Islamic Coverings in Turkey: Women, Young Girls, and Economics
During my first trip to Trkey in 2014, I was surprised to see few women sporting Islamic coverings. Although public transit was plastered with advertisements for silk hijabs sported by smiling women wearing shiny trench coats and coordinated makeup, the street itself was relatively bare of covered women. In retrospect, the fact that I spent all my time around the Hagia Sofia and Blue Mosque explains my experience; touristic neighbourhoods are typically only frequented by foreign women since Turkish women understand that the shops and restaurants there are overpriced and the salesmen typically lecherous and inappropriately bold.
The following summer, I moved to Izmir. Izmir, by Turkish standards, is remarkably liberal – a repository of the deification of Ataturk and his doctrine of secularism. In Izmir, bikini-clad ladies roam the beaches and barely-there sparkly dress-clad women roam the nightclubs (before returning home each night to save their virginity for marriage.) Wearing a hijab in Izmir was an act of rebellion, not a capitulation to a ruling social morality. Even my erstwhile boss, a self-professed Muslim from a more conservative city in the south eschewed it. “No, the hijab is not very good. Anyway the way women wear it these days, it is not modest!” she wailed to me once. “If you wear the hijab for modesty, you shouldn’t also wear makeup!” She showed me a picture on her phone of a Facebook friend of hers, smirking shiny red lips at the camera over a sumptuous meal, an orange hijab of expensive fabric carefully arranged atop her head. “See?” she said. “This woman is wearing so much makeup. She looks not modest.”
My more recent forays into Turkey have allowed me to see a third snapshot of Turkish culture. I now live in a mixed neighbourhood of Istanbul. Here, Turkish students and Turkish and Syrian families of varying levels of conservatism live together. In my neighbourhood, it is a bad idea to eat in public during Ramadan. Shorts are a fairly rare sight on both men and women, even in the heat of summer. About 50% of women wear some sort of head covering, from the hijab paired with jeans and a long-sleeved t-shirt to the face-covering niqab styled with matching long flowing black robes.
I’m told that there has been a shift towards covering in recent years – that in the olden days of 20 years ago, women who covered typically only did so following marriage and usually simply tied a scarf loosely over their hair. The new style of more intense covering has been blamed variously on the government, the government, the government, and Arab influence coming in from Syria and the Gulf, a typhoon (apparently) blowing the winds of conservative political Islam Turkey’s way. Of course, these are only the perspectives of the ultra-liberal mostly-Marxist couche sociale that I find myself a part of – it’s not exactly easy for me to gather other perspectives because the people who have them aren’t in the habit of talking to foreigners like me and, as I don’t attend school or work in Turkey, I have equally few opportunities to talk to them.
The prevalence of Islamic covering in Turkey presents an intellectual conundrum for me. As a feminist, I support a woman’s right to wear what she wants. I’m not so blind to the fact that women are presented with many similar messages in the West as they are in Turkey – you should be sexy, but also not sexy. If you’re too sexy, people won’t take you seriously. If you’re not sexy, people won’t think you’re attractive. You should wear makeup to look nice, but not too much because there’s a possibility that people won’t find you attractive if it’s too much. They could also find you too attractive and then it will be your fault if they come onto you inappropriately. You should exercise and keep in shape – but God forbid that a man see the outline of your butt in yoga pants because he might get a boner or talk about seeing your butt to his friends. You shouldn’t care about what men think of you and you should wear what you want for yourself. But be sure that it’s sexy enough to be attractive and modest enough so that nobody can question your character. And don’t forget women. Women are the arbiter of what society thinks too, so if they think you’re not dressing correctly – well, you shouldn’t care, but make sure you’re sexy enough for women to compliment you, but not sexy enough to make their partners be attracted to you.
But back to the hijab. As a Westerner, I’ve always had a live and let live relationship with the hijab. In Canada, whenever I see one I think one of these things:
“I just remembered I forgot to buy dish soap.”
“Oh, a woman wearing hijab.”
“That must be so warm in winter.”
“How does she make it look like a turban? How do the pins stay in place? I wonder if they can prick you by mistake, or are there safety pins specifically for hijabs that you can buy?”
“Is that really all her real hair under that thing?”
“She could be wearing it for so many reasons – it could be because she wants to express her religion outwardly. Or because it’s a way to publicly express her identification with her culture. Or maybe because her family wants her to. Or maybe she didn’t wash her hair today.”
In short, I tend to make the assumption of a more-or-less free choice, or a choice that, at the very least, is just as free as the choice I and many Western women make to dress in ways that tread the brutal line between being attractive and being the sort of person one takes seriously.
This live and let live attitude came with me during my first months in Turkey, and I ardently argued for my perspectives to secularist friends and acquaintances, probably to their great annoyance. After more time spent in the country, however, my perception of the hijab in Turkey has changed; I now understand that pressures to dress a certain way go beyond society and enter many strata of government. To hear my friends tell it, a certain level of conservatism is practically a requirement if you have your eye on a good post in government, and a post in government is like being thrown onto an island of job stability while other Turks drown in the treacherous sea of the Turkish economy. So, while I still affirm an adult woman’s right to wear what she wants, the social pressure that exists in Turkey to dress in a way that covers your body is bothersome to me because the more pressure there is, the less choice a woman actually has.
What bothers me even more is when I see prepubescent girls who are already covered. I have seen a few girls around the age of eight. My sister-in-law told me she once saw a covered little girl around the age of 5. I’m no Muslim theologian, and I haven’t thoroughly studied what Muslim scholars say about Islamic modesty’s links to (female) sexuality. However, this lack of profound knowledge notwithstanding, I do understand that popular perception holds that the hijab is about hiding the body and sexuality or (more generously) about seeing a woman for virtues that have nothing to do with her body and sexuality. So whenever I see young girls with heads already covered, I can’t help but resent the implicit sexualization of the young girl’s body.
If I’ve learned one thing from feeling frustrated about people who cover their children or people who refuse to admit that the hijab isn’t as free a choice as it could be, it is this: engaging another culture can present real and serious difficulty to people with a particular notion of ethics, morality, and what is good for people; it is not as simple as just “respecting” somebody else’s culture. Sometimes, differing beliefs can even motivate the essentially altruistic behaviour of trying to change something about a culture (although, of course this may not be perceived positively by the culture one is trying to change.) Even though I say nothing when I see eight-years-olds wearing hijab, I feel suddenly empathetic for the bad guy “orientalists” and “missionaries” and “colonists” of history, not because I think all their actions can be justified, but because I understand what it feels like to see something in another culture and believe that it’s basically wrong.
When do we have the right to try to change something? Or to make a moral call? Does anybody have any ideas that are better than mine?
**To be very clear: I believe that adult women should be able to make the free choice to cover or uncover. I also believe that implicit sexualisation of young girls and being forced to cover for economic and other unavoidable reasons is wrong.
