CHAPTER 20 Özlem Denli Harvey, Between Laicist State Ideology and Modern Public Religion: The Head Cover Controversy in Contemporary Turkey
Özlem Denli provides an overview of the head-cover controversy in contemporary Turkey, a secular country with a Muslim majority. The state-imposed head-cover ban has far-reaching consequences for women who consider veiling in public life to be a religious obligation. Such women are excluded from the entire public sector, which is rather sizeable in Turkey. Among other things, they are deprived of the opportunity of a university education. This in turn blocks access to employment and other forms of engagement in public life. For the last two decades, this controversy has set the tone for public debate on freedom of religion or belief. More than just giving an account of the problem, however, Denli uses the concrete religious headdress issue in Turkey to provide an insightful sociological account of the tensions between laicist ideology and the resurgence of public religion in Turkey. She demonstrates how the headcover issue has become a “nonnegotiable boundary between laicism and Islamism,” and concludes that the “laicist policies of the Turkish Republic are expressions of a comprehensive doctrine that is systematically biased and exclusionist in its very makeup.”90
90 Denli, chapter 20, 510.
