Gender Issues

The increasingly public face of Islam in Turkey has gender implications. While the Islamists see themselves as an oppressed minority seeking equal rights to public goods such as access to higher education. Secular women, however, view the prospect of creeping Islamization as inevitably diminishing their rights. The current president, Abdullah Gul, an observant Muslim, was introduced to his wife when he was 30 and she was just 14. “If you ask her, did she choose freely to wear the head scarf? She’d say ‘yes.’ What does that mean?” asked a concerned secular woman who questioned how much power a teenage bride had to make such choices.

After the constitutional amendment passed in Parliament, female university students won the right to wear head scarves on campus in February 2008. There was a fear that they would then push for this right to be extended to those who have obtained college degrees and pursue professions in the public sector. But, in early June 2008, the Turkish High Court reversed Parliament’s decision and reinstated the ban on head scarves. Few expect this will end the broader struggle between the Islamist-elected government and the country’s secularists to define Turkey’s future.

European Union accession hopes have had the perverse effect of helping the Islamists on the grounds that legal discrimination is not permitted among member states. Yet the policy does not address the issue which secular women are concerned about, namely the second-class status of women under Shari’a law. Many feel a showdown is now inevitable.