against these assignments and collaborated in their
creation.
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Sondra HaleTurkeyTurkey is one of those countries where reaction
against the ambivalent consequences of moderniza-
tion assumed the form of identity politics, and
where an Islamist movement pushed the Muslim
woman’s “covered identity” to the center of the
debates surrounding secularism, modernization,
and Westernization.
In the mid-1980s when civil society began to
flourish in Turkey, Islamist women’s groups also
took their place among the numerous civil initia-
tives. Although part of a general Islamist move-
ment that was an outlet to express political
dissatisfaction caused by the sharp social, eco-
nomic, and politico-cultural cleavages in the Turk-
ish system, the Islamist women’s groups had their
own specificities. They organized primarily in
defense of their right to wear headscarves, espe-
cially in the universities, and to promote an Islamic
way of life in general. Women, supported by men,
engaged in public demonstrations and boycotts,
and the battle given in defense of the headscarf was
interpreted as an act of protest by the general pub-
lic against the secular state. The 1990s witnessed a
new yet vigorous activism by these women who
organized in the Ladies’ Commissions of the
(Islamist) Welfare Party. They contributed consid-
erably to the electoral victories of this party both at
the local (1994) and national (1995) levels by reg-
istering almost one million members to its ranks
in six years. However, to their disappointment,
women were pushed backstage immediately after
the elections.
The activism of Islamist women was echoed in
various publications, pamphlets, and books, which
led to a heated debate over women’s issues among
themselves. It also drew the attention of non-
Islamist women academicians and feminists result-
turkey 615ing in a proliferation of academic work on Islamist
women. Although very careful about not calling
themselves “Muslim feminists” and always keep-
ing their distance from feminism, which they
claimed to be a Western import corrupting espe-
cially women, Islamist women nevertheless tried
from within an Islamic framework to develop
emancipatory agendas for women. Both female and
male Islamist writers tried to steer a middle course
between interpretations of sociopolitical and cul-
tural realities (veiling and segregation, for example)
of Islam and the universal human rights discourse.
In their effort to assert that there is complete gender
equality in Islam they pointed to the chasm between
the message of the Qur±àn (egalitarianism) and the
manner in which it is historically interpreted, and
argued that it is “tradition tainted by Judaism” and
not Islam as such that has oppressed women; thus
a return to the sources – the Qur±àn and the sunna–
was to be sought (Aktaç1991, Akdemir 1991,
Kırbaço(lu 1991).
Islamist women’s activism provided an opportu-
nity for marginalized women to seek empowerment
(Arat 1999, 89), yet it also demonstrated the limits
of an identity politics based on religiously sanc-
tioned biological essentialism of bodily difference.
According to Islamist writers, gender roles were
God given, therefore fixed and unchangeable; any-
one attempting to change them or blur the bound-
aries between them was in rebellion against God
and showed a “pathological nafssituation” (Hatemi
1991, 329). In the process of modernization, dou-
bly burdened with wage work and family responsi-
bilites, women had lost their identity as women and
the only solution lay in reinforcing traditional gen-
der roles. Therefore it was complementarity and
not equality that women should demand. A promi-
nent Islamist woman writer, Cihan Aktaç, argued
that the feminist movement, in seeking equality
with men and ignoring “women’s fitrat,” failed to
acknowledge the importance of women’s roles as
mothers and homemakers; Islam had given woman
the position of helpmate to man, not his enemy.
Aktaç, while demanding a more active life for
women and their right to enter the public domain,
at the same time endorsed the concept of women’s
fitna(the destructive effects of woman’s potential
for creating discord in the community): “If women
will be shut in the home, then what is the rationale
for veiling and covering? Is this [covering] not the
way to ensure women’s participation in the social
arena without her giving way to fitna?” (Aktaç
1991, 255).
Islamist women’s struggle to question the fair-
ness of republican secularism that excluded them