Last update - 00:00 15/02/2008
Progress, or regress?
By Yigal Schleifer
Like most developments in the ongoing battle between secularism and Islam in Turkey, the recent vote by the parliament in Ankara to lift a ban on headscarves in universities was interpreted, both inside and outside the country, with few shades of gray.
For Turkish secularists - and worried observers in Israel and elsewhere - the end of the ban was another indication of Turkey's creeping Islamization, perhaps even another step on the road toward Iranian-style sharia rule. For members of the liberal Islamic Justice and Development Party (AKP), which leads Turkey's government, and its religious-minded supporters, the parliament's move constituted a victory for democracy and human rights.
Which one is it? The answer really lies in where the AKP government takes things from here and, in that respect, there are already some troubling signs.
The AKP was tapped again last summer to form the government, with a resounding 47 percent of the vote and 341 of the 550 seats in parliament. The party's success was due, in part, to its impressive economic track record, but also because it was able to attract a large number of nonreligious voters who believed that the AKP was the only party that represented the idea of democratic change in Turkey. Although its leadership traces its roots to Turkey's political Islamic movement, the AKP has tried to present itself as something more along the lines of Europe's Christian Democratic parties - socially conservative, but not ruled by religion. During its previous term, for example, the AKP government, led by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, enacted a number of important political reforms, such as the updating of an antiquated penal code that helped place Turkey solidly on track toward its long-held goal of European Union membership. During the election campaign, meanwhile, the AKP's leadership promised to introduce a new, civilian-minded constitution to replace the current one, which was drafted by the Turkish military following a 1980 coup and is considered the source of many of the country's anti-democratic laws, including the headscarf ban.
But since retaining its power, the AKP seems to have lost its enthusiasm for democratic reform. A draft version of the new constitution, though it has been ready for months, has yet to be unveiled. And, although it has promised to do so for the past year and faces strong EU pressure on the subject, the government has yet to take steps to amend Article 301 of the penal code, a vaguely worded law used to punish those who "insult Turkishness" and which has marred Turkey's record on issues of freedom of expression. Nobel Prize laureate Orhan Pamuk and Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, who was murdered by a Turkish nationalist youth on an Istanbul sidewalk a year ago, are two of the law's best-known targets to date.
Actually, the only significant reform that has been passed by the government since its reelection was the package of constitutional amendments that made ending the headscarf ban possible. In this case, the legislation zipped through parliament in a matter of weeks. But it wasn't only the speed with which the legislation was approved that surprised observers. In order to make sure the amendments passed successfully, the government formed what some critics are calling an "unholy alliance" with the opposition Nationalist Action Party (MHP), a hard-line group that has taken a rejectionist stance on many of Turkey's policies relating to the EU, although it is hoping to increase its appeal to religious voters by supporting the ending of the headscarf ban. Many Turkish liberals who have supported the government are now worried that the AKP's zeal for realizing the headscarf reform could come at the expense of other democratic reforms. The AKP's deal with the nationalist MHP has already reaped some bitter fruit, with the government reportedly ready to back off from certain points of a bill that would provide for the return of property confiscated by the Turkish state from religious minority groups. The MHP strongly opposes the bill.
The lifting of the headscarf ban is clearly not the last skirmish in the battle between Turkey's emerging Islamic elite and its entrenched secular one. Some 80 years after the secularizing reforms of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, modern Turkey's founder, the country appears headed for another round of reforms, only this time they aim to open up more space for religion in the public sphere. This is not necessarily a dangerous thing, as long as these reforms go hand-in-hand with democratic changes that benefit all Turks, not just the AKP's core voters.
Government leaders have promised to make 2008 "the year of the EU," and declare that "surprises" are in store. That remains to be seen. But as recent events have shown, the AKP certainly has a greater appetite for taking on issues dear to its voters' hearts even if they are highly divisive than tackling some of the other reforms necessary to bolster Turkish democracy.
The lack of enthusiasm for what could be termed "minority issues" may ultimately not bode well for Turkish secularism. After all, as indicated by the results of last summer's elections, in which the secularist Republican People's Party (CHP) won only 20 percent of the vote, Turkish secularists themselves now constitute a minority (albeit one that still has its hands on some serious levers of power). The day after the vote in parliament, the daily Sabah newspaper ran a front-page cartoon showing a headscarfed woman standing at a bank teller's window with the word "freedom" written on it. Waiting behind her are a collection of Turkish minorities, including a Kurd, an Alevi Muslim, a Christian, a Jew and a gay man. "Don't push," the covered woman says to them. "We've waited a long time for our turn." The worry for secularists, perhaps Turkey's newest minority, is that they may soon find themselves standing at the back of that line.
Yigal Schleifer is a journalist based in Istanbul.