Lifting of 90-year headscarf ban stirs up controversy
TURKEY
WOMEN MPs were allowed to wear the Islamic headscarf in Turkey’s parliament yesterday for the first time in the country’s 90-year history.
Secularist demonstrators gathered outside the building in Ankara as four members of the governing Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP) wore veils as they took their seats for its reopening ceremony.
The headscarf – a flashpoint issue in Turkey’s cultural war over the role of Islam in public life – has caused controversy, with the party of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Prime Minister, being accused of promoting Islamism by stealth.
‘‘We think the AKP is exploiting religion. We will never remain silent towards actions aimed at eliminating the principle of secular- ism,’’ Dilek Akagun Yilmaz, an MP for the opposition People’s Republican Party (CHP), said.
The MPs put on headscarves for the first day of the parliamentary term after Erdogan lifted a ban on the Islamic veil in public offices last month.
Despite the small group of protesters from the fringe Workers’ Party outside, the scene in the parliament itself was muted, with governing party politicians congratulating the women. The MPs Sevde Bayazit Kacar, Gulay Samanci, Gonul Bekin Sahkulubey and Nurcan Dalbudak had earlier announced that they would attend the assembly wearing headscarves.
Dalbudak told Turkey’s state news agency that their decision had been influenced by recently performing the Hajj pilgrimage. ‘‘We have decided to continue this after being influenced by the spirituality there, and with the help of social conditions that have become mature,’’ she said.
The last time a woman tried to wear a headscarf in parliament, in 1999, she was shouted out by angry secularists and berated by the prime minister, Bulent Ecevit.
Since then, Erdogan’s party has won three elections and a series of mass trials have broken the political power of the armed forces, which long saw themselves as the guardian of the secularist system crafted by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey.
Opposition to the headscarf has also dwindled, with many secularists now saying that they were overzealous in their opposition to it. ‘‘Most of the Turkish Left has not read and researched its culture and religion ... It has ostra- cised the beliefs of the people,’’ wrote Soner Yalcin in the antigovernment OdaTV news site.
‘‘You have to learn these things if you are to save Islam from the clutches of bigots. This is the only way to save our people from the quagmire of ignorance, not with bans and rude and harsh rhetoric.’’
While Erdogan has been widely praised for easing religious restrictions, many now fear the new conservative elite is going further by seeking to impose religious mores on society.
Speaking about education reform last year, Erdogan caused uproar when he said his Government wanted ‘‘to raise pious generations’’.
This year the Government brought in the country’s harshest ever restriction on the sale and advertising of alcohol.