growing pressures to be loyal wives and sacrificing
mothers, that the public image of the modern
Turkish woman had little impact on everyday gen-
der relations (Sirman 1989), and that women’s
liberated bodies have been the source of a “schizo-
phrenic identity,” which has left little room for
women’s personal fulfillment (Tekeli 1990) or even
a sexualized or gendered identity.
The goals of the early Turkish Republic equated
secularization and Westernization, which were
contrasted with traditional Islamic practices. The
traditionally dressed woman wearing a headscarf
was the embodiment of backwardness and the
Ottoman past. In the secularist imagination, such
women continue to inhabit the margins of modern
society, epitomized in Turkey’s villages which have
not yet been fully modernized and in the shanty
towns on the outskirts of major cities where
migrants from rural areas congregate and form the
lowest class.
With the rise of Islamism, women’s dress and the
organization of gender became the focal point of
yet another controversy over identity and national
policy. In 1984, political protests erupted over
the government’s policy of banning headscarves on
university campuses (Olsen 1985). Before this,
women adopted modern dress when they entered
schools and universities, giving up the headscarf as
a sign of the traditional uneducated woman. Young
Islamist women in the early 1980s were at the van-
guard of a movement that had developed a new
perspective on the relationship between national
identity and the West. Influenced by the writings of
thinkers such as Maudùdìin Pakistan and al-Qu†b
in Egypt, Islamism was a growing transnational
movement; it disrupted Orientalist dichotomies
which equated modernity, technological develop-
ment, and the West and contrasted them with the
backwardness of the Muslim world. For many
Islamists, the position of women and the headscarf
became key symbols for asserting the relevance of
Islam for the modern world. Women’s identity in
the Islamist movement is sharply distinguished
from what both Islamists and secularists label the
“traditional” Muslim woman, whom both see as a
passive bearer of habits and local practices. The
Islamist woman’s headscarf is worn in a style dis-
tinctively different from that of the traditional vil-
lage woman but similar to that of Islamist women
across the globe, marking a Muslim identity that
transcends national differences and identities.
The woman who adopts the Islamist headscarf is
asserting a Muslim identity based on a conscious,
personal decision rather than on submission to her
community or to the authority of men (Göle 1996,290 identity politics
Ewing 2000). Becoming knowledgeable about Islam
through study groups and maintaining public visi-
bility are important elements of women’s Islamist
practice which contrast with the traditional organ-
ization of gendered spaces. Some women have
asserted an Islamic feminist position. When the
Islamist Welfare Party first came to power for a
short time in the late 1990s, some women who had
played an active political role in the party were dis-
appointed when their male colleagues failed to give
them significant positions in the new government,
and openly spoke out against efforts to relegate
them back into the home. The Islamist headscarf
also has a class dimension (White 2002): many of
these women have gained access to higher educa-
tion, seek professional careers, and lead urban mid-
dle-class lives. They assert an identity, not against
modernity, but against specific forms of secularism
and the dominance of Western European cultural
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