The Islamic veil was not an issue in Turkey until the 1980s, when women began wearing it in public and challenging the state’s secular precepts. In 1980, following a military coup aimed at clearing out growing Islamic influences in the country, wearing the veil in universities (public or private), in schools or by government workers on government grounds was prohibited.
One woman’s battle symbolizes the labors of Islamically minded women to wear the veil: Leyla Sahin.
Banned from University for Wearing Head Scarf
Leyla Sahin was born in Istanbul, Turkey, in 1973, into a family of practicing Sunni Muslims. In 1993, she enrolled as a medical student at Uludag University (also known as Bursa University) in Turkey, some 100 miles south of Istanbul. Sahin wore a head scarf—but not a face-covering veil—while attending school in Bursa.In August 1997, Sahin applied at the Cerrahpasa Faculty of Medicine at Istanbul University. She was admitted. In March 1998, wearing her head-scarf, she walked into a university hall to take an oncology exam. She was denied entry. Less than a month earlier, the vice chancellor of the university had issued a “circular” reaffirming a ban on the wearing of headscarves or other forms of religious dress on campus.
Taking Turkey’s Ban to Court
Founded in the 15th century, Istanbul is one of the main centers of government-funded higher education in Turkey. It has an enrollment of about 50,000 students. It abides by the national government’s prohibition of the wearing of religious clothing on any state-run campus or public school. Government employees must abide by the same prohibition. The vice-chancellor’s circular at Istanbul University specified that even foreign students wearing headscarves—or beards—were banned from entering exam and lecture halls.Sahin’s enrollment at the university was rescinded. While she pressed her case—going to lectures and exams despite the ban, but wearing the head scarf—she was subsequently denied entry to a neurology lecture and an exam on public health.
In July 1998, Sahin petitioned the Istanbul Administrative Court to overrule the vice chancellor’s circular, saying her rights to religious freedom had been infringed. The court dismissed the petition eight months later, and in 2001 Turkey’s Supreme Administrative Court dismissed Sahin’s appeal. Meanwhile, the university officially reprimanded her for her behavior. She was suspended from the university in April 1999 even as she triggered unauthorized student protests on her behalf.
European Court of Human Rights Upholds the Ban
The Turkish legislature passed an amnesty in 2000 lifting penalties imposed on students in Sahin’s circumstances. But it was too late. Sahin, in September 1999, left Turkey and enrolled at the Faculty of Medicine at Vienna University in Austria, where she was allowed to wear her headscarf. She did not, however, abandon her legal case. She appealed to the European Court of Human Rights .On Nov. 10, 2005, 17 judges of the European Court of Human Rights, including Rıza Türmen, Turkey’s representative judge on the court, upheld the headscarf ban. The stunning decision set a precedent that enabled governments across Europe to enact similar bans, although France is the only country that applies the ban as strictly as Turkey. (See a country-by-country run-down of veil laws in Europe and North America.)
The Veil as an Expression of “Extremist Political Movements”?
“In Turkey,” the judgment stated, “wearing the Islamic headscarf to school and university is a recent phenomenon which only really began to emerge in the 1980s. There has been extensive discussion on the issue and it continues to be the subject of lively debate in Turkish society. Those in favor of the headscarf see wearing it as a duty and/or a form of expression linked to religious identity. However, the supporters of secularism, who draw a distinction between the başörtüsü (traditional Anatolian headscarf, worn loosely) and the türban (tight, knotted headscarf hiding the hair and the throat), see the Islamic headscarf as a symbol of a political Islam. As a result… The court did not lose sight of the fact that there were extremist political movements in Turkey which sought to impose on society as a whole their religious symbols and conception of a society founded on religious precepts.”Leila Sahin Vindicated
Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan , who rose to power on the strength of the Islamist vote, in early 2008 pushed through parliament a measure that would amend the Constitution to enable women to wear the head scarf in universities. (Erdogan’s wife wears the head scarf in public.) The measure passed Parliament in early February 2008, with 410 members of Turkey’s 550-seat Parliament supporting it. But the measure had to be approved by Turkey’s Constitutional Court.
