The Middle East’s modernization drives initiated in the 1800s transferred power in stages from clerics to secular officials. Turkey’s secularization under Atatürk and İnönü is the boldest effort in this vein. Other ambitious campaigns occurred in Iran under the Pahlavis, Egypt under Nasser, and Tunisia under Bourguiba. These regimes might have been expected to facilitate exits from Islam, radically reinterpret the Quran, and broaden religious freedoms generally. In fact, they simply made it easy to ignore Islam. Their ideal was to have citizens disconnect their public selves from religion, and they felt justified in imposing their preferences on the masses. Indeed, they treated certain Islamic practices as archaic and drove them out of the public realm. Just as heterodox Muslims were once repressed as heretics or apostates, so now under secular leaders the pious were persecuted as obscurantists. In the process, modernizers constricted all discourses on Islam. Quashing dissent on religious policies, they effectively replaced one form of religious repression with another. Some secularists considered their illiberal policies transitional. Religiosity would decline with economic development, they believed, and worldviews would become secularized. But resistance from the pious led, instead, to a softening of secularist repression.

The chapter investigates how assertive laicism made women one of the battlefields in the conflict between religion and the state. However, to depict them as passive recipients of a conflict does not paint the whole picture. The increase in female schooling during the 1960s induced many conservative families to let their daughters study in religious vocational schools (Imam-Hatip). In 1976, the Imam-Hatip opened classes for female students and de facto accelerated a process of feminization of religious education. Many of these female students enrolled in the faculties of theology at universities, where the head scarf ban was introduced in the 1980s. The relationship between female religious education and the reinforcement of the head scarf ban is here carefully examined. Many of these “pious and educated” Muslim women joined Islamist movements and parties claiming the right of education and work. They experienced the reinstatement of the head scarf ban in universities and its reinforcement after the February 28, 1997, coup. Since the AKP’s rise to power in 2002 and the appointment of Ali Bardakoğlu as the Diyanet president in 2003, new political opportunities fostered the decision to include women within the Diyanet’s state bureaucracy.