(This is yet another installment in what is now my ongoing rant.)
Earlier this week TRT fell to the fundamentalists, and it looks like YOK is headed in the same direction. (In case you don’t know, Zaman is a conservative newspaper and Ahmet Necdet Sezer was one of the last advocates of democratic secularism left in government with any power.) Earlier this evening I saw on television the results of a comprehensive national poll that shows a large majority of people here probably think this is a very good thing. Some of the poll’s highlights include:
- 70% of all women in Turkey now wear a headscarf (or turban).
- A majority of people feel the ban on headscarfs on public employees and in universities should be lifted.
- A majority of people feel that resaurants should not be allowed to be open during the day in Ramazan.
- A majority of people feel that places that serve alcohol should not be allowed to be open at all during Ramazan.
- A majority of people feel that men and women should not be allowed to pray together at funerals.
I am now watching a talk show (not on TRT) with a panel of women who are discussing the headscarf issue. The panel consists of four seemingly liberal women: a totty 20-something model, a somewhat older journalist, a 50-ish former sex-symbol movie star, and the grandma of the bunch–a novelist/feminist. The totty thinks that it would be really sweet if the ban on the headscarf were lifted. The resident elder objects to this on the basis that it would mark the beginning of inescapable social pressure to conform and conserve. I agree with her.
The journalist points out that thirty years ago women had no problem walking around Erzincan and Erzurum (in eastern Turkey) wearing miniskirts, but today in many places in Istanbul a women can expect to get crap for just showing a bit of leg. I can second this with my own observation that there has been a significant shift in the way this country “feels” since I first started getting intimate with it ten years ago. Back then it was becoming liberal, albeit in a very goofy way, and it was fascinating to watch. Today it is becoming something else.
Toward the end of the discussion, the totty tried to defend her “lift the ban” position with something about cultural relativism and how she had gone to Egypt and covered herself up there to feel comfortable and didn’t feel at all weird about it. The resident elder then pointed out that that’s what’s in store for Turkey if the turbanists have their way, and upon her saying that, the hugely massive token that had been hovering over the totty’s head finally dropped and forced her into deep silence, along with everyone else.
It took a long time for the totty to get it. She’s one of the 30% of women here who don’t cover up. “Turbanists” are waging a cultural war in which the headscarf issue is a symbolic battle, and that forces the ever-decreasing advocates of liberalism to treat it as the same. World War II showed us that appeasements don’t work. Attention.
