An Appeal for Secular Feminisms in Turkey

Abstract

T he military coup in 1980 transitioned Turkey to a neoliberal economic and political development model led by Turgut Ozal, who held high-level positions, including prime minister and president, between 1980 and 1993. Recep Tayyip Erdogan founded the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi; AKP) in 2001 and led it until 2014. In 2002 party leaders, declaring it a conservative democratic party, announced that it was breaking from its classic Islamist roots. Erdogan also claimed that he was committed to Ozal’s economic and political policies. The AKP won the general election in 2002, tolerated by nearly every segment of society, including the Kurdish and Turkish oppositions and liberal-leftist intellectuals. In2007and2010 theparty expanded its powers by referendum, and in 2010 Prime Minister Erdogan took dictatorial control. The head scarf movement and women were of central importance to the rise of Turkey’s Islamist conservatism. In the 1980s updated booklets (ilmihal) about Islamist rules and principles for daily life brought Islamist rebirth to large numbers of women. Islamist discourse sheltered women from the immoralities and crises of modern life.Many Islamist women debated with Islamist men and became actively involved and politically vocal. In the 1990s women’s votes facilitated the rise of the classic Islamist Welfare Party. Islamist women demanded the democratic right to live in line with their beliefs. In the spirit of equal opportunity, many feminists support women’s right to wear the head scarf in public settings, although other secular women support state prohibitions on the head scarf. In Turkey we divide feminism into three temporal frames, beginningwith the feminists who lobbied for equality in the early twentieth