Esra Özcan - Mainstreaming the Headscarf: Islamist Politics and Women in the Turkish Media

Gender and Islam Series

Series Editors

Professor Nadia Al-Bagdadi, Central European University, Hungary

Professor Randi Deguilhem, National Institute of Scientific Research (CNRS), France

Professor Bettina Dennerlein, University of Zurich, Switzerland

Advisory Board

Madawi Al-Rasheed, Middle East Centre, London School of Economics, UK

Kathryn Babayan, University of Michigan, USA

Jocelyne Cesari, Berkley Center, Georgetown University, USA, and University of Birmingham, UK

Dawn Chatty, University of Oxford, UK

Nadia El Cheikh, American University of Beirut, Lebanon

Hoda Elsadda, Cairo University, Egypt

Ratna Ghosh, McGill University, Canada

Suad Joseph, UC Davis, USA

Published and Forthcoming Titles

Queer Muslims in Europe: Sexuality, Religion and
Migration in Belgium, Wim Peumans

Sexual Norms in the Arab World: Desire and Transgression in Islamic Culture, Aymon Kreil, Lucia Sorbera and Serena Tolino (eds.)

Forced Migration and Masculinity in the Middle East:
Syrian Refugees in Egypt, Magdalena Suerbaum

This book is personal for me. I grew up among strong conservative women in Turkey: my grandmother, mother, aunts, and their circle of friends. They were highly educated, ardently studied religion, believed, and practiced. I heard the stories of conservative women from the 1960s firsthand and witnessed how this generation of conservative women shaped the coming generation. In that sense, I am writing not just from the position of an observer or researcher. Even though I am an outsider today, I feel part of the story when I try to make sense of the question that prompted me to write this book in the first place: Why have the vast majority of Turkeys strong, educated conservative women ended up supporting a repressive authoritarian regime? They were the ones who suffered most under Turkeys authoritarian secularism and challenged it on all fronts by resisting the headscarf ban in universities and questioning the anti-democratic practices of the state. What happened?

The conservative women I knew throughout my childhood were not actively engaged in party politics, yet they tended toward voting for the parties on the Right. Those who were politically active organized around Turkeys right-wing Islamist parties. They later became the carriers of the Justice and Development Partys (Adalet ve Kalknma PartisiAKP) ideological program to reshape Turkish society in religiously conservative terms. They became successful in mobilizing millions of other women to support the AKP. The conservative womens story in Turkey entered into a whole new phase with the rise of AKP to power in 2002.

The conservative womens story pre-AKP is a story of struggle, exclusion, and victimization. Although not all conservative women cover their hair, the story of the headscarf in Turkey has become an inseparable part of the story of conservative women. During the 1980s, wearing an Islamic headscarf was a stigmatizing decision that invited verbal insults and judgmental looks particularly in middle- and upper-middle-class neighborhoods. Not wearing a headscarf was the norm. I remember young conservative womens days of struggle at the gates of the university during the second half of the 1980s because of Turkeys notorious headscarf ban. The topic was close to the family, as many women around me wore the headscarf. I remember watching the news with my grandmother and her calm demeanor when Kenan Evren (19172015), the engineer of the 1980 military coup and the seventh president of Turkey (198390), referred to the ban in terms of cleaning the blood in our veins. It was common and pretty normal to refer to women wearing the headscarf (or the more extensive black araf) as cockroaches, to dehumanize them.

The headscarf ban continued on and off depending on the government and the political climate in the country. I attended university at the liberal The ban was not in place when I started the university in 1992, but it came back in 1998 before I completed my MA degree. Boazii University was famous for its resistance to the headscarf ban and allowed students like me, a very small minority at the time, to attend classes in spite of the ban. Still, after the reinstitution of the ban, I remember feeling the fear of exclusion each time I approached the gates of the university. That was discrimination. For students who were not allowed to attend classes in other universities, that was a traumatizing experience. I stopped wearing a headscarf a year after I graduated, in 2001. Hardships aside, my liberal education had convinced me that it was not God who wanted the headscarf for women. Many other women (and men) who spent their youth in conservative circles left conservatism (and the headscarf) for a variety of reasons. I am one of them.

This book grew out of my engagement with conservative women and leftist feminism, as well as my frustration and sadness about the rise of authoritarianism in Turkey and conservative womens role in it. As of this writing in 2018, and with my time wearing the headscarf long in the past, I am amazed by humans endless capacity to find justification for inflicting on others the same pain that was once inflicted on them. It truly saddens me to see conservative women who once suffered from the headscarf ban defending repressive policies when these policies do not affect them anymore but do affect others. All the restrictions on the headscarf are now removed. Doors are wide open for young conservative women to participate fully in education, the economy, and politics. Yet, the removal of the ban went hand in hand with the suppression of dissent and the establishment of a conservative gender hegemony. Under Turkeys President Recep Tayyip Erdoans repressive regime, the headscarf moved to the mainstream and has become a symbol of desirable womanhood, pushing Turkeys secular feminists and their ideals of womanhood more and more to the margins. While conservative women cherish their new freedoms, for Turkeys secular population the headscarf has become one of the signifiers of increasing authoritarianism, adding a new layer to the already-complex meanings of the garment.

The globalized neoliberalism, the West has lost its promise to be a model for equal citizenship and democracy. Situated within this broader context, this book questions some of the established categories that we have been using in academia to make sense of Islamist politics, women, and the media in Turkey. My narrative challenges the established naming practices employed to tell the story of Turkeys conservative women, particularly in academic literature written in English, and evaluates the basic assumptions behind these practices.

Writing this book was painful and challenging. As I was trying to capture the moment and document it, others writings documenting the same moment have started to disappear day by day, both from the digital and material world, because of the campaign against the media in Turkey. At international conferences, I met colleagues from smaller Anatolian universities who were afraid of writing about media censorship in Turkey for fear of losing their jobs. After the failed coup attempt of July 15, 2016, I just stopped counting the number of journalists, writers, and academics that went to jail, and the number of newspapers that were shut down. The newspapers that I used as sources were not there the next morning. Throughout the process of writing this book, I spent a lot of time saving and archiving news stories or articles that crossed my path for fear that they might disappear at any point because of the AKPs crackdown on the media.