On August 27 a new law has been passed in Turkey, which allows female police officers to wear headscarves. Across the country, policewomen are starting to wear the headscarf, showing Turkey their religious choices.
Though this law has been widely accepted in Turkey, there are still many people who are skeptical of the ruling. Turkey is known for being a secular country in the Middle East, and banned headscarves and fezzes back in the early 1920s. Now, with Erdogan and the AKP party in power, Turkey has been reversing all of the progressive changes that it was founded on. The AKP is establishing religious schools, bringing back outdated Ottoman traditions, and legalized the headscarf again.
The Turkish media has become a hotbed of debate as to what the AKP party means by allowing policewomen to wear headscarves. Government supporters agree with the new law, saying that the law promotes religious freedom, and that it is another step towards putting an end to the “authoritarian secularist mentality.” However, others are saying that the AKP’s new law is ruining Turkey, saying how it is a step backward in women’s rights, and that Turkey is slowly turning into another Iran.
The debate even spreads to the political world, where the law is getting backlash by nearly all of the AKP’s opponents. Veli Agbaba, leader of the Republican People’s Party (CHP) claims that the AKP is trying “to continue implementing its politics and its own secret agenda.” Many political opponents also argue that the new headscarf law doesn’t help the police force whatsoever. In fact, they say, it actually strains the justice system due to the conflicting religious views that people might have.
What most of the debates are failing to mention, however, is the larger issue that concerns the new headscarf policy: In Turkey, the ruling party does its best to protect those that share the same views as them, while excluding anyone with opposing views.
The main divide in Turkey is the fight between those who practice Turkey’s long-standing tradition of following their liberal, secularist roots, and those that believe that those secularist roots are dangerous for Turkey, who believe the country should go back to its Muslim roots. It is no secret that the AKP party is on the Islamist side of the spectrum, and with every new law, the secularists in Turkey are suffering. With this new headscarf law in place, the police force is showing the population that they are supporting the Islamist government and are tasked with carrying out their laws. Now that the police force is showing support for the Islamist government, there is now a growing sense of abandonment of justice amongst the secularist population.
Out of historical retrospective, this could be seen as a form of revenge. Before the AKP party came into power, devout Muslims were under constant oppression in Turkey. In a country founded on secularist ideals, they have found it hard to express their faith openly and felt as though the government was against them. During this time, they were scared to show their Muslim heritage.
When the AKP party came into power and legalized the headscarf in 2010, many disillusioned Muslims now were able to find hope and believe in the justice system once again, but now at the cost of having the secularists suffer the same consequences.
The debate on policewomen wearing the headscarf is putting the media and Turkish politics into a frenzy, but the debate also touches upon a question that everyone has in the back of their mind. In a country where people have conflicting viewpoints and a constant struggle for power, one has to wonder: can Islam and liberalism coexist? In order for that sort of society to exist, the people of Turkey have to focus on what really matters. As Ahmet Hakan, a columnist for the Daily Hurriyet, plainly says, “Let us focus on the way the headscarf-wearing policewoman does her job and not on the scarf on her head.”
Read more: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2016/09/turkey-headscarf-ban-women-police-officers.html#ixzz4JNoC4FRL
