Global South 4, 5, October 2008 10 Visit us at www.sephisemagazine.org Articles The Headscarf Issue, Women and the Public Sphere in Turkey Yýlmaz Çolak Abstract This study aims to investigate the right-based implications of the question of headscarf for the exercise of citizenship status in Turkey. In particular, I will reconsider the relationship between the discussions on the headscarf and the public sphere, by examining the identity claims of Islamic female students to new rights. This study argues that the question of the headscarf is part of the ‘citizenship debate’, seen as an issue of human right to articulate different cultural identities and forms. Introduction Turkey’s headscarf issue once again became the source of the political crisis as the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) with the support of the opposition Nationalist Action Party (MHP) passed constitutional amendments to lift the ban on the headscarf for female university students in February 2008. The secularist opposition, Republican People’s Party (CHP), brought this legislation to the Constitutional Court and then it was outlawed. It was fol- lowed by another case file to close down the AKP and ban PM Recep Tayyip Erdoðan, whose wife and daughters wear the headscarf, from politics for five years. The AKP and its leaders including PM Erdoðan and even President Gül are accused to violate the principle of secularism, in which its emphasis on the freedom for the headscarf is mentioned as one of the main incitements. It is obvious that the clarification of the scope of the headscarf dispute sheds some light on the dynamics of today’s Turkish society and politics. Background: Kemalist Modernisation, Public Sphere and the Issue of Dress In the early years of the Republic (1920s and 1930s), Turkish state-led modernisation resulted in the formation of a public sphere. That was designed as ‘secular’ and ‘national’. Such secure structure faced to a set of serious challenges arising from diversifying civil society in the 1990s. Different religious and ethnic groups began to question the certainties of Kemalism, the Turkish state ideology. Questioning the boundaries of Turkish public sphere and citizen- ship, their ultimate goal has been to be repre- sented ‘as they are’ in the public sphere and achieving cultural rights as well as civic and political ones. The most serious challenge came from Islamist groups together with Kurdish ethno-nationalists. Maintaining a counter- hegemonic movement, Islamists debated and rejected Kemalist secularism that has sought to prevent the public visibility of Islamic groups. At the heart of that struggle on who controls the country’s public sphere, there were women. Islamist women and their dress-style became a motto and symbol for Islamist movement. This is a clear challenge to the civilised, secular standards of Kemalism. To understand this struggle very well we should know how the Kemalists formed and developed these standards for public visibility and representation. Kemalist modernisation during the early Re- publican era sought to create a modern state, society and culture by cutting all ties with the past, the Ottoman/Islamic one. 1 The Kemalist reformers described and imposed the standards of the ‘civilised’ world on the people. In this regard, the prescriptions for how to talk, how to dress, how to eat, and so on, all were neces- sary for being publicly visible. In the process, then, instead of the ‘old’, a new system of politics and education were instituted, new forms of public and private life were set in motion, and new family types and gender roles were introduced. It was ‘a new way of life’ 1 For the formation of a new Turkish culture and public sphere during th early Republican period see “Nationalism and State in Turkey: Drawing the Boundaries of ‘Turkish Culture’ in the 1930s”, Studies in Ethnicity and National- ism, 3, 1, 2003, pp. 2-20. Yýlmaz Çolak is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Eastern Mediterra- nean University, North Cyprus. He taught at Eastern Mediterranean University as an Assistant Professor from 2000 to spring 2005. He received his Ph. D. in Political Science at Bilkent University (Ankara, Turkey) in 2000. He was a Visiting Research Fellow at United Nations University / Comparative Regional Integration Studies (Brugge, Belgium) in Fall 2003. His research interests include Turkish politics and state-culture relations, particularly the issues of nationalism, secularism and citizenship in Turkey; politics of identity and citizen- ship and migration in North Cyprus. He is currently working on the politics of nationalism, citizenship and history in Cyprus and politics of cultural diversity in Turkey.