Headscarf controversy in Turkey
| Part of a series on |
| Islamic female dress |
|---|
| Types |
| Practices by country |
| Concepts |
| Other |
| This article is part of a series on |
| Turkey portal |
In the Ottoman Empire, dress codes were based on religious and ethnic principles and also served as an indicator of professional and social status. However, in the last two centuries of the Empire, with increasing interaction with the Western world, Muslim women began to abandon traditional clothings and wear garments that bore Western influences. These garments left their faces and necks exposed as outer dress. During this period, imperial decrees were issued to prevent this trend. However, the presence of some rulers and sultans, alongside the writers and artists who encouraged this change, accelerated this trend rather than halting it.
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk had the ambition to transform Turkey into a new modern secular state. The modernization reform program of Turkey by him abolished sex segregation and encouraged women to unveil as a part of a social revolution in order to make Turkey a modern state. He appeared in public with his wife Latife Uşaki unveiled, and arranged formal state receptions with dinner and dance where men and women could mingle, to encourage women to leave seclusion and adopt modern clothing, and in the mid-1920s, upper and middle class Turkish women started to appear unveiled in public. In 1925, the Turkish government introduced a new Family Law modelled after the Swiss Family Law, and in the same year, it banned Mahmud II's reformation hat for men to be Westernise, the fez. In 1928, the Turkish government removed the official religion provision from the constitution. Even so, Atatürk never forbade the headscarf (the dominant form of hijab in Turkey, where it is called başörtüsü meaning head cover), but did not encourage its use either. One exception to this might be the 1935 Ministry of Interior circular banning women from wearing clothing that covered their faces. While no law was passed, the ban was enforced through municipalities and law enforcement. However, this ban during the single-party era was not the first; similar practices existed in the Ottoman Empire, such as during the reign of Abdul Hamid II.
Between 80 and 90% of Turkey is Muslim, whilst a significant portion of them are Cultural Muslims. The use of veil is 40 to 50% of women in general, while only 35% of the young women are veiling. However, until the 1980s and 1990s, Turkish women held positions and served in public institutions in compliance with the secular dress codes introduced by Turkish governments. By the 1980s and 1990s, with the rise of Islamist revolutions in neighboring countries like the Iranian Islamic Revolution, the rise of the Islamist wave in Türkiye, secular segments of society, primarily the military, who dominated state institutions, declared religious extremism as the primary threat to themselves and the government. Another characteristic of this Islamist wave was the breaking away from traditional female roles that isolated women from society, and the encouragement of women entering the public sphere wearing clothings labeled as Islamic, particularly the headscarf, which they presented as "God's command." The headscarf became a topic of discussion for many Islamic writers, and later for non-Islamist writers who approached the issue from a human rights perspective, becoming a key element in the Islamist-secular conflict.
The headscarf debate in Türkiye arose as a reaction to the rise of conservatism and political Islamism, fueled by migration from rural areas to cities, and also after the secular-minded military seized power in the 1980 coup. The coup regime, in an effort to suppress right-left factions that caused divisions and deep conflicts among Turkish youth, introduced strict disciplinary rules in universities, including those concerning dress code and began to be implemented in a radical way after the 1997 military memorandum. Restrictive provisions were lifted by the democratization package in 2013, with the amendment made in article 5 of the dress code regulation, but remained in effect in the military, police force and judiciary. The ban was lifted for Turkish policewoman's in 2016 and few months later the headscarf ban was lifted in the Turkish military, the last state institution where it remained, as the military’s opposition to the government’s reforms had been weakened following the failed 2016 coup attempt.
In 2022 both Turkey's Islamist government and the formerly secular opposition vowed to take "legal steps to enshrine women's right to wear Islamic headscarves".