Repeat: Meaning Is In Our Heads, Not On Our Heads
This old shoe leather scrap of an idea keeps coming up again and again: The problem of banning headscarves from campus can be solved if the students simply tied their scarves differently! Here’s my response to this when the idea was debated two years ago. As I wrote in an Op-Ed for Zaman: Meaning is in our heads, not on our heads. (click here)
It’s back! This time via the highly respected scholar Sencer Ayata who headed up a CHP committee to look into how the headscarf ban problem can be solved. Tie the scarf differently!
In all fairness to Professor Ayata — I know him as a very smart liberal — I suspect this is a result of a decision by committee that takes into account the Realpolitik of present-day Turkey, that a removal of the ban will not be countenanced by the courts or the military (witness the reactions when this has been tried over the past two years — in 2008, the Constitutional Court almost brought down the government). So what to do? Tie the scarf differently to reveal some hair, as long as it’s kosher (the committee intends to get an Islamic OK). In effect, that might open up the university to some women willing to make this compromise. After all, some pious women have been wearing string caps, wigs, and other head paraphernalia in creative attempts to get around the ban, although that too ended up being banned in some colleges. So perhaps it IS the only possible practical solution right now. I suppose I shouldn’t scoff if I can’t come up with a better (practicable) solution. Women have a right to an education.
(The excerpt below is from a Today’s Zaman column by Ihsan Dagi. Click here, in English)
Last week Professor Ayata proposed a middle-way solution: cover only some part of hair and keep the rest open as is exemplified by the traditional way of wearing the headscarf in Anatolia in order not to offend the secularists…
When headscarves became a problem in universities during the 1980s, the argument of Islamic scholars and intellectuals was that wearing a headscarf was an “Islamic obligation” for Muslim women. That is to say that they defend the headscarf through an Islamic language of “obligation.” They engaged in debates with the secularists to prove that wearing the headscarf is part of Muslim women’s religious duties. But in the late 1990s, Islamic groups changed their language, logic and basis for defending the headscarf, which was portrayed by secularists as a symbol of jihad against the Kemalist regime.
Islamic groups brought in the idea of human rights to justify the headscarf, talking about the freedom of choice, the right to an education, equality before law, freedom of expression and conscience. They frequently referred to international human rights conventions and applied to the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) on the grounds that their fundamental rights had been breached by state policy in Turkey…
While all these changes are taking place on the Islamic front, the Kemalists, politically represented by the CHP, continue to view the headscarf issue as a means to oppress, exclude and marginalize conservatives. But this authoritarian attitude has led to the marginalization of the Kemalists themselves who now appear as a movement that opposes the values of political modernity…
I think the Kemalists have no idea how to deal with the post-Islamist turn in Turkey.
Hah, if one could expect something that made sense from a CHP sponsored thing on this, perhaps more people like me would have considered truly siding with them for the first time in their lives. Instead, of course, we get inanities from them.
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The only thing against freedom of attire that makes sense to me is the fear that the faculty in some universities would pressure all women to cover up. The fix for that cannot be banning headscarves but taking a long hard look at how we are staffing universities and what protections we have for students. The same people will bully their students on other stuff too — not just the headscarf. In fact I am sure they do, applying that kind of pressure is probably part of the culture here and academic degrees or positions, by themselves, will not get rid of that. So that problem will need to be dealt with anyway. (If this kind of freedom is desired, that is. I myself would be happy to wear a headscarf (as a male!) to school if the school was otherwise good, BTW. I don’t think anyone would miss seeing my shiny head. I do after all wear a tie when the payoff is high enough. Or rent a tuxedo when people make me. So I don’t quite understand this fuss about clothing. I also know how our civil servants can misuse their authority and how helpless an ordinary citizen is when they do it because I’ve been subject to it both from Islamists and leftists. That kind of thing goes beyond dress code and is possibly orthogal. As would be the general mistreatment of women. The headscarf thing works wonders to obscure far far more important issues that people on both sides of the polarization are more or less equally guilty of perpetrating.)
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How is this Sencer Ayata hoping to remain ‘highly respected’ (as you say) if he says stuff like this? Is it possible that he’s being misquoted or quoted out of relevant context?
Allright, here are the constraints Ayata is operating under:
http://haber.gazetevatan.com/haberdetay.asp?detay=kilicdaroglundan-turban-talimati&tarih=24.08.2010&Newsid=324682&Categoryid=9
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This seems critical:
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“Uzlaşmaya dayalı, hiçbir kesimi rahatsız etmeden, hiçbir kesimin de zafere ulaştıgını düşündürtmeden uzlaşma mümkün mu bunun yanıtını arıyoruz”
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Given that as a constraint, perhaps what he’s suggesting makes sense.
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Now that I am reposting, I’ll also point out that I find this bogus:
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The headscarf issue is a useful yardstick to measure one’s democratic credentials. An attitude that dares to interfere in people’s choice of clothing would drag us all the way down into authoritarianism.
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This only make sense if any clothing or lack thereof was un-interfered with and that liberty was protected. If you assert this as a principle, it wouldn’t be democratic but libertarian, IMHO. Clothing is interfered with all the time, otherwise. I dare Dagi to walk out butt-naked and then write in Today’s Zaman about what kind of authoritarian society we’re living in. The headscarf issue is getting stress because a sizeable number of people are getting hurt not because people have problems with dressing norms in general.
Have you changed the text, Jenny? It is fine if you did, but then the commenters look foolish commenting on the original. I’m perfectly able to make a fool of myself, but I’d like to know if it was just me being a klutz or if someone pulled the rug from under me?
I haven’t changed the text, Bulent. I’d have put the change in blue.
Heheh, than it is my foolishness, indeed. Thanks for the response, Jenny. I violently agree with you about Ayata, then. As for my literacy — I dunno.
Why does BM get all the compliments all the time?