Yeşim Arat

Religion, politics and gender equality in Turkey: implications of a democratic paradox?

Abstract This article examines the gendered implications of the intertwining of Islam and politics that took shape after the process of democratisation in Turkey had brought a political party with an Islamist background to power. This development revived the spectre of restrictive sex roles for women. The country is thus confronted with a democratic paradox: the expansion of religious freedoms accompanying potential and/or real threats to gender equality. The ban on the Islamic headscarf in universities has been the most visible terrain of public controversy on Islam. However, the paper argues that a more threatening development is the propagation of patriarchal religious values, sanctioning secondary roles for women through the public bureaucracy as well as through the educational system and civil society organisations.

Toward a democratic society: The women's movement in Turkey in the 1980s

Abstract This article explores how the womens movement in Turkey contributed to the process of democratization in the 1980s. The movement did not merely give more women the opportunity to participate in politics through grass roots organizations, but also helped create the political milieu conductive to the establishment of a political democracy. The movement extended the political space allotted to civil society. In the context of a statist polity, feminist women organized independent of and in opposition to the state. They generated power through civil society as they established feminist institutions. Their movement was a secular front against Islamic revivalism, one that mostly tolerated and even influenced the Islamists. consequently, by the end of the 1980 decade, political parties which worked to consolidate political democracy in Turkey had heard womens voices, even though their response was far from satisfactory.

Feminists, Islamists, and Political Change in Turkey

This paper examines how some feminist and Islamist women in Turkey helped bring about change in political values during the past decade. The traditional political culture upheld statist, corporatist (as opposed to liberal, individualist) norms. The state controlled religion in the name of secularism and limited democracy within the confines of formal equality. Both feminists and Islamists contested traditional political values by insisting on their own definition of their interests, as opposed to those that were state-enforced. The feminists questioned the justice of formal equality as they sought substantive equality; Islamist women challenged the secular concept of equality as they insisted on the justice of male-female complementarity. Both groups engaged in active politics and expanded the parameters of democratic participation as they sought substantive equality beyond formal equality. Yet the patriarchal heritage of Islam defined the limits of Islamist womens search for liberation within the confines of religion.

Contestation and collaboration: women’s struggles for empowerment in Turkey

Women’s struggles for empowerment in Turkey have been intimately linked to the state-initiated modernisation process. In their struggle to expand their opportunities, women have contested and collaborated with one another as well as the modernising state. Women’s strategies for ameliorating their predicament evolved in their conflictual relationships both with the state and among themselves. Confrontation alternated with cooperation. Women succeeded in changing laws and perceptions through this dynamic process of conflict and collaboration in a context of globalisation. During this process, they helped transform the relationship of the legendary ‘strong Turkish state’ to civil society, and pushed the state to cooperate with its constituents. In this chapter I shall trace the evolution of women’s struggles for empowerment with a focus on their relationship to the state. I shall first present an overview of the historical development of the women’s movement in Turkey since the Young Turk era, and then will highlight prominent issues, groups and organisations through which women mobilised in the 1980s. My focus will be on the emergence of an organised and oppositional feminist movement since the 1980s and will include the mobilisation of Islamist and Kurdish women’s groups in recent decades. The discussion will aim to examine how women’s demands coincided or conflicted with and ultimately precipitated the Turkish state’s claim to modernity. If modernity requires respect for human rights and democratisation, women have pressured the state to ensure that these values are upheld, and this chapter hopes to throw light on this process.

Group-Differentiated Rights and the Liberal Democratic State: Rethinking the Headscarf Controversy in Turkey

The development of liberalism with both the courage and the capacity to engage itself with a different world, one in which its principles are neither well understood nor widely held, in which indeed it is, in most places, a minority creed, alien and suspect, is not only possible, it is necessary. -Clifford Geertz. 2000. Available Light. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, p. 258. Over the past two decades, the debate over multiculturalism challenged the justice of neutral, “difference blind” rules in liberal democracies. Allegedly neutral institutions were shown to be implicitly biased toward the priorities, experiences, or interests of the dominant groups in the society. Criticism of difference-blind rules and claims for justice to minority groups defined the relationship between government and opposition in many contexts. Arguments for special rights to protect minorities, women, or ethnocultural groups gained legitimacy (Young 1990, Jones 1990, Phillips 1991, Taylor 1994, Kymlicka 1995, Kymlicka and Norman 2000).

Nation Building and Feminism in Early Republican Turkey

The nation building project in Turkey has precipitated improvements in women’s status and the expansion of women’s opportunities. Contemporary feminism, on the other hand, has focused on women’s agency in this process. Most post-1980s feminists developed their discourse, if not identity, in opposition to the Kemalist discourse on women’s rights. If Kemalists expanded women’s rights because, as founding fathers, they knew what women’s interests were, feminists claimed they wanted rights because they knew their interests better than men did. Women’s agency was at the heart of the controversy. Even today, as Turkey’s process of nation building undergoes important structural changes in its desire to become part of Europe, any women’s issue that is significant in shaping the contours of the nation state is still about women’s agency.

YAEL NAVARO-YASHIN, Faces of the State: Secularism and Public Life in Turkey (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002). Pp. 247.

By now it is a platitude to claim that social scientists have long underlined the important role of the state in Turkish political life. The “strong Turkish state,” the “centralizing Turkish state,” the “transcendental Turkish state,” the “bourgeois Turkish state” have all been problematized, elaborated, and questioned by students of social studies. However, Yael Navaro-Yashins work is the much needed and most welcome anthropological study of the state in Turkey. Faces of the State , unlike any other book on the subject, shows us what the state means in peoples lives and how people endorse and cultivate statism in their public life. The author focuses on the issue of secularism that has long defined the state in Turkey, and she interrogates in all its complexity how secularism is lived in private and championed in public in a context of increasing religious observance.