In Turkey, headscarf is a women’s rights issue

Turkey has a long history of pigeonholing women. Women who chose to cover their heads were labeled “backward” and uneducated while those who went uncovered represented the modern ideal of a woman bravely rejecting religious conservatism.

The headscarf symbolized the battle between the forces of modernity and arch-conservatism. But for a new generation of women, it is as much a political statement about their rights as about their religion.

Wearing the headscarf was banned in public institutions, including universities, in the early 1980s, but morphed into a women’s rights symbol in the 1990s and 2000s as Muslim women campaigned on university campuses all over Turkey for the right to wear it.

Often, the campaigners found themselves doubly isolated. Harassed by the secular authorities and denied public-sector jobs, the wider women’s movement also shunned them as a “single issue” regressive group. 

The battle appeared to be won when President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in 2002. Veiled women had worked hard for the party, canvassing door-to-door, but it was another eight years before the ban on head coverings in universities was lifted.