ISTANBUL — High school hurt for Havva Yilmaz. She tried out several selves.
She ran away. Nothing felt right.
“There was no sincerity,” she said. “It was shallow.”
So at 16, she did something none of her friends had done: She put on an
Islamic head scarf.
In most Muslim countries, that would be a nonevent. In Turkey, it was a
rebellion. Turkey has built its modern identity on secularism. Women on
billboards do not wear scarves. The scarves are banned in schools and
universities. So Ms. Yilmaz dropped out of school. Her parents were angry. Her
classmates stopped calling her.
Like many young people at a time of religious revival across the Muslim
world, Ms. Yilmaz, now 21, is more observant than her parents. Her mother wears
a scarf, but cannot read the Koran in Arabic. They do not pray five times a
day. The habits were typical for their generation — Turks who moved from the
countryside during industrialization.
“Before I decided to cover, I knew who I was not,” Ms. Yilmaz said, sitting in
a leafy Ottoman-era courtyard. “After I covered, I finally knew who I was.”
While her decision was in some ways a recognizable act of youthful
rebellion, in Turkey her personal choices are part of a paradox at the heart of
the country’s modern identity.
Turkey is now run by a party of observant Muslims, but its reigning ideology
and law are strictly secular, dating from the authoritarian rule in the 1920s
of Mustafa
Kemal Ataturk, a former army general who pushed Turkey toward the
West and cut its roots with the Ottoman East. For some young people today,
freedom means the right to practice Islam, and self-expression means covering
their hair.
They are redrawing lines between freedom and devotion, modernization and
tradition, and blurring some prevailing distinctions between East and West.
Ms. Yilmaz’s embrace of her religious identity has thrust her into politics.
She campaigned to allow women to wear scarves on college campuses, a movement
that prompted emotional, often agonized, debates across Turkey about where
Islam fit into an open society. That question has paralyzed politics twice in
the past year and a half, and has drawn hundreds of thousands into the streets
to protest what they call a growing religiosity in society and in government.
By dropping out of the education system, she found her way into Turkey’s
growing, lively culture of young activists.
She attended a political philosophy reading group, studying Hegel, St.
Augustine and Machiavelli. She took sociology classes from a free learning
center. She met other activists, many of them students trying to redefine words
like “modern,” which has meant secular and Western-looking for decades. She
made new friends, like Hilal Kaplan, whose scarf sometimes had a map of the
world on it.
Their fight is not solely about Islam. Turkey is in ferment, and Ms. Yilmaz
and her young peers are demanding equal rights for all groups in Turkey. They
are far less bothered by the religious and ethnic differences that divide older
generations. “Turkey is not just secular people versus religious people,” Ms.
Kaplan said. “We were a very segregated society, but that segregation is
breaking up.”
In a slushy week in the middle of January, the head scarf became the focus
of a heated national outpouring, and Ms. Yilmaz one of its most eloquent
defenders.
The government of Prime Minister Recep
Tayyip Erdogan pledged to pass a law letting women who wear them
into college. Staunchly secular Turks opposed broader freedoms for Islam, in
part because they did not trust Mr. Erdogan, a popular politician who began his
career championing a greater role for Islam in politics and who has since
moderated his stance.
Turkey remains a democratic experiment unique in the Muslim world. The
Ottomans dabbled in democracy as early as 1876, creating a Constitution and a
Parliament. The country was never colonized by Western powers, as Arabs were.
It gradually developed into a vibrant democracy. The fact that young people like
Ms. Yilmaz are protesting at all is one of its distinguishing features.
In many ways, Ms. Yilmaz’s scarf freed her, but for many other women, it is
the opposite. In poor, religiously conservative areas in rural Turkey, girls
wear scarves from young ages, and many Turks feel strongly that without state
regulation, young women would come under more pressure to cover up.
The head scarf bill, in that respect, could lead to less freedom for women,
they argued. But for Ms. Yilmaz, the anger against the bill was hard to
understand.
So one day, armed with a microphone and a strong sense of justice, Ms.
Yilmaz marched into a hotel in central Istanbul and, with two friends, both in
scarves, made her best case.
“The pain that we’ve been through as university doors were harshly shut in
our faces taught us one thing,” she said, speaking to reporters. “Our real
problem is with the mentality of prohibition that thinks it has the right to
interfere with people’s lives.”
Ms. Yilmaz’s heartfelt speech, written with her friends, drew national
attention. They were invited on television talk shows. They gave radio and
newspaper interviews. Part of their appeal came from their attempt to go beyond
religion to include all groups in Turkish society, like ethnic and sectarian minorities.
After Ms. Yilmaz left high school, she joined a group called the Young
Civilians, a diverse band of young people who used dark humor and occasional
references to the philosopher Michel Foucault to criticize everything from the
state’s repression of Kurds, the biggest ethnic minority, to its day of “Youth
and Sport,” a series of Soviet-style rallies of students in stadiums every
spring.
Their symbol was a Converse sneaker. Their members were funny and
irreverent. One once joked that if you mentioned the name Marx, young women
without head scarves assumed you were talking about the British department
store Marks & Spencer, while ones in scarves understood the reference to
the philosopher.
In a tongue-in-cheek effort to change perceptions of Kurds, the group ran a
discussion program called “Let’s Get a Little Kurdish,” which featured sessions
on Kurdish music, history and — in a particularly rebellious twist — even
language.
By March, the month after Parliament passed the final version of the head
scarf proposal, the debate had reached a frenzied pitch. Ms. Yilmaz and some
friends — some in scarves, some not — agreed to go on a popular television talk
show. The audience’s questions were angry.
One young woman stood up and, looking directly at another in a scarf, said
that she did not want her on campus, said Neslihan Akbulut, a friend of Ms.
Yilmaz, who had helped to compose the head scarf statement. Another said she
felt sorry for them because they were oppressed by men. A third fretted that
allowing them into universities would lead to further demands about jobs,
resulting in an “invasion.”
Ms. Yilmaz said later: “I thought, are we living in the same country? No,
it’s impossible.”
They did not give up. They spent the day in a drafty cafe in central Istanbul,
wearing boots and coats and going over their position with journalists, one by
one.
“If women are ever forced to wear head scarves, we should be equally
sensitive and stand against it,” Ms. Akbulut said.
One of the journalists said, “You don’t support gays.”
Ms. Kaplan countered: “Islam tells us to fight this urge,” but she said that
did not affect a homosexual’s rights as a citizen. “I am against police
oppression of homosexuals. I am against a worldview that diminishes us to our
scarves and homosexuals to the bedroom.”
Ms. Yilmaz agreed. “When you wear a scarf,” she said, “you are expected to
act and think in a certain way, and support a certain political party. You’re
stripped of your personality.”
The young women say that the scarf, contrary to popular belief, was not
forced on them by their families. Some women wear it because their mothers did.
For others, like Ms. Yilmaz, it was a carefully considered choice.
Though it is not among the five pillars of Islam — the duties required for
every Muslim, including daily prayer — Ms. Yilmaz sees it as a command in the
Koran.
“Physical contact is something special, something private,” she said,
describing the thinking behind her covering. “Constant contact takes away from the
specialness, the privacy of the thing you share.”
Still, in Turkey, traditional rules are often bent to accommodate modern
life. Handshaking, for example, is a widespread Turkish custom, and most women
follow it. Turkey is culturally very different from Arab societies, and for
that reason interprets Islam differently. Islam here is heavily influenced by
Sufism, an introspective strain that tends to be more flexible.
“You can’t reject an extended hand,” Ms. Kaplan said. “You don’t want to
break a person’s heart.”
Young activists like Ms. Yilmaz are driving change in Turkish society
against a backdrop of growing materialism and consumerism. Most young Turks
care little for politics and are instead occupied with the daily task of paying
the bills.
That is an easier task in Turkey than in a number of Middle Eastern
countries, because Turkey is relatively affluent. After three decades of
intense development, its economy is five times bigger than Egypt’s — a country
with roughly the same population.
The wealth has profoundly shaped young lives. In cities, young people no
longer have to live with their parents after marriage. They take mortgages.
They buy furniture on credit. They compete for jobs in new fields like
marketing, finance and public relations.
In past generations, women lived with their husband’s families, doubling
their work.
“When you don’t have time to do anything for yourself, you don’t have time
to question anything, even religion,” Ms. Kaplan said.
The economic changes that have swept Turkish society, bringing cellphones,
iPods and the Internet, are transforming the younger generation. Young people
are more connected to the Western world than ever before. A quick visit to a
bookstore or a movie theater offers proof.
Observant Turks are grappling with questions like: Where does praying fit in
a busy life of e-mail messages and 60-hour weeks? How do you hold on to Eastern
tradition in a rising tide of Western culture?
The head scarf debate ended abruptly in June, when Turkey’s Constitutional Court
ruled that the new law allowing women attending universities to wear scarves
was unconstitutional, because it violated the nation’s principles of
secularism.
Ms. Yilmaz got the news in a text message from her friend. In her bitter
disappointment, she realized how much hope she had held out. “How can I be a
part of a country that does not accept me?” she said.
Still, she has no regrets and is not giving up. “What we did was worth
something,” she said. “People heard our voices. One day the prohibition is
imposed on us. The next day, it could be someone else. If we work together, we
can fight it.”