On May 3rd, 1999, the Turkish national assembly held one of its most difficult sessions when the newly elected deputies were sworn in: among the record number of 22 women elected to the assembly, one woman, Merve Kavakçi, a deputy of the Islamic Virtue Party, caused an uproar by coming to the ceremony with a headscarf on. The only other woman deputy who had appeared in public with her head covered, Nesrin Unal, a deputy of the nationalist-islamist Nationalist Action Party, uncovered her hair for the session. In interpreting this incident, most accounts frame the action of the headscarved deputy within the Islamist-secularist tension in Turkey.

I argue that the actions of the deputy who unveiled and those who never covered also need to be studied in order to explain the contested location of gender in contemporary Turkey. I therefore propose a multivalent approach that analyzes the incident through four interconnected social processes which create layers of meaning: first, the initial boundaries of meanings are set as each political actor takes a position on the incident; then, the meanings start to polarize as social actors filter the incident through the standpoints of the Turkish state, Islam and Western civilization. Next, the Turkish military intervenes, in this case indirectly, to specify the limits of tolerance and suggest the acceptable range of meanings. Finally, the ensuing silences in meaning within and outside the incident point to the cost of intervention in meaning production. When viewed within this framework, the decision to veil is no longer reduced to a personal choice propagated by religion; it becomes instead a social choice that spans the full spectrum of action to veil, unveil or not to veil, one decided upon through the complex process of political positioning, polarization, intercession, and confinement.

The initial meanings of the incident start to polarize as they filter through the historically constructed categories of state, Islam and the West. In the eighteenth century, the relationship among state, religion and the West was redefined as the emerging nationalism stressed the significance of legal rights embedded not in divine will but instead in popular will. The political system was subsequently secularized and industrialization emerged in full force. The West, most specifically France and England, gradually acquired material and later moral superiority over the rest of the world; it legitimated its colonialism through the “civilizing mission.” The Muslim world responded with a series of reforms to accommodate the changing social and material conditions. These social transformations had very significant effects on gender relations.

The State. There was an especially strong link between the nation-state and the body. In addition to the organic metaphor of nationalist ideology where the word nasci alluded to “birth,” as of a people, the nation generated loyalty similar to that one owes to one’s parents, uniting against “foreign” enemies that threaten its unity, and creating a single acceptable code of social and sexual behavior of the “citizen.” Again in the specific case of women, this code was infused with patriarchal concerns dictating women to employ their sexuality specifically in the privacy of their home for the biological reproduction of the nation. Education and emancipation became necessary for women to make them more efficient mothers who then biologically and culturally reproduced better citizens for the nation-state. Women therefore appeared more in public, but often divested of their sexuality to emerge next to men as “equal” citizens, an equality that existed more in form than content, and one that was monitored closely by the state.

The modern nation-state attempted to control the body in order to manufacture docile subjects and an obedient work force through the systematic disciplining of people’s bodies. The intersection of capitalism with nationalism further exacerbated this control as the nation-state attempted to increase the efficiency of labor and at the same time, to reproduce the legitimation of the political system through developing checks and balances on the social actions of its citizens. States created secular spaces so that their legitimacy rested not in a divine source but rather in opposition: hence secular space was by definition that which was not religious, a category which quickly became blurred since religion and culture often overlapped.

The West. The concomitant transformation of social relations within the West entered a different stage as it started to translate across societies. The colonial state set up a system of rule that relied on a definition of colonial difference that assumed the local culture to be inferior and backward and thus in need of the colonial intervention for improvement. When the nationalists inherited this system, they also internalized the presumed backwardness to justify their control over decision-making. Women within this context fit perfectly, as they were located first in colonial feminism as oppressed subjects waiting to be liberated by the colonialists, then after national liberation in state feminism where they became asexual citizens sacrificing their self-empowerment to aid the development of the nation and where they were given the political rights of citizenship in return.

Even though Turkey had not been colonized, it nevertheless always carried an imaginary dialogue with the West, one that aspired the Turkish nation-state to be “just like the West.” Subsequently, in 1928, five years after the establishment of the Republic, the Turkish Constitution was formally amended to disestablish Islam as the state religion; the amendments of 1937 expressly defined the Turkish state as secular. And even though the new Kemalist state increased women’s visibility, women’s autonomous political initiatives were actively discouraged: the Women’s People’s Party founded in 1923 transformed into a women’s federation only to disband in 1935 after acquiring the right to vote and deciding that now women had indeed established equality. Women’s emancipation was indeed not an aim in and of itself but part of a larger project of nation-building and secularization. Although Kemalism was a progressive ideology fostering women’s participation in the public sphere, it did not alter patriarchal forms of morality.

Islam. The Islamist women resisted incorporation into the nation-state by objecting to the state-supported image of the desexualized secular woman in a suit with the hair in a bun; they provided instead an alternate image of a woman who also desexualized herself but this time through covering her hair and wearing loose-fitting clothing. Covering was specifically the demarcating element of a Muslim woman’s identity, the zone of transition from the private to the public where the woman neutralized the private by covering herself. By doing so, she successfully negotiated the tension between guarding her privacy and modesty in accordance with religious principles and publicly carved herself a space and mode of participation.

Thus, the filters of state, religion and the West polarized the meaning surrounding gender in Turkish society. Women started to take sides on the secular/religious divide overlooking their shared experiences as women. This social condition also affects the relations among the women, whereby secular and Islamist women work separately to promote the political aims of their own group rather than the betterment of all Turkish women.

One scholar Ay?e Kadioglu aptly identifies the chasm between the Islamists and secularists, where “the former are absorbed into the myth of the era of bliss (asr-l saadet) and retreat into the golden age of Islamic history, and the latter view Islam as an anomaly or antithesis of modernity and try to erase it from their history by unleashing a process of voluntary amnesia in the name of modernization.”i Indeed, the secularist and Islamist literature amply demonstrate the sharp divide between the two groups as both idealize their own group and stereotype the other.

This difference between the secular and Islamist women presents a great challenge to the liberal model of tolerance that forms the basis of current democracies; the model views tolerance “in individualistic terms as the protection of individuals’ free conscience.”ii It therefore lacks the analytical tools to successfully recognize groups and communities, runs into problems when a number of differences intersect to form societal patterns, and naturalizes the consensus reached by a powerful segment of society, in this case the powerful secular women. The Islamist women, however, form a community through their beliefs and practices, and their difference intersects gender with religion. Their practice of headcovering therefore symbolizes not only an individual choice but also the expression of a communal belief and practice, one articulated through the visible symbol of the headscarf. Tolerance as it is currently theorized recognizes the individual choice but balks at the intersection with the community on one hand and the representation of political difference on the other.

This separation of individual, communal and political levels also contains within it the assumption of a private/public divide, the boundaries of which work well when imagined analytically but are constantly challenged in practice. As Suad Joseph argues, the development of civil society, citizenship and democratic nationhood all hinge on the separation of the public and private spheres, a separation which ultimately abnormalizes both spheres since liberal political theory perceives the public sphere as the realm of reason and the private sphere as the realm of body and emotion, that is, the realm of woman.iii This formulation also informs the way headscarving in Turkey is defined and tolerated: it forms an individual practice in both private and public spheres, but becomes ambiguous when articulated as a public practice.

The national assembly and the covered women have disparate amounts of power. The national assembly politically represents the entire nation, has administratively developed a set of regulations for such representations, and counts on the support of the legal system for their execution. Yet, the assembly faces the danger of gradually losing its legitimacy if it fails to adapt to societal transformations, thus its gradual delegitimation through alienation from the people. The covered women have social support outside the assembly, however, and draw attention to the possible reconstruction of assembly regulations and by implication of the legal system. Here, several questions need to be asked:

(A) Why was the dress code of the assembly not modified in seventy-five years to specifically exclude the headscarf? Opinion polls within society at large revealed that people wanted the practice of covering the head to be left to the discretion of the individual. The national assembly therefore avoided the issue because it was bound to create tension. Indeed, one could argue that the assembly as practice chose to leave the rules governing women’s behavior ambiguous in order not to contradict the existing tradition that inherently opposed, at least in appearance, the modernity of the secular political structure. (B) Why was Kavakçi’s act immediately subverted from the larger issue of democratic space in modern Turkey to her personal failings? The virulent campaign against her person trivialized the behavior and marginalized her political position. She was perceived as a person with particular traits and life history not shared by the rest of society; the fact that she had been elected with the votes of a significant proportion of the populace was overlooked. No one was concerned about who would represent that proportion and how. (C) Why do the secularists and the military assume that their compromise on this headscarf issue would naturally and swiftly lead to an Islamic state? This fear is so naturalized in Turkey that no one is willing to consider the possibility that it can be critically examined and altered. It is part of a social construction that has emerged through history under the influence of certain factors.

I would conjecture that the roots of this fear and of the implied but unstated fragility of the Turkish state can be traced once more to Turkey’s dialogue with the West and her adoption of the Western legal system. The main difference between creation and adoption concerns empowerment: Turkish citizens and their representatives may not feel empowered enough to successfully question and reconstruct the legal system. One can further contend that since the Western legal system was one of the foundation stones of the Turkish Republic, any criticism of the system may be directly associated with the nature of the republic itself. Another constructive solution concerns the recognition of hybridity of the categories of Islamists and secularists. When the secularists and the Islamists are studied within the same analytical framework the continuities among them become more articulated. A case in point is the work of Mervat Hatem (1994, 1998) on Egypt. No such studies yet exist in the Turkish context where secularists and Islamists are always studied as two disparate groups.

Indeed, the public discussion of the silences in the headscarf incident combined with a critical analysis of both the Islamist and the secularist positions on the incident may enable the Turkish society to trespass its schizophrenic divide to finally bestow upon all her citizens, men and women, their own democratic space.