At the 7th Annual Forum on Social Justice & Activism at New York University last week, I had the opportunity to listen to, and later meet, Merve Kavakci – the gutsy former Turkish parliamentarian and victim of what she describes as “secular fundamentalism.” Elected to the Turkish parliament on a Virtue Party ticket, Kavakci was barred from taking her oath in parliament due to the fact that she wore an Islamic headscarf and was accused of violating the tenets of the secular Turkish Republic. Ever since then, the Harvard-educated Kavakci has concentrated her energies on teaching at George Washington University’s Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies in the United States, where she is now a visiting professor.

Kavakci’s plight highlights the staunch beliefs of Turkey’s military leaders, the self-proclaimed sentinels of secularism in the country. The stress on secularism in Turkey owes its origins to the cultural reforms initiated by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the revolutionist statesman and founder of modern Turkey. Atatürk once stated that, “Culture is the foundation of the Turkish Republic,” and in keeping with that ideology, his reforms included a shift to the Latin alphabet for Turkish and banning the fez. Instead, he forced the Turkish men to wear Western hats in public. Kavakci contends that while the secularism and Western thrust in Turkey is fine by her, the government cannot deny elements of its population their rights, of which close to 98% is Muslim, by disallowing them freedom of religious expression in the interest of secularism.

In a country with such strong notions of secularism, the headscarf is viewed by many as a symbol of political Islam and a threat to the secular credentials of the republic. The laws in Turkey explicitly outlaw public servants from wearing the headscarf. Says Merve Kavakci, “Most of the headscarf-wearing women I meet in Istanbul introduce themselves as ex-school teachers, ex-doctors and ex-lawyers, while I myself describe myself as an ex-parliamentarian.” The proliferation of women who have been rendered unable to go on with their careers and public lives because of their wish to “ostentatiously display” their religious beliefs has irked people like Merve Kavakci for some time now.

When the law first came out, headscarf-wearing public school teachers who still desired to continue teaching in order to earn, be independent and support their families resorted to wearing their headscarves right until the school gates, taking them off for the duration of the school day and then putting them back on before returning home from work. In the very Turkish parliament where Merve Kavakci was denied her rightful seat, a female MP from the Nationalist Action Party who sports a headscarf drew applause when she entered parliament with her head uncovered and hair tightly pinned back. The “way out” adopted by the public school teachers so greatly incensed the authorities that they ruled the practice illegal. While the ban on wearing headscarves in school would remain in place, the authorities informed, the ban would now extend to wearing headscarves on the way to and on the way back from school. The logic provided was that, “if the students see them outside school in a headscarf, it would set a bad example.”

In the minds of many Westerners, the headscarf and the veil are viewed as instruments used in the oppression of women and indeed, there are many women who are fighting for the right to be able to take them off. However, the opposite is also true as Merve Kavakci has demonstrated in the case of women in Turkey. While the scourge of religious fundamentalism is affecting many lives today, Kavakci cautions against the danger in condoning the other extreme – secular fundamentalism – a situation where people aren’t able to express their religious beliefs freely, with increasing attempts to have people’s religious leanings shorn off.

As of now, the many headscarved girls and women of Turkey continue to hold peaceful protests outside their schools and universities in the anticipation that the government will relent and see the folly in their paradoxical policies of championing the education and upliftment of women on one hand, and on the other, compelling a large number of girls and women who refuse to shed their headscarves to abandon their studies and their professions.