In Turkey, from headscarf to 'immorality' ban

For many in the West, the Islamic headscarf (hijab) that many conservative Muslim women wear is a symbol of oppression. They assume that these women must be wearing this unusual headdress because their husbands, fathers, brothers and others must be forcing them to do so. Even when the headscarf is worn willingly, it is taken by some feminists as the sign of an internalized misogyny — a "false consciousness" into which Muslim women were drawn by patriarchal men.

While both of these arguments might have some merit in certain contexts, in the Turkish context, the headscarf has rather become the symbol of something that most Westerners would hardly associate it with: freedom.

The simple reason is that unlike in "Islamic" states such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, where the headscarf is praised and imposed by the authorities, in "secular" Turkey the authorities have rather ridiculed and banned the headscarf for decades. Wearing it in Turkey's passionately secular republic, therefore, has become an act of opposing state authority to claim individual liberty.

This uniquely Turkish meaning of the headscarf comes from Turkey's self-styled secularism called laiklik. Imported from the French laicite, this has always been an illiberal idea, which gave the state almost unlimited powers to "enlighten" society by banning institutions and practices that it deemed "backward." The 1989 decision by the Turkish Constitutional Court — then a strong ally of the super-strong military — had clearly affirmed this view by arguing that the state has the duty to "protect society from dogmatism." Therefore, practices that the state considered "dogmatic" could be easily banned. (Where the state's own dogmas such as the "Six Arrows" of Ataturk would of course be untouched.)