by Alev Scott
I have a great deal of sympathy for those Lebanese girls. They are young, hormonal, and want to show themselves off – why on earth not? The fact that they manage to do this despite the intended restrictions of their conservative code of dress is actually a victory, but it is patently ridiculous and the restrictions can only serve to exacerbate the girls’ frustration. You see this kind of small-scale rebellion at every level of conservatism. I have observed Arab tourists in full burqas in Istanbul shopping malls with only their eyes showing – but what eyes! All the effort that would have been put into an outfit is concentrated on the only tiny strip showing us who this person is – eyes so immaculately dressed in mascara and eyeliner, eyebrows shaped to perfection, that the difference between this and the shapeless black sack she is wearing is almost, but not quite, comical. If, as in some cases, the eye area is covered by a mask or visor, you must look downward to the feet for some sign of personal identity or femininity – beautifully pedicured feet in exquisite Jimmy Choos or Manolos. I find these cases very sad, and quite different from the young girls who have managed to buck the system.
Significantly, there is a huge amount of money in the Islamic clothing industry, which is expanding fast in Turkey with the growth of the religiously conservative middle class. Companies like Primo Moda advertise items for women such as the Hasema bathing suit, or ‘burkini’, which covers the body from top to toe, and long cotton sleeves for ‘when you wish you could wear that three-quarter-length shirt if only it were long-sleeved’. These kinds of brands declare themselves the champions of the ‘modest but fashionable woman’, which is fair enough, but what I cannot reconcile is the paradox between the nature of the clothing on sale and the alluring pose of the model in the photographs, the same pose you see in mainstream fashion shots everywhere. Clothes look better worn by attractive women with hands on hips and arch expressions, which is why the companies advertise them this way, but this is directly at odds with the ethos of modesty which supposedly defines the brand. The female form is a battleground in this kind of situation – the line between glamour and dowdiness is stretched and blurred in the quest for the acceptable yet attractive marriage of modesty and femininity. It is total hypocrisy.
Burqas, like headscarves, are a highly emotive subject in Turkey. There are, of course, critics of conservative Islam everywhere, but in Turkey overt displays of religion are seen by many as a terrible betrayal of the principles of the secularist, modern republic as envisaged by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. From 1923, he brought in a series of reforms to prohibit the wearing of traditional and religious clothing, starting with the fez (the famous ‘Hat Law’), and including, most significantly, the law relating to ‘Prohibited Garments’ in 1934. These garments included the veil and turban, and Western-style dress was actively promoted in their stead.
Burqa’ed women can be seen as far afield as Harrods or the Champs-Elysées, but their significance in Turkey is different. There is the recent surge in Arab tourists to Turkey to account for the presence of these particular ladies, but the burqa’ed form in general is a relatively new sight in Turkey, stemming from a religious demographic steadily growing in confidence since the mid-eighties, after the coup in 1980. The rules governing the wearing of headscarves and burqas in public institutions have a long and chequered history in Turkey. Women have been turned away from universities, civil service positions and indeed government posts for wearing a headscarf, but throughout various periods in the last thirty years the rule has been ignored, bent and reinforced. In February 2008, the AKP put forward a bill to revoke the headscarf ban in universities, demanding that everyone should have an equal right to education, but five months later, Turkey’s Constitutional Court upheld the ban, arguing that secularism was an integral part of Turkey’s constitution. In 2010, the Higher Education Board (YÖK) sent a circular to universities telling them to ease up on the ‘no headscarf’ rule. Many universities complied, but many others insisted on observing the ban and prevented headscarved students entering lectures and classes. The most recent call for headscarf acceptance came in the controversial ‘Democratisation Package’ put forward by the AKP in October 2013, further escalating the legal back-and-forth between defenders and critics of the ban.
The burqa is by no means ubiquitous but is not uncommon in some parts of the country, including some parts of Istanbul, as I discussed in the opening chapters. While I have many sympathies with the Kemalist point of view, and admit to finding burqas disturbing, I think headscarves are a different matter. I would not wear one out of choice myself, but I do think that a non-judgemental attitude is much healthier given the indisputable fact that the majority of the Turkish population is religious in practice as well as theory, and women from a religious background in many cases feel more comfortable and indeed more free to go about their business if they can wear a headscarf in public. I can even understand those who charge headscarf-banning authorities with the very crime of which they are accused; namely, repression. Reciprocally, I very much welcome not feeling judged for being uncovered in areas where most women wear a headscarf. It should work both ways; sometimes it does not.
My mother spent the weeks preceding my departure to Istanbul trying to convince me to leave all my summer clothes behind. She is scarred by her own experience of arriving in Ankara as a naïve, mini-skirted student in the sixties, fresh from provincial Northern Cyprus, excited to wear her fashionable new clothes in the capital city of Turkey. When she was walking down a busy street one day, a venerable old man called out to her. She stopped politely, waiting for him to approach, whereupon he slapped the back of her bare thigh so hard that she had a red handprint of shame to mark the rest of her journey. She does not want me to go through a similar experience, which is fair enough, but I have learned my own way.
A lot of the fear and hate that secular Turks feel for their religious counterparts is fuelled by the notion of rural Turkey, in particular the east, as a backward, fanatical society that drags the country back to the Dark Ages and stops it from fulfilling its potential as an advanced state on a par with (the rest of) Europe. Religion should not be confused with poverty, obviously, but one can see why it is easy to unconsciously equate these impoverished, devout communities with the problems that plague them.
In my mind, the problem is not religion but a very deep-seated patriarchy, which makes it difficult for girls to participate fully in either school or an independent career. This situation self-perpetuates from generation to generation, mainly due to the socially cancerous effects of a generally poor education system. It is hard to make the distinction between patriarchy and conservative religion, particularly when it comes to girls being excluded from school, and this is not the place to attempt it. I can merely report what I have heard and observed.
Despite nationwide rules applying to school attendance, the number of girls in high school is significantly lower than boys in every region of Turkey, and particularly in the east. This is often due to very large family sizes which call for everyone to chip in to the agricultural labour central to many households’ livelihoods, and the care of the younger members of the family. The fact that girls (and in many cases boys too) attend just a couple of years of school and then drop out is obviously detrimental to their future prospects. Both in Antep and in Diyarbakır, I was struck by the sight of children climbing over the fences of school yards to play with their peers at break time, unnoticed by harassed teachers amid the mayhem. It was clearly a daily occurrence; a very sad token of what these kids were missing out on both in terms of camaraderie and formal education.
Beyond this root problem, there is a fundamental lack of autonomy that extends to these girls when they grow up. They are restricted in terms of financial independence, choice in marriage and opportunities to socialise. The ramifications of breaking free of these restrictions are occasionally reported in national media in the form of honour killings, for example. Again, this is widely viewed in the West as a phenomenon peculiar to Islam, but I think
it is inextricably linked to the more archaic, regional mores of family identity and kinship, which are much harder for an outsider to understand and indeed to criticise. Either way, what is really needed is not criticism but an attempt to solve at least the basic problems.
The greatest beacon of hope I have seen in the east of Turkey is an organisation called the Turkish Grameen Microfinance Project (TGMP), which offers business loans to women all over the country, but most significantly to repressed women in the Kurdish and Arab communities in the south-east of Turkey. All across rural Turkey, from Antalya to the Black Sea, I have seen women working in fields, chopping wood, planting crops and hoeing. In cities, where the public eye is more present than in the countryside, women work in the home, raising huge families. Either way, Turkish women work just as hard as men, if not more so. The difference is that they do not get paid as men do, and that is why the TGMP is so revolutionary in that it gives them the chance to take financial responsibility and the potential to make a lot of profit from their own enterprise.
In May 2012 I visited the regional project headquarters in Diyarbakır, Urfa, Mardin and Gaziantep, where I interviewed many of the women and the people who run the project. It was founded in 2003 by Dr Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning creator of the microcredit concept, and Aziz Akgül, a former Turkish MP with Kurdish origins, from Diyarbakır. After much initial scepticism, both from the Turkish government and rural women unexpectedly offered the chance to be self-employed, the scheme has had resounding success; so far more than $100 million has been given out in loans, there is currently a hundred per cent payback rate and around sixty thousand women are actively enrolled in the scheme as I write. Groups of women from any particular area sign up to secure each other’s loans in the event of someone being unable to repay, which simultaneously gives the participants confidence while galvanising entrepreneurial energy – no one wants to let the side down. Moreover, the enormity and novelty of being entrusted with money means that these women are extremely cautious investors. Those who fund TGMP do not expect huge returns, but there is easily enough interest generated to cover costs, consistently.
TGMP serves as a significant counter-example to Turkey’s generally poor reputation in the areas both of gender equality and interaction with Kurdish and other minorities. These women, as former victims of religious suppression, terror and domestic violence, are at face value the least likely of successful business people. Yet here they are, proudly independent and quietly working away, while women’s-rights NGOs, despite sterling efforts, achieve very little in the face of ingrained patriarchy.
Most of the TGMP loan holders I met were shy, unassuming ladies who looked nothing like entrepreneurial social pioneers, although that’s exactly what they were. You got the sense that while they were ambitious for their children, particularly their daughters, they themselves were working because they had to, and the benefits of social and financial independence were secondary to supplementing the household coffers.
Occasionally, however, I came across some unabashed feminists. Safiye Hanım, whom I met in Diyarbakır with the local TGMP co-ordinators, was in her element as she showed us into the restaurant she bought six months ago, chattering all the while and sporadically shouting instructions to her all-male staff in the kitchen. She belongs to the flamboyantly covered class of ladies I mentioned earlier, more common to countries like Lebanon; her vivid purple eye shadow demanded notice, and her personality burned through the headscarf she wore as if it were an accessory of purely sartorial choice. Safiye sat us down and ordered pide (a kind of bread filled with cheese or meat), obliterating our protests with a dazzling hostess smile.
‘Of course you must eat! Alev hanım, you are new to Diyarbakır? Welcome, eat, eat!’
Safiye, with impressive initiative, approached TGMP when her husband was laid off work as a dolmuş driver as the result of an accident. Most newcomers are referred to the programme by friends, or are gradually persuaded to join by TGMP employees who conduct a sort of conversion crusade, methodically targeting local homes. Safiye, however, approached the organisation herself, bullying the Diyarbakır office staff with relentless charisma into advancing an unprecedented amount of money, straight up, so that she could put down the deposit for the purchase of the restaurant. The TGMP girls accompanying me on this visit fell silent, intimidated, as Safiye turned to the subject of her monthly credit allowance with all the assurance of a seasoned City trader: ‘Three thousand lira? What a joke! Girls, how can I run this lot on that? I need at least ten thousand. Tell Mehmet Bey [the chief of the Diyarbakır office] what I want, he won’t refuse me. We understand business, Mehmet and I.’ When I asked Safiye whether her male staff resented being subordinate to a woman, she laughed and yelled out to the kitchen: ‘Ali! Serdar! Do you resent me? No? Back to work then!’
I spent my last day in Diyarbakır, a Monday, in the TGMP headquarters speaking to women who came in to collect their weekly allowance, plus the odd insurance payout. The first of them arrived at nine in the morning, and by eleven the offices were packed with seated and standing women, but it was oddly quiet save for the calling out of queue numbers and a low hum of conversation. It was like a very refined and sedentary market, wads of cash handed here and there, women waiting patiently in turn for the means to run their lives. A few of the women were pregnant and many had children with them. When I asked one lady why her son was not in school, she told me that state schooling is only provided from the age of seven; before that age parents have to pay for private schooling. This is a hindrance for mothers trying to work; in an attempt to solve the problem, some mothers choose to take their older children out of school to look after younger siblings, and, unsurprisingly, those chosen are generally girls. This was yet another example of the inadequacies of an archaic education system affecting the future chances of girls or the freedom of their mothers, and I had to temper my reaction in the presence of this quietly resigned lady, steadily answering my rather impertinent questions.
A further benefit of the TGMP programme is the social support which is not explicitly planned but comes about organically due to the clublike nature of the organisation, and is as valuable to the women involved as the monetary help. Because the programme is restricted to women, husbands of prospective members are relaxed about allowing their spouses to attend meetings and work with the other women involved. This is actually quite rare, considering that many women in these communities are not allowed to socialise out of the house alone. They are given the opportunity to discover solidarity in these group scenarios, they realise that they are not alone with their problems of marital disputes or violence, and it acts as a form of therapy.
On the flight back from Diyarbakır, I tried to work out what it was that had impressed me so much about TGMP, aside from the extraordinary cases and individuals I had met. Something was missing, but in a good way: an agenda. There is no rhetoric about gender empowerment or social change, or any political content to the programme whatsoever. It is completely direct and straightforward, giving money to the women running their own businesses, ensuring independence and self-respect through the very simple procedure of giving a manageable loan. Even better, the secondary effects of the project are beginning to be felt, and at the very least, sixty thousand women are successfully running businesses in some of the most patriarchal, impoverished and conservative areas of Turkey – something which I very much doubt any government could have achieved, even if they had the inclination.
Seeing these kinds of women makes me optimistic about social progress in the east; TGMP is of course a catalyst, but I have seen signs of change in other cases, which gives hope that, gradually, the idea of education and independence in women as a positive thing is catching on in the area. It is not something that can happen overnight; I hope it happens within my lifetime.
One evening in the old quarter of Mardin, my boyfriend and I were toiling up the hill to the castle and its unparalleled view of Mesopotamia. It was one of
those occasions when both of us were rather tired and secretly would have happily given up to go and have some çay and narghile somewhere, but neither wanted to be the first to voice this. Occasionally we encountered a shepherd or villager coming down the hill, exchanged our selams and eyed them enviously as they descended. Suddenly, happy voices hailed us from on high and we looked up to see a child and young woman in an almond tree by the side of the path, vigorously shaking the branches and scattering furry green almonds onto laughing family members assembled below. We were invited to share the almonds (surprisingly delicious when unripe) and to inspect their small garden and house.
Jumping down from the tree, the young woman, headscarved like every local woman I had seen in the area, cheerily held forth on the magnificent view of Mardin stretched out before us. It turned out she was about to leave her hometown and head off to Mersin University to take a degree in religious studies. Her family were very proud of her. I have to admit that when I heard the subject of her degree my heart sank a little, before I forced myself to consider her situation fairly. Here was a confident young woman, devout but unfazed by a foreign couple, so far showing herself to be more open-minded than I was. The attitude of a Kemalist, which I have undoubtedly absorbed to some extent, is always that of automatic suspicion and distaste when confronted with a mix of religion and education: it produces a sort of mental curdling akin to the mixing of yoghurt and lemon. Put in perspective, however, this young woman’s prospects were very much preferable to the fates of girls who, for generations, have spent their formative years in fields rather than classrooms. This girl had been to school; she was making her own choice to go to university and will lead a relatively independent life, compared to her grandmother or even her mother.