by Alev Scott
The older generation, while not in a position to enjoy educational opportunities themselves, are also getting used to the gradually shifting lie of the land. On the bus from Urfa to Mardin, I chatted to an old lady who told me with great pride that her granddaughter was sitting exams for university entry, but she was prouder still that all her daughters were married and mothers themselves. This lady came from a generation whose foremost priority for their daughters was security, and in the east that still means marriage and cementing family life with children and more children (the average number per family in the eastern region comprising Mardin and Siirt was seven in 2011). Unfortunately, it does not look like the government is interested in reducing the poverty and strain caused by huge family sizes – in fact, quite the opposite. Erdoğan has repeatedly called for Turkish couples to have at least three children in order to ensure a booming economy. He explained it succinctly: ‘One or two children mean bankruptcy. Three children mean we are not improving but not receding either. So, I repeat, at least three children are necessary in each family, because our population risks ageing.’ During the Gezi protests in 2013, Erdoğan claimed that unspecified ‘forces’, jealous of Turkey’s growing power, had tried to scupper the Turkish economy by encouraging birth control and abortion, but declared that he would not let this pernicious situation continue.
On 25 May 2012, Erdoğan announced at an AKP Women’s Conference that ‘abortion is murder’, sparking a media frenzy. Over the next few days, a bill effectively banning abortion was discussed. Significantly, this issue was raised smack bang in the middle of another incredibly controversial subject, namely the furore over the Uludere air raid which had happened five months previously and had recently been brought back into the media, much to the government’s detriment. Thirty-four Kurdish smugglers had been killed on the Iraqi border by Turkish soldiers, who had apparently mistaken them for PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) rebels on the basis of aerial images provided by US surveillance. Erdoğan has never apologised for the incident, and seized the occasion of a press conference to tell journalists that ‘every abortion is an Uludere’. The extraordinary nature of the bill’s announcement seemed to achieve what critics of the government saw as an attempt to distract attention from Uludere to something which would not, in the end, be put into practice, and which would in the meantime please the government’s religious voting base.
The new legislation would change the present ten-week limit for termination to four weeks, at which point most women do not even realise they are pregnant. It sought to eliminate any feasible exceptions, including pregnancies resulting from rape. The Turkish government, we were assured, would magnanimously take into foster care the babies born of rape. As an addendum to the abortion bill, it was also proposed that Caesarean sections should become less easily available. This seemed more reasonable, since around fifty per cent of mothers in Turkey are given Caesareans as a matter of course, because in state hospitals it is more convenient for the doctors to be able to schedule births, and in private hospitals, more profitable. But Erdoğan’s questionable claim that Caesareans limit mothers to two births immediately cast suspicion on his motives.
Of course, an outcry ensued, with protests all over the country, petitions, noted feminists writing impassioned articles like the Turkish novelist Elif Shafak’s for the Guardian, and a great deal of foreign interest, especially from the EU, who immediately cautioned the Turkish government against restricting women’s right to choose. Ironically, Turkey introduced the current abortion law nearly thirty years ago. It is hard not to view the current situation as a serious regression.
Bolstering theories that the bill was only proposed to draw attention from the Uludere raid, and to gratify the AKP’s considerable devout following, nothing concrete was passed, but the subject has not been dropped. It has resurfaced sporadically since its sensational introduction, with the AKP trying to include clauses in the proposed new constitution relating to the ‘healthy continuation of the human race’, which, among other things, would prohibit sperm banks because ‘every child has the right to know his father’. A tour company which foresaw a gap in the market and started advertising three-day ‘abortion trips’ to destinations such as London, Northern Cyprus and Bosnia had its licence revoked by the Ministry of Tourism.
You can be as cynical as you like about the AKP’s political manoeuvring, the judicious timing and juggling of its contentious announcements, and claim that they are mainly for show, but there is an undeniable undercurrent of religious rhetoric that is, to my mind, disturbing. By all means, allow people to practise their religion, and to have an unexpected baby, or wear a headscarf, or fast during Ramadan. But it is when Mehmet Görmez, who as head of Turkey’s Religious Affairs Directorate is both government official and high-ranking Muslim cleric, says that ‘The mother is not the real owner of the foetus she carries [. . .] It is a gross injustice to handle this issue as a women’s issue, as men have always held the greatest responsibility in this issue throughout history’ that my blood really boils. It parboils on hearing this sentence uttered in a purely religious context, but what really angers me is the political voice this man has. Turkey needs to wake up to the real issues surrounding women’s rights. In 2011, women’s participation in the labour force fell to thirty-one per cent. In the same year, the name of the Ministry for Women and Family Affairs was changed to Family and Social Policies, at a time when women’s rights desperately need addressing. The last thing anyone needed was a bill limiting abortion.
Being a woman with a firmly secularist outlook and a Muslim mother, I have a rational respect for religious Turks but am often surprised by my unexpectedly strong emotional reactions to being treated as an alien entity by certain Turkish men. I have already spoken of my sad, one-sided friendship with the Cheese Man – that I have become used to. But odd occasions catch me out; for instance, in Urfa my boyfriend and I were given a tour of the nearby Atatürk Dam by a friend of a friend called Burak (incidentally, the name of the Prophet Muhammad’s horse). An otherwise lovely man, I noticed he never directly addressed me or really looked at me. When it came to our goodbyes, I thanked him profusely and held out my hand. He looked away and made no move to meet it, leaving me to lamely back away. In hindsight, it must have been quite a comical scene, and indeed my boyfriend joked about it as we walked off, but I was upset. At the risk of sounding melodramatic, I had felt like an Untouchable – which, of course, I was. In my hitherto sheltered state, I was convinced that some great outrage had taken place – an offence to my sex and my status, something that must surely be illegal in modern society. When I asked my more knowledgeable friends about this behaviour, it turned out that the man was probably a Shafi’i (a member of a certain school of religious law within Sunni Islam); if I had touched him (or, worse, the other way round), he would have had to wash and pray to cleanse himself.
Since then, I have grown more used to examples like this, and have learned, at least in part, not to take offence from individuals. Islam should not only be thought of in terms of crazy fundamentalist examples like this. Mehmet Bey, for example, was the model of gentlemanly behaviour, kind, patient, working for very little money with women on the TGMP project, a typical AKP-supporting, moderately religious Muslim. How these two men could identify with each other is slightly beyond me.
There are plenty of liberal women like me in Turkey, but they are more equipped to deal with the gamut of social and religious etiquette, having grown up with it. In a way this makes life easier for them, but they are also judged unfavourably by the Turkish standard, which I am not. They are often in the slightly uncomfortable position of having Western aspirations fettered by the expectations of their family and social group, in some cases, or even just by their colleagues and acquaintances. Even if these expectations are not expressed, women like Selin, my ex-flatmate, are acutely aware of what is expected in Turkish society, and are either consciously or unconsciously shaped by that.
Recently I had an enlig
htening conversation with a Turkish gardener called Murat, who worked for a friend with whom I was staying in a village on the Aegean coast. He was enquiring about the other guests, and the conversation turned to who was sleeping in which room. It was clear that he was rather shocked that unmarried young couples were sharing rooms, and I took the plunge and asked him to explain why.
‘These people are in love, but not married?’
Yes.
‘And tomorrow they might love someone else?’
Maybe.
‘In Turkey, we men like to know we are the first, we look for kızlık [literally, ‘maidenhood’]. In England, don’t they look for that?’
I tried, hesitantly, to explain that people change, love fades and blossoms again, etc., but was aware of sounding rather lame and Bertie Woosteresque after Murat’s unapologetic, hardline logic. I must point out that he was not condemning our lifestyle, and did not mention religion once – he had the slightly prudish outlook of many Turks, but I think he genuinely wanted to know why it didn’t bother us that our partners had previously loved Another, or even Others.
Critics of traditional Turkey are cynical about this obsession with kızlık (virginity, basically), saying that Turkish men feel secure marrying virgins because there is no chance that they will be compared unfavourably, as a lover, to another man. Whether or not that is true of the majority of cases, I am not convinced that such a premeditated concern is at the root of it. It is not such a peculiar phenomenon, and while to an English ear it may sound rather Victorian, you just have to look at the Bible-bashing belt of the US today, or the Catholics of southern Italy, to see that it is far from being particular to Turkey or indeed Islam. I think it is rather a primeval instinct, and in the case of Turkey, at least, it has only a coincidental religious slant; in an archaic society, everything you do is part of your religion, because your religion is formed by what you do – relatively few people actually read the Koran, but many of its edicts are part and parcel of their communities, which have been formed over thousands of years. Mores like the prizing of virginity pre-date formal religion across much of the world. It must also be said that Turks are indescribably romantic – ‘my one true love’ is the sentiment that no doubt reinforces this particular tradition (to suppose that it created the tradition would be appropriately but misguidedly romantic in itself).
To return to Murat’s attitude, which mirrors that of many Turks I have met, I would like to make clear that I was not, and very rarely am, made to feel judged for being different. Murat, for instance, was almost childlike in his quest to understand my attitude, and to explain his own, with not a hint of rebuke in his voice or expression. I had a long girly gossip with his wife the following afternoon, and when she expressed the hope that my boyfriend and I would get married it was in no way a holier-than-thou, ‘lest you rot in hell’ hope, but the genuine, generous impulse of one human being wishing happiness for another. I have often felt that, despite my supposedly open mind and liberal attitudes, I am much quicker to judge these people than they are to judge me.
Too often people in the West, and indeed some from the East, regard women in headscarves as fettered, unhappy, symbolic of some dark Islamic threat, as though the headscarf were as simple as a uniform of repression. In Turkey this is even more the case because Atatürk’s anti-religious rulings emerged in conjunction with unambiguously progressive changes such as granting the vote to women; in the 1935 general election, eighteen female MPs joined the Turkish Parliament before women in many European countries even had the right to vote. Thus (anti-)religious reforms and social reforms have been mixed up in the Turkish psyche for a long time, leading to a deeper distrust of religion among some circles than seems reasonable. The current government is attempting to solve this, but it still remains to be seen if it will succeed. More to the point, I am not convinced that religious and political figureheads have done an awful lot to support women.
I wonder if Prime Minister Erdoğan ever thinks of Atatürk’s stirring words in the early days of the republic: ‘If, from now on, women do not share in the social life of the nation, we shall never attain our full development. We shall remain irremediably backward, incapable of treating on equal terms with the civilisations of the West.’ Depressingly, things have regressed since then. In July 2010, at the International Women’s Meeting in Istanbul, Turkey’s current leader proclaimed: ‘Men and women are not equal. They only complement each other.’
I find it even more frustrating when Turkish women merrily jump on the misogynistic bandwagon. In 2012 the head of Erzurum’s Women Entrepreneurs, Zeynep Çomaklı, gave a speech in which she said: ‘Woman should not be governors or district governors. You should make a sound when you slam your fist on the desk. Not every post is a post for a woman.’ Çomakli may not be as public a figure as Erdoğan, but she is a woman, supposedly a role model for ambitious women in Turkey. The struggle to achieve sexual equality seems even bleaker when women are fighting themselves as well as male politicians and family members. With or without headscarves, sexual equality remains an important goal in Turkey and, unfortunately, it sometimes feels like a goal which is very distant.
5
Transvestites in Tarlabaşı
A male friend of mine who used to live in Syria once said to me: ‘It’s very easy to be gay in Syria. Men are so affectionate with each other that it goes unnoticed. Besides, homosexuality doesn’t officially exist, so really . . . what’s to notice?’
Striking though this revelation initially was, I realised that there is a similar situation in Turkey, definitely a Middle Eastern country in this respect. There is plenty of what in a Western country would be thought of as homosexual behaviour, but relatively few of the men having sexual relations with other men would consider themselves gay. They are probably married fathers of four, their sexuality not in question either to outsiders or to themselves. Turkey is relatively free of the strict classifications of sexual behaviour that are in place in Western societies, but it is equally free of the Western tolerance for men who openly profess a preference for men over women. In a country where many young men in conservative communities are either in arranged marriages or unmarried, without the option of casual relationships with women, a kind of homosexuality of convenience is not a surprising outcome. It is accepted as normal in practice (rather like old-fashioned English attitudes to boarding school and the navy), but not in theory – homosexuality ‘by choice’ is first ignored, then condemned, which is bad news for gay rights.
Physical affection between Turkish men does not have the same implications as it does between Western men, where it is unusual and therefore must be classified as gay. Turks in general are very affectionate, and what Americans call bromance is absolutely the norm. Men unselfconsciously link arms while walking down the street, kiss each other on the cheek, give a gentle squeeze to the shoulders of a seated friend. I have to admit it was odd for me at first, used as I was to the chilly timbre of most English interactions, but now it is perfectly normal, and I have got used to regarding affection between men in the same spirit as affection between women. When I am in England I miss the displays of public affection which are symptomatic of the warmth felt between men, women, friends, even the most casual of acquaintances in this hot-blooded country. This warmth does not equate to sexual interest, but sometimes they can overlap. What is refreshing is that there is not the same stigma attendant on male affection that still persists in, say, the UK, despite the politically correct attitudes that have been encouraged in the last few decades to remove it.
I live in Beyoğlu, which is the gay hub of Istanbul and full of areas which resemble very down-to-earth versions of Old Compton Street in Soho. A couple of years after I moved to Istanbul I met Ami Nouvel, a documentary maker based in Berlin who was making a film about Kurdish ‘gay for pay’ sex workers in Beyoğlu. I was intrigued by the project and joined him on set.
Ami’s main focus was Aquarius, a gay brothel in Beyoğlu. It has a licence for a
sauna but is in fact very well known on the grapevine (and indeed now in Lonely Planet) as a brothel. I was absolutely not allowed in by the owner, who threatened to call the police when he saw me, but I managed to sneak in a side door with Ami and his crew when the owner was welcoming two Japanese tourists in. We entered into a long, dingy hall filled with wet towels being dried by two industrial-sized fans at either end, and as we walked along, these swirled to reveal young men in tiny hamam-style towels wandering to and from clients in rooms off the hall.
We found out that the six employees of the sauna were all brothers of varying ages, from a big Kurdish family which had moved to Istanbul from the south-east around fifteen years ago when the father was jailed for having ‘terrorist sympathies’. The second eldest brother runs the joint (but does not work there as his brothers do), and looks like a typically conservative, religious Kurd. At one point I was astonished to see him perform his prayers in a corner of the reception room as we chatted outside to his young brother who was offering his services to both Ami (who is gay) and me. What I soon realised was that these men did not consider themselves gay – they were merely doing a job, and getting paid very well by Istanbul standards. They were at pains to distance themselves from their professional persona when they talked to us, flirting outrageously with me to prove their heterosexuality, which was rather strange. The eldest of them, Sabri, confided to us that two of his brothers had never been with a woman and this was a source of great misery to them. They were clearly confused about their sexuality but wanted to class themselves as straight to outsiders, and I think a great part of this was because they were from a conservative family. They claimed to only ever act as the active partner, because they saw that as the more masculine of homosexual roles, but it is really impossible to know whether that was just an attempt to save their pride.