Turkey's ban on women wearing headscarves in all educational and state institutions is backfiring on its original intent to protect personal freedoms and guard against religious intolerance, writes Mary Fitzgerald
Seyma Turkan was faced with a dilemma. The teenager from Ankara had her heart set on studying economics at Sutcu Imam university in southeastern Anatolia. Her grades were perfect, her father had paid the tuition fees and all Seyma had left to do was register.
The only hitch was her headscarf, banned in all schools, universities and government buildings in avowedly secular Turkey. She knew she could not enter the campus veiled, so she did what many devout Turkish women do to get around the ban without compromising their beliefs.
She pinned back her hair and covered it with a stretchy scarf that clung tightly to her head. Then, reaching for the wig bought just days before, she stood in front of a mirror and tugged it into place over her headscarf.
However, the elaborate charade was not enough. Seyma was turned away by university officials who told her she could not register wearing a wig. Her father has launched a lawsuit, claiming the decision deprives his daughter of her right to education.
"The first ban on wigs," one newspaper headline screamed earlier this week. Ironically, the accompanying report pointed out, Sutcu Imam university is named after one of the country's war heroes, a milkman who fired shots at a group of French soldiers as they tried to remove the veils of two Turkish women at the end of the first World War.
Seyma Turkan's case marks the latest tragi-comic chapter in Turkey's headscarf debacle, a controversy as long-running as it is bitter.
Nothing stirs the emotions of both staunch secularists and devout Muslims quite as much as the square metre of fabric used by more than 65 per cent of Turkish women to cover their heads. It is perhaps the most divisive issue in this predominantly Muslim country, one that symbolises a wider battle over what kind of state Turkey wants to be.
Walk down Istiklal Caddesi, Istanbul's crowded pedestrian thoroughfare, and it's hard not to wonder what all the fuss is about.
Girls in brightly coloured headscarves and jeans hang out with their uncovered friends, while matronly veiled women shepherd fashionably-dressed daughters with long, highlighted hair. "This is rarely an issue in people's private lives," says Ayse Bohurler, the first TV presenter in Turkey to wear a headscarf.
"You see women with headscarves and women without in the same family or group of friends. It only becomes an issue in public spheres like education and politics, places where the elite don't want to be challenged."
Those who veil say they do it as an act of faith, dressing according to codes of modesty they believe are prescribed by the Koran. In the eyes of Turkey's powerful secular elite, however, the headscarf comes laden with all sorts of ideological and political baggage that threatens the founding ideals of Kemal Ataturk's republic.
Hence, they say, the need for a ban in all government and educational institutions.
A majority of Turks beg to differ. One national survey conducted earlier this year found that 68 per cent consider the prohibition to be a form of religious oppression and support its repeal. Many human rights groups deplore the ban, complaining that a law supposedly drawn up to protect personal freedoms and guard against religious intolerance has had the opposite effect.
"In Turkey the wearing of the head scarf by students or elected representatives has not presented a threat to public order, health or morality and it is difficult to imagine circumstances in which it might," noted the New York-based group Human Rights Watch.
"All citizens of Turkey should have equal rights, but instead we have a situation where the lives of the majority are dictated by a small minority," says Ayla Kerimoglu, spokeswoman for Hazar, an Istanbul- based support group for veiled women. "We are made to feel like unwelcome guests in our own country."
Women who wear the headscarf are barred from civil service employment, taking seats in parliament, appearing as lawyers in court and working in schools and universities. Some women claim they have been refused treatment at state hospitals because of their headscarves. Three years ago a veiled defendant was ordered to leave a courtroom by the presiding judge, who declared she "had no right to be in a public area - a courthouse".
For many critics of the ban, however, the most damning aspect is the effect it has had on women's education. Government regulations have long required students to "to wear modern costumes and look modern", but the outright ban on headscarves dates back to the 1980s, when greater numbers of students from conservative religious backgrounds began attending university. A 1989 constitutional court ruling summed up the secularists' position: ". . . some of our daughters, who are not sufficiently educated, cover their heads as a result of the influence of society and of certain traditions and customs, and not because they have something important to say about religion. It is also known that some of our women, who have received sufficient education to enable them to resist societal pressure, cover their heads in order to demonstrate their opposition to secularism and their support for a theocratic state.
"For people in the second category, covering their heads is not just an innocent habit; it is the symbol of a world view opposed to women's liberation and to the main tenets of the Turkish Republic."
The ban was enforced sporadically until 1997 when regulations were tightened and the issue became more entrenched along with the rise of Islamist political parties. Today some universities take it more seriously than others, setting up checkpoints at campus gates to prevent anyone in a headscarf entering. Others are more relaxed, asking students to remove headscarves only during classes and allowing those studying Islamic theology to veil.
In 2000, a medical student in Istanbul was sentenced to six months in jail, later reduced to a fine, for "obstructing the education of others".
Her crime? Wearing a headscarf to sit her finals. Last year the rector of a university in northeastern Turkey sparked a national furore when he decided to extend the ban to include mothers attending their children's graduation ceremony on campus.
According to Mazlumder, a Turkish human rights organisation, more than 10,000 women in Istanbul alone have been affected by a stricter enforcement of the ban in recent years. Some have decided to opt out of university altogether rather than remove their headscarf, a worrying trend in a country where women's education levels leave a lot to be desired.
Critics say that instead of emancipating women, the ban often stifles the ambitions of those from conservative religious backgrounds who shy away from university as a result. "It is hard to know how many women have chosen to go without a university education as a result of the ban," says Yesim Arat, a political scientist at Istanbul's Bosphorus University who has written a book on the issue. "Many have resigned themselves to the fact that the ban exists and they must find ways around it. We should not allow this to become an excuse for women not to go to university, but unfortunately it can be used as such."
Those who can afford it choose to study in countries where they are free to wear what they want. Prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan sent his two daughters to the US so they could complete their university education without giving up their headscarves. The ban also affects his veiled wife - she cannot accompany him to official functions in state buildings.
Sena Nur Celik (20) turned down a place at one of Turkey's most prestigious universities because of the headscarf ban. Now studying law at Warwick University in Britain, she plans to write her dissertation on the issue. The very first headscarf ban came into effect two months before Sena's mother, Saniye, was due to graduate, having passed all her university exams. Twenty years later, she is still without her diploma.
"Women are being punished without committing a crime," says Sena. "The reasoning behind this prohibition is not well founded. I wear my headscarf to university in the UK and no one notices - it's not a big deal. In Europe there is respect for religious freedom. When I come back to Turkey, I feel like I am relegated to the position of a second-class citizen. I simply do not matter."
Cigdem Hacak grew up in Germany with her Turkish parents but now lives in Istanbul. She wears a headscarf but has decided to take it off so she can fulfil her dream of becoming a teacher.
"It will be difficult because I have worn it since I was eight years old," she says. "I have accepted that removing it is something I have to do but I still think the ban is wrong. We live in a country where most people are Muslim, yet women are forced to decide between their faith and their education or work. That is not an easy decision for anyone."
Campaigners against the ban had previously pinned much of their hopes on the European Court for Human Rights. In 1998, medical student Leyla Sahin filed a case with the court, arguing that the ban violated her right to an education and discriminated against her because of her religion. Sahin had faced disciplinary action for wearing a headscarf at her university. The court rejected her case and an appeal last year also failed, disappointing more than 1,000 other Turkish women who had filed similar complaints.
One of them was Hayrunisa Gul, wife of Turkish foreign minister Abdullah Gul, who had been denied admission to university because of her headscarf. She eventually withdrew her complaint to avoid going to court against a country where her husband was a minister.
In its final ruling, the European Court for Human Rights said the headscarf ban was based on principles of secularism and equality enshrined in Turkey's constitution and therefore justified. "The court did not lose sight of the fact that there were extremist political movements in Turkey which sought to impose on society as a whole their religious symbols and conception of a society founded on religious precepts," the court's ruling added.
The headscarf can sometimes be used as a political statement in itself, says Hulya Kucuk, a theology professor at Selcuk University in Konya, a central Antlion city considered one of Turkey's most religiously conservative.
The way it is arranged and tied around the face can often indicate the political or religious group with which the wearer is associated. Kucuk uses a headscarf herself, removing it for work.
"Of course I would like to be able to wear the headscarf all the time, but I realise that for some people it is not just a religious issue, it's political. If people did not exploit it for political reasons the situation would be different," she says, while acknowledging that the ban has also, conversely, succeeded in politicising the headscarf even more. For some young Turkish women, it has become a badge of protest and rebellion.
"If the ban was lifted the issue would diminish because that element of protest would be removed. In the past it wasn't a big fuss but it has become such an issue for some people that it has almost taken on the same importance as praying," Kucuk says.
"It is not one of the main principles of Islam - you are still a Muslim woman if you don't wear a headscarf. There are people who refuse to allow their daughters attend university because it would mean taking off the headscarf and that is a real pity."
Many Turks consider the issue a convenient diversion for the country's politicians, displacing debate on more pressing problems. Both sides of Turkey's secular/religious divide are prone to hyperbole when it comes to discussing the headscarf and its place in Turkish society. Eight years ago an Islamist MP caused a fuss when he compared uncovered women to "immoral prostitutes".
Hardline secularists peddle fears that lifting the ban would help usher in an Iranian-style theocracy. "They believe that one day it will be the headscarf, the next sharia law and polygamy," says Yesim Arat. "People get quite scared and emotional about it."
Such fears are groundless, says Ayse Bohurler who also sits on the executive council of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP).
"Turkey can never be an Iran or Afghanistan. We have unique cultural, historical and social dynamics that make such scenarios impossible here."
It still hits a raw nerve with many. When the AKP introduced a draft law to relax the ban following its 2002 election victory, the opposition CHP, a political party founded by Ataturk, warned that any change would take place "only through a bloody Islamic revolution".
The AKP's efforts to unpick the legislation have so far foundered.
In the meantime, pious Turkish women who refuse to sacrifice their education will continue to visit wigmakers such as Enver Erciyas in his cramped upstairs shop off Istanbul's Taksim Square. There, among the spiky day-glo hairpieces he sells to the city's clubbers and transvestites, are what Erciyas calls the "veil wigs" in various shades of black and brown. Synthetic, machine- washable and imported in bulk from China, they sell for €20-35 apiece.
The veiled students insist on shoulder-length styles to ensure the nape of the neck is not exposed, he says. Despite the Seyma Turkan incident, Erciyas expects to sell at least five "veil wigs" a day in the next six weeks as students prepare for a new semester.
"They're embarrassed when they come here and embarrassed that they have to do this," he says. "You can't help feeling sorry for them."