Interventions:
A Middle East Report Online Feature
Lawfare
and Wearfare in Turkey
Hilal Elver
April 2008
(Hilal Elver
is a visiting professor of global and international studies at
the University of California-Santa Barbara and an editor of Middle
East Report.)
For
background on the July elections, see Kerem Öktem, “Harbingers
of Turkey’s Second Republic,” Middle East Report
Online, August 1, 2007.
See
also Gamze Çavdar, “Behind
Turkey’s Presidential Battle,” Middle East Report
Online, May 7, 2007.
On
religious minorities in Turkey, see Kerem Öktem, “Being
Muslim at the Margins: Alevis and the AKP,” Middle East
Report 246 (Spring 2008). Order the issue online. |
With war on
its eastern borders, and renewed turmoil inside them, Turkey
is transfixed by something else entirely: the desire of university-age
women to wear the Muslim headscarf on campus, a seemingly innocent
sartorial choice that has been forbidden by the courts, off and
on, since 1980. At public meetings and street demonstrations,
in art exhibits, TV ads, and dance and music performances, headscarf
opponents argue vociferously that removing the ban will be the
first step backward to the musty old days of the Ottoman Empire.
A quieter majority of 70 percent, according to a recent poll,
thinks that pious students should be allowed to cover their heads,
perhaps because approximately 64 percent of Turkish women do
so in daily life. There is almost no middle ground between the
two poles: Even completely apolitical Turks have gravitated one
way or another.
Headscarf
opponents see themselves as following in the footsteps of founding
father Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who launched an ambitious program,
beginning in the 1920s, to remake the heartland of the longest-lasting
Islamic empire into a modern, Westernized nation-state. In the
Kemalist camp are the majority of the officers in Turkey’s powerful
army, as well as high court judges, opposition party leaders
in Parliament, secular women’s organizations, business associations,
many university presidents and professors, and the bulk of the
mainstream media. They will stop at little to prevent what they
perceive as the downfall of secular Turkey.
Proponents
of lifting the ban also claim the mantle of history. In July
2007 elections, the Justice and Development Party (or AKP), made
up of politicians with roots in a series of outlawed Islamist
parties, retained its healthy parliamentary majority in one of
the most decisive victories in the history of the Turkish multi-party
system. The landslide came despite the disappointment felt by
the AKP’s core constituency, the devout middle class, in the
party’s failure to lift the headscarf ban at universities during
its first term in office. To the surprise and perhaps the dismay
of the secular opposition, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan
carefully avoided the headscarf issue from 2002-2007, so as not
to be seen as defying the will of the outspoken generals. Now
that the Turkish public has endorsed its rule, and implicitly
rebuked the army, the AKP feels justified in pleasing its electoral
base.
The proscription
of the headscarf is not black-letter law, but rather the Constitutional
Court’s interpretation of the provisions for secularism and equality
in the Turkish constitution. To lift the ban, Turkish politicians
have tried multiple times to pass more specific laws or to amend
the constitution, as the AKP succeeded in doing on February 9.
Opponents of the headscarf have long relied on the courts to
block such efforts. This time around, both sides have waged such
“lawfare” with unprecedented vigor, bombarding not just the Constitutional
Court, but also a host of lower courts, with claims and counter-claims.
The chief prosecutor of Turkey, a staunch Kemalist, drastically
upped the ante by asking the Constitutional Court to consider
the extreme measures of closing down the AKP and banning Prime
Minister Erdoğan and his top 69 colleagues, including President
Abdullah Gül, from politics. On March 31, the judges agreed to
hear the case, raising the prospect of a second “postmodern”
coup in Turkey. Unlike the first of these in 1997, this coup
would take place without the army’s direct involvement and would
depose a party that, not even one year ago, was reelected by
a significant margin.
Constitutional
Deadlock
The lawfare
over the headscarf commenced promptly after the July 2007 elections,
when the AKP set about trying to fulfill its campaign promise
to prepare a “civilian constitution.” Such a document was long
overdue: The constitution promulgated by the military after toppling
a democratically elected government in 1982 contains so many
limitations on human rights that it is a major stumbling block
to the initiation of membership talks with the European Union.
EU membership, until recently, was the ultimate prize for Turkey’s
political class, and was once seen as the logical end of the
Kemalist project. Since taking control of Parliament in 2002,
ironically, the AKP has made greater strides toward meeting the
EU’s “Copenhagen criteria” for accession talks than any of its
secular predecessors.
As soon as
the AKP’s chosen constitutional law scholars submitted a draft
of a “civilian constitution,” furious criticism erupted. Critics
objected not only to the provision for a free dress code applicable
to university students, but also to new formulations of the concepts
of secularism, freedom of religion and religious education. Paradoxically,
the working document was moderately liberal in content, following
closely the principles of the European Convention on Human Rights,
to which Turkey has been a party since 1954.
The Kemalist
opposition, such as the Republican People’s Party (CHP), played
on the fears of many Turks that the government’s real goal is
to eliminate, or at least enervate, the strict secularism established
by Atatürk. In the words of columnist Mustafa Akyol, “The suspicion
ranges from extravagant conspiracy theories about the ‘hidden
Taliban-like face of the AKP’ or ‘the gradual Islamization of
our daily lives’ to more reasonable concerns about the rise of
moral conservatism in public life.”[1] The AKP, for its part, tried to convince the opposition, and,
more importantly, the military, that their true intention was
to make secularism stronger than before. There was no reason,
they said, to touch that “non-derogable” principle of the constitution.
In practice, state secularism has served to keep religious affairs
under official control, allowing Turkish governments since the
foundation of the state to promote a particular version of Sunni
Islam (the Hanafi legal school) at the expense of other religious
traditions. Why would the (Sunni) AKP weaken its prerogative
just for the sake of headscarves?
Surprisingly,
given the salience of other elements of the reform package, the
headscarf controversy brought the whole “civilian constitution”
undertaking to a standstill. Any draft constitution would have
required extensive discussion to gain the backing of the widest
possible array of social and political forces, but public debate
was preempted. Among the long anticipated reforms that were not
discussed and are now on indefinite hold are those concerning
comprehensive cultural rights for Kurdish citizens and a more
robust concept of freedom of speech. Important shortcomings of
the draft document, like its vagueness about legislative checks
on executive power, the role of the judiciary and academic freedom,
also got short shrift. Even more importantly, such items as the
“right to a live in a healthy, balanced environment” (Article
56 of the present charter) had disappeared from the draft revision
in deference to free-market economics. All of this went barely
noted thanks to secularists’ obsession with covered female heads.
Quick Fix
Key AKP constituents
-- in particular, students who want to wear the headscarf and
their families -- let the party hear their disgruntlement with
the deadlock. The startling result was that the AKP took up an
offer from the far-right Nationalist Action Party (MHP) to find
an ad hoc solution to “the headscarf problem.” It was an unlikely
alliance, to say the least. The MHP is implacably opposed to
Turkey’s European aspirations and routinely blasted the AKP’s
efforts from 2002-2007 to bring the country’s legal and political
system into line with the Copenhagen criteria. MHP activists
organized many an angry demonstration against the government’s
tentative overtures toward Kurdish rights and softening of the
traditional Turkish hard line on Cyprus, among other issues.
But together, the two parties command a super-majority in Parliament,
and amidst the clamor from the AKP faithful over the headscarf,
the right-wing nationalists’ olive branch was too tempting to
spurn. Rumor has it that this offer traded MHP backing for lifting
the headscarf ban for the government’s agreement to postpone
or even forego other important human rights reforms. It is perhaps
no accident, for instance, that the AKP’s promise to get rid
of the notorious Article 301 of the penal code, which allows
citizens to be prosecuted for “insulting Turkishness,” has vanished
from the party’s agenda.
On February
9, by an overwhelming margin, the AKP-MHP coalition passed amendments
to two constitutional articles, Article 10 concerning equality
and Article 42 concerning the right to education. The wording
in Article 42 is as follows: “Except as otherwise stated in the
laws of the Republic, no one can be prevented from pursuing the
right to university education. The limit to the ways in which
this right is pursued is specified by law.” It was a quick fix
that satisfied no one: For headscarf-wearing women, it was too
narrowly worded, while for secularists, it was too broad. Far
from being resolved, the battle was rejoined.
A few university
administrators heeded the decree implementing the amendment from
Yusuf Ziya Özcan, the AKP-appointed president of the Higher Education
Council, and allowed headscarf-wearing students on campus. Most
refused, however, expecting that a judge would soon strike the
amendment down, as has happened to numerous similar laws since
the 1980s. The Kemalist CHP, unwilling to acquiesce in the 411-103
vote for the amendment, took their case to the Constitutional
Court.
The chief
prosecutor’s 162-page complaint against the AKP reveals how far
interpretations of secularism and the principle of “rule of law”
can stray from accepted meanings in Turkey’s present political
climate. Among the actions and statements of Erdoğan and
Gül deemed contrary to the secular order, and so, criminal: employing
headscarved doctors in public hospitals, allowing a local administrator
to say, “May God have mercy on the souls of our colleagues who
have passed away,” promoting the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights, declaring that the headscarf ban is against international
human rights standards, respecting all religions equally and
advocating freedom of religion for all. Erdoğan was also
scored for complaining that his two daughters cannot attend universities
in Turkey.
Binding
Ambiguity
The headscarf
controversy dates back to 1980, following the Islamic Revolution
in Iran. Since that time, Turkish women, particularly the pious
among them, have been caught in the middle as Turkish governments
and judicial institutions have swung in favor of and against
the headscarf with the political winds.
On the dark
day of September 12, 1980, the Turkish army staged its third
coup, with the aim of smashing the campus left, limiting civil
rights and establishing a military-dominated constitutional order.
As elsewhere in the Cold War-era Middle East, the communist left
was then considered a much greater threat to the state than Islamist
students, especially women. Universities were thus quite relaxed
about the headscarf. In this period, indeed, İhsan Doğramacı,
first president of the Higher Education Council founded to purge
campuses of leftist ideology, added the word “turban” to Turks’
political vocabulary. Turban was a foreign word, used to designate
the trendy headgear on the catwalks of contemporary France. Doğramacı
called the Muslim headscarf a “turban” to indicate that it was
a voluntary means of covering a woman’s hair, a fashion statement,
and not a religious duty or a political symbol.[2]
In the second
half of the 1980s, with the headscarf increasingly in evidence
at universities, there was deepening uncertainty about its status.
It was not socially accepted, but neither was it legally banned.
There were several attempts to enshrine the right to wear the
headscarf in law. In 1989, however, the notoriously Kemalist
Constitutional Court annulled the decade’s last such legal provision.
The judges argued in their decision that secularism has a unique
history in Turkey and that a secular state cannot introduce legal
measures that take religious convictions into account.[3] The reasoning was more political
than legal. The Court also wrote of the need to protect students
who do not wear the headscarf from social pressure. In 1990,
still another law was passed stating that “dress is not subject
to any prohibition in higher education, provided that it is not
forbidden by law.” Again an appeal was made to the Constitutional
Court. This time, instead of ruling the law unconstitutional,
the Court simply refused to take the case, opining that freedom
of dress did not include wearing a headscarf. This sort of “interpretative
refusal” has not normally been recognized in the Turkish constitutional
system.
In the 1990s,
more and more young women were showing up for classes wearing
the headscarf. It was an index of the growing clout of religion-friendly
parties, and it made the Kemalist establishment nervous. In February
1997, the military carried out its “post-modern” or “e-coup”
against the Islamist Welfare Party, warning in a communiqué that
Deputy Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan’s statements were threatening
to secularism. The communiqué makes clear the headscarf connection:
“Clothing practices that have emerged against the law and will
direct Turkey to an outdated appearance must be prevented.” Erbakan’s
cabinet stepped down.
Amidst the
hostility toward Islamism, in 1998 the Constitutional Court abolished
the Welfare Party entirely. In this ruling, the unconstitutionality
of the “turban” was affirmed, though there was no specific law
against it, and Welfare’s support of the freedom to wear it was
adduced as a reason to outlaw the party.[4] Days
after publication of the Court’s decision, a retired general
staff colonel gave a briefing to judges and presidents of universities,
suggesting that the headscarf should be formally banned. Soon,
the committee of university presidents issued a declaration titled,
“The Relevant Legislation on Clothing in Higher Education Institutions
and Legal Appraisals,” which applied a ban on headscarves across
the board. Protesting the lack of an actual law, students applied
to administrative courts for relief, and met with some success.
The judges who concluded that the headscarf ban is against the
law were disciplined, however, and stripped of their pending
cases. At the end, these judges became “convinced” that the headscarf
ban was correct after all.[5]
During the
last decade, while the number of headscarf-wearing university
students continued to increase, the ambiguity of the law literally
left the question of whether to admit these women to campus to
the individual discretion of university administrators. Some
were less tolerant than others, leading to what might be dubbed
“wearfare.” “Persuasion rooms,” wherein students were enjoined
to shed their headscarves if they wanted to attend class, appeared
at the gates of several institutions. Some women agreed, while
others creatively replaced or disguised their headscarves with
wigs or hats.
Meanwhile,
the sides in the legal struggle dug in. For the Kemalists, the
ban rests on the solid ground of the decisions of the Constitutional
Court. According to them, the headscarf is not a matter of personal
freedoms, but rather one of disallowing symbols of political
Islam. The headscarf advocates claim that the freedom to wear
it is connected to freedom of religion. Since that principle
is protected in the Turkish constitution, the 1989 decision of
the Constitutional Court cannot contravene it. Moreover, they
challenge that decision, which went unenforced until 1998, as
the illegitimate issue of an extralegal military intervention
in Turkish affairs. Others argue that there is no legal ground
for such a ban, given that many practicing Muslim women consider
wearing the headscarf to be a religious necessity.
In 1999, the
Turkish judicial system again resorted to highly dubious reasoning
to settle a headscarf confrontation in the Turkish parliament.
Newly elected Merve Kavakçı, of the Virtue Party that had
arisen from the ashes of Welfare, petitioned to assume her seat
with her head covered. Her fellow parliamentarians accused her
of a political attack on secularism and Turkish democracy. The
Constitutional Court dissolved the Virtue Party, on the grounds
of anti-secular activities, among them tolerance of the headscarf,
and Kavakçı lost her Turkish citizenship. Subsequently,
public institutions were much more strictly policed for the headscarf,
as more than 100,000 students, over 1,000 civil servants and
more than 300 primary and secondary school teachers were forced
to leave their positions. The minister of education declared:
“[Wearing the headscarf] is a crime, and the punishment is dismissal
from the civil service. Everybody must comply with this rule.
If they don’t, they have no place among us.”[6] Thousands
of university students again filed suit against the ban. Some
of the applications were settled in favor of the students in
lower courts, only to be turned down on appeal.
European
Validation
Concurrently,
the headscarf dispute was playing out in Europe. In the 1990s,
the European Human Rights Commission (now the European Court
of Human Rights) agreed to be tribunal of last resort for the
member countries’ domestic courts. (In 1987, when Turkey formally
applied for EU membership, it accepted the principle that Turkish
citizens could file complaints against the state in Europe; two
years later, Turkey recognized the jurisdiction of the European
Court of Human Rights.) As early as 1993, when a Turkish university
refused to award diplomas to headscarf-wearing female students,
the Commission declined to hear the students’ appeal, on the
Turkish Constitutional Court’s own grounds that the secular state
has the right to restrict religious practices consistent with
citizens’ rights to equal treatment and religious freedom.[7] The Turkish educational establishment happily
cited this decision as European validation of the ban.
The 1993 decision,
questionable as it was in human rights terms, was consistent
with a later ruling on the abolition of the Welfare Party. Turkey
is the world champion of political party banning -- no fewer
than 24, communist, socialist, Kurdish and Islamist, have been
shuttered since 1963. One by one, the parties sued in the European
Court of Human Rights. In every case, except that of Welfare,
the court ruled that Turkey had to pay compensation to the party,
emphasizing the importance of protecting political rights, freedom
of association and freedom of expression. Upon the negative judgment
for Welfare, the Virtue Party withdrew its own case. As a result
of this decision, a swath of Turkish public opinion is convinced
that that the European Court of Human Rights is biased against
Islamic values, and that it has acted politically, not legally.
When the Commission
became the Court, headscarf ban victims again sought relief (including
the wife of current President Abdullah Gül, though she withdrew
her petition when her husband became foreign minister in 2002).
In its first, and most recent, decision, the Court ruled in 2005
that medical school student Leyla Şahin’s education could
indeed be obstructed in Turkish universities because she wears
the headscarf. The decision came as a surprise to many liberal
legal scholars and human rights organizations in Turkey, Europe
and the United States. The Court’s basic argument was that the
headscarf ban is not necessarily against freedom of religion
and could be justified on grounds of “protecting the rights and
freedoms of others and maintaining public order.” Legally speaking,
the decision conflicts with the Court’s mandate to redress individual
injustices as laid out in the European Convention on Human Rights.
The decision suggests a double standard, particularly since the
Court raised the specter of Islamic extremism, when there was
absolutely no evidence that Leyla
Şahin was part of any political movement, and since the Court
accepted the claim that she wears the headscarf because of religious
belief. The Court even disclosed a value judgment about Turkish
democracy, that it is “fragile.”
Secular Turks
of the old Kemalist persuasion hailed the
Şahin decision, and again called for curtailment of discussion
of the headscarf ban, there being no higher legal authority than
the European Court of Human Rights. In 2008, when the AKP signaled
its desire to overturn the ban through legislation, Kemalists drew
upon the European Court’s prestige to make a baroque legal argument:
“The headscarf ban rests on the decision of supreme courts, and
as a judicial decision, it can only be changed through another
judicial decision. The decisions cannot be altered by a new legal
provision by the AKP government.”
Covered by
the Headscarf
By the time
the AKP acceded to power in 2002, the very terminology of the
headscarf debate had become inverted. No longer harmless, the
word “turban” became a buzzword signifying the threat of political
Islam, and secularists deployed it to cast aspersions. As in
France, where opponents of headscarves in schools use the Arabic
word hijab rather than the French foulard, secularists
use “turban” to emphasize the foreignness and radical “otherness”
of the practice. The preference of the practice’s defenders for
the Turkish word başörtüsü is also ideological.
The AKP’s
second electoral sweep in 2007 raised the stakes of the debate
considerably. Under Turkish law, the majority party in Parliament
has the right to nominate the president of the republic, and
the AKP put forward the name of former Foreign Minister Gül.
Secular Turks bluntly proclaimed that while they can accept the
headscarves of their pious grandmothers, or those of maids from
rural Anatolia, the prospect of a first lady wearing a headscarf
was too much to bear. Here, urban secular elites, or “white Turks”
as they are sometimes known, hinted that they fear losing power
to the emerging Anatolian elite and middle class as much as they
fear Islamization. For the first time in modern Turkish history,
devout, socially conservative Turks are staking a claim to be
equal participants in politics, the economy and society.
As the controversy
grew more bitter, secular media outlets run by the Doğan
family began publishing the illustrated life stories of the headscarf-wearing
wives of AKP ministers and high-level civil servants. Such, the
coverage implied, would be the permanent fate of Turkish women
if the headscarf ban were not maintained. And not only that:
Turkey would become an Islamic state. The conspiracy theories
about Islamization, oddly enough, are fueled by strong anti-American
sentiment. In such theories, the AKP government plays the role
of the “moderate Islam” needed to cloak the imperial ambitions
of such projects as the Bush administration’s failed Greater
Middle East Initiative. Columnists regularly found American “religion-friendly”
secularism wanting in comparison with the state secularism of
France and, of course, Atatürk.
More legitimate
concerns focused on the rights of gender equality achieved under
Atatürk and subsequently. Yet the headscarf is skillfully used
to cover up the real social and economic problems of Turkish
women. In a recent international study on the status of women
in countries around the world, Turkey ranked an embarrassing
105 out of 115.[8] To improve that figure, it is imperative that
rural women have better access to education and that all women
have better access to the workplace. But neither the secular
media nor many feminist organizations are as interested in these
problems as they are in the “neighborhood pressure” that secular
women may feel from the headscarved majority if the ban is lifted
on campus.
The frenzy
over pieces of fabric has also distracted the secular media from
the ongoing Turkish raids upon Kurdish guerrillas in northern
Iraq, renewed tensions in majority-Kurdish southeastern Turkey
and the capture of an ultra-nationalist gang deemed responsible
for several assassinations, including that of Armenian-Turkish
journalist Hrant Dink in 2007. The gang, which calls itself Ergenekon,
is run by retired army generals and prominent lawyers and is
alleged to have plotted the extra-judicial murders of Kurdish
dissidents at the height of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party insurgency
in the early 1990s. The capture of Ergenekon was the most important
proof in years of the existence of a “deep state,” a nexus of
elites and far-right nationalists willing to kill to preserve
its dated and purblind vision of what Turkey should be.
Forgotten
Women
Most of all,
the political struggle over the headscarf has overshadowed the
fact that two generations of Turkish women have been stymied
in their educational and professional pursuits -- simply because
they choose to cover their heads. From university administrations
and government offices, these young women have heard the same
message about their life prospects: Go back home and bear children.
The first women to be expelled from universities are now grandmothers.
Headscarved women are barred from holding public office. Headscarved
lawyers are not allowed to represent their clients in court,
and have difficulty entering court buildings. Defendants have
been asked to remove their headscarves before they testify.[9] Women
wearing the headscarf were even prosecuted for participating
in a workshop on strengthening the penal code’s provisions against
discrimination, because it was held in ministerial offices.[10]
The headscarf
ban, lacking a legal rationale, is based in Kemalist conceptions
of “public space,” but of course it bleeds into the private sector
as well. Women wearing the headscarf face discrimination on the
job market, both in finding employment and in wages. A few brave
“independent intellectuals” with means, after encountering the
hostility of secular feminists, have established their own organizations
to study and publicize the problems of headscarved women and
advocate for their constitutional rights. But this civil society
movement willing remains weak in the face of a judicial establishment
long known as dogmatically secular. On a few occasions, judges
have been fired, demoted or exiled to far-off districts for deciding
in favor of headscarf rights, or even prosecuted themselves because
their wives were wearing the headscarf.[11] These incidents raise serious questions about
the independence of the Turkish justice system.
Because the
headscarf ban is applied inconsistently, it is hard to document,
or even estimate, the numbers of women who have been discriminated
against. There are no reliable statistics on how many girls have
been expelled from universities, because university administrations
do not necessarily record the real rationale for expulsion. Indeed,
90 percent of female students who were not permitted to attend
classes after the ban were kicked out under the guise of absenteeism.[12] But one scholar believes that 270,000 of the 677,000 students
ejected from higher education institutions since June 2000 are
victims of the ban.[13] There are reports that the
number of fired female teachers is approximately 5,000.[14] Bearing
in mind that the informal ban goes back to the 1980s, it seems
reasonable to conclude that the number of women who have been
deprived of their rights to work and get an education reaches
into the hundreds of thousands. The extent of the economic, social
and, more importantly, emotional impact of the ban on women and
their families, generation after generation, will likely remain
unknown.
As the political
crisis over the headscarf continues to unfold, it is disturbing
that the AKP seems to be searching quietly for ways to neuter
their Kemalist opponents, as their precursor parties did before
being closed down one after another. The right-wing nationalist
MHP seems to play a key role in such parliamentary mathematics,
and the AKP may conclude it has no choice but to accept what
the MHP offers to survive. A reprise of the “Turco-Islamic synthesis,”
the right-wing and particularistic ideology behind the 1980 coup,
is one nightmarish scenario. There is a much better way: for
liberals to overcome their prejudices, resist the pull of Kemalist
fearmongering and stand up for the rights of everyone, even those
not like them, in a genuinely free and liberal Turkey. For the
obduracy of the Kemalist establishment over the headscarf has
not only undermined the prospects for a “civilian constitution,”
but has also come to threaten the future of the democratically
elected AKP government, and indeed, the future of Turkish democracy.
Endnotes
[1] Mustafa
Akyol, “Islamization of Turkey: Not What You Would Think,” Turkish
Daily News, March 15, 2008.
[2] On
July 22, 1981, however, the military enacted a law on the attire
of students at elementary and high schools mandating that female
students’ heads be uncovered. A subsequent regulation dated July
16, 1982 specified that female civil servants’ heads must be
bare, in keeping with several other restrictions on the personal
appearance of women and men alike, from hairstyles to the length
of nails and skirts, from mustaches to the model of shoes. These
regulations are still in force, but are not generally observed.
Mustafa Şentop, “The Headscarf Ban: A Quest for Solutions,” SETA
Foundation Policy Brief 8 (March 2008).
[3] E.1989/I,
K.1989/12, T.7.3.1989, JCC 1991 at p. 25.
[4] E.1997/I,
K.1998/I, T.1.16.1998, JCC 1999 at p. 31.
[5] Şentop,
p. 3.
[6] Turkish
Daily News, February 11, 2000.
[7] European
Human Rights Commission, Admissibility Decision on Application
18783/91, Lamia Karabulut and Şenay Karaduman v. Turkish
Government, May 3, 1993. According to the decision of the
Commission: “A student who chooses to attend a secular university
should accept the regulations of the university. These regulations
provide a system to allow for students of different beliefs to
coexist. Particularly in countries where the vast majority of
the population belongs to a particular religion, exhibition of
the rituals and symbols of this religion without regard to any
restrictions of place and form can cause a pressure on students
who do not practice this religion or, instead, belong to other
religions.” The Commission’s logic is strange, to say the least,
considering that pursuant to Article 42 of the Turkish constitution
there are no religious universities for students to choose in
Turkey. As for social pressure from the “exhibition of the rituals
and symbols” of religion, in Turkey, the opposite has long been
the case.
[8] World
Economic Forum, The Global Gender Gap 2006, cited in European
Stability Initiative, Sex and Power in Turkey: Feminism, Islam
and the Maturing of Turkish Democracy (Berlin/Istanbul, June
2, 2007), p. 1.
[9] Yeni Şafak,
November 7, 2003.
[10] N.112-2003-466/10994.
[11] Ministry
of Justice circulars 152, T.3.10.2000, 149. For cases where judges
lost their jobs for granting visas to headscarf-wearing women,
see Vakit, October 20, 1999.
[12] Ali
Bulaç, “AIHM ve Başörtüsü,” Umran Dergisi 129 (May
2005), p. 33.
[13] Fatma
Benli, “Assessment of Women’s Condition in Turkey,” prepared
for the Organization for Women’s Rights of Non-Discrimination
(AKDER), Istanbul, 2007.
[14] Zaman,
October 1, 2004.

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