Turkey's lifting of its ban on the hijab comes at a time when a number of countries are debating or imposing restrictions on traditional Muslim head coverings – particularly full-face veils such as the burqa and niqab, which are already banned in France and Belgium. "The challenge that lies before Turkey is not whether or not Turkey is becoming more religious," he emphasizes, "but whether or not Turkey will finally move on from a rigid, state-controlled public space into a pluralistic society that can accommodate different ethnicities and beliefs." "Yet this is likely to create tensions, particularly in western Turkey, once women wearing headscarves start appearing in workplaces and becoming more visible in certain sectors. "The lifting of the ban on headscarves ends a disgraceful human rights abuse that took away futures of generations of women in Turkey," says U.K.-based Turkish academic and commentator Ziya Meral. When the repeal was announced this week, Turkey's opposition party declared it "a serious blow to the secular republic." By the 1980s, these lengths of cloth had taken on hot political connotations.Ĭritics worry that Turkey's relaxation of the headscarf ban will blur the line between religion and the state and could herald a stealthy march toward an Islamist state. The headscarf was banned in government offices, hospitals, universities, and schools. Many did.īy the 1970s, though, and particularly after Turkey's military coup in 1980, discouraging headscarves had taken on the force of law. In granting women the freedom to decide for themselves whether they wanted to cover their heads, it was more or less assumed they would eventually give up the headscarf as the new, secular Turkish identity took hold. That autumn, the Hat Law of 1925 was passed, making European-style men's headwear de rigueur and punishing fez-wearers with lengthy sentences of imprisonment at hard labor, and even a few hangings.Ĭuriously enough, Ataturk left women's attire alone. Ataturk himself famously adopted a Panama hat to accent his Western-style gray linen suit, shirt, and tie when he toured the country in the summer of 1925 to sell his new ideas to a deeply conservative population. The fez-the short, conical, red-felt cap that had been in vogue in Turkey since the Ottoman Sultan Mahmud II made it part of the official national attire in 1826-was banished. The Western dress code at that time, though, was aimed at men. The regulations were part of a sweeping series of reforms that altered virtually every aspect of Turkish life-from the civil code to the alphabet to education to social integration of the sexes. Turkey's restrictions on wearing overtly religious-oriented attire are rooted in the founding of the modern, secular Turkish state, when the republic's founding father, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, introduced a series of clothing regulations designed to keep religious symbolism out of the civil service. "Headscarf-wearing women are full members of the republic, as well as those who do not wear it." "A dark time eventually comes to an end," Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in a speech to the parliament. The new rules, which don't apply to workers in the military or judiciary, come into effect immediately and were put into place to address concerns that the restrictions on hijab were discouraging women from conservative backgrounds from seeking government jobs or higher education. Turkish women who want to wear the hijab – the traditional Islamic headscarf covering the head and hair, but not the face – to civil service jobs and government offices will be able to do so now that the Turkish government has relaxed its decades-long restriction on wearing the headscarf in state institutions.
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