Turkey’s Ruling Party Survives High Court Vote : NPR
Posted by Ginny on August 3, 2008
Assalamu alaikum, let me see if I understand this correctly, the ruling party in Turkey is implementing democratic reforms, is putting Turkey on the path to joining the EU, yet they’re against secularism and called Islamist because they want to lift the ban on headscarves?
It would seem to me that if this party was truly “Islamist” they’d not be even thinking about joining the EU. But oh, all you have to do is bring up the headscarf and oh my, you’re an Islamist, even if everything else you’re trying to do says otherwise.
This “headscarf is a display of political Islam” stuff angers me, whether it’s in Turkey, France, or wherever. Political Islam, my Headscarf! I can assure you that I, and most of the women I know who wear headscarves, aren’t thinking about “political” anything when we put them on. We’re doing it to please Allah and because it’s the right thing to do, and not in order to make some sort of political statement. And denying women the right to an education, or access to government buildings, etc., and all other kinds of barriers imposed on women who wear headscarves does the very thing that banning the headscarf is supposedly seeking to stop, i.e., the oppression of women. I don’t understand why those in favor of this sort of ban don’t see that, unless of course they are thinking “oh it’s no big deal, she can just take the scarf off”.
It’s not just a piece of cloth on a woman’s head, and yet it is only a piece of cloth. It’s like asking someone to walk without a shirt on, to many of us, and we’d not dream of doing that, so we, well, the women who wear scarves, don’t go to school, don’t go to government buildings, unless we do so grudging, and how is that in the nam eof “democracy”, etc.
It seems to me that the only reason we have this ban is because of misguided notions of “oppression” and “forced wearing by male relatives” that is associaited with wearing hijab, and a little bit of “secularism” and “Islamism” thrown in there too.
It all is very angering to me the ignorance and short-sightedness displayed by those in favor of this sort of a ban.
