On Channel X there were huge emotional crowds accompanying the cortège. That Professor Saylan's burial coincided with a holiday celebrating national sovereignty was an occasion for many to reassert their commitment to secular values and express their own sense of threat. By contrast, the section of the media largely sympathetic to the government felt honor bound to mention her passing, but seemed impatient to skip over, as decently as possible, to the next item. On Channel Y (in fact “S”), for example, they surrendered pride of place to an extended, and to my mind, misleading item about the unwholesome nature of pigs.A brief word about pigs: They are reputed to be intelligent animals and I am sure feel gratitude to the two major faiths who advise against turning them into bacon sandwiches, let alone those who believe it wrong to eat meat altogether. Intensive animal husbandry is bad for the environment and cruel to animals, but this is true for chicken. People, not porkers, spread swine flue. The news item struck me as a bit of pseudo-scientific hysteria, particularly as almost no one in its target audience is ever likely even to see a pork chop. Far more useful would be to examine people's real diet. How healthy is an Adana kebab?
Let me not be distracted from trying to assess the life of Turkey's most controversial septuagenarian. Professor Saylan was by any reckoning an extraordinary woman, a public health warrior who helped defeat leprosy. Her success in her chosen career led her to aspire on behalf of all Turkish women for access to education, equality of opportunity and engagement in public life. So far so good. She framed her life in the radical Kemalist language (I am referring to Atatürk himself, not to those who claim to speak in his name) of permanent revolution (my own translation for “inkilap” or “devrimcilik”). She was no armchair modernizer, intent on defending the privileges of her class. Rather, she tried to extend recruitment to her own way of life by rolling up her sleeves to lead girls from enforced domesticity and into school. Hers was a constant struggle to extract womankind from the whirlpool of social backwardness. Not surprisingly, those she ascribed as reactionary (once they managed to get television stations of their own), declared her attitude patronizing. They found her recipe for liberation, the sense in which they seem expected to denounce the identities with which they were born, to be the very thing holding them down. They posited their own values against her proselytizing certainty, and some went as far as to dismiss her missionary zeal as the foreign legacy of her Swiss mother.
Neither Türkan Saylan nor her fellow members of the Support for Modern Life Association (ÇYDD) tried to conceal their belief that the present government had betrayed the spirit of the Atatürk Revolution. Professor Saylan believed she was inspiring a movement to drive the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) out of power. However, as the over-zealous police and prosecutors who raided her home and tapped her phone as part of the Ergenekon investigation were forced to concede, her contempt for the government did not extend to actual support for unconstitutional or a military putsch. The final abiding image of her is of a frail woman wearing a headscarf to conceal the effects of chemotherapy. Perhaps her last and unintended victory was to subvert the symbols of those she opposed. The headscarf became emblematic of the intolerance heaped upon her head and not those of the pious women whose determination to remain covered was a barrier to the professional life Professor Saylan wanted them to have.
The legal harassment of Türkan Saylan was seen by many as proof that the prosecutors had abandoned their brief and were guilty of the very crime of confusing the power of the state with their own. Rather than rooting out an illegal and ruthless deep state, it was prosecuting a legitimate opposition. Such concerns have to be taken seriously. To dismiss them as hogwash would be wrong, not to say pigheaded.
