I live in USA where people are allowed to study and work with their headscarf or with any other religious or cultural dressing. In this country we do not look at what do you wear and what do you believe in. We look at how hardworking you are. This the secret, I think, that makes USA a super power. We respect diversity. Where I work there is a girl with head scarf and there is a a very religious jewish guy.

I think, letting people have Kurdish language classes does not divide Turkey. Letting girls wear headscarf does not make Turkey an Islamic state.

If you do not want an Islamic regime in Turkey, you should allow girls with head scarf to study and work in public spaces otherwise they will be the enemy of the secular system.

As you are scared of religious people, some people are scared of Kurds. You should respect the differences.

This is an article published in Turkish Daily News by a brilliant young Turkish intellectual, Mustafa Akyol.

Why Are We a Nation Obsessed with the Headscarf?
[Originally published in Turkish Daily News]

To most outside observers the scene must be looking pretty bizarre: Thousands of otherwise reasonable men and women in this country, who make up much of the social elite, are having panic attacks in the face of the possibility that Turkish universities might tolerate their students wearing the Islamic headscarf. Virtually everyday, bureaucrats, pundits and even university rectors lash out against the proposed article in the proposed constitution to set the headscarf free. "This will be the end of the secular republic," they passionately claim, without realizing that a secular republic that doesn't respect the rights and liberties of its citizens is called a secular tyranny.

I have repeatedly said what I think about this prohibition on the headscarf: It is a violation of human rights, and it is a shame on our democracy. I also have made a suggestion to make things more fair if this ban is going to last: The citizens who wear the headscarf should pay less taxes. They obviously don't get anything from Turkey's education system, and they should not be required to take a share in its finance. If they are second-class citizens, why should they pay the same rates with the folks in the first class?

Anyway, tyrannies are tyrannies and they don't bother about such details. And the story of our homegrown one is too broad a topic to discuss in a single column. That's why I rather want to focus on the origins of the obsession with the headscarf. While other Islamic practices such as the Ramadan fast is not a problem in Turkey, why is this one a huge bone of contention?


Remembering the hat revolution

To find an answer, we have to go back to the Ottoman Empire, which underlies much of modern Turkey. In this multi-ethnic and multi-religious state, headgear was an important symbol because it specified a person's religious and thus legal identity. For a long time, the three “nations” of the empire — the Muslims, the Jews and the Christians — had their own distinct turbans. What you put on your head also said who you are.

The person who changed that was Sultan Mahmud II, who, during his reign (1808-1839), brought in many modern concepts such as the rule of law, the limits of the state's powers and the idea of equal citizenship. Under Mahmud, Jews and Christians were granted equal rights with Muslims, and all of them were introduced to a new headgear called the “fez.” This red cylindrical cap was a novelty, which some conservatives did not like, but soon all Ottoman citizens, regardless of their creed, accepted it.

Yet the real revolution would come about a century after Mahmud II, and this time the goal was not “Ottomanization” as he had aimed, but rather de-Ottomanization. Mustafa Kemal, Turkey's Westernist founder, took that bold step as early as 1925 with this famous “hat revolution.” For him, the fez symbolized everything that he wanted to save the Turks from, and the bowler hat represented everything that he wanted to turn them into. He showed up in the conservative city of Kastamonu in August 1925 with a bowler on this head. “This is called a hat gentlemen,” he said, “from now on, we will wear this.”

Soon came the hat law, which outlawed all religious turbans and made it compulsory for civil servants to wear the “headgear of the civilized peoples.” Atatürk did not touch women's veils, but he systematically promoted the ideal “modern Turkish woman,” who was supposed to wear all the trendy clothes including those vintage swimsuits of the ‘30s.

Atatürk and his followers were very enthusiastic about the bowler hats, and, at a time when much of the war-stricken Turkish society was in total destitute, they did not refrain from spending great sums of money to import them from various European countries. Yet not everybody was a great fan of this compulsory fashion. For many devout Muslims, the hat represented the Christian West and they perceived its imposition onto Muslim society as an act of forced self-denial. They saw in the bowlers even an implicit message of disobedience to God. It was impossible to wear this rimmed hat during the daily Muslim prayer, in which the believers put their foreheads to the ground as a sign of submission to the Almighty. So putting on the hat, for them, looked like abandoning worship.


The victims of the bowler hat

Hence came the reactions to the hat revolution. In the northeastern coastal town of Rize the whole populace rejected the idea, sparking a rebellion that led Ankara to send the giant warship Hamidiye to the shores of the city in order to be persuasive. In Erzurum a group of 30 protestors were fired upon by the gendarmerie and several of them, including a woman, were shot.

The most notorious episode would be the case of İskilipli Atıf, a “hodja,” i.e., a religious scholar, who wrote a treatise titled “The Hat and the Imitation of the Franks,” in which he objected to the idea by arguing that it would amount to the abandonment of Muslim culture. Although he had written that 32-page tract before the revolution, at a time when the word was around but the law was not in practice, he was arrested by the authorities charged with treason. Soon he was tried by one of the “Independence Courts,” which were arbitrary revolutionary tribunals similar to the ones established by the French revolutionaries and later the Bolsheviks in order to eliminate the “enemies of the people.” In his defense, İskilipli Atıf said that he stood behind his views, and the court cold-bloodedly sentenced him to death. The old man was executed by hanging on Feb. 4, 1925. “Don't cry my child,” he said in his last hours to his daughter who was in tears. “Just recite the Koran for my soul.”

İskilipli Atıf was only one of the many victims of the hat revolution. Eight others were executed in Rize, seven in Maraş and four in Erzurum. According to the Turkish version of Encyclopedie Larousse, the number of people killed by the regime was as high as 78. Moreover, many others were sentenced to 10 to 15 years of imprisonment.


Permanent revolution

More than 80 years have passed since the hat revolution and its victims. Yet the mindset of the revolutionaries has changed very little, if at all. Nobody wears hats anymore, and the male headgear is a non-issue. But now the focus is on the female headdress. The revolutionaries still want to do the same thing: They want to eradicate all traditional Islamic clothes. They would love to do it by employing revolutionary guards on the streets to rip the veils off, but that is not feasible. So they rather prefer to contain the veiled women by pushing them out of the “public square” and denying them the right to education. The ultimate aim is to make all of them “modern” by using coercive powers of the state.

What these revolutionaries fail to understand is that in the modern world, states have no right to interfere with the dress codes of their citizens, and that individuals have the right to live in whatever manner they choose. Actually if there is any version of “modernity” that they resemble, that is the way of Chairman Mao, whose Cultural Revolution traumatized a whole nation during the late ‘60s. Turkey's cultural revolution has been much less radical, thank God, but unlike Mao's now defunct tyranny, it still goes on.

Another one by the same author...

Turkey and the Headscarf
[Originally published in The Washington Times]

There are few countries in the world in which policemen ensure that women dress appropriately. Saudi Arabia is one example. Its notorious "religion police," called mutawwa, force women to cover their heads and bodies. In Turkey, the story is reversed: The Turkish police require the removal of headdresses.

To be fair, Turkey's dress code is much less severe than Saudi Arabia's. In Turkey, the ban is enforced only in defined parts of the public square: government buildings, courtrooms, university campuses and all schools.


This ban has been a hot issue in Turkey for many years. While no civil servant or high school student has ever been allowed to wear a headscarf, university students once were accorded this privilege — until the 1990s, when the secularist establishment was alarmed at the growing number of such "religionists" in colleges, and strict rules were applied to ensure the "tightheads" wouldn't be taken in.

Some students agreed to uncover their heads and continued with their education, but thousands lost their chance to graduate — simply for choosing to wear a cloth over their heads, which they believe to be God's will.

A few months ago, a new episode was added to the longstanding drama. In the Ataturk University of Erzurum, a very conservative town in the East, all students, of course without any headscarves, came to receive their diplomas at graduation. With them came many mothers and grandmothers. Alas, some wore headscarves. Following a order from the university rector, police denied them entry.

The women cried and swore that they, too, believed in the principles of Ataturk, Turkey's founding father; but the orders were strict. In secular Turkey, no religious garment must ever appear on the "public square" — the liberated zone of Turkey's self-styled secularism.

* * *

The bone of contention here is the rigid ideology of Turkey's secularist establishment. Theirs is an intolerant version of secularism imported from France in the early 20th century, a time when the anticlerical zealotry of French revolutionism was at its zenith, and the Nietzschean claim "God is dead" was the intellectual norm. An all-powerful state and a uniform society were seen as the key to "progress."

The young Turkish Republic, founded in 1923, formulated an authoritarian mode of secular nationalism, not neutral to but dominant over and sometimes outright hostile to religion. In two decades of single-party rule, most Islamic traditions were replaced with European ones. Speaking against these "reforms" was punished severely.

That's why Turkey was never a really convincing example of the compatibility of Islam with modernity for Muslims in other nations. At the problem's heart is the lack of real democracy. While Turkey evolved into a much more democratic country in recent decades, it still retained some vestiges of the authoritarian secular nationalism.

Turkey's current conservative government, run by the AKP (Party for Justice and Progress) is very much willing to lift the headscarf ban. Yet whenever AKP leaders speak about changing the ban, they are reminded by the secularist establishment such a move would create a "regime crisis," a euphemism for pressure from the military. Consequently, Turkey remains the only country in the world in which a Muslim woman wearing a headscarf has simply no chance for any kind of education. Turkey's secularist establishment claims this is necessary, because otherwise Islamists will turn Turkey into another Iran.

That's an unsubstantiated fear. Turkey's current government led by AKP leader Tayyip Erdogan is not Islamist — let alone "Islamofascist" as a commentator recently argued — but a conservative political force that has brought more freedom to the whole Turkish society in recent years. Polls show more than 90 percent of Turks wish to live under a secular regime, but more than 70 percent oppose restrictions on the headscarf and such personal Islamic practices.

What the people actually want is a government that makes no laws — and employs no police — "respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." Thus, while the United States promotes liberty and democracy in the broader Middle East, it should remember even Turkey needs more of both. Apart from secularist and Islamist authoritarianisms, there is a third way called liberal democracy. That is exactly what the Turkish society needs — and deserves.

Did they catch the killer, who was he?