February to protest against lifting the ban on Islamic headscarves in universities. [Getty Images]

AKP won 46.6% of the vote, gaining the support of business circles as well as liberals who wanted stability and a continuation of EU political and economic reforms.

In his victory speech in July 2007, Erdogan said his party was committed to Turkey's democratic, secular and social system and rule of law. He reached out to those who voted for the secular opposition, saying "I can understand your concerns; your votes are also valuable for us. You are richness for our democratic life".

According to Cüneyt Ülsever, a leading columnist who once saw the AKP as having the potential to transform Turkey into a liberal democracy, the prime minister has not delivered on his pledge.

Instead of being a "prime minister of all Turkey" and moving forward with liberal democratic reforms, Erdogan has mostly spearheaded changes meant to benefit his Islamist core constituency, Ülsever says.

Currently, Turkey's politicians and intellectuals are discussing an exit strategy to the crisis, which has already started to undermine the country’s economic prospects and its credibility as an EU candidate country.

Turkey's most popular columnist, the editor in chief of the mainstream Hurriyet newspaper, issued a call to both camps to work for the good of the country.

"We should now forget everything and open a new page for a new social consensus," Ertuğrul Özkök wrote in his column on Thursday. "We should avoid further controversy and come together around our common aims, starting from the EU membership," he said.

Özkök suggested a new comprehensive discussion on the headscarf controversy and suggested the ban could be lifted as long as new assurances were given to secularists, such as forbidding such Islamic symbols in primary and high schools, as well as for public servants.

"A new social contract is possible for a democratic and secular Turkey," he said. "But we should first start gaining confidence among each other."

This content was commissioned for SETimes.com