Politics Without Guarantees: The Headscarf Ban

Abstract

For almost three decades now, since the 1980 military coup, the women’s headscarf issue has figured prominently in the ongoing debate over Islam’s increasing presence in the public sphere in Turkey. Women who wear the Islamic headscarf insists that it helps them make sense of their public life experience, while others view it as a symbol of political Islam. With the exception of a few scholarly works on the subject (Abu-Lughod 1986/2000; Hoodfar 1997; Mahmood 2005; Ozdalga 1997; Saktanber 2002), the headscarf remains largely unexamined from the point of view of the people who embrace it. This chapter and the next examine how the headscarf acquires meaning in the Islamic refashioning of social life. I consider how Islamic groups encounter the ‘secular’ institutions and social practices of public space, although it is not entirely clear what the secularity of that space consists of (Taylor 2007), nor how these groups reconfigure a public ethos of engagement with various conceptions of public life.

I borrowed this formulation from Patel and McMichael (2004: 251).