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Becoming The “Other” as a Muslim in Turkey: Turkish Women vs. Islamist Women1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 July 2015

Ayşe Saktanber
Ayşe Saktanber*
Affiliation:
Middle East Technical University, Department of Sociology
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Extract

The covering of women has become the mark of Islam's new visibility in urban Turkey since the 1980s. Women wearing long, loose overcoats and headscarves tightly framing their faces and covering their necks and bosoms are now a familiar part of the urban scene, as well as of university campuses. They are usually referred to as İslamci (Islamist) women, sometimes also as dinci (religionist), gerici (regressive), irticacı (reactionary), kara peçeli (black veiled) or türbanlı (turbaned). Thus in the lexicon of Turkish identity, these women constitute a group defined through oppositional terms, similar to such ephitets as “leftist” women and “femininist” women. The words “Kemalist” and/or “Atatürkist” women have concurrently gained new political significance in denoting women (often professional elites) who, as against the so-called Islamist women, proclaim their allegience to Atatürk and his principles, i.e. speak from a pro-western, pro-state, secular-nationalistic and gender egalitarian position.

Type
Articles
Information
New Perspectives on Turkey , Volume 11 , fall 1994 , pp. 99 - 134
Copyright
Copyright © New Perspectives on Turkey 1994

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Footnotes

1

This paper is a revised version of a paper written under the same title in a much more extensive form than the present one. I would like to express my thanlcs to Aycan Eren, Çağlar Iceyder and Ayşe Öncü who read the first version of this paper and made valuable criticisms. I feel especially indebted to Ayşe Öncü for the scholarly effort she put into shortening this paper without omitting any points of its core argument.

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