EUROPE DIARY: HEADSCARF CHIC
Designer Cheek

BBC News, UK
Nov 9 2006

BBC Europe editor Mark Mardell talks to headscarf wearers and headscarf
opponents to get a full picture of the Turkish debate on Muslim dress –
plus more thoughts on the Ottoman slaughter of Armenians.

Undo the clips, and it’s a revealing halter neck Rabia Yalcin looks
stunning. I am not sure I should write that about someone who prides
themselves on dressing in accordance with the Islamic dress code,
but she is an Istanbul fashion designer who says her aim is "to show
the beauty of the flower, while covering the flower". She’s wearing
a bright scarlet headscarf, a grey jacket and trousers modelled on
Turkish pantaloons.

She has an interesting, not to say cheeky, take on the religious
rules. She shows us one of her latest creations. It’s a floor length
pink gown with a black velvet headscarf. Very modest. But a couple
of clips undone here and there and it becomes a very revealing halter
neck evening dress leaving little to the imagination. Rabia says it’s
of course only to be worn at home in front of husband and family.

FUNKY HATS She has a similarly ingenious way of coping with Turkey’s
headscarf ban.

That’s a kalpak, not a fez

The Turkish Republic has a bit of a thing about the political symbolism
of headgear. Its founder, whose picture still adorns every office,
every public place, Kemal Ataturk banned the fez as a head covering
and expected men to wear the hat. His own favourite was evidently
the Panama, although he’s often depicted wearing a kalpak, a tall
black fuzzy number which in certain lights could pass for a fez,
but which obviously has some crucial difference that I’m missing.

Like all his dramatic changes to Turkish society, from a new alphabet
to public dances, it appears to have been accepted with remarkably
little fuss. Although he banned religious dress in public places and
railed against veiling women he didn’t make much progress against the
headscarf. It was left to a government in 1979 to make that illegal.

Rabia’s ingenious solution? Her daughter is at university and she
has designed haute couture items to satisfy both Koranic law and
the Turkish state. Her daughter wears funky hats that cover all her
hair… Many of her fellow students and lecturers just thought she
was ultra-fashionable, and I guess rather eccentric and blessed with a
talented mum, until they saw her out of class wearing the traditional
head dress. Then the penny drops.

HARD CHOICE The story of Rabia’s personal assistant, who doesn’t have a
designer mum is rather different. Aslinur Kara is one of those people
who immediately makes you think: "I wish she worked for me." She
exudes no-nonsense efficiency and directness. She’s also devout and
had a hard choice when the time came to go to university.

Aslinur wanted a degree, so she had to remove her veil She told me that
she decided not to waste her education and ruin her life. So she took
the scarf off at the doors. She said it was hard, against her values,
an insult and against human rights. But in time it didn’t hurt so much,
and she came to feel that for her fellow students it was brains, the
person inside, that mattered, not what they wore. One is tempted to
say, "Well, precisely!" But I don’t.

She now has a job where she can wear the headscarf. But the law
remains and she couldn’t go into politics or the civil service or
teaching without making that hard choice again.

PRO-MILITARY LIBERALS I suspect many, probably most people in
Britain would see this as a matter of freedom of choice, but it’s
not seen like this here. The government’s tentative plans to change
the law meet fierce opposition. Just last weekend there was a march
through Ankara, a crowd of 12,000 people, to protest against the very
possibility. It’s an interesting twist that people who most probably
would be leftie Hampstead liberals in Britain are here supporters of
the army – the principal opponents of any weakening of what they see
as the secular state.

Bedri Baykam is an artist who clearly loves to shock. He’s working
on a series called Picasso’s women and his studio is covered with
photographs of naked women. He says that women who wear the headscarf
these days are making a statement that they are warriors for militant
Islam. He says their head covering is not like the headscarves worn
by his mother or grandmother but have tight elastic so that not one
scrap of hair escapes. He says it’s ridiculous that people should
treat hair as though it’s a sexual organ.

SLIPPERY TERMINOLOGY The former four-star general Edib Baser goes
further. He says that religious groups pay poor women to wear the
headscarf and he too makes the point that these are not the traditional
dress of his mother and grandmother. What the secularists miss is
that mum and granny would not be allowed into universities.

Spending a great deal of time and effort passing laws required by
the EU is not the usual prelude to Islamic revolution

I don’t know how Rabia and Aslinur vote but they certainly don’t
strike me as having a particularly strong political agenda. But terms
like "political Islam" are slippery. The ruling party is Islamic but
prefers to see itself as Conservative. As one academic remarks dryly,
spending a great deal of time and effort passing laws required by
the EU is not the usual prelude to Islamic revolution.

I spend some time chasing a rumour that high taxes have been imposed
on alcohol in some parts of the country, before it strikes me that
Tessa Jowell is Urging the same thing at home.

ANGRY DOCTORS But there’s no doubt some people feel deeply
uncomfortable with the current order.

The Cetins think the headscarf ban is like a growing cancer Nilufer
Cetin was in her fourth year studying to be a doctor when the headscarf
ban was introduced. She went to Hungary to finish her education but
still can’t practise as a doctor. She said: "I was shocked. It was
unbelievable, it was a terrible situation. But I think it was just
a pretext to attack believers."

Her husband, also a doctor, is still angry. In fact he radiates
anger. When I tell him that I can never see the headscarf being banned
in public institutions in Britain he is derisive and insists I will
be proved wrong. He says the ban will have to go: he’s a doctor and
"it’s like suppressing the function of a cell, if it goes on a cancer
will grow, there will be chaos."

THANKS FOR YOUR MESSAGES Thanks to all of you who answered my plea to
help me with understanding attitudes to the Armenia killings within
Turkey. They are all very thought-provoking and interesting.

Read your comments below last week’s diary I haven’t met many people
here who deny that something terribly wrong happened. Many however want
to put it in context. It’s true I did speak to one highly intelligent
individual who should know better than to try to convince me that
Ottoman soldiers were merely trying to escort Armenians out of a danger
zone when attacked by Kurdish brigands. But such effrontery is rare.

I have heard several stories of how Turkish families sheltered
Armenians or helped them escape. One academic made the point that
while Germany, as a state, has made full apology and admitted the
Holocaust, few Germans who were around during that time talk easily
about it. By contrast, he said, Turkish people have many stories to
tell and it is the state that cannot tolerate debate.

IMMACULATE CONCEPTION But it was Professor Halil Berktay who had us
entranced. The interview went on for rather a long time and I was
about to apologise to the rest of team when Xav the cameraman said:
"That guy is so interesting, I could stay here all afternoon and
listen." So I’ll offer without adornment Prof Berktay’s take on why
the Turkish state cannot face up to what happened.

The Armenian genocide, the tragic uprooting, deportation and
annihilation is not something that sits well with [Turkey’s] narrative
of pure victimisation and suffering

Professor Halil Berktay As the Ottoman empire broke up, nations were
created from the Balkans to the Arab world, he says: "All of which
were conceived in anger and hatred and enmity and antagonism towards
one another. In each case, these nationalisms never like talking
about what they have done to others. But they can speak for hours and
hours of what others have done to them. Especially in this part of
the world. In the Balkans and south-east Europe and the Middle East
everybody loves to talk about how they have been victimised but they
have never hurt anyone else.

"The Turkish grand narrative turns to a very large extent on how Great
Power imperialism kept hounding and persecuting the Muslim Turks of the
Ottoman empire, and eventually the Turkish rump that was left. Then
we had to wage this glorious nationalist struggle against them and
against plots to partition us. Now, the Armenian genocide, the tragic
uprooting, deportation and annihilation is not something that sits
well with this narrative of pure victimisation and suffering."

He compares it to a child believing that they were brought by a stork,
that their parents couldn’t possibly have had sex and calls his theory
"the immaculate conception of the nation state."

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