Azza Karam

This interview was conducted in conjunction with the SSRC project on Religion and International Affairs. Karam here speaks only for herself, not for any institution, organization, or board.—ed.

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NS: Before we get to your work at the United Nations, let’s start with recent events in Egypt, your home country. How, in your view, is the Egyptian revolution of a few months ago proceeding? Has it been betrayed yet?

AK: It sounds as though you’re waiting for it to be “betrayed”!

NS: No, not at all. I’m wondering what exactly it would mean for the revolution to be betrayed. It seems to be assumed that, somewhere along the way, all revolutions are.

AK: The revolution is proceeding with the hiccups associated with any comprehensive transformation entailing the political, social, economic, and legal overhaul of an entire country. Is the revolution over? On the contrary, we have but begun. Are there disappointments en route? Definitely. But is there a sense that no change is taking place? Not at all. Are we going backwards? Impossible, given the enormity of what has transpired in the consciousness, not only of Egyptians, but of all Arab people. This revolution is, first and foremost, about crossing the Rubicon of fear, about reclaiming dignity, and about the youth being engines of political and social transformation on an unprecedented scale. None of these dynamics are reversible. We are living through the enactment of a new collective consciousness.

NS: Maybe in that sense it can’t be betrayed. But the enactment won’t be easy.

AK: Well, there are the grimy realities of entrenched, interest-based politics; an economy struggling to recover from being on hold while the revolution was taking place, in a global financial environment that is itself struggling to stand on its feet; and a legal system that needs to be overhauled—all while maintaining security and stability in a region being christened, by fire, into freedom.

NS: What was going through your head during the uprising? Were you afraid of what might happen?

AK: I was afraid for the safety of the youth demonstrating so courageously, creatively, and with so much passion. I was afraid for the millions left in the clutches of a government that deliberately instigated instability for the first four days of demonstrations.

NS: And then?

AK: My fear was gradually replaced by several other emotions, starting on January 29, when a series of events began to take place: I allowed myself the first thin line in the crescent of hope when I heard the rumblings of discontent within the Egyptian army itself—rumblings that were articulate and deliberate, and that echoed the people’s demands for both dignity and systemic change. I began to allow myself to smile—and then to grin—when, at the very same time, an Egyptian sense of humor asserted itself in the various venues where demonstrations were taking place—in slogans, attire, and much more. I shook my head in utter disbelief at the camels and horses that were brought in—and felt sorry for them, because of the five-hour journey from the pyramids to Tahrir Square that they had had to endure under whips and ill-treatment. But I wept like an orphan for the people who were dying. I clenched my fists and invoked hell upon those who were deliberately causing the loss of life. I stayed awake night after night, with Egypt’s time defining that of my own life, calling friends and family in Egypt and everywhere else in the world, exchanging information about events, analyzing, hoping, and arguing. Above all, and throughout, I—and every single Egyptian I know, Muslim and Christian—prayed and prayed and prayed. On February 10, when we all expected Mubarak to announce he was stepping down, I literally cursed him—and threw my shoe at his image on my computer screen—as did most Egyptians listening to him across Egypt.

NS: What was it like for you when he finally stepped down?

AK: On February 11, 2011, I was born again as a proud Masriyya—Egyptian—deeply humbled by those ten or twenty years younger than I, but a thousand years more courageous. I kissed my computer screen—the very same one that had just suffered the indignity of having a shoe hurled at it—when Al Jazeera aired the announcement and displayed the unadulterated joy of Egyptians at Mubarak’s resignation. I was amazed, beyond words, at the images of people cleaning up in Tahrir Square. There and then, I prostrated myself in thanks to the Almighty for the beauty of the spirits of the people whom He had enabled. And on the streets of New York City, I held my head up and greeted the Egyptian coffee vendors, hot dog vendors, and commuters loudly, in Arabic, and joked and laughed and shook their hands—for the first and only time in the ten years that I have lived here.

NS: Have you been to Egypt since then?

AK: No, but the enormity of the transformation does not require one’s physical presence within the national boundaries to be appreciated. The Arab awakening in the neighboring countries is itself an indication that the change that has taken place is very much ongoing, and that it is reshaping the identity of the entire region.

NS: Some observers heralded the apparently secular quality of the Egyptian revolution. Do you think that religion will be less on the lips of leaders in the Arab world now than it has been in recent decades?

AK: Secularism comes in many shades and varieties, but it has never manifested—not even here in the United States—in the manner of a total repudiation of religion. A famous Egyptian nationalist leader in the early twentieth century, describing his nationalist aspirations and the struggle against British colonialism, once said: “I am a Copt by religion, a Muslim by culture, and an Egyptian by both and much else.” This multitude of identities, which includes different religious-cum-cultural contexts, has and shall always characterize Egyptians and, indeed, all Arabs. Are we likely to hear less religious talk in Egypt today? I doubt it. After all, why should religion not continue to feature in a country that believes itself to have invented religion in the time of the pharaohs?

NS: How is religion being talked about and thought about at the United Nations? Are there ways in which it is, perhaps conspicuously, not being talked and thought about?

AK: Religion, as an ingredient of culture, has always been part of the business of human development. In the last decade or so, especially after the events of September 11, 2001, and the subsequent reconfiguration of geopolitical dynamics, discussions about religion have begun to occupy a more prominent role in the discourse within and among the various UN agencies. The last two Secretaries-General have referred specifically to the role of faith in several of their speeches, in terms of both culture and faith-based service organizations. More and more UN agencies, beginning with UNFPA, have started to identify faith-based partners in social development, on issues of health, education, child care, nutrition, and the environment. The United Nations system today is more aware of the fact that religious communities, and their affiliated organizational entities, are some of the oldest, most deeply rooted, and furthest reaching social welfare networks and providers known to humanity. They are increasingly recognized as part of the partnerships for development at the United Nations.

NS: How do you help others at the UN to become better attuned to the importance of religion in development work?

AK: What I do is provide technical support to my colleagues at UNFPA, so that they are able to discern the appropriate faith-based partners for our reproductive health, gender equality, and population and development work. My job, then, is to facilitate strategic engagement with the world of religion, as part of the broader culture, in order to further the realization of our human rights mandate. In 2008, many of UNFPA’s faith-based partners were convened to launch the Interfaith Network for Population and Development, a unique human rights-oriented initiative within the United Nations. Several of our UN colleagues joined the deliberations and attended the launch, which took place in Istanbul. Today, there are over 500 member organizations, with a legacy of partnering not only with UNFPA but also with several of its UN sister agencies on a range of development issues. The UNFPA also currently chairs an Inter-Agency Task Force on partnerships with faith-based organizations around the Millennium Development Goals. We come together to share information, coordinate activities, and share experiences and lessons learned.

NS: What lessons has this process taught you?

AK: One thing I’ve learned over time is that these FBOs (faith-based organizations) and “religion” are not one and the same thing. The world of religion is vast and difficult for us to quantify and categorize into neatly distinct entities. Religion and faith do not lend themselves to the usual normative frameworks of development praxis, which means that engagement with religious communities has to be sustainable, built upon common goals, and mainstreamed into broader civil society and government partnerships. This is critical to establishing and maintaining the trust that is required for any such engagement, and for facilitating the co-ownership of national development processes among all the different partners involved.

NS: How do you choose those partners?

AK: The United Nations cannot afford to—nor should it—work with only one faith tradition, or with only one FBO, or with the same religious leaders on all issues. We are obliged to work with varied representatives of different religious organizations and communities on addressing a multiplicity of human development needs. And we have to maintain the same respect and appreciation for the respective strengths and modus operandi of each partner, as long as there is agreement on the basic goals of human development, that is, human rights, peace, and security for all. But we have also learned that the responsibility for cultivating and maintaining these partnerships lies on all sides. Just as we hold ourselves accountable to our intergovernmental boards, mandates, and civil society partners, we expect our FBO partners to do the same with each other, and with us.

NS: Religion seems especially relevant—as a source of controversy, I mean—to the issues of gender, reproductive health, and population that the UNFPA deals with. Do you find the organization’s work to be constrained by religious concerns?

AK: It is not really possible to speak of religious constraints as such. Religious concerns, positions, and services vary significantly according to the religion itself, as well as per country, region, and situation. Issues of reproductive health vary enormously, too. What I can say, almost unequivocally, is that it is virtually impossible to embark on any issue relating to sexuality, women’s rights, and gender relations without coming across particular cultural dynamics. But it would be wrong to assume that particular cultures are unchanging obstacles. If there is one lesson we keep learning from history, and that has been highlighted of late by the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, is that people change their own cultures from within all the time.

NS: Do you think the revolution represents a sea change in the role of women in Egyptian society?

AK: In my opinion, and contrary to popular (and largely ethnocentric) beliefs, the revolution could happen only because women’s roles in Egyptian society—and Arab societies as a whole—have already been undergoing a sea change. Anyone who has studied Arab societies in the last thirty years will attest to how socially active, politically informed, and economically engaged women have been. The magnitude, scope, and diversity of their participation in the revolution is itself a testament to how intrinsic to the social, economic, legal, and political fabric they already are—and have been. What is now transpiring with women’s rights in Egypt—and elsewhere in the Arab region—is a continuation of the struggle for gender equality within the emerging political framework, which is part and parcel of the larger effort to safeguard all human rights in the new polity that is now being collectively fashioned.

NS: What can people in the West do to help advance the cause of women in the Middle East? Or would it be better to butt out?

AK: Arab women have made it clear they are perfectly capable of activism and of articulating their own needs and aspirations. If and when these women need the assistance of “people in the West,” they will let that be known in no uncertain terms. After listening, the “people in the West” can then decide whether and how best to respond. And it would be wise to do so in consultation with the same women who made the request.

NS: Many have expressed concern that conservative groups, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, will gain power in Egypt—one assumption being that that would be deleterious to the cause of women’s rights. Is there a chance, then, that things could become worse for women?

AK: It is seriously myopic to assume that the Muslim Brotherhood is “anti-women.” I first started studying the Brotherhood, as part of a range of Islamist formations around the world, back in the late 1980s. Even within the organization itself, there are diverse perspectives on women’s rights: there are extremely active, very well-educated, cultured, and articulate women members of the Brotherhood, just as there are some members who are deeply conservative when it comes to women’s roles in public. Bear in mind that revolutions are happening within almost every group, party, and institution in Egypt today: the army, political parties, universities, professional associations, media, NGOs—you name it. So, even within the Muslim Brotherhood, a revolution continues to unfold among its diverse members—young and old, men and women, and so forth. The journey of these different revolutions is, for everyone concerned, a process of acquiring wisdom, and I believe strongly that we have little to lose and a great deal to gain.

NS: What do you think is the cause of all this upheaval? Why now?

AK: We are living in the context of a generation of youth—which is over 60% of our populations—that has grown up as part of a global youth culture equipped with mass communication technologies and amid huge challenges to established powers. I mean, who would have thought the Soviet Union would collapse; or that religion would re-emerge so strongly after decades of attempts to keep it out of politics; or that a woman and former guerilla fighter would be elected president of the largest Latin American country, and a black man would be elected as president of a country that once went to war with itself over racism? This generation is growing up at a time when even what it is to be a man or a woman is being radically redefined.

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.

An-Na‘im recognizes that this case may seem to be a hard sell for the Muslims who are his primary audience. He reports that a series of focus groups that he sponsored in Indonesia to discuss these ideas were almost uniformly hostile to the concept of a secular state, which participants associated with Western attempts to undermine Islam. In Indonesia and elsewhere, many devout Muslims associate the secular state with the promotion of irreligion.

An-Na‘im proposes that the opposite is more likely. Through a variety of Islamic arguments, he makes the case that a secular state is actually good for religion. From the standpoint of Islamic ethics (‘ilm al-akhlaq), he argues that state enforcement of shari‘a vitiates Muslims’ ability to carry out their religious duties through the exercise of human will. From the perspective of Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh), An-Na‘im remarks that Islamic sacred sources say little about the form of government that Muslims should adopt, citing work by other major scholars such ‘Ali ‘Abd al-Raziq (Egypt, 1888-1966) and Nurcholish Madjid (Indonesia, 1939-2005). He argues that the existence of multiple interpretations of Islam undermines the claim that there is a single, timeless set of shari‘a regulations for the state to enforce.

From the biographies of the earliest generations of Muslims (siyar al-salaf), An-Na‘im argues that the first four successors to Muhammad in the 7th century offered a precedent for the modern secular state. These leaders, known in the Islamic heritage as the “Rightly Guided Caliphs,” were particularly devout and religiously knowledgeable, An-Na‘im notes (to note otherwise would place him outside of the Sunni mainstream). Their legitimacy as rulers of the Muslim community was based not on their religious authority, he argues, but rather on their political authority as heads of state. Other companions of the Prophet, who are also revered for their piety and Islamic learning, did not necessarily agree with the policies of these first caliphs, but they accepted caliphal authority in order to protect the new polity.

And from the standpoint of contemporary Islamic welfare (maslaha), An-Na‘im argues that state enforcement of shari‘a — as it has been traditionally understood — undermines democracy and human rights, including the rights of women, non-Muslims, and the freedom to choose one’s religion. In each of these areas, An-Na‘im suggests that Muslims need to engage their religious traditions in a spirit of self-criticism, rather than perpetuate misguided aspects of Islamic heritage out of understandable defensiveness about Western colonial and post-colonial influences.

An-Na‘im weaves these Islamic discourses together with case studies of three secular states — Turkey, India, and Indonesia — where Islamic faith is, if anything, on the rise. An-Na‘im notes some of the drawbacks of these secular regimes. In Turkey, the Kemalist version of secularism inhibits the free expression of religiosity (most famously women’s desire to wear headscarves in public institutions). In India, the post-colonial state has largely endorsed the colonial-era Anglo-Mohammedan system of personal and family law, to the detriment of Islamic reformist movements. In Indonesia, the government forces citizens to register as members of one of the five official religions. Still, these secular governments have not undermined religion, as some devout Muslims fear. If anything, Muslims’ religious freedom may be greater under these regimes than under so-called Islamic regimes, which favor certain sects and interpretations and impose barriers on others.

An-Na‘im does not engage in statistical analysis, but one could add to his argument the findings of the World Values Survey: among Muslims in India, Indonesia, and Turkey, regular attendance at religious services (weekly or more often) is higher than under the decidedly pro-shari‘a regimes in Iran and Saudi Arabia. In fact, religious attendance in Iran and Saudi Arabia is among the lowest quartile of 20 countries with significant Muslim populations surveyed by the World Values Survey over the past decade. These figures — and An-Na‘im’s case for secularism — seem to be consistent with competition theories in the sociology of Christianity: the less monopolistic the religious scene, the greater the incentives for religious denominations to market themselves to potential adherents, with the result that more people are drawn into religious participation.

The World Values Survey also asked Muslims in eight countries whether the state should enforce only shari‘a law, and 68 percent agreed. Yet a majority of these pro-shari‘a respondents also agreed with the statement that “Democracy may have problems but it’s better than any other form of government.” Similarly in the Pew Global Attitudes Project, a majority of Muslims in 10 countries who said that they wanted Islam to play “a very large role” in political life also said that “democracy is not just for the West and can work well here.” The Gallup World Poll appears to found a similar overlap between pro-shari‘a and pro-democracy attitudes in many Muslim-majority countries, though the detailed findings are beyond my budget (the WVS and Pew data are free).

Democratic procedures are only one of An-Nai’m's criteria for a truly secular state. At other points in this book, An-Na‘im also suggests that all modern states count as “secular”: “the state is by definition a secular political institution, especially in the present context of Islamic societies,” since some or all of the personnel in charge of the state are lay rulers whose selection and policies depend on factors external to religious interpretation — even the Saudi monarchy (which came to power through force) or the Iranian president (who came to power through popular, if limited, election). The very idea of the nation-state, which has become entrenched in post-colonial societies, is a secular notion. (Though some governments have tried to Islamicize the concept — in Uzbekistan, for example, the Communist-era bosses who run the post-Soviet state posted billboards quoting a statement of the Prophet Muhammad, “Feeling for one’s homeland (vatan) is greater than all things.”)

Elsewhere, An-Na‘im offers a more restrictive definition of the secular state that involves the substance of state policies: states that attempt to enforce traditional shari‘a norms are not secular, by these lights. To count as secular, a state must protect human rights, even when these run counter to the will of the majority or to traditional understandings of Islamic piety. In an earlier project, Islamic Family Law in a Changing World, An-Na‘im documented many of these legal limitations on a country-by-country basis, and his current work encourages Muslims to face up to these human rights failings.

An-Na‘im also offers an even more restrictive definition of the secular state that focuses not just on the substance of policy but also on the form of political discourse used to make policy. To invoke religious authority as the basis for policy, he argues, is a breach of secularism, regardless of the content of the policy. In this vision of the secular state, policy must be grounded in civic reason: “For example, if all I can say in support of the prohibition of interest on loans is that it is prohibited for me as a Muslim (haram), then there is nothing to discuss with other citizens, who must either reject or accept my proposal only on the strength of my religious belief. … It is also better for my own faith as a Muslim to reflect on the social rationale for the dictates of Shari‘a and try to persuade others of the general good of those commandments.”

This approach overlaps considerably with John Rawls’s concept of “public reason,” An-Na‘im notes, but the authors also differ in significant ways. For Rawls, religion was a side issue and only permissible in political debate under exceptional circumstances, such as the social divides that confronted the abolitionist movement and the civil rights movement in the United States. Rawls’s position was firmly allied with the secularization thesis in the sociology of religion, whereby religion inevitably recedes from the public sphere as a country modernizes. For An-Na‘im, by contrast, religion is a permanent and worthwhile feature of human life that informs many citizens’ political priorities, just as other aspects of social position and ideology do — a position that is consistent with the work of Christian Smith and others in the sociology of religion who have contested the secularization thesis. An-Na‘im favors a secular state, but he also favors a robust role for faith in public life.

Rawls and An-Na‘im also differ in the focus of their normative judgments. An-Na‘im is writing primarily for Muslims, and he urges non-Muslims to let Muslims take the lead in gaining their freedoms. By contrast, Rawls wrote primarily for the United States and other North Atlantic democracies — these countries provide the bulk of his examples and the institutional framework for his ideals of justice. His main consideration of the rest of the world, a late book entitled The Law of Peoples, focuses primarily on the threat that illiberal regimes pose to the North Atlantic democracies. These other regions must be contained or reformed, by military intervention if necessary — the same “civilizing mission” reasoning propagated by imperialists. An-Na‘im considers such interventions to be hypocritical and ineffective — hypocritical since altruistic discourses are almost always combined with exploitative practices, and ineffective because the aftermath of the intervention is rarely liberal or democratic.

At the same time, Rawls also considers the possibility of “decent” non-liberal peoples, whose polities may not be fully democratic but at least enforce the rule of law and respect human rights. These “decent” nations pose no threat to the international order and should be left alone to live their own way, so long as they do not become indecent. Rawls’s example of a “decent” non-liberal people, tellingly, is a fictional Muslim country, “Kazanistan” — presumably a play on the capital of Tatarstan, Kazan. An-Na‘im, writing for the citizens of the “Kazanistans” of the world, is not prepared to give non-liberal Islamic states a free pass. He does not call for Western intervention, but rather for internal reform. Muslims themselves have a duty to bring about constitutionalism, human rights, and democratic citizenship, An-Na‘im argues. He proposes that the best path toward these ideals — and the best path toward Islamic fulfillment — is a secular state.

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.