Lifting the Veil

The Republic of Turkey marks the centenary of its birth this year. In 1923, founding President Atatürk created a Western-style secular nation at the point of a gun. He gave women the vote even before France and Italy; believing that to be Western, you had to dress Western, he even banned the fez on the grounds that it is too oriental. Atatürk saw Islam as a superstition, and a burden on development.

Now another charismatic leader is exploiting headgear customs to reverse Atatürk’s secular legacy. President Erdogan’s laws encourage women to wear Islamic headscarves in universities, parliament, and the army. Erdogan’s Government has also built thousands of mosques as part of a campaign to create a more pious society. The problem is that in assailing the secular state, Erdogan has also undermined its legitimacy. Tens of thousands of people have been jailed on dubious grounds such as ‘insulting the president’, while journalists and opposition politicians are hounded by the police. Like Atatürk, Erdogan knows that his regime must modernise Turkey; but in rejecting Western democratic values he risks losing half of the nation. In 2016, an attempted coup cost over 300 lives – just one battle in an ongoing war over national identity. Just as Istanbul sits astride the Bosphorus, so Turkey lies on an historical civilisational fault line between East and West, where conflict has been the norm.

For six hundred years the Muslim Ottoman armies went on the march until the Sultans ruled a vast multi-ethnic territory stretching from Vienna to the Persian Gulf. The Ottoman Empire’s early prowess in artillery was legendary – it was commonly said to have been ‘hatched from a cannonball’ – but by the nineteenth century scientific progress had helped Christian Europe to overtake the Ottomans. Infighting bedevilled the Sultan’s court, where status-obsessed viziers squabbled over the colour and size of their turbans. To catch-up with the European Powers, in 1829 Sultan Mahmut II swapped his embroidered silk caftan for plain white trousers and decreed that all his soldiers and officials should wear the fez. The conical red cap quickly grew in popularity thanks to two ingenious features: a strap that secured it during prayers and a tassel that enabled the wearer to be hauled straight up to heaven. This sartorial sea-change launched a period of reform known as Tanzimat, aiming at modernisation through a sense of nationhood.

Ditching the turban couldn’t save the Ottoman Empire. It finally melted away in the cauldron of nationalism that was the First World War, and in 1923 the new state of Turkey was born. By this point the Balkan peoples, Greeks, Armenians, and Arabs had all split-off, leaving just Turks and ethnic Kurds. The job of defining a new national identity fell to a ruthless ex-army officer, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. So far-reaching were his reforms that he gave his name to the political ideology of Kemalism (the process of ‘modernisation-through-Westernisation'). To divorce church from state, he slung out the Caliph. To boost mass literacy, he switched from an Arabic to a Latin alphabet. The fez ban was not a popular move, and following the ‘Hat Law’ of 1925, several people were hanged for rioting. He wasn’t keen on beards, either…

In curbing the official role of religion, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk created what the political scientist Samuel Huntington called a ‘torn country’ – one where the ruling elite is Western and secular in its outlook, but the ordinary people remain Muslim and non-European in their customs and institutions. A century later, and the secular elites are now being supplanted under the regime of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a charismatic campaigner who came to power in 2003. A serial election winner, he has now held power for longer than Atatürk. His pious supporters come from the fast-growing cities of the Anatolian plain and are wary of the metropolitan middle-classes of Istanbul and Ankara. Erdogan promotes religious values to discredit the secular elites as enemies of his brand of Turkish nationalism. He once warned, “in this country there is a segregation of Black Turks and White Turks. Your brother Tayyip belongs to the Black Turks”.  By ‘White’ Turks, he meant the Westernised elites; while ‘Black’ Turks is shorthand for the downtrodden and pious poor who are more likely to wear headscarves. They follow a strict reading of the Koranic verse which states that women should ‘maintain their chastity. They shall not reveal any parts of their bodies, except that which is apparent.’

Early on, Erdogan’s AK party removed restrictions on hijab use in public institutions, but secular forces fought-back in the then-independent courts. In 2005, a student Leyla Sahin contested a university headscarf ban in the European Court of Human Rights. She lost. Perhaps surprisingly the liberal judges of Strasbourg ruled that her sartorial freedom took second place to the principle of secularism that was ‘necessary for the protection of democracy in Turkey’. Sahin now proudly wears her hijab in parliament as a member for the AK party.

The hijab issue festered. Soon afterwards the army used a post on its website to threaten the AK party presidential candidate on the grounds that his wife wore a headscarf. The world’s first ‘e-coup’ was avoided, but the army purged. In 2013, residents of Istanbul gathered to protest the construction of a mosque covering Gezi Park, a rare green space in the city. They were brutally beaten by the police, and twenty people died after demonstrations broadened to demand freedom of assembly and protest curbs on alcohol. Like many populists, Erdogan holds that the power conferred by his election victories trumps individual citizens’ rights. 

Turkey’s EU neighbours are very concerned with its recent human rights record. Erdogan rails against Western values, threatening to “bury LGBTQ supporters at the ballot box”. To the dismay of NATO allies, Turkey is buying Russian missiles, and building a nuclear power station with Russian help. Given its size and pivotal location, the stability of this ‘torn’ nation is vital for the region, but it is struggling with serious problems such as soaring inflation and absorbing millions of Syrian refugees.

Can Turkey be governed effectively without the consent given in proper democratic elections? Not many of the losing opposition voters in this year’s presidential election, some 48% of the electorate, accepted the process as free or fair. The courts banned the best opposition candidate, Istanbul mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, on a dubious charge of ‘insulting judges’.

In its centenary year, a ‘torn’ Turkey faces an uncertain future, yet President Erdogan seems bent on replacing Western-style democracy with more traditional forms of authority. By fostering a sense of Muslim identity, and positioning himself as the guardian of Islamic customs, he has cemented his position among the faithful. While his proven charisma does generate a strong sense of devotion, it is a feeling shared by only half of his subjects. Time will tell whether the new Sultan can hold his country together, or if hard hats will be required.