In Turkey, there are various human rights organizations dedicated to defend oppressed groups or individuals. One of them, Mazlumder, is unique, because it has explicitly Islamic credentials, unlike most others that are more secular. Yet the same Mazlumder is going through a major purge these days under a government that also has explicitly Islamic credentials. The apparent irony here is worth examining, for it tells a lot about the nature of the regime that is being built in Turkey.

Mazlumder was founded in 1991 by a group of pious Muslims alarmed by the draconian headscarf ban imposed in all schools, universities and public jobs. While defending the right to wear a headscarf as a human right, the organization also expanded its scope to other human rights crises such as the “Kurdish question.” During the bloody conflict between the security forces and the armed and outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), in which both sides acted brutally, Mazlumder became one of the fair voices that tried to uphold the truth. The organization was, as its motto read, “With the oppressed and against the oppressors, whoever they are.”

Through its work, Mazlumder also made Turkey’s religious conservatives adopt the concept of “human rights,” which can be easily shunned by Islamists as a “Western invention.” I personally remember having such a discussion in the early 2000s, where the case for the freedom for the headscarf became a basis for accepting freedom for all walks of life.

In the past few years, however, a tension emerged within Mazlumder. The state was no longer the old secularist Turkey that oppressed pious Muslims. Now the state was rather dominated by those very pious Muslims under the pro-Islamic leadership of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Would Mazlumder still continue its mission of speaking truth to the ruling power? Or would it now be more lenient to power?