I may be part of the mildly apathetic global Gen X brigade, but like many an urban Turk, I was raised on a solid diet of modernist mantras. The secular zeal of Turkey”s nation-builders runs in my blood. As an air force pilot, my grandfather fought alongside Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, modern Turkey”s founder, in the country”s war for independence. After it was won in 1923, his job was to help build Turkey”s first fleet of biplanes. My grandmother was what”s called an “Ataturk girl” — like many others, she was put on a train to Germany, on her own at age 13, and told to study because the nascent republic needed educated women. Needless to say, they did not wear head scarves. Indeed, the fervor with which they spurned them explains a lot about the conflict now, as the government seeks to lift a ban on wearing them at universities.
To that generation of reformers, the West was the shiny future, progress the ultimate good. English and French were spoken round the dinner table, and the women gathered to knit the latest Paris fashions. These children of a revolution dreamed of a westernized Turkey, and naively believed a little social engineering would get them there. Modernity was their religion.
My last relative of that generation, a great-aunt, died recently in Ankara. In her lifetime, the capital”s population went from 75,000 to 4 million, swelled by inflows of rural migrants looking for a better life. In time, a pious and conservative urban middle class emerged, and with it a different vision of Turkey”s future. Ataturk”s palace is now occupied by a former Islamist, whose wife wears a head scarf.
Predictably, my great-aunt didn”t cope well with the changes. To her, Ataturk”s most profound legacy was to get women out of their veils and their homes. She was unable to understand why anyone would choose to wear a head scarf. For her, being modern and wearing a head scarf were incompatible; my live-and-let-live attitude infuriated her.
To most Americans and Europeans, the head-scarf issue is a no-brainer. In a functioning democracy, an 18-year-old has the right to attend university dressed however she chooses. That much is indisputable. By lifting the ban, Turkey will have righted a wrong that has been a thorn in its side for far too long.
But the current clash over the ban isn”t just about democracy. It is also a reflection of class struggle between the old élite (the “White Turks”) and a new ruling class. At an upscale shopping mall in Istanbul last week, I overheard a group of teenage girls with big hair and designer jeans proclaim loudly as two head-scarved young women approached: “Why do they have to come here? Can”t they go somewhere else?” That”s the ugly face of secularist snobbery. Some university professors have even declared they won”t teach head-scarved students, while Deniz Baykal, leader of the opposition Republican People”s Party, speaks of the head scarf in militaristic terms as a “uniform imposed by outside forces.”
But in rejecting that intolerance, let”s not kid ourselves that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is a champion of women”s rights. I have attended meetings where his Justice and Development Party (AKP) deputies chose not to shake my hand simply because I”m a woman. I know that hardly any of the AKP deputies have wives who work; when one of them sought to file charges against her husband for allegedly beating her, she was quickly dissuaded. I have watched Erdogan”s daughter (who studied in the U.S. because of the ban) come home, get married and disappear. There was not a single female MP on the commission that drafted the current constitutional amendment … about women!
Erdogan seized on the chance to lift this ban with an enthusiasm that he hasn”t shown for any of the many other democratic reforms Turkey needs. The government has shelved plans to lift Article 301, which makes it a crime to denigrate “Turkishness,” under which writers and intellectuals like Nobel prizewinner Orhan Pamuk have been tried. Erdogan has made little progress in addressing the grievances of Turkey”s Kurdish minority. If he is really out to prove his democratic mettle, these are the kinds of issues he needs to address.
Turkey is facing a reality check. Both the secularist hardliners and the overzealous AKP must face the fact that democracy is messy. Turkey must learn to trust in its institutions and civil society, and be tolerant of difference. My grandparents” generation mustered great courage to make Turkey into a modern country. Now my generation, both secular and veiled, has to gather that same dedication to the pressing task of making it democratic, too.
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Time Magazine