What a pleasant surprise! He was the son of a former neighbor who moved away few years ago. The reason I was unable to immediately recognize him was that not only has he grown enough to be in high school now. It was mainly because he had a strange, black, uniform-like outfit on and a ring piercing his lip. The transition from adolescence to adulthood is not necessarily eventless. Things going on in the family, peer pressure and many other social and personal factors can contribute to unconventional choices. I clearly remember him playing with my five-years-younger son at the "party place" in the woods. He has apparently now adopted a relatively radical lifestyle. I felt a great deal of sympathy toward this young man, because he reminded me of similarly provocative clothing choices that some female teenagers make in Turkey. The only difference is that their outfits are religious.
When Turkey debates whether the religious headscarf ban in Turkish universities should be lifted or not, I think many people in the West don't even understand where the problem is. Yes, religious outfits could be deemed less conventional in a secular society. But why should that be a reason to deny the right of higher education to a citizen?
No argument by the ban's proponents is able to resonate normally with Westerners. Even if the headscarves are used as political symbols rather than for religious reasons, as claimed by some of Turkey's secularists, isn't political activism an essential part of university life in a normal country? But there are always those opportunists who play into the fears of Islam in the West. They tend to portray every religious-looking female as a political Islamist soldier. And they can be persuasive, especially to ignorant and/or prejudiced people.
No compassion, no sympathy at all for pious young girls from our ardent secularists. They are currently in the official business of meddling in the way adolescents pick their outfits. Isn't that funny? I wonder if they would have treated unconventional but "secular" outfit choices of their own daughters the same way. Turkey's hardhearted secularists, like big business advocate the Turkish Industrialists and Businessmen's Association (TÜSİAD), are using their propaganda outlets in the West to attempt to prove why politicians are being "hasty" in trying to correct this drama that has been ongoing for decades. They are making so much noise, out of fear of future social and governmental pressure on their lifestyle. But a senselessness of urgency prevails when it comes to pressures exerted on religious people today.
In the eye of an oppressor, the solution to the so-called "headscarf problem" lies in females giving up their outfits. What could be better than one less woman in a headscarf! Who is going to pay all the psychological costs of bullying these people? The cost of forcing them to make extremely difficult choices, often at an immature age, under competing pressures from different social environments? Ruining their dreams? Taking away their careers? Dealing them permanent financial damage as well? Forget about it.
Without hearing thousands of human stories, one cannot grasp the damage inflicted upon society by the headscarf ban. Treating teenagers who, for overwhelmingly faith-related and social reasons, dress modestly as a regime problem proves a deep sense of insecurity among the ruling secularist class in Turkey. This sense, or I should say senselessness, is the major threat to our future; not opening the avenues of higher education up for pious girls. Such absurdities can only make Turkey a less formidable candidate for full-fledged membership to the Western club. So much for our secularists' allegiance to Atatürk's modernization path!
