TURKEY: The last few years have seen changes in Turkey aimed at legitimising the place of women in the religious order, writes Nicholas Birch
Dressed in headscarf and ankle-length coat, the uniform of conservative Turkish women, Sule Yuksel Uysal brushes off the suggestion that she is a revolutionary. But she does a job whose very existence confirms Turkey's place on the front lines of Islamic reform.
Appointed 18 months ago by the country's directorate of religious affairs, or Diyanet, Uysal is one of 200 state-paid vaize, or female preachers. Women acted informally as preachers in the early days of Islam, but they have never before been officially recognised as such.
"Turkey is a country that has accepted the idea of sexual equality and that must be reflected in religious practice," says Diyanet head Ali Bardakoglu, who implemented the changes.
"Anyway, the Koran has taught the equality of men and women for 1,400 years."
His sanguine words belie the depth of the controversy in the Muslim world over women's religious authority.
When American theologian Amina Wadud led Friday prayers in New York last year, Egypt's top cleric, Abdul Aziz-Seikh, described her as "an enemy of Islam" who had "violated God's law". Unlike Wadud, the Turkish vaizes make no claims to be religious leaders, or imams. For Yuksel, their fundamental role is to provide women with a woman's perspective on Islam.
"Turkish mosques remain male-dominated places and most women only hear what imams say via their husbands or fathers," she explains. "We give them an opportunity to go to mosques and ask questions they otherwise wouldn't dare to."
That may not sound much, but the vaizes' sermons often touch on contentious issues like honour killings and women's rights under Islam. Not all men are happy with their wives' new-found learning.
"One of the first sermons I heard was about women's marital rights," said Meryem Uzun, from the conservative southeastern city of Mardin. "When I told my husband what I had heard, he got angry and tried to try to prevent me going to the mosque again."
For Esra Ozdemir, a preacher in another southeastern town, Sirnak, local women's interest in her teachings offers stark evidence of the need to increase the number of vaizes.
"They see me almost as a saviour," she told the Islamist weekly Aktuel late last year. "I don't think anybody had listened to their problems before."
Analysts however say it would be wrong to cast Turkish women in the role of perpetual victims. The last few years have seen a raft of changes aimed at legitimising their place in the religious order.
As well as being preachers, women now have the right to lead groups on the annual pilgrimage to Mecca.
Since last year, 15 Turkish provinces have a female deputy mufti, experts on religious law who monitor the work of imams in mosques.
More importantly, given that 70 per cent of requests for advice come from women, the assistant mufti has the right to issue fatwas, or religious opinions.
Theologian Hidayet Tuksal thinks these are crucial changes. "Religion is the best way to reach religious women," she says, "much better than diktats handed down by secularist feminists in Istanbul."
Perhaps the best-known of a growing band of what the Turkish press calls Islamist feminists, Tuksal puts the changes down to the rise of a new sort of conservative Turkish woman: feisty and not afraid to question tradition.
"When I began teaching in the 1980s I had to justify my demand for a salary," she remembers. "Today those attitudes are unthinkable."
However, like her colleagues at the Ankara-based foundation she set up to combat religious justifications of inequality, Tuksal still thinks there is much to be done.
Of the 80,000 employees of the Diyanet, she points out, fewer than 3,000 are women.
More importantly, explicitly sexist interpretations of traditions of the Prophet - the belief that a woman needs a man's consent to go to heaven, for instance - are still popular.
"Good intentions are not enough," Tuksal says. "Such traditions have to be tackled, forcefully."
Though he acknowledges the length of the road still to be covered, Diyanet's Ali Bardakoglu cautions that there are limits to the speed of reform. "The Diyanet aims to lead believers," he says. "It can't do that if it's running so fast it disappears from sight."