Roles shifting in the headscarf debate

Opposition leader Deniz Baykal's speech on Tuesday at his party group meeting is an example of how the debate is shifting from one of basic rights to a religious issue. Baykal defended the ban by arguing that the religion of Islam cannot be reduced to the headscarf. What matters in religion is its essence, not its form. By insisting on the form, people miss the fundamental spirit of Islam and put their sincerity into question. This, in turn, suggests a political agenda that uses religious sensitivities for political purposes. According to Baykal and others, this is what the AK Party is doing.

On the other side of the debate, there are those who oppose the ban by using primarily the language of basic human rights. The AK Party, the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), conservative NGOs and liberal intellectuals see the issue as expanding the sphere of civil liberties in Turkey. Both the AK Party and the MHP could easily develop conservative religious arguments to defend the headscarf. As a matter of fact, their constituency considers the headscarf as a religious duty, not a political symbol. But they also say that they do not want it to be imposed on others on religious grounds because that would be a violation of a person's free choice. In short, the headscarf is a religious issue but the decision to wear it or not is a matter of basic rights.

This shift in positions is extremely significant and shows that Turkish religious conservatism is adapting the universal language of human rights to deal with the most critical issues of the country, including religious freedom and the Kurdish problem. The Islamist discourse of the '60s and the '70s were mostly opposed to such a language and had regarded democracy and human rights as Western values which were impossible to reconcile with the Islamic tradition. Fighting against Western imperialism also meant rejecting values that had originated in the West.

The Islamic modernism of the 19th and the 20th centuries had sought to show the compatibility of traditional Islamic and modern Western values. Its fathers had believed that there was no clash between constitutionalism, democracy, rights of religious minorities or non-Muslims and the rule of law on the one hand and the religious and political teachings of Islam on the other. But their problem was that they were responding to the challenge of a dominant civilization and political power. Today, that power is open to question not only in the Muslim world but also in the West as well as in other parts of the non-Western world. The monopoly over modernity has been broken.

The fact that the Turkish religious conservatism has internalized the universal language of human rights and liberties is in tandem with the universal language of the Islamic tradition. But it has also huge implications for the encounter and engagement of the Muslim world with the challenges of modernity. The Muslim world is gradually rising over religious parochialism and claiming the global public discourse to question, challenge and eventually contribute to it.

The current initiative to lift the headscarf ban in Turkish universities is a good example of how combining traditional conservatism with basic human rights can help expand the domain of liberties in Turkey. Obviously, it is the conservatives and liberals, both of whom have had their problems with radical secularist modernism, that are redefining the relationship between religion and modernity. As in the case of the EU membership issue, the AK Party, which positions itself as a center-right party, is leading the way to the West but at the same time redefining what the "West" is.