Abstract
This article investigates religious transformations in contemporary Turkey through the case of women’s unveiling. Drawing on 10 in-depth interviews with university-educated urban women who have recently stopped wearing the veil, the article examines their experiences and their motivations for unveiling. It asks to what extent and in what ways Muslim women’s decisions to unveil are a reaction against the ruling Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) shift towards electoral authoritarianism and Islamic conservatism. Some practicing Muslims, particularly youth, have withdrawn their support from the government because of its political authoritarianism and its abandonment of Islamic ideals relating to justice. Since the 2013 Gezi Park protests, the AKP has come under critical scrutiny, both economically (e.g., increasing youth unemployment rates, widening income inequality, the shrinking middle class, clientelism) and sociopolitically (e.g., gendered social welfare policies, pro-natalist campaigns, the discourse on creating a pious generation). However, although the current political atmosphere plays a significant role in women’s unveiling, the article also discusses women’s personal and theological motives. The article elaborates on how ex-hijabi women contest both Islamist politics and Islamic orthodoxy regarding female religiosity and how these women reinterpret dominant gender norms.
Highlights
In March 2018, İhsan Fazlıoğlu, a renowned professor of Islamic philosophy, made some statements about headscarf-wearing students who identified as deists or atheists but remained veiled due to familial and societal concerns
The study confirmed that increasing numbers of young Muslims were leaving Islam (Milliyet 2018)
The interviewees offered diverse narratives: some described their personal journeys away from Islam (BBC 2018; Medyascope 2018); others explained how they used historicist, leftist and/or gender-egalitarian interpretations to made peace with Islam (Bianet 2018d). Some said that their strict religious upbringing had produced a personal backlash against Islam (Bianet 2018a), while others related their disenchantment with Islam—namely its widespread Sunni interpretation—to the political, economic and social injustices experienced under the Islam-friendly AKP
Summary
In March 2018, İhsan Fazlıoğlu, a renowned professor of Islamic philosophy, made some statements about headscarf-wearing students who identified as deists or atheists but remained veiled due to familial and societal concerns. Some chose women-led grassroots activism to campaign against the ban, arguing that it violated women’s citizenship rights to religious freedom, education and work (Barras 2013; Çayır 2000) These activists highlighted the gendered nature of the ban and aimed to draw support from secular feminist NGOs. The headscarf ban as an issue of women’s solidarity, was a highly contentious topic. The 2007 election of President Abdullah Gül made his veiled wife Turkey’s first headscarf-wearing first lady This was followed in 2008 by efforts to lift the ban in higher education, resulting in a closure case against the AKP.. Jalal’s (1991) useful notion, they chose the “convenience of subservience” to the AKP’s male-governed party politics These events exacerbated the binary opposition between “good” and “bad” Muslim women, providing the AKP with an effective discursive tool to create and regulate political friction within Muslim women’s organizations. Women’s multiple trajectories of (un)veiling in Turkey need to be analyzed against this social and political backdrop
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