72 No god but God
ON INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S Day in 1998, many in the
Western world were stunned to hear Masoumeh Ebtekar, at the time
Iran’s vice president of environmental affairs and the highest-ranking
woman in the Iranian government, present an opening address in
which she lashed out against Afghanistan’s Taliban régime and their
horrific human rights violations against women. Although this was
some years before the Taliban became a household name in the West,
what most shocked the international audience was that Ms. Ebtekar
delivered her vehement condemnation of the Taliban—a fundamen-
talist régime that forced its women into veiling and seclusion—while
she herself was fully clad in a traditional black chador that covered
every inch of her body save for the flushed features of her impassioned
face.
Around the same time that Ms. Ebtekar was censuring the reli-
giously inspired misogyny of the Taliban, the Turkish parliament was
in an uproar over the decision of a newly elected representative, Merve
Kavakci, to take the oath of office while wearing a headscarf. Ms.
Kavakci was angrily denounced by her fellow members, some of whom
shouted obscenities at her from the floor of parliament. Although she
had made no political or religious statements whatsoever, Turkey’s
president at the time, Suleyman Demirel, accused her of being a for-
eign spy and an agent provocateur. For the simple act of displaying her
faith, Ms. Kavakci was not only dismissed from her position as a demo-
cratically elected member of parliament, but, in an act of profound
symbolism, she was stripped of her Turkish citizenship.
It may seem incongruous that a conservative Muslim country like
Iran—in which some manner of veiling is mandatory for all adult
women—boasts one of the most robust and politically active women’s
movements in the Muslim world, while at the same time a secular
democracy like Turkey—in which the veil is expressly outlawed in
much of the public sector—routinely deprives veiled women of their
rights to government employment and higher education. But to
understand what is behind this seeming incongruity, one must con-
sider the conflicting ways in which the veil has been defined through-
out history by those who have never worn it.
For European colonialists like Alfred, Lord Cromer, the British
consul general to Egypt at the end of the nineteenth century, the veil