Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty by Akyol Mustafa

Author:Akyol, Mustafa [Akyol, Mustafa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2011-07-17T18:30:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Turkish March to Islamic Liberalism

Perhaps the reason why we have not seen the proposal of a liberal development paradigm for the Middle East is because we have assumed that it must counter the Islamic trend.

—Leonard Binder, Islamic Liberalism1

TURKEY BEGAN 2008 in the shadow of a very heated debate. The issue was whether female university students could cover their hair with a headscarf—a practice allowed in the whole free world, except in Turkey, where it was banned by the staunchly secularist Constitutional Court in 1989. The incumbent Justice and Development Party (AKP, with its Turkish initials) was a “conservative” party led by devout Muslims. They had just won a sweeping election victory six months earlier, in July 2007, and were willing to permit the headscarf—which most of their wives and daughters wore—at least on campuses.

In February, the AKP, with the support of two other parties in the Turkish parliament, passed an amendment that inserted two clauses into the constitution. One of them stated that all citizens, regardless of their religion, race, or ethnicity, would “benefit from public services equally.” The other amendment provided a guarantee: “No citizen can be barred from the right to higher education.”

These clauses might sound like commonsense declarations to most people, but to the secularist establishment they constituted an unacceptable heresy that opened the doors of the universities to “backward-minded” conservative Muslims. Soon the Constitutional Court stepped in. It not only nullified the amendment but also levied a hefty fine on the AKP government for violating the country’s self-styled secularism. The ruling party, in fact, barely survived being disbanded and buried in Turkey’s political graveyard, where more than two dozen parties rest in peace simply for having failed to comply with some aspect of the official ideology.

In the middle of this peculiar political controversy—during which “freedom” and “secularism” had become opposing slogans—an interesting voice emerged from the headscarfed female students whose right to education was being discussed. On a website titled “We Are Not Free Yet,” three hundred of them put their signatures under the following statement:

What we have suffered since the day that the door of the university was shut in our face taught us something: Our real problem is the authoritarian mentality which assumes a right to interfere in the lives, appearances, words and thoughts of people.

Thus, as women who face discrimination because we cover our heads, we hereby declare that we won’t be happy simply by entering universities with our scarves—unless:

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