The Secular and the Sacred

Last Saturday, the Turkish Parliament voted to overturn a long-standing ban on Islamic headscarves in universities—a ban that has long protected the secularism of the classroom from the growing influence of religious conservatives. Tens of thousands protested the repeal, arguing that a repeal on the ban is the first step to increasing Islam’s influence on society and a serious threat to a non-religious public life. While the ban may seem anathema to Western liberal countries that prioritize freedom of religious exercise, the unique political and demographic characteristics of Turkey have made the ban quite appropriate, especially as the headscarf has become a political symbol of religious conservatism. The issue here is not simply the rights of individual women to don the headscarf in the classroom, but what impact the repeal will have on women’s rights and secularism in the broader context of Turkey’s political climate.

Despite the seemingly heavy-handed nature of Kemalist secularism, it is borne of a real danger posed by religious conservatism to the freedom and autonomy of women in Turkey. Proponents of the repeal claim that the ban has cruelly forced women to choose between their faith and educational future. But such a claim presumes that women are in fact making an individual choice to wear their headscarf. While many certainly claim to, such choices neglect the backdrop of a strongly patriarchal and oppressive religious climate in which gender-biased practices constrain rather than enable a woman’s autonomy. By limiting women’s capacity for self-reflection and free action, this backdrop of religious conservatism has robbed too many women of the ability to meaningfully contemplate alternative lifestyles—without which individual consent is meaningless.

Genuine consent requires that women not be implicitly swayed by social norms: They must be free to accept or reject a given practice without harsh social repercussions. But in Turkey, a country with a population that is 99 percent Muslim, the immense societal pressure to be a devout and practicing Muslim goes beyond mere “peer pressure” to deeply influence the range of lifestyles women can conceive for themselves; moreover, once the practice wearing a headscarf becomes “normalized” by society, refusal to do so becomes a criterion for exclusion and harassment—something which women should never face, let alone in public institutions of higher learning.

Moreover, the unique political circumstances of Turkey complicate the extent to which such strong secular practices are needed. Despite its modern history, contemporary Turkey faces a growing Islamic threat—and any concession to the religious conservatives is as an injury to the nation’s secularism. And in that war between secularists and Islamists, the classroom ought to remain a sacrosanct environment that ought to be free of religious influence. Unlike in France and other Western countries, some of which have instituted similar bans, aversion to religious practices in schools in Turkey has been motivated not out of any xenophobic hatred of immigrants, but rather, out of a profoundly liberal desire to protect secularism, democracy, and the preservation of women’s rights and equality.

Certainly, any state should exercise the utmost restraint before curtailing the freedoms of its people in any way. But the state must also protect the rights of its individual members, especially those most disenfranchised by society. While a headscarf may be a harmless practice by itself, the broader context of Islam’s influence on Turkish society must be considered; and in that context, it represents an unfortunate constraint on female agency—one that the ban addressed in a limited but meaningful way. Its repeal, sadly, has marked an reversal of fortune not only for secularists, but for the women of Turkey.