Cassie's Experience

...A discussion with an older woman who identified herself as Muslim but chose not to cover her hair proved particularly illuminating.  Standing outside a shop, she held a cigarette in one hand and wore her hair tucked into her hat, but purely for warmth, as we would learn later.  She appeared neither Muslim, nor, well, not Muslim.  She looked like an ordinary woman, the type of woman one might find anywhere, besides the fact that she spoke exclusively Turkish.  But, as she explained through a translator, she indeed considered herself a Muslim.  She pointed out that she chose not to cover her hair, that it was her decision, but that she felt no pressure one way or another.  She expressed a great deal of respect for Muslim girls who covered their hair, and did not feel like she differed greatly from them.  She acknowledged the possibility that veiled girls might not view her in the same friendly manner, but said she had never been made to feel that way.  Talking to her, one could appreciate a sort of peace that no one happens to mention in all of the articles about the turmoil of the country.  Responding to the question of whether she identifies as a Turk first, or a Muslim first, or a woman first, she revealed that such divides may not be necessary.  She was Turkish, Muslim, and a woman, all at once, and felt no pressure to be any other way.  And this reveals something essential about the Turkish case.  Women matter there, because women matter everywhere.  A cloth wrapped around your head is certainly an expressive sign, but in the end signs are no more than what you make of them.  Women put on the veil in the morning, and take it off at night. Or they don’t.  But underneath all of that hair, hidden or not, is a woman, making her way in a complex world.  The fabric on her head does not define her to herself anymore than it should define her to anyone else...

Tom's Experience

...This issue of terminology and classification of the other is problematic in Turkey. In the first place, the term secularist is often applied to students such as the Sabanci student who was undoubtedly a secularist, however the implications are that firstly, she is not religious – which is neither the aim of a secular system nor the necessary result of it – rather it is a way of seeing the interaction between the state and religion. Given the weight attached to this classification, secularist can be a poisonous term for the most pious and is extremely divisive. The implications of the word secular are best understood when considering the complementary terms such as Muslim or Islamist. Islamist is a similarly volatile term in Turkish politics and is often misapplied. I would speculate that the majority of those who are labeled Islamists are in fact ardent supporters of a secular government however want to seem some basic concessions that allow freedom of religion, not freedom from religion as is the current Kemalist model of secularism. The lack of more specific terms in common discourse on Turkish politics thus leads to a polarization of opinion and enables the mislabeling of the other, for lack of a better alternative...

Tommy's Experience

...What I found most illuminating were the discussions we had on three main terms: feminism, modernity, and gender.  There are few things, we found, that bring stronger reactions than the idea of feminism and being a feminist.  In Turkey, feminism has become a negative word filled with negative connotations.  The discussion began with the women wearing headscarves in the café at Fatih.  They talked extensively about where they locate the ideas of feminism.  I would characterize their beliefs on women’s rights as progressive, but they were not about to claim to be feminists.  Nazife Sisman said that she agrees with many facets of feminism, like their calls for equality of men and women, but again would not identify with the movement.  Both the girls from Fatih and Sisman are more devout Muslims than the students from Sabanci that we met, but even they were against being considered feminists.  The women at Fatih characterized it as anti-Islamic because it denied some male/female roles that are inherent in their family units.  Sisman told us that the term was tantamount to loose sexual values.  But Hale Sirin, one of the very secular students from Sabanci, also felt uncomfortable with the term.  These three groups of women—young Muslim women, young secular women, and an older Muslim woman—all would be considered unconventional 50 years ago, but today, through modernization and liberalization of a country that has held women back, they are exceptional.  Only elite Islamists seem to wear the veil for overt political purposes (White 228).   I think that feminism as an ideology or movement has been snuffed out in Turkey, with women instead looking for a less militant or aggressive form of social equality through things like religion, education, and democratic institutions.  The women of the Gulen Women’s Platform said this best: they see feminism as blaming men for everything that is wrong in their lives, when they instead are looking for better and more constructive ways to reach for more equality.  But the basic ideas of feminism hold for Islamists.  They believe that the headscarf allows them to have an “active public life alongside men” because it acts as a shield” (Çinar 76).  And self-described Islamist feminists fight for rights every day.  On the ground though, generally speaking, feminism has a negative connotation (Arat 2010, 881)...  

Suel's Experience

...While the visible part of Turkish gender iceberg is still ‘covered with a veil’ by Western media, the much larger, unseen part of the actual situation remains under water, hidden and unpublicized. It is unbelievably mesmerizing, trying to juxtapose every woman that you meet in Turkey. Jülide, our tour guide was devout believer in Atatürk and Republican values, drinking raki and at the same time fasting for Ramadan - yet she was not an activist. Nazife Şişman, was very sceptic of Atatürk’s legacy, probably never tasted any alcohol in her lifetime, yet she believed in some fundamental rights of woman and she was an activist, being referred as a feminist in Islamic circles and as an islamist in secular circles. Hale, Sabanci student, was quite liberal in her views and at the same time, one of the few people, who was not ‘a fan’, nor 'a sceptic' of Atatürk, yet she considered any sort of activism, including feminism being useless. This whole range of attitudes defines the current snapshot of the whole Turkish society: diverse, yet very disconnected at the same time...

Tessa's Experience

...During our class trip to Turkey, we had the opportunity to meet with students from the Gülen movement. After reading about this organization for some time, I was interested in finding out whether it really was the way it had been portrayed in the books. I spoke with a young man that was around my age about how the school served as more of a structure for the students’ faith, towards which they could opt in or out. We eventually moved on to the subject of the headscarf and contrasted the hazy meaning I had interpreted it to be with what it meant to him. He explained how it was simply an extension of other types of clothing, used to cover ones’ private body parts from the public gaze. This meant to him that, it wasn’t necessarily just a symbol of someone’s religiosity but could simply be representative of a woman’s sense of modesty for the public sphere. He attempted to explain this in a way I’d better understand, referring to the attire a woman would consider appropriate for the office scene in the United States. In this sense we discussed the length of skirts and the plunging neckline of a low cut shirt. He asked how a woman would feel if there were norms stating how long her skirt could be or saying that the neck and bosom had to be visible to the public. For Muslim women, he continued, the request or order to remove the headscarf sounded similar to the example of the office attire. This reasoning was further supported by a conversation with a woman whom I interviewed in the streets of Istanbul. When asked why she wore a headscarf she exclaimed “Well, why do you wear a shirt? Comfort, I feel comfortable leaving my house when my hair is covered, so I wear a headscarf.” After these interviews, it became apparent that the headscarf wasn’t simply donned because the Koran dictated it, nor was it always a matter of what parents or husbands expected. It became more and more understandable that the symbol of identity that the headscarf had been explained as so many times, was an idea I found acceptable...

Kate's Experience

...There we were, in a Turkish café surrounded by cigarette smoke, heavy jackets, and cups of tea that took the shape of a perfect womanly figure. With our Sabanci buddies Talha and Besik leading the way, we left Istiklal, the ‘Broadway’ of Istanbul, onto this tiny cobblestone road, which led us to an incredibly charming, straight-out-of-a-children’s-book courtyard. There must have been upwards of thirty miniature tables and chairs, similar to the ones that you would give your daughter for tea parties. Twinkle lights darned the miniature trees and walls of the café, and it was only until I excused myself to use the restroom that I realized all of the tea, coffee, and shalep- a warm, white, cinnamon, egg nog-like drink that we all inhaled - was coming from a hole in the wall, two burner, mom and pop kitchen. Charlotte, Alex and myself, two Asians and an American, sat with Besik, Talha and some of his friends from high school who came to join us. We probed the two boys, since most of our interviews thus far had been with girls, about how they felt regarding headscarves. From most of our readings, it seemed like our class was walking into a war zone: the secularists on one side and the faithful activists in opposition. To our surprise, the headscarf issue was no longer in Vogue and most women were permitted to enter into universities covered, which signaled to us that what we thought was the hot button issue, is no longer so hot. That being said, it was clear that the two sides had not yet meshed together. Across the table Sar Jean from Izmet sat in his large, puffy, grass-green winter coat that accentuated his dark features. In response to our question about the girls he hung out with, he ended up answering an entirely different inquiry all-together, “I don’t have prejudice towards them” he chuckled nervously, “I just feel like if I look at them, they’ll think I’m a pervert.” Who are the ‘them’? Young women in headscarves... 

Our Trip

Every Sunday and Wednesday the thirteen of us meet from 2:35-3:50 at New York University Abu Dhabi. Our class starts with some light hearted discussion, and at 3:20 the call to prayer emanates into our classroom from any one of the five mosques in the 400 meter radius of Downtown campus and we all know we're almost home free, but the truth is, none of us are ever that anxious to leave. Roger Friedland, a visiting Professor of Sociology and Religious Studies from the University of Santa Barbara, has gotten us hooked on the nation-state, religion and the politics of gender. Using Turkey as a looking glass into the effects of religion in government, our class has learned all about how politics can craft gender relations and roles in the public and private sphere. For the first week of the course Professor Friedland gave us a basic understanding of the nation-state, and then the next 7.5 were spent attempting to understand Turkey.  I'm convinced we read everything we could've possibly read about Turkish politics, so that when we took our all expenses paid class trip to Istanbul during fall break, we'd know our stuff! For most of us, this has been a once and a lifetime class. The intimate classroom atmosphere provides for fruitful discussions and dissections of the reading material but it's also made us a sort of family. Just the other day we all spent Thanksgiving together, feasting on our country's traditional foods; and being that NYUAD's 300 student body population covers 70 different countries, you can bet that we had more than just turkey! Unfortunately, all good things come to an end, but that's the beauty of this blog; our class may end, but the dialogue continues.