From both the perspective of the state and its people Turkey’s stance on basic human rights is complex. On the one hand, Turkey is a functioning parliamentary democracy with regular, free, fair elections in a region where this is still a rarity. Despite important limitations, the Turkish press is both broad and diverse. If most of the mainstream Turkish media tends toward populist nationalism, there are a number of influential sources (mostly print) that persistently and successfully critique the great and the powerful.

On the other hand, restrictions on freedom of expression and limitations on the press, while enforced only sporadically, are enforced nonetheless, and have a significant cooling effect on public debate. More important is the extent to which the Turkish public accepts these restrictions and other basic limitations on human rights. Among the myriad problems facing Turkey, only one percent of the population cites the justice system as the most important problem facing the country, and only two percent cite democratization. The fiercely nationalist quality of much of Turkish public discourse makes many types of debate suspect, with even the most basic criticisms often seen as treasonous. Similarly, a recent poll suggests that Turks are remarkably accepting of the state’s use of torture, with a slight majority favoring its limited use in terrorism cases and as much as eighteen percent believing that the state has the right to use it freely. Support for a total ban on torture in Turkey was lower than in any of the countries polled in both the Middle East and Europe. At the same time, despite frequent reports of abuse by security services, the military remain far and away the most popular institution in the country, with eighty-one percent of the population expressing confidence in them.

The painful reality is that domestic pressure for expanded freedom of expression, minority rights, and protection from abuse by members of the security services is extremely limited. There are important NGOs working to document human rights abuses and defend basic freedoms in Turkey, but they represent an embattled fringe and have a limited role in popular discourse.

The AKP and the dynamics of human rights reform

Turkey’s human rights record has generally improved under the AKP, but it is hardly spotless. Restrictions on expression and assembly continue, torture still occurs, and security officials still act with relative impunity. In fact, after some years of significant improvement, general human rights conditions in Turkey have begun to trend downward again.

Given the lack of popular domestic pressure, however, it is the very real improvements in Turkey’s human rights record since the AKP first came to power in 2002 that most need to be explained. By understanding the dynamics of the AKP’s efforts to improve Turkey’s human rights situation, more recent setbacks can best be understood.

Although previous governments had made efforts to address Turkey’s human rights record, none were willing to engage in the broad, transformative effort envisioned by the AKP. That the AKP was willing to do so was rooted in both political philosophy and political calculation. Perhaps the largest element of this willingness had to do with their distance from traditional state institutions. Suspect because of their religiosity, members of the AKP maintained the fierce nationalism evident throughout Turkish society but were less inclined to venerate the state and state institutions. As Jenny White has deftly shown, the roots of the AKP came from grassroots mobilization that simultaneously bypassed and fused with state institutions.

The AKP also reflected broader changes in Turkish society that had been in motion since the late eighties. One element of this was the indirect role of the West: a large number of the young technocrats who supported the AKP in its rise to power were young men and women who had spent significant portions of their youth in Europe or the United States. In their time abroad they had experienced an environment in which they could express their religiosity more openly than they could in Turkish professional life. These individuals, comfortable with pluralism but personally devout, formed an important technocratic core for the emerging leadership of the AKP. The diversification of Turkish media allowed for the development of a sophisticated Islamist press, while the opening of the economy and expansion of education created a large and devout middle class. Finally, a number of NGOs developed that were simultaneously distinctly religious in character and dedicated to the issue of human rights in Turkey. Of these the most prominent is Mazlum-Der, founded in 1991, which is now an important element of Turkish human rights activism. While these groups were not necessarily large, they played an important role in merging the language of human rights with the specific concerns of Turkey’s devout and in building bridges with secular human rights groups both in Turkey and overseas.

The AKP developed as a party willing to overturn long held certainties of the Kemalist state. In foreign policy, Turkey simultaneously improved relations with its Arab and Iranian neighbors and made important steps toward resolving the continued division of Cyprus. The AKP’s most important efforts, however, were in the attempt to move forward with Turkey’s long held aspirations at European accession, and it is here that the AKP’s foreign and domestic policy are most clearly merged.

The process of European accession provided the AKP with a number of important benefits. First, by being more “pro-European” than any of the secular opposition parties the AKP was able to support its claim that it was not an Islamist party, but rather a forward-looking party of the center-right. Second, the policy was electorally savvy because the proposition of European accession was extremely popular at the beginning of the AKP’s term in office and, despite considerable setbacks, maintains considerable popularity to this day. Third, progress in European accession helped lure in considerable foreign investment, which in turn served as the engine for rapid economic growth through the first years of AKP rule. Fourth and finally, the process of liberalization that the European Union demanded would also serve the AKP’s domestic interests by undermining the power of Kemalist strongholds in the bureaucracy and military and by opening greater opportunities for religious expression that were expected by the AKP’s base.

Whether one believes the AKP acted primarily from idealism or from political calculation, its early program of liberalization was impressive. As Sultan Tepe shows, bans on publishing and broadcasting in Kurdish were lifted, citizen access to government documents was broadened, and the penal code was reformed. Quietly, Kurdish villagers who had been forcibly relocated in the previous decade were allowed to return to their homes. Torture and harassment became less frequent. As one Kurdish activist told me, “When we have a gathering, we are still arrested. But there isn’t torture like there used to be.” The AKP was initially optimistic that the broadened freedom to use the headscarf in public institutions would also be addressed under a “European umbrella”; however, in 2004 the European Court of Human Rights ruled that banning students from wearing the headscarf in the university did not constitute a limit on religious freedom. Thus, while the general human rights record of Turkey was in many ways improving, the AKP was failing in addressing the one issue that most concerned its base.

Whether it was because they were opposed to the reforms that the AKP was implementing or because they saw these reforms as a cover for an Islamist agenda (or both), both the parliamentary opposition and Kemalist elements in the military and courts worked to undermine the AKP reform agenda. Military and security services were involved in the 2005 bombing of a Kurdish bookstore in the town of Şemdinli, which killed one and injured others, and they seem to have been at least indirectly involved in the assassination of Armenian journalist Hrant Dink in 2007. These attacks, as well as a far broader pattern of harassment and threat, served three purposes simultaneously: they demonstrated the limits of AKP power, they undermined the AKP’s international support, and they served as a fundamental damper on those who wished to take advantage of the AKP’s liberalization program. Prosecutors as well as private lawyers used the loosely framed Article 301, which makes “denigrating Turkishness” a crime punishable by imprisonment for up to three years, as well as similar statues in the same way. These cases carried a message for the Turkish public, which was underlined by the opposition in Parliament: that the AKP, with the support of Western powers, was intent on undermining Turkey through criticism of its greatest heroes and most venerated institutions.

As European accession faltered, the AKP became more defensive in the face of these attacks and less ambitious in its reform efforts. It allowed the case against the soldiers implicated in the Şemdinli attack to be tried in a military rather than a civilian court, thus limiting the possibility that high level officers would be implicated. At the same time, the AKP rank and file seemed to be as leery of ridding themselves of 301 as the opposition. The government suggested various changes in nuance to Article 301 rather than doing away with it altogether.

The 2007 elections and after

In the spring and summer of 2007, a constitutional crisis over the selection of the next president resulted in the AKP calling early elections, which they won in a landslide. Initially, at least, the AKP seemed to be ready to renew a program of broad reform and even began discussions of rewriting the constitution, originally written under the auspices of the military following the coup d’état of 1980.

It was not to be. Increased separatist violence effectively forced the AKP to give in to the military’s demand for a more aggressive policy with regard to the Kurds, including incursions into Iraqi Kurdistan. More tellingly, as Jenny White described in her February article for The Immanent Frame, the AKP made an alliance with the militantly nationalist MHP, in which the MHP agreed to lend its parliamentary support to a broadening of freedoms for the headscarf, in return for which the AKP would drop its plans for a far wider program of liberalization. The decision suggests both the centrality of the headscarf issue for a significant section of Turkish society and the limitations of the AKP’s own commitment to a broad human rights agenda for Turkey.

Ironically, the alliance bore little fruit. The constitutional amendment lifting the ban on headscarves in the universities, which the AKP and MHP had passed, was struck down by the Constitutional Court in June, 2007, while a case which threatened to ban the AKP itself continued to wind its way through the legal process. In the end the AKP avoided, by the narrowest of margins, an outright ban. It emerged, nonetheless, significantly chastened by the experience.

In the intervening months, AKP reform efforts have been markedly muted. Rather than move forward on human rights or constitutional reform, it has turned its attention instead to foreign policy initiatives, such as its recent overtures to Armenia, and to quietly supporting the on-going court case against the ultranationalist Ergenekon network, which, not incidentally, seems to have included many of the AKP’s most militant critics. The unraveling of the Ergenekon conspiracy is, without question, a remarkably important component of Turkey’s democratization.

The recent past has taken much of the luster off of the AKP’s record for human rights reform. Many human rights advocates still see the AKP as the best hope for broad reform in Turkey. Nonetheless, the AKP’s record shows that its commitment to human rights, while real, is limited and contingent. They are not, to be sure, the secret Islamic revolutionaries envisioned by the Turkish military and some of conservative commentators in the United States. But neither are they the shining model for Muslim liberalism that some have imagined them to be.

The soon to follow written explanation can be expected to be in line with the two perceptions that dominate the general view of current political developments in Turkey: first, that Turkish society is split between secularists/Kemalists on the one side, and Islamists/traditionalist Muslims on the other; secondly, that it was the AKP’s anti-laicist politics—most emblematically its take on the headscarf—that constituted the major reason for its political predicament. I believe that these two perceptions hide the much more complex economic and political transformations and realities of Turkish society, and would like to challenge the first and complicate the second.

Focusing on the religious/secularist divide—and thus assuming ideology is the major problem—serves to cover up material conflicts of interest. These conflicts result partially from structural changes in Turkish society (as a consequence of immense demographic transformations); partially from the emergence of a new Islamic middle class; and partially (as a consequence of the earlier two developments) from the increased self-confidence of more traditionalist parts of Turkish society, who wish to claim their share of political power. In light of these material and political conflicts, the question of Turkish laicism should be recast: who has an interest in securing the prominence of religious/laicist contestation in Turkish politics, despite the fact that one could very easily claim that other issues ought to be much more pressing? Why would observers elevate this ideological divide above, for example, the widely felt economic instability of the country, huge geographic imbalances of development, and the socio-political fault lines that have emerged as a result of the rapid social changes of the last decades?

It is undeniable that there is a close connection between the AKP’s affirmative position on the headscarf—emblematic of the question of laicism—and the current political crisis. But mainstream public debates on this crisis, as launched both by Kemalist and secular-right Turkish media outlets and echoed by the international media, often reduce the conflict to one between Islamists and secularists, a conflict over cultural heritages and civilizational missions as old as the Turkish Republic. True, in the fashioning of the republican public the female body became the surface on which this conflict was inscribed by a male public gaze. And opposing sides have continued to argue about where and how this body should be (un-)dressed. Yet the battlefield should not be mistaken for the source of the conflict. I would argue that too much focus on the headscarf, and by implication too much focus on laicism, does more to obscure the current political situation than to explain it.

I do not claim that the current crisis in Turkish politics has nothing to do with different conceptions of secularism. Certainly, what is at stake in the public debates about the Islamic headscarf is the power to define the language and the rules of conduct in the Turkish public sphere, particularly when it comes to the legitimate place of religion. To use a term coined by José Casanova, the conflict is about the “knowledge regime of secularism.” The current debates reflect the trembling of this knowledge regime, and in this sense the anti-Islamist rhetoric that is found not only among staunch laicist Kemalists, but also among many traditionalist—and laicist—Muslims, is proof of the success of this regime, as it has, for roughly 80 years now, been propagated by the institutions of the state, and dominated public discourse. More recently, with the opening of the public sphere to previously marginalized segments of society, the knowledge regime of Turkish laicism has come under question, and the meanings of laicism are now debated as openly and controversially as never before: should Turkey stick to its top-down, state-centered definition and organization of religion, or might it be beneficial for the public good if the state were to soften its grip on religion? How should the realms of the private and public be defined, and how much room should there be for religious symbols and speech in the latter? Finally, what are legitimate communal and individual religious rights, and how should one weigh them if they appear to be in conflict? The origins of this debate can be traced back to the beginnings of the Republic, when discussions about the headscarf, the female body and laicism operated as a proxy for the larger debate on the modes and direction of Turkish modernization, and its civilizational commitment.

A critical analysis of the history and politics of Turkish secularism certainly has to be part of any attempt to grasp the current crisis, and the semantics of Turkish politics more generally. The analysis should not end here, however, but should also consider broader political and material interests, beyond the realm of ideological contestation. In other words, one should not forget to ask who benefits from the maintenance of the current knowledge regime of Turkish laicism. What are the stakes for those who seem never to tire of casting the debate in religionist-laicist terms? As a matter of fact, one could easily argue that for many major recent developments, the laicism/religion focus bears very little explanatory potential. It is, for example, not for religious reasons that the Turkish economy (and not only those parts of it with roots in traditional Islamic culture) has been supportive of the AKP, and neither is it for religious reasons that the AKP has proved to be the political party invested the most strongly in advancing Turkish prospects to enter the EU. It is also hardly for religious reasons that there occurred in the Kurdish dominated southeastern provinces of the country in the last elections a remarkable transfer of votes from Kurdish nationalist candidates and parties to the AKP. These developments—and more examples could be given—have more to do with economic interests and political reasoning than with civilizational or religious commitments.

The simplistic perception of Turkish society as divided into two camps, one laicist and the other Islamist, is but a caricature; the large majority of the population does not easily fit into this scheme. A Turkish citizen who is undecided about whether to cast her vote for the AKP or for the Kemalist CHP is therefore not schizophrenic. The considerations that influence her decision are not ideological, but rather pragmatic and everyday: economic concerns, both personal and general; concerns over affordable housing and retirement; and concerns about public services such as health care and education (to name the most pressing issues in the minds of many). One can hardly deny the existence of identifiable groups of Kemalist hardliners—as well as staunch Islamists—whose respective lifestyles and worldviews can be fitted in the dichotomist laicist/religionist perception. And it is also true that people can get temporarily polarized around extremely controversial issues. But the political, ethnic, cultural, religious, and class divisions of Turkey are multiple, and to divide Turkish society categorically along laicist/Islamist lines is not more meaningful than dividing it according to ethnic (Turkish/Kurdish), religious (Sunni/Alevi), cultural (Istanbulites/Anatolians), class specific (bourgeois/proletarian) or other binary categories.

All of this said, the questions that remain to be answered are: why has the secularist/Islamist binary acquired as much political leverage as it has, and why does this divide appear to so many observers as such an obvious starting point for an analysis of the current political crisis? Beyond the obvious success of the knowledge regime of Kemalist laicism, and the pressures resulting from this laicism’s institutionalization in state institutions and civil minds, let me suggest some aspects that should additionally be considered in attempts to develop an answer.

(1) The fast speed of the urbanization of Turkish society since the 1950s, and the cultural and economic changes that the subsequent migration into the urban centers have meant for huge parts of the population are important factors that have to be considered. The headscarf student and the Islamist party are urban phenomena that reflect the search for new models of development/modernization in line with traditional values. They demand a voice in the public sphere and proportional access to political institutions and state services. This emergence of new types of actors in the public sphere naturally means shifts in the distribution of access to political and cultural resources, and is bound to provoke resistance by those who resent such redistribution.

(2) A new Islamic bourgeoisie with roots in Anatolian culture (the “Anatolian Tigers”) has become economically very influential, and claims its share in the distribution of social and political capital. It has found a political ally in the AKP and it is clear that this symbiosis is seen by the Kemalist establishment as threatening its privileged position. The “Kemalist establishment” in this case includes those segments of society that hold positions of power in the state institutions (such as the educational system, the judiciary, and the army) as well as those who have, due to their economic position, been able to lead comfortable secular lives and see their secular lifestyles under threat by growing conservative segments of society.

(3) Since the 1980s, Turkey has rapidly transformed into a society strongly influenced by consumer capitalism. Those who benefitted from the economic liberalization and have material stakes in the well-being of corporate capitalism will naturally not like language which frames societal conflicts in terms of class and access to particular consumerist lifestyles. It can be assumed that debates on laicism/religion are much less upsetting to the capitalist sector than debates that focus on the material fault lines that divide Turkish society and problematize the increasing cleavages between socio-economic classes. Attempts to seriously question the neo-liberal politics that took hold of Turkish society after the coup of 1980 have been launched both by the Kemalist left and other leftist critics, but they never were able to set the tone of public debate, and were—especially within the Kemalist camps—sidelined by ideological debates like those on laicism. In this context, it is important to know that the mainstream Turkish media is to an enormous extent monopolized in the hand of a small number of media holdings.

(4) The Turkish military justifies its place above politics with its role as guardian of national unity and the laicist order. If Turkish laicism were to be redefined in a more liberal direction, then the military would be deprived of a major argument to legitimate its supra-democratic status. Therefore, one should assume that the military has an existential interest in safeguarding the current knowledge regime of Turkish laicism. And in fact, the military plays a leading role in public campaigns against enemies of laicism, namely political Islam as the recent political crisis has drastically shown.

The concept of religion dominant in the Turkish public sphere is utterly modernist. It is based on mono-linear readings of history dominated by the Kemalist master narrative, and conceives of the religious and the secular as opposite poles in a two-dimensional plane. This dichotomist view renders the articulation of alternative perspectives on modernity, history, religion, and politics, as well as alternative visions concerning the rules of the public sphere, extremely difficult. This is particularly true since emerging alternative readings of these concepts are not only perceived as an ideological challenge, but also impact the distribution of socio-political power and material privileges. From this perspective, I would argue that the investigation of the knowledge regime of Turkish laicism, which cultivates a perception of the world in line with the religionist/secularist binary, has to be supplemented with a close look into demographic transformations, political privileges, and economic interests. It appears to me that those who feel politically and economically threatened by a new class of political actors, the emergence of a new religiously conservative middle class, as well as the capitalist sector in general, have very manifest interests in the maintenance of the current knowledge regime of Turkish laicism. Any comprehensive analysis of Turkish laicism will have to take these factors into account if it does not want to limit itself to mono-causal models of explanation, which are themselves stuck within the mono-dimensional semantics of the secular-religionist paradigm.

The state sees itself as the guardian of secularism and of the integrity of the Turkish nation-state. The government, on the other hand, sees itself as representing the interests of the electorate, a large percentage of which is devout or conservative in lifestyle. The state has consistently interfered in the working of the elected government since the first multi-party election in 1950. There have been three coups against elected governments, several operations just short of a coup, and the Constitutional Court has shut down 24 political parties. The usual reason given is to safeguard secularism against elected parties seen as being too Islamic.

The AKP is the offspring of a series of overly Islamist, at times pro-shariah parties that all were closed down over the past twenty years. The earlier parties, led by Necmettin Erbakan, were influenced by the Nakshibendi Sheikh Mehmed Zahid Kotku and by Islamist writers like Mawdudi, Hasan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb, whose works were translated into Turkish in the 1970s. They advocated Islam as a political project in place of Westernization. In 1975 Erbakan laid out his vision, Millî Görüş or National View, which was a nationalist form of Islamism with a strong racialist component based on Turkishness, Turkish blood and history. Millî Görüş advocated withdrawing from NATO and the West in general, but was not against modernization. In fact, Islam provided an authentic Turkish justification of modernization that did not rely on the West, and it also provided a justification for orienting Turkey to the Middle East, that is, to its former Ottoman territories.

By 2000 the charismatic junior party member Recep Tayyip Erdogan eclipsed Erbakan’s ideas with a more moderate, liberal conception of the role of Muslims in politics. Erdogan founded the AKP, which claims to have abandoned Millî Görüş altogether, including both its ethno-nationalist and Islamist views, and to have become a conservative democratic party. The idea is that Muslims bring their moral values to politics, but run a secular system. There is still a strong Islamic component to the party, but its roots have shifted from Nakshibendi influence to the more globally oriented Nurcu, particularly the Fethullah Gülen movement that focuses on modernizing Islam through education and popularizing it through outreach. There are estimated to be between five and six million followers of Fethullah Gülen’s Nurcu movement, many in business and the professions. Pro-business currents based explicitly on Muslim ethics have become prominent within Turkish Islam and the pious business community has become very successful, especially in the Anatolian provinces. The confrontation between government and state is in many ways a power struggle between the old secular and the new pious elites.

Both the AKP and the secularist supporters of the state have a problematic relationship to democracy. The secularist side is quite open about their discomfort with liberal democracy, with some people wishing for a coup to get rid of the hated government and its Islamic influence. The AKP, despite its liberal rhetoric, has applied democratic principles in an a la carte way that betrays a functional attitude toward reform. For instance, while the government has pushed to repeal the ban on headscarves in universities, it has not followed through on promises to expand and protect the rights of Christians and minority Alev Muslims. The AKP recently made only cosmetic changes to the notorious Article 301 of the Penal Code, which criminalizes insulting Turkishness, and which has been used to muzzle writers, activists, publishers and scholars, including Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk.

Having said this, the AKP government has made some strides in aligning Turkey’s laws and institutions with EU standards as part of the accession process and is in the process of replacing the military-designed constitution with a new civilian constitution. While this is a good thing for democratic liberalization, it must also be seen as part of the continuing battle between government and state, since many of these changes will increase the realm of Islamic practice and discourse in society, and reduce the ability of the military and nationalist courts to step in to stop it.

The state’s saber-rattling continued last year when the military issued a memorandum on its website in effect threatening to intervene if the AKP’s choice for president, Abdullah Gül, was elected by the AKP-dominated parliament. Gül’s wife wears a headscarf, which an opposition party MP recently likened to Nazi Brown Shirts. The AKP government responded to the threat by calling early elections, winning 47% of the vote, which insulated it somewhat from outright military interference. So Gül and his veiled wife moved into the presidential palace and the AKP, buyoed by its strong electoral showing, began to focus more on Islamic concerns, for instance rescinding the headscarf ban and restricting the sale of alcohol. Reforms dealing with minority rights, freedom of speech, and so on, languished. In other words, in what appears to be a display of hubris, the AKP squandered the political capital it had built up and provided fodder for those arguing that the AKP is just using democracy to undermine Turkey’s secularism and make it into an Islamic state. It’s a long leap from allowing the headscarf in universities to imposing sharia law—and I don’t believe AKP has any interest in making that leap—but the battle between the government and the state’s secular nationalist supporters is intensifying around these issues.

Turkey at present is experiencing a slow-motion coup as its Constitutional Court hears a case against the AKP that accuses it of undermining the secular nature of the state and seeks to close the party and ban 71 members and former members of the party from politics, including Prime Minister Erdogan and President Gül. If seven justices on the 11-member Constitutional Court vote to convict, this will in effect topple the popularly elected government. The indictment cites as evidence, among other things, the parliamentary approval in February of a constitutional amendment to allow university students to wear a headscarf, even though the law was appealed and has been overturned.

Other “crimes” against secularism mentioned in the indictment are statements by Prime Minister Erdogan in which he calls Turkey a Muslim society, a statement by former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell calling Turkey a “moderate Islamic republic,” and Erdogan’s participation in the U.S. “Greater Middle East Initiative,” which the indictment defines as an American project aimed at installing moderate Islamic regimes in the region. The indictment claims that in its almost six years in power, the AKP has hidden its true intentions of imposing shariah law, by violence if necessary, behind a façade of interest in human rights, democracy, and freedoms of religion and conscience. The headscarf is a banned symbol of religious fanaticism that the AKP has tried to pass off as a right reflecting freedom of religious belief.

On May 1, AKP presented its defense, which argued that the indictment is politically motivated and not based on legal grounds. However, the general expectation is that the court will close down the party. There is no consensus on what will happen next. The Democratic Society Party (or DTP) which represents a Kurdish constituency in parliament, may also be closed down by the court (in this case for allegedly supporting the PKK). Closing the AKP and the DTP in effect would disenfranchise almost the entire Kurdish population, which voted heavily for AKP. At least a dozen lawmakers are scrambling to found new parties or revive old ones. It is almost certain that the AKP will split.

One group will be made up of Muslim democrats or what some are calling the “new right.” These are people who favor globalization, a competitive liberal economy, and are pro-West. They make up about 66% of the AKP and would include followers of Fethullah Gulen and some Naksibendi under Nurettin Cosan, who replaced Said Kotku as head of the influential Iskenderpasha Mosque in Istanbul. Another group would be the conservative religious faction, still influenced by Millî Görüş and, thus, anti-West, anti-EU, and anti-globalization.

It’s worth noting that many secular nationalists, the people supporting the judicial coup, also are suspicious of globalization, are against liberal rights, and do not support joining the EU, as well as being anti-Islam.

The secular nationalists are willing to go to great lengths to overthrow this government. Over the past few months, the police have arrested a diverse group of shadowy figures, including former military officers, secret police, prosecutors, and others, accused of plotting to overthrow the Turkish government, preparing to assassinate Prime Minister Erdogan and Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk, and of being involved in the murder of other prominent Turkish figures, including last year’s killing of ethnic Armenian journalist Hrant Dink. The issue around which this gang organized its activities was the protection of Turkish blood and identity against foreign powers whom they believe to be acting against Turkey through its Armenians, Christians, and other minorities (Kurds, for instance) and through missionaries. The group is thought to have ties high up in the state apparatus (the Turks call this shadowy network the “Deep State”) and probably in the military. There is some similarity to the Gladio affair in Italy, another state-linked and financed group involved in criminal activity. The Ergenekon Group, as it calls itself, is accused of plotting to destabilize Turkey through assassinations and bombings blamed on the PKK, creating enough chaos that the population would welcome a coup.

The majority of the population views the court case against AKP as politically motivated and most do not see the party as a threat to secularism. In fact, after the case was filed, AKP’s popularity soared; in an election today, their share of votes might reach 70%. But if the government is brought down through judicial means or even a “coup,” you won’t see anyone climbing on a tank to protest. After the initial jaw-dropping moment of learning about the indictment, the population, media and politicians already seem to be adjusting to the inevitability of the government’s demise. There is a popular ennui that this is happening again.

The tendency to attribute problems to outside forces is due to lack of knowledge and heavy ideological indoctrination. Although the details of the court case against AKP and the Ergenekon arrests are debated in the media, readership of newspapers is very low. Most people obtain information from friends and family, radio and television, where what is consumed is opinion, rather than information. School textbooks glorify the state over the citizen and warn against “plots” by unspecified outsiders to undermine Turkey and betrayal by disloyal insiders who are in cahoots.

Not surprisingly, the public tends to blame outside forces (the CIA and EU) for any unrest in Turkey. Despite the revelations about Ergenekon and the Constitutional Court case against the AKP, in a recent survey, the military was still the most trusted institution, followed by the Constitutional Court. A warning sign is the spread in recent years of virulently xenophobic attitudes and ultra-nationalist conspiracy theories among highly educated professionals. In 2007, only 9% of Turks held a favorable opinion of the United States, down from 23% in 2005, the lowest of 46 countries in the Pew Poll.

The wounded AKP has renewed its efforts at reform, but it is hamstrung with regard to some of the most important issues on the table, from Kurdish rights to Cyprus, as these are all issues the nationalists can use against the party. This judicial coup should not go unremarked as an internal matter of no concern to the U.S.. Despite its conservatism and occasional Islamic rhetoric, the AKP is not a threat to Turkish democracy. Turkey is drifting toward a more openly conservative and pious society, which is not without its problems, but the AKP government has created the basis for stability, broader rights, global integration, and an eventual nearing to EU standards, even if the accession process falters. The alternative is an intolerant, threat-oriented state authoritarianism that is suspicious of the outside world, a militantly secular Fortress Turkey that, like the Soviet Union, is modernizing without democratizing.

Closing political parties that are accused of threatening the laicist order and/or the national unity of the country is a pretty common occurrence in Turkey, and has been a popular political practice ever since the earliest years of the Republic. What is different this time around is that the AKP has an impressive political mandate, having secured a record high 47% of the vote at the last elections in the fall of 2007. When it took over government following a surprise victory in 2002 as reincarnation of the moderate wing of the just banned Virtue Party, it certainly benefited from the electorate’s dissatisfaction with the previous political establishment, which had been widely entrapped in corruption affairs. In its first five years in government, the AKP focused less on Islamic identity politics, and more on a pragmatic politics of services and economic stability, and in this way was successful in earning the trust of people far beyond its traditional electorate. This enabled it to broaden its electorate beyond religious and cultural lines and even increase its vote in 2007. And it should have increased its political leverage, enabling it to move ahead on the path of economic and political reforms in line with the recommendations made by the EU, with which the party had itself closely aligned, hoping to further advance the EU-membership negotiations it had been able to secure in what was its most outstanding political achievement. At first, it indeed looked as if the AKP government was determined and capable to continue its reform politics. However, the party became entrapped in a series of highly sensitive political debates that basically bound all its political energies. Gradually, the government lost political momentum, and found itself in an ever more defensive position.

The current political crisis, and in a sense the fall of the AKP—never mind the outcome of the closure case—started with the struggle over the Turkish presidency in early 2007. Despite its historical position of strength within the Parliament, it proved very difficult for the AKP to move its own candidate into this highest political office. And the political costs of this victory were enormous. The contestation over the presidency mobilized Kemalist Turkey and united it to an extent that the headscarf debate would never have been able to on its own. Laicists perceived an Islamist president as just the next step in the gradual Islamization of the state. In the spring of 2007, encouraged by belligerent political statements from the military, and supported by most of the mainstream media, Kemalists organized mass demonstrations in the name of laicism. Already ruled by a supposedly Islamist government, the fear of a president with roots in the Islamist movement motivated hundreds of thousands of people with apparently very diverse political motives to participate in huge rallies—a truly remarkable event since the Republic had never before seen people from all walks of life taking to the streets in defense of laicism. This successful mass mobilization certainly encouraged anti-AKP forces to continue their attacks. From this point on—only briefly interrupted by the impressive (and for the Kemalist elite, increasingly alarming) electoral victory of the AKP in the fall of 2007—the guardians of Kemalism (i.e., the military, and more recently also the judiciary) increased their pressure on the government.

The final showdown began in February of 2008, when President Gül approved an amendment to the constitution that was meant to allow female students to enter universities with the headscarf. It did not take long for the Republican People’s Party—founded by Kemal Atatürk and convinced that it represents his single legitimate political heir; also currently the AKP’s main opposition in Parliament—to bring the amendment in front of the Constitutional Court. On June 5, the court declared the amendment void and its application illegal.

It was no accident that on the same day, the chief of the Turkish military staff, General Yaşar Büyükanıt, delivered a public speech in which he made clear that neither the Turkish judicial system nor the army would allow modifications of the laicist system. Indeed, when it comes to the protection of laicism, the judiciary and the military tend to walk closely together, and this cooperation appears to be rather concrete, as a scandalous document written from within circles of the General Staff and published by the newspaper Taraf on June 20 revealed. This document, crafted prior to the election of 2007, detailed an action plan—according to official statements, never signed and enacted—for creating a public climate hostile towards the government. The same newspaper has made public secret meetings between high-ranking generals and members of the Constitutional Court in the course of the last year.

Similar procession in tandem can be expected in the last act of the current crisis. The constitutional court commenced its negotiation on the AKP closure yesterday, and can be expected to receive the backing of the army, the highest generals of which will convene for the Military High Council on August 1. Ironically, this council is headed by the Prime Minister, who by the time of its meeting might already have received his (second) five-year ban from politics.

I am not convinced that the lifting of the headscarf ban is the real basis of the case for three main reasons. First, the constitutional amendments do not mention headscarves or anything else related to religion or secularism. They added the following two phrases into the Turkish Constitution. To article 10: “state organs and administrative authorities shall act in compliance with the principle of equality before the law in all their proceedings and in benefiting from all public services.” To article 42: “no one can be deprived of his/her right to higher education for reasons not openly mentioned by laws. The limits of the use of this right will be determined by law.” (The amendment specifically mentions “higher education” since the ban in all schools will continue while it is lifted at universities.) Second, the amendments were initiated and supported by the National Action Party (MHP), yet the prosecutor has not done anything against the MHP. Last, but not least, despite the constitutional amendments, the presidents of universities did not lift the ban. Students wearing headscarves are still not allowed to enter the campuses of almost all Turkish universities.

One may argue that the main reason for the case is the AK Party’s anti-secular activities in general. Yet, this is not convincing either. In Turkey, there has been a debate between the pro-Islamic conservatives, including the AK Party, and the Kemalists, including the majority of military and judicial bureaucrats, as well as the Republican People’s Party (CHP). The Kemalists have accused the AK Party for being anti-secular, while the AK Party members have criticized the Kemalists for being anti-religious. Actually, both sides defend secularism; but they have different notions of secularism.

The AK Party defends what I call passive secularism, which requires the state to play a passive role in the public sphere to accommodate the public visibility of religion. The United States, at this specific point, seems to be a model for the AK Party. The Kemalists, on the other hand, defend the dominant assertive secularism in Turkey, which asks the state to play an assertive role to exclude religion from the public sphere and confine it to the private life. In a 1997 decision, the Turkish Constitutional Court stresses that secularism does not mean separation of religion and the state, but it implies “separation of religion and worldly affairs, [such as] social life, education, family, economy, law, manners, dress codes, etc.” This is an extreme version of assertive secularism, even more radical than the dominant understanding of secularism in France.

The dominant assertive secularist ideology is problematic for not only the Muslim majority, but also non-Muslim minorities in Turkey. For decades, it had been illegal to construct churches and synagogues in Turkey. The AK Party government made it legal in 2003 through a legal reform to expand religious freedoms. That is why the Armenian Patriarch called all Armenians to vote for the AK Party in the elections of July 2007. Two months ago, the AK Party group also passed a law to maintain the rights of Christian and Jewish foundations. The assertive secularist CHP applied to the Constitutional Court to strike down the law. That also shows the assertive secularist intolerance toward not only Islam, but also all other religions in the Turkish public sphere. In sum, the debate between the Kemalists and the AK Party is not a struggle between secularists and Islamists; it is a struggle between the defenders of two types of secularism.

How can we explain the closure case against the AK Party if it is not really based on the headscarf issue, in particular, or secularism, in general? The best explanation has already been made by several Turkish and European commentators: the closure case against the AK Party is a “judiciary coup d’état.” The Kemalists try to stage a judiciary coup, since a military coup is no longer an option in a country that negotiates membership with the European Union. The main reason why the Kemalists have supported coups, rather than defending democracy, is the tension between the Turkish society’s religiosity and the Kemalist assertive secularist ideology. This tension dooms the Kemalist CHP to be a loser in elections (it has been unable to receive more than 20 percent of votes). Since Turkish society is highly religious, people do not vote for the assertive secularist party; therefore, the assertive secularists support military or judiciary coups.

As I explain in my forthcoming book, Secularism and State Policies toward Religion: The United States, France, and Turkey, these three are secular states since a) their legal and judicial processes are out of institutional religious control, and b) they constitutionally lack an establish religion. In the three cases, the relationship between societal religiosity and type of secular ideology plays important roles regarding state-society synchronization. Based on three criteria (percentages of those believing in God, affiliating with a particular religion, and attending religious services weekly), Turkish (99%, 99%, and 69%) and American (96%, 85%, and 40%) societies are highly religious, whereas the French society (61%, 55%, and 10%) is low religious. In the U.S., a high level of societal religiosity co-exists with passive secularism that tolerates such religiosity. In France, low religiosity of society fits to the assertive secularist ideology of the state; both are comfortable with the absence of religion in the public sphere.

Turkey is the most paradoxical of the three by having a highly religious society and a very assertive secularist state ideology. That is the reason for the substantial tension between the state and society, as well as between assertive secularism and democracy. The conflict will not end unless a shift in the state ideology (from assertive to passive secularism) occurs, or unless there is a decline of societal religiosity in Turkey.

Interestingly, there are two different styles of headscarves: the traditional one is called başörtüsü, and is worn by women who are considered “peasants” even though they live in big cities. They usually work as maids who clean houses and care for children. They are not viewed as dangerous due to their subservient stances. On the other hand, the modern headscarf —called türban—is worn by university students in major Turkish cities. These women claim full citizenship and seek employment in competitive job markets. They show up in the urban cultural milieu such as art exhibitions, concerts, coffee houses and restaurants in their openly religious costumes. They are criticized by the secularist, urban elite for trespassing into a modern territory while dressed in costumes that signify backwardness. In spite of their visible demands, urban women with türban have been unable to become “full” citizens in Turkey in terms of civil, political, and social rights.

Women with headscarves as harbis

In the Ottoman society, there were two expressions that were commonly used in referring to the non-Muslims. First of all, there were the dhimmis, meaning those non-Muslims who did not seek independence from the Ottoman rule and who were loyal servants of the state. Secondly, there were the harbis who were fighting for their independence from the Ottoman state. The latter were determined to become actors who wanted to define their own destiny. The dhimmi Greeks, for instance were referred as “Rum,” indicating their subservience to the Ottoman state, whereas the harbi Greeks were called “Yunan,” indicating their wish to become independent actors. It is my contention that, today in Turkey, the traditional women with başörtüsü are viewed as dhimmis, whereas the modern women with türban who seek to become full citizens are characterized by the secularist elite as harbis. In fact, while the latter are depicted as dangerous actors who are adamant about seeking their citizenship rights, the traditional women are increasingly finding their headscarves less and less tolerated as well. The superintendents of apartment buildings in some high-income neighborhoods, for instance, are finding it increasingly difficult to maintain their jobs if their wives and daughters are wearing headscarves. In sum, the current polarization over the headscarf issue in Turkey is such that, even the traditional women with headscarves are increasingly seen as dangerous harbis.

Turkish modernes de robe

The early republican elite in Turkey showed a great distaste for religion. They tried to diminish the religious outlook of women by embracing Western dress codes. In the end, a Western outlook became much more important than many other attributes of modernity. Despite the existence of a women’s political movement, which was led by a female activist named Nezihe Muhiddin in the 1920s, women activists were thwarted by pressures from above. Hence, all of the major rights conferred upon Turkish women were the result of the efforts of the male revolutionary elite who had the goal of elevating Turkey to the level of Western civilization. Even though the early republican reforms encouraged women to participate in the public realm, especially as teachers and nurses, women’s primary responsibility remained within the private domain as good wives and mothers. The early republican reforms opted for creating an image of the modern Turkish woman as honorable, chaste, enlightened and modest. These virtues suppressed women’s individuality and sexuality, while highlighting their Western outlook.

In Turkey, modernization came to mean, first and foremost, a Western as opposed to an Islamic appearance. The women who became products of the early republican reforms were similar to the noblesse de robe (nobility by virtue of clothes) of pre-revolutionary France who joined the ranks of the nobility by purchasing offices and putting on aristocratic attire. Early republican reforms included efforts to change the appearance of the Turkish men as well. Republican Turkish men were expected to wear modern hats in place of the Ottoman fez after the acceptance of the “Hat Law” in the parliament in 1925. I argue that women who were adamant about a Western outlook in early republican Turkey became modernes de robe; they wore Western clothes and adopted Western codes of conduct, yet remained quite traditional, especially regarding relations with men and their self-perceptions within the confines of the family. They represented simulated images of modernity. Their clothes symbolized the political ends of the male republican elite. Hence, a state feminism instigated from above had led to the delay of a feminist consciousness on the part of these women. The secularist elite women opposing the headscarf in their life spaces are mostly the daughters of these early republican women who placed great significance on a Western appearance as an emblem of modernity.

Secularization as a project

In most Western societies, the secularization process accompanied modernization. As societies became more modern, they became more secular. In Turkey, secularization did not accompany modernization, but rather, became a project in order to realize the goal of becoming modern. The headscarf came to represent its nemesis. It is this view of secularism as a project that turned the issue of the headscarf into such a politically sensitive matter. The headscarf came to represent the very opposite of the goals of the Turkish Republic. Today, the demands for full citizenship on the part of the urban women with headscarves are portrayed as a challenge to the republican regime. In the end, the predicament of Turkish democracy is reduced to a tension between a political regime crisis on the one hand and a rights discourse on the other. For the secularist elite, such a rights discourse constitutes a threat to the political regime. Therefore, it is not surprising that today the presence of women with headscarves in the urban, modern setting is seen as a major threat to the continuity of the republican regime.

The urban women with headscarves primarily demand greater education rights. The initial ban on the headscarf in higher educational institutions was enacted in the aftermath of the military coup in 1980. In 1988, the civil government tried to lift the ban by adding an article to the Higher Education Law that indicated that women could wear headscarves in university campuses for religious reasons. This article was abolished by the Constitutional Court in 1989 on the basis that the Constitution does not allow such referrals to religion in law.

The issue became politicized in the aftermath of 1997, when the Turkish military defined Islamic fundamentalism as the biggest enemy of Turkey and pressured the government, which had an Islamic base, to resign. Many observers called this a post-modern coup. After 1997, the headscarf ban on university campuses began to be applied more severely. Most of the civil societal organizations expressing demands about the right to education of women with headscarves were formed in 1999. These women were unable to enjoy full citizenship rights unless they took off their headscarves at the gates of the university campuses. Some women agreed to wear wigs on top of their headscarves in order to attend their classes. Some universities established “persuasion rooms” at their gates where women were “convinced” to take off their headscarves. At times, even elderly women with headscarves who came to the graduation ceremonies of their children on university campuses were not allowed through the gates. In 1999, the first woman Member of Parliament wearing a headscarf was elected to the Turkish parliament. She tried to enter the parliament amidst protests, but failed to do so. In a rather interesting case in 2003, a woman wearing a headscarf was expelled from the courtroom by a judge for refusing to take off her headscarf despite the fact that she was in the courtroom as the accused person.

These cases portray that, in Turkey, women who chose to wear headscarves for religious reasons were unable to enjoy certain basic rights of citizenship. These are not subservient women. They do not want to limit their activities to the private realm. Instead, they try to be active in the public realm. In doing so, they shatter the myth about the submissiveness of religious women. Urban secularist elites, on the other hand, think of themselves as Muslims, too, yet they like to see the control of religious activity by the state. In sum, urban secularist elites portray a statist profile. They are not troubled by a view of secularism that involves a state that controls religion as well as the dress codes of its female citizens. In a series of demonstrations held in 2007 in the name of defending the republican regime, some of the secularist elites went so far as approving military intervention, viewing it as aligned with the interests of the republican regime. These demonstrations were sparked by the candidacy of Abdullah Gül for the position of the President of the Turkish Republic, since his wife wears a headscarf. After securing about 47% of the votes in the July 2007 national election, Justice and Development Party reestablished itself in government. Afterwards, Gül was elected by the parliament as the new President.

The self-reflection of adult citizens

Many liberals in Turkey who are neither statist/secularist nor religious have been supporting the demands of women with headscarves in terms of their right to education. The ban was lifted in 2008 by a reform in the Constitution that was undertaken by the Justice and Development Party. Some of the liberals were critical of the “methods” of the Justice and Development Party since the lift of the headscarf ban was handled as a “single” issue of the Muslim community rather than as part of a “package of human rights reforms” that could have included the reform of the notorious Article 301 that prohibits “insulting Turkishness.” (This article has been used against many writers and intellectuals in Turkey.) Still, there is no doubt that liberals support the lift of the ban on headscarves on university campuses. What some of the liberals do not support is the toleration of religious clothes in primary and secondary schools.

There is no doubt that the lift of the ban contributed to a succession of political events that may eventually end in the closure of the Justice and Development Party. On March 31, 2008, the members of the Constitutional Court unanimously decided to deliberate a lawsuit that contained an indictment against the Justice and Development Party for being the focal point of anti-secular activities. It was filed by the country’s top public prosecutor.

To conclude, it is obvious that the headscarf is a highly contested issue in Turkey. The assessment of this issue as a matter of modernization and progress as opposed to backwardness has been harmful, since it draws one’s attention away from the basic citizenship rights of the women with the headscarf. The heart of the headscarf issue in Turkey really involves women who are self-reflecting adults and who would like to receive university education. State officials in Turkey seem unable to make a distinction between the civil servants that work for the state and those that they serve. Women with headscarves who are longing to attend universities are not civil servants. They are adult citizens who just want to be served by civil servants by attending classes in university campuses. The debate over religious insignia, which usually involves children and teenagers in primary and secondary schools in Europe, is quite different from the headscarf debate in Turkey. The fact that the Turkish state had been able to instigate such a ban on headscarves in universities portrays the endurance of the legendary state tradition in Turkey. It is obvious that this state tradition still constitutes a big shadow over the realm of politics in Turkey.

I nevertheless think that the analysis of the headscarf controversy cannot simply be based on arguments of liberal politics. Rather, it has to be analyzed within its historical context. In Turkey, the headscarf has assumed a symbolic character that refers to different historical memories and different understandings of modernity. For both sides of this conflict, the headscarf is at the center of the debate because the debate is, in its essence, about gender relations.

According to data from the World Values Survey (conducted between 1995-2001 by Ronald Inglehart of the University of Michigan and his international team in 75 countries that contain approximately 80% of the world’s population), what distinguishes Muslim publics from publics elsewhere are questions of gender equality and sexual liberation. Anyone familiar with Islamic doctrine would concur that the issue of gender is indeed its “fault line,” and Islam’s gaze at women, despite claims from modernist Islamists that men and women are equal in God’s eyes, would be extremely difficult to reconcile with any liberal understanding of gender. Both in history and now, societies living under Muslim law are singularly problematic from the point of view of women’s status. And critical literature by Islamists about secular societies thoughout the Muslim geography is full of the imagery of modern Sodoms and Gomorrahs, of sinful cities with mini-skirted women, nightclubs, promiscuous sexual relations, and the like.

Turkey, of course, is not a country that is under Muslim law. For many years, secularists argued that Islamist parties in power had a hidden agenda: to publicly accept the secular legal system, but ultimately aim to destroy it. In recent years, this discourse has been replaced by a new argument: given secularists’ resistance to the Islamist political project, including resistance by the judiciary and the army, the agenda is no longer to work toward the impossible goal of overthrowing the secular regime in favor of an Islamic state, but to gradually “Islamize” the country so that the public sphere is transformed into an Islamic public sphere, the most apparent feature of which is the overwhelming presence of covered women and gender-separated public spaces.

At the root of this controversy lies a century and a half of debate about the role of Islam in Turkish society. The beginning of this debate goes back to the mid-19th century when Ottoman statesmen and intellectuals found the panacea to the empire’s decline in modeling their institutions on Western examples. The establishment of the Republic in 1923 by revolutionary cadres who were committed to a program of total Westernization ended the debate between the Islamists and the Westernists as to what to take from the West. Repressing the Islamist opposition during the one-party years, the original founders of the republic were successful in both taking Islam out of the public sphere and in marginalizing people who wanted to have a more visible role for Islam in the social and political life of Turkey. This, however, proved to be short-lived. After the transition to democracy in 1946, the Islamist “underground,” originally instigating rebellions in the early years of the Republic, chose to play by the rules of the game and advance its agenda through political party competition. From 1950 on, this started an intense political debate about the role of religion, which has continued to this day.

On one side of this division are the “secularists.” Traditionally, the “secularist camp” consisted of the judiciary, the bureaucracy, the academia, the intelligentsia, mainstream business circles and the press, the army, and the urban educated middle and upper middle classes. Over time, however, positions have changed. In each of the categories cited above, except the military, there are those who have grown much more sympathetic to the rights claims of the Islamists and who now believe that the real problem lies in the radical, repressive understanding of the Republic towards questions of identity. On the other side are the “Islamists.” These were, traditionally, mostly people of rural, small town, or lower middle class backgrounds who were not, or could not, be part of the “Westernized elite” of the center and who represented the “Muslim” periphery. They were left outside of political power circles, social status groups, and intellectual prestige circles of the Republic. At the same time, they also benefitted least from an economic system that followed import-substitution policies until 1980, and which required connections with the government for success in economic entrepreneurship. Like the “secularist” camp, their status has also changed over the years, as they now occupy important positions of power within the state bureaucracy, the government, and the economy. Thanks to political Islam and its electoral successes, they now constitute what might be called a “counter-elite” of politicians, entrepreneurs, intellectuals, journalists, university students, and middle and upper middle classes. What now divides these two groups are questions of lifestyle, and especially, gender relations.

At the root of both the republican and Islamist projects lies the status of women in society. In order to achieve the republican aim of being a part of what its founders considered the “civilized” West, the position of women in Muslim society had to be radically altered. The restructuring of gender relations during the early republican years was one of the most important achievements of Kemalism. Many of the legal and educational reforms implemented during the early years of the republic were designed to empower women so that they would have equal status with men in the public sphere. In this transformation, the republic was indeed radical in its abolition of Islamic law and its opening up of educational and career opportunities for women. The lifestyle that goes with this republican project is mixed-gender public places, whether these are schools, restaurants, bars, parks, discotheques, beaches, etc.

The Islamist project, on the other hand, is largely based on the segregation of sexes. Although political Islam in Turkey is to be distinguished from radical Islamist movements elsewhere, and although it does not argue for same-sex public life, its understanding of the place of men and women in the public sphere differs from the republican understanding. This difference is most vividly apparent in the covering of young girls and women There has been heightened press coverage of numerous attempts by municipal governments, public educational institutions and other government offices controlled by the Islamists to introduce changes that might indeed suggest the “Islamization of public life,” such as to include Islamic or ‘intelligent design” texts in primary and secondary school curricula, to permit the covering of young girls in certain extra-curricular activities even at the primary school level, to relocate restaurants that serve liquor to the outskirts of cities or refuse to give them licenses, to open “women only” public parks, to ban alcohol in municipal-owned recreational or art centers, etc.

At stake in this controversy is what one might call a “culture war.” It has to do with the question of what constitutes moral behavior. Traditionally, the Islamic understanding of moral behavior is closely linked with Islamic theology, which considers the community life of the believers to be under the principles of religious law. The historical solution to this Islamic insistence on social control has been to give the men charged with Islamic theology and jurisprudence the authority to determine the limits of moral life. Accordingly, both in historical examples of the Islamic state as well as its contemporary versions, the Islamic way of life has meant the ordering of gender relations on the basis of sex segregation. This has often led to the repression of women in the public sphere and their seclusion behind veiled bodies and/or same-gender public spaces as, for example, in Afghanistan under the Taliban regime or in other contemporary examples.

This Islamic conception of morality – as an issue that needs to be regulated through state control of public and private lives – is in sharp contrast to the secular understanding that leaves the question of morality to individual conscience and choice. It is here that the “culture war” between the Islamists and secularists in Turkey is most fiercely fought out. For both women and men who have internalized the republican understanding of gender equality, covered women are symbols of repressed sexuality and the gender-biased conception of public life. For the Islamists, on the other hand, the headscarf is also a symbol, of a Muslim way of life that the Republic destroyed.

At issue is also a certain resentment by established elites toward people who were marginalized by the Republic and left out of political power circles and high status groups, but now constitute part of the elite. There were, of course, always large numbers of women who covered despite the Republic’s discouragement of it. However, it was largely peasant women, women of traditional families in towns, or rural migrants in cities who covered. Hence, the social establishment in Turkey has long associated the head cover with rural or lower class origins. With the growing success of Islamist parties since the mid-1970s, however, and especially in the last few decades, a new entrepreneurial class has emerged in Anatolian cities. Many of these entrepreneurs come from conservative, religious families and benefit from connections with government, as well as new groups of people in major metropolitan cities who now occupy important positions of power within politics and the state bureaucracy. Thus, for the first time in the history of the Republic, there are growing numbers of covered women who are economically well-off and who do not live on the outskirts of Turkish society. Although the head cover of peasant or lower middle class women has never been seen as a major threat by the secularists, the old status groups feel threatened by and resent the emergence of a new middle class that has adopted a lifestyle different from their own. The Islamists, on the other hand, are aware of the fact that no matter how successful they are economically, politically, or intellectually, they continue to be shut out from the social circles of the old establishment. In fact, the Islamists often remark that they are the “Blacks of Turkey” and that status groups are caste-like, reserved for “White Turks” only.

Also at issue in this conflict is what one may call an image problem. For the secularists who have internalized the Republic’s vision of placing Turkey among the “civilized” nations of the West, Turks who resemble, either in dress or lifestyle, the “backward, reactionary Muslims” of the ancien régime create an unacceptable international image of Turkey. This attitude is at the same time related to secularists’ historical consciousness, the fact that the Republic called on them to be oblivious to the past, even changed the alphabet and the vocabulary of the language so that new generations would have no access to that past, that its official historiography equated the Islamic civilization of the Ottomans with obscurantism and represented itself as an enlightened world based on progress. Hence, in the collective psyche of the secularists, public visibility of an Islamic way of life, most apparent in women’s covering, has the negative impact of a feared return to the Islamic past. On the other hand, in the collective psyche of the Islamists, the Republic symbolizes the defeat of their 19th century stand that Islamic civilization is kept untouched and Westernization is limited to technology transfers and industrial growth. Although the various Islamist parties since the 1970s have been keen on economic development and have accepted the need to function within a democratic system, their vision of a Muslim society remains substantially the same. This has meant two different interpretations of how Turkey should situate itself in the contemporary world.

By way of summary, let me end by pointing out that the headscarf debate in Turkey needs to be analyzed within a much more comprehensive and nuanced paradigm that takes into account the historical context and the collective historical psyche of both sides of the debate. Thus far, much of the literature has concentrated on understanding the Islamists and empathizing with their “underdog” status. There is no study, to my knowledge, that tries to uncover the fears of the secularists who have been dismissed as “the dinosaur Kemalist elite,” oblivious to change and clinging to past authoritarian measures despite the fact that there are large numbers of secularists who are neither within elite circles nor display authoritarian values. This lacuna needs to be filled if we want to make sense of this major dispute that goes beyond the question of who should wear what.

The gendered dimension of secularism is an intrinsic feature of Turkish modernization. Turkish “laicite” (inspired from the French one) meant a strong will of the republican state to endorse a public sphere where religion will be absent, but women present. The reforms, whether they were providing legal rights (with the abolition of the sharia law and the adoption of a civil family code), political rights (women’s vote and eligibility), or educational rights (co-education of girls and boys), all underpinned the republican coupling of secularism and women’s rights. Since the Republic, women were markers of a secular public sphere and a “modern way of life” (read also western). The headscarf confounds the established imaginaries of modern, secular and feminist.

The headscarf conflates in a single symbol both personal piousness and public assertion of Islamic difference. It is difficult to distinguish religious from cultural and political meanings. Those who argue against the headscarf make distinctions between “good” Muslims exhibiting “authentic” belief and others who exploit its “political” symbolism. The headscarf of the peasant, the working-class woman or the grandmother is considered traditional or pious and is therefore acceptable. The young woman’s headscarf (called the “turban”) provokes, on the contrary, powerful emotions, anger and aversion to the extent that the temporal (religion as a relic from the past) and spatial (religion at the margins) separations and class distinctions between secular and religious disappear. Muslim women’s access to higher education also challenges the idea that secularism equals modernity. Women who are proponents of the headscarf distance themselves from secular models of feminist emancipation, but also seek autonomy from male interpretations of Islamic precepts. They represent a rupture of the frame both of secular female self-definitions and religious male prescriptions. They want to have access to secular education, follow new life trajectories that are not in conformity with traditional gender roles, and yet fashion and assert a new pious self. They are searching for ways to become Muslim and modern at the same time, transforming both.

The established past meanings of the symbol of Islamic veiling are undergoing a transformation: from the submission of Muslim women who are secluded in the private sphere to assertive, and public, Muslim women. The veiling, from a sign of stigma and inferiority, is in the process of being transformed into a sign of empowerment and the prestige of Muslim women. It is certainly a challenge to secular conceptions of female emancipation, but also to male Islam, which identifies the veil with submission to their authority.

The public demonstrations against the bill, which were initiated by women’s organizations, have shown the other female face of this debate – that of Turkish secularism. The form of secularism that has been implemented as a principle of the republican state has often been considered a “top down” ideology, foreign in its roots (inspired by French “laicite”) and believed destined to disappear if not backed up by the army’s power. In the last decade, we have seen that secularism was an indigenous value, defended by women’s societal organizations, going from state-politics to street-politics. This has been made particularly clear by the public demonstrations that have gathered millions and have spread from one city to another, including those during the summer of 2007 that mobilized against the presidential candidacy of Abdullah Gul because of his Muslim background and his covered wife. Despite this evidence of civil society’s support for secularism, however, the flags and the nationalist slogans that were widely used in these demonstrations have also revealed the state-oriented and nationalist feature of Turkish secularism.

The debate over the headscarf is putting secularism to a democratic test; exposing disagreements between liberal and authoritarian secularists. While the hard-liner secularists make a claim for the restoration of order (if necessary with military power) the liberals address a critique to secular militarism and republican nationalism. They take aim at the expansion of democratic rights and freedom of expression. They have given their support to the previous democratic reforms engaged by the government within the context of Turkish membership to European Union. The new legislation deceived those who were expecting a package of laws – for example by eliminating the law against “insulting Turkishness” – that would have broadened the constitutional changes for freedom of expression.

The new legislation is not based upon religious arguments, but, on the contrary, on arguments against discrimination, for equal access to higher education, and furthermore, in conformity with the European norms and freedom of dress codes. But overall, it could not overcome the politics of fear and suspicion. The end of the ban is feared to provide a first step that will pave the way for the escalation of Muslim claims and the spread of the headscarf in places other than the universities, such as in the public schools, in Parliament, and among public servants and professionals. Secondly, it is feared that the headscarf will not only acquire legitimacy but also will be used to enforce conservative Islam upon others, especially on “unveiled” students in Anatolian universities. The fear is that once the secularists are in a minority-position, not only will women’s rights cease to be respected, but they will be intimidated and oppressed by the rising tide of conservative gender roles and Islam. The “daughters” of Ataturk are worried for the freedom of their own daughters. Many secularists therefore fear the intentions of the AK Party – the Party of Justice and Development that acquired a majority vote in the last general elections – suspicious they have a hidden agenda to promote a conservative religious culture.

None of these arguments can be dismissed, particularly in light of the strength of political Islam and its compulsory practices in neighboring countries. However, history is not about social engineering, and the force of democracy is to open up the possibilities for the future and to enhance action and interaction among competing, contending forces of diversity. But sustainability of democracy requires overcoming politics of fear and suspicion, including those among women. Today, women are part of the forces of pluralism; their subjectivities and agencies, both secular and religious, are affecting political dynamics in Turkey. What we learn from Turkey is that the tensions between secularism and Islam are unfolding in the realm of everyday life and gender politics. Matters of Islam and secularism are not only matters of the state and male politics, but are also becoming foremost a women’s affair. We can hope that assuring women’s public presence and liberty in this game will be a guarantee for pluralism and diversity.

The ruling Muslim-inflected Justice and Development Party (known by its Turkish acronym AKP) made a deal this week with the nationalist MHP in parliament to secure enough votes to eliminate the ban. The ban had been imposed after the 1980 coup by a secularist military suspicious of political symbols, although only fully implemented in the late 1990s. Now that the ban has been lifted in the name of religious freedom and freedom of expression, it remains to be seen whether those principles will be applied to other communities in Turkey, such as religious minorities and the Kurds.

In earlier decades, students tended to come from secular, urban backgrounds, so covering on campus was not an issue. These days, students are often second- and third-generation offspring of rural migrants. Their fashionable and eclectic styles of veiling would be unrecognizable to their mothers: a red OpArt headscarf paired with red high-top sneakers; see-through navy gauze with a jeans pant-suit; dayglo sandals and a multicolored net draped over a dark cap.

The electoral success of the AKP, now the majority government, and the economic growth of pious businesses since the neoliberal economic reforms of the 1980s have made the notion of ‘covering as empowering’ legitimate and possible. Until now, though, at the gates of the university, as in government offices, the scarf had to disappear. Some intrepid pious students coped by stepping into a booth or changing room by the university gates and – like superheroes– emerged wearing string caps or even wigs to circumvent the ban. Many others, though, were shut out from professional development and careers that require a university degree. It is instructive to those of us who instinctively see Islam as a barrier to women to see a Muslim government pushing through reforms that have given women greater rights and protections under the law and now access to education denied them by secularists.

Wearing a headscarf is anathema to the rigidly secular lifestyle envisioned in the early twentieth century by Turkey’s revered founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, and guarded today by the Turkish state – the military, judiciary, educational institutions and their supporters that are now facing off against the lifting of the university headscarf ban by the Muslim-dominated government and its nationalist allies in parliament. There is also a sizable element of the population, mostly women, who fear that their secular lifestyles will be endangered on the presumption that what is allowed now will be required later. It is already galling to many that their prime minister’s wife covers her head in the signature tightly wrapped headscarf and to see the covered wife of Turkey’s president, Abdullah Gül, occupying the presidential palace. Because of Gül’s wife’s headscarf, she is forbidden by law to accompany her husband at official functions, creating continual protocol dilemmas for the government.

This past week thousands of anti-headscarf activists demonstrated in the streets and gathered at Ataturk’s tomb, warning that the presence of women with covered heads on campus will be the camel’s nose in the tent, the next step in the Islamicization of Turkish society. Before long, they argue, the headscarf will be allowed everywhere, girls will be pressured to conform and Turkey will become Malaysia.

Presidents and rectors of universities have come out against lifting the ban, arguing that it would lead universities away from rationality and reason. One rector went so far as to say he couldn’t be sure of treating covered students the same as other students if the ban were lifted. In response, thousands of university professors have signed petitions supporting the right of students to cover their heads, arguing that universities should be places where different beliefs, ideas and lifestyles should be freely expressed.

Not even recent revelations about state-sponsored gangs involved in assassinations and coup plots has raised public wrangling and outrage to this level. That is because battle lines are drawn not only between pious and secular Turkish Muslims, but between the dying old system and the new. The urban-based secularist elites who were in charge of Turkey’s direction and image for most of the twentieth century have lost ground as elections brought to power the pious majority, people who had formerly populated the countryside and lower-class squatter settlements, but are now reaching for a share of Turkey’s wealth and power. These many Turkish citizens may no longer be ignored as country bumpkins with headscarves. They are driving SUVs to the presidential palace. Many find this threatening and fear, perhaps with some justification, that a political party with no viable opposition is dangerous not only because it is Muslim, but because it cannot be stopped.

The Justice and Development Party has been aligning Turkey’s laws and institutions with those of the European Union, with an eye to membership, and has commissioned a new constitution that enshrines parliamentary democracy and human and individual rights. These innovations by their very nature undermine Turkey’s authoritarian institutions that in the eyes of many are the only safeguard of a secular lifestyle.

Some are questioning, however, whether the reforms spearheaded by AKP are meant to broaden only freedom of Muslim religious expression in Turkey, not freedom of expression for anyone else. Now that the headscarf ban has been lifted at universities, will the government turn to righting other wrongs or will it push on to lift the ban in schools and government offices? Will the impetus for reform of the constitution be blunted once the headscarf ban is lifted? There have been worrying indications of declining government commitment to the rights of non-Muslim groups in Turkey.

Those pushing for an end to the ban on restricting a Muslim woman’s right to education have been notably absent from demonstrations and discussions demanding rights for Turkey’s religious and ethnic minorities. Few covered women attended the eight-thousand strong demonstration in Istanbul on January 19 commemorating the one-year anniversary of Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink’s murder by ultranationalists. Demonstrators called for justice. The trial of his killer and his accomplices has been marred by coverups, lost evidence, and harrassment of Dink’s family in the courtroom. The year before, a hundred thousand people accompanied his coffin to his funeral. The lack of representation from the pious community was striking. Hrant Dink was murdered because he was Christian Armenian and he wrote about about the killings of Armenians in 1915.

The AKP needed the votes of the nationalist, anti-minority MHP in parliament to lift a ban on headscarves. In return, AKP has announced that it is backing down from its minorities bill that would have, among other things, returned property and assets that had been confiscated from Christian, Jewish and other minority religious groups by the state. Since early in the Republic, minority religious foundations and their buildings and other assets were taken over by the government and these minorities were forbidden from repairing their remaining buildings or adding to them.

This reform is crucial for Turkey’s EU membership bid. The fact that AKP is willing to give it up in return for MHP support on the headscarf vote seems to indicate what many have feared – that AKP reforms are designed to support Muslim religious rights, but does not extend to broader religious tolerance and freedom of expression.

Protesting Dink’s murder and the lack of a proper trial for his killers, like the right of churches and synagogues to regain and repair their properties, are issues of religious tolerance and freedom of speech worthy of attention by those who claim to support elimination of the headscarf ban in the name of religious tolerance and freedom of expression. So are support for Kurdish language rights and open discussion of the killings of Armenians in 1915. In all of these issues, the government has made overtures, but failed to fully put its weight behind the necessary reforms.

Perhaps it is simply too many taboos to break all at once. The secularist military and judiciary, the university rectors and a sizable part of the population are against one or all of these reforms. As a result of a creeping, xenophobic nationalism, many Turks believe minorities (Armenians, Greek Christians, Jews and Kurds) are a Fifth column for a Europe out to weaken the Turkish nation or to divide it as they did after WWI. Liberal democratic laws exist in order to protect groups and individuals against the intolerant forces of society. But how does an elected government create such laws in the face of powerful and often intolerant special interests?

By allowing headscarves in universities, Turkey is making a leap of faith that democracy will guarantee tolerance. It is an experiment some are unwilling to countenance because they believe AKP’s democratic reforms are self-serving. The resounding din on both sides about encroaching Islam and endangered secularism has drowned out much-needed debate about the principles of democracy and the role of tolerance.

History, both in France and Turkey, contradicts the claim that secularism guarantees equal rights for women and men. The French secular state long denied women the right to vote and its civil code enforced male prerogatives over women in families until well into the twentieth century. The Turkish republic (a one-party state until after WWII) was inspired by the French republic (although it gave women the vote in 1934, ten years before France) and it modeled its penal code on Italy’s. Until that code was revised in 2001 (with the support of the AKP), women were defined as men’s property and rape was considered a violation of a male property-holder’s right. Ideas about family honor resting on the control of women’s sexuality are not unique to Islam, nor are they foreign to secularism.

The sharp opposition between the secular and the religious is a distortion of historical reality. Most of the secular states of Western Europe found ways to accommodate their religious majorities rather than banishing them; it is probably more accurate to speak of forms of Christian secularism than of the erasure of the public presence of religion. School holidays in secular France are Catholic holidays and the state supports the upkeep of churches as part of the national patrimony. In Germany, there is religious instruction in public schools. In these countries, Muslims have rightly wondered whether restrictions on their religious expression were a form of discrimination against a minority presence rather than a defense of the secularism of the state.

Although Muslims are a majority in Turkey, the question of discrimination has also been raised there. This time, it is new migrants to cities as well as residents of the countryside who are questioning the entrenched power of urban elites. The emergence of a multi-party system in Turkey is associated with breaking the hold of these elites, whose support for military authority in defense of secularism made them seem suspicious of, if not hostile to democracy. The multi-party system brought the question of religion—its representation and its practice—into play. The need to figure out an accommodation between a majority religion and democratic practice is not unprecedented in the history of European nation-states.

Allowing headscarves in universities may be one way of accomplishing this negotiation. It is especially interesting that the Prime Minister has explained the need to lift the ban as a way of guaranteeing all girls the “right to higher education,” a right that assumes not only equality with men, but among women of different classes and social backgrounds. For observant Muslim women—the majority, some 60% in Turkey—wearing the headscarf means many things, but one of its effects is to enable mobility and independence in the public arena; this means access to the education and jobs traditionally enjoyed by the minority of women associated with established secular urban elites.

It is important to note, too, that feminist groups in Turkey are divided on the question of the headscarf. They realize how complicated an issue it is in terms of achieving not only gender, but social and economic equality. They are not divided about other proposed changes to the constitution, however. These involve dropping the commitment of the government to insure equality for all (a hard won gain for women’s groups) and introducing language referring to women as a “vulnerable group.” These changes would bring back the laws that prevailed under the secular republic until the end of the 20th century; laws that subordinated women to men and confined them to the domestic sphere.

In Turkey there seem to be two separate issues at stake in the constitutional reforms. One is the restoration of male privilege, which would come in the form of revisions to the civil code. The other is the recognition of women’s rights, which would include the right of individual religious expression. Ironically, since the right to wear the headscarf has been defined as a woman’s individual political and social right, it could make the full restoration of male privilege difficult to justify, if not impossible to implement.