AK Party Politics 2.0: Turkey’s Evolving Private Sphere Rebecca Mueller

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Introduction

On November 4, 2013, notes leaked from a closed political strategy meeting revealed

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyıp Erdoğan’s plan to tackle an ongoing complaint among his

conservative Muslim electoral base: co-ed living arrangements among university students (Jones

2013). When, a day later, Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi [Justice and Development Party, hereafter

AK Party] Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arınç assured the public that crackdowns on co-

habitation were not a part of that party’s agenda, Erdoğan resisted this characterization and

confirmed his commitment to the issue (A.Z. 2013). The Prime Minister noted that his

government had already segregated 75% of state-owned university housing by sex. He also

suggested that “girls and boys staying together on private property” was a concern of Turkish

parents that could be addressed by “legal regulation if needed” (Reuters 2013).

The response by AK Party opposition groups was swift and loud. In a student-led Twitter

uproar, young people defiantly posted photographic proof of their own co-ed living

arrangements. Liberal students also held a physical protest march to Iskele [Pier] Square in

Istanbul’s cosmopolitan Kadıköy district, uniting a cardboard cutout of a female cow with the

existing bronze statue of a male cow and declaring the area “Girls and Boys Square” (WNA

2013). Turkish political commentators, including some prominent pro-Islamist voices, have

questioned the wisdom of this and other recent developments as supporting claims regarding the

AK administration’s growing moralistic and authoritarian bents made by Gezi Park protesters

during Summer 2013 (Well 2013).

The AK Party establishment, for its part, appears divided on the issue. The public dispute

between Erdoğan and Arınç led to Arınç’s threatening resignation (A. Z. 2013), with the co-

habitation issue merely symptomatic of deeper, longer-lasting tensions within the Party. Several

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other MP’s voiced their support for Erdoğan’s new initiative. Sadık Yakut, AK Party MP and

Vice President of the Grand National Assembly from Kayseri, moved beyond Erdoğan’s

disapproval of student cohabitation. At a speech delivered at the 14th National Children’s Forum

two weeks after the Prime Minister’s remarks, Yakut declared that co-education had been a

“mistake” for Turkey and promised to work to correct it (AP 2013).

When the AK Party gained control of the government in 2002, its self-defined status as a

“conservative democratic” party served as proof of its break with banned Islamist party

predecessors, the Refah Partisi [Welfare Party] and the Fazilet Partisi [Virtue Party] and cleared

the way for alliances bridging contemporary political and religious divisions in Turkey. The

proportion of the national vote captured by the AK Party has increased steadily through 2002, to

2007, to 2011 (after the traditional five-year term of MP’s was reduced to four), rising from a

mere 25% in 2002 to a near-majority at 48% in 2011. But, as Feride Acar and Gülbanu Altunok

suggest in their recent article on the “politics of intimate” in Turkey, the AK Party’s initial

presence as a democratizing and (economically) liberalizing force in Turkish society has, since

2007, increasingly mobilized “patriarchal and moral notions and values, often framed by

religion.” They characterize the AK Party’s current emphasis on both public and private morality

as “not only incompatible with the existing legal framework in Turkey, but also unheard of in the

public discourse [of] a national political figure in Turkey” (Acar & Altunok 2013:14).

The recent trend in AK Party politics can be situated within a much wider discussion of

post-modern state governance, social conservatism, and religious revitalization that affects the

Muslim and non-Muslim worlds and hinges on a number of related, overly simplistic social

dichotomies: public–private, collective–individualistic, political–apolitical, religious–secular,

liberal–conservative, traditional–progressive, stability–change, and, indeed, masculine–feminine.

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Talal Asad notes that “pair[s] of categories” like public and private are basic to modern liberal

society and crucial to the protection of individual liberties (2003:683). As the expectation of

human, civil, and minority “rights”—once highly specific to the West European context—have

morphed into global, even universal political and social currencies in recent decades, state and

civil society forces in countries like Turkey struggle to rectify these rights with local, more

traditional notions of public and private good.

In this paper, I will examine the negotiation of public and private during the period of

(growing) political dominance by Prime Minister Erdoğan’s AK Party in Turkey. I will begin

with a discussion of the theoretical and practical articulation of public and private by social

scientists, Islamic jurists, and modern states. I will then situate the AK Party’s engagement with

these categories—particularly as they relate to the private sphere of home and family—within

the political landscape of Islamist mobilization and democratization created by the Welfare

Party, its predecessor. Finally, I will present the allegedly increasing Islamist–traditionalist focus

of the AK Party and the concern for human rights and individual liberties expressed by women’s

groups, students and others. What can debates about the “protection of families” and, most

recently, “girls and boys” tell us about the changing political currency of morality and private

affairs for Turkey’s AK Party and their opposition?

“Boundaries and Rights” in Secular and Islamist States

The father of the theoretical public and private spheres was Jürgen Habermas. He dealt

with them in the context of bourgeois Western Europe in the modern period, namely 18th century

Britain, France and Germany. Habermas’s conceptualization of the public sphere was tied to

both practice and place: the practice of rational discussion of state policies and common interests

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in places like coffee shops and salons (Habermas:1962). The private sphere, less of a focus in

Habermas’ manuscript, contained the quotidia of life beyond the purview of public interest,

though it is from the merging of previously private sphere individuals that the public sphere is

created. Many cultural theorists have critiqued Habermas, pointing out the limited access

enjoyed by a large proportion of that public, including women, migrants from these countries’

colonial lands, and the poor to the so-called “public” sphere. Others have envisioned the private

sphere—a somewhat secondary category of concern in Habermas’s work—as a place of politics,

with second-wave feminists in the United States famously adopting the slogan “the private is

political.”

Public, private and related concepts are not, of course, simple dichotomies. The

boundaries between public and private spheres are diversely interpreted within cultural, religious

and political traditions. They are, moreoever, continuously contested and adapted. In his broad

consideration of the differences between Western and Islamic perceptions of privacy, Mohsen

Kadivar notes that questions of public–private boundaries bear on “such concepts as the

individual, family, society, and government” (2003:660). These concepts, by their very nature,

encompass all of human life, and have thus been crucial to recent understandings of both

government and religion (not necessarily separate categories) as social forces that determine the

public and private dimensions of individual lives.

Michel Foucault’s studies of state governmentality describe technologies of power—

including censuses, public health programs, and other forms of surveillance—in which the state

collects information, categorizes, and controls its citizens. In contrast, cultural theorist Lauren

Berlant’s understanding of neo-conservative politics in the United States is one of citizenship

and identity formation rather than strict governmentality. Indeed, moralizing rhetoric in and of

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itself served a purpose during the Reagan-era and aftermath, not only enforcing normative

behaviors and identities but disempowering “regular” citizens by infantilizing them and

preoccupying them with imagined internal threats like immigration and sexual deviance (Berlant

1999). Berlant’s ideas bring us closer to a discussion of the AK Party, for whom George W.

Bush, a neo-Reaganite in his own right, provided a model of religiously-informed governance,

faith-driven speeches and activism from a seat of great (abuse of) power.

At their most basic level, debates over the role of Islam in governance in Turkey and

elsewhere in the Muslim world also hinge on changing definitions of public and private interests.

Just as (post)modern states have sought power in a Foucauldian sense through the regulation of

private, even bodily affairs, Islamic (or Jewish, or Christian) states make alternative, faith-related

claims to arrive at similar ends. A brief discussion of public and private interests in Islamic

tradition will further serve our analysis of Islamist governments, the Turkish Welfare Party, and

its political successor, the AK Party—in whose highly fluid and pragmatic political brand both

governmentality and religiosity can be found.

For devout Muslims, of course, Islam as religious ideology is an all-encompassing

worldview that provides a formula for right living that cross-cuts all areas of life. However,

Islamic intellectual tradition does offer fairly specific delineations of the application of Islamic

law, both regarding the regulation of religious practice and of other affairs, in the Muslim

community. In Islam, Muslims’ personal lives are regulated through Şaria, the system of law

based predominantly on the seventh century teachings of the Prophet Muhammad that deals

primarily with private sphere issues surrounding familial relations, household economics, and the

individual obligations of Muslims to God and fellow persons (Esposito 1998). (The counterpart

to Şaria, Mazalim, is the system of Islamic public or customary law which relies on the writings

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of early and medieval Islamic judges and pertains to any issue necessary to the practical

governance of a society but not expressly handled in Şaria.)

As Mohsen Kadivar notes, the terms public and private are absent from the Qu’ran and

hadith (Kadivar 2003:660–661). However, fiqh, or Islamic jurisprudence, contains many

protections of what we today might term “private life.” As appropriate for a faith in which

adherents are answerable to God, Muslims are under no obligation to confess their sins to

someone else “except when another person’s rights have been compromised” (Kadivar

2003:664). Kadivar writes that Islamic jurisprudence “fully acknowledges the sanctity of the

private domain,” that there is “ample admonition against prying into the affairs of others,” and

that “preventative measures can be found that guarantee the privacy of personal information and

positively support individual rights to property and promote freedom in determining one’s course

of life” (2003:662), and, elsewhere, that Islam is fully compatible with freedom of opinion

(Kadivar 2001). However, it is incorrect to equate early and medieval Islamic tradition with

modern, liberal notions of the private sphere and individual rights (Kadivar 2003, Vogel 2003).

According to Frank Vogel, fiqh was always ultimately interpreted in relation to the the “ends of

the Shariah, which fundamentally include the morality, spirituality, and salvation of all”

(2003:752–753).

Much of what fiqh presents on privacy is ultimately related to home (and private

property) and family. In his examination of early rulings on Muslim women’s dress, for example,

Eli Alshech describes a system aimed primarily at families’ protection from invasions of privacy

implied when women left the home or when strangers entered it. “The fact that Muslim jurists

required [women’s] modesty primarily in the presence of strangers but allowed family members

and household help to see certain parts of the bodies of women in their household is

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illuminating.” He argues that women’s bodies can be seen as constituting part of the “larger

familial sphere of privacy,” which for early Muslims, Alshech concludes in a footnote,

encompassed “the home, information related to the home, and information related to the

behavior of family members” (2007:290). Alshech too contrasts the above notions to the modern,

liberal sense in which women’s privacy and self-ownership of her body are individual rights.

Several authors have discussed the ways that modern Islamist states overstep not only

Western, liberal notions of public–private boundaries but the limits of private interference set

quite clearly by influential Islamic judges during early and medieval Islamic periods.

According to Mehrangiz Kar, the post-revolution Iranian regime “justifies [its intrusion into the

private lives of citizens] by cloaking it in a religious guise” (2003:829). Juan I. R. Cole describes

the radical fundamentalism of the Taliban that “challenges the emergence of a reasoned public

sphere, favoring forms of authoritarian rule, patriarchy, and religious control” (2003:775). While

Kar offers a cynical view of the Iranian regime as authoritarian in religious garb and Cole offers

a somewhat differing perspective, arguing that the Taliban were, first and foremost, religious

fundamentalists who agenda lent itself to authoritarian governance, their arguments lead to a

single crucial point: The methods of modern Islamist states in the Middle East actually mirror

controversial methods of governance used around the world, and bear a much stronger

resemblance to general authoritarianism than to historically-defined Islam.

Countries like Iran, Taliban Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia do not provide us with case

studies of full Şaria implementation or the successful creation of Islamic states and societies, but

of the highly effective instrumentalization of Islam in the creation of new-old modes of citizen

control and the assurance of regime longevity. If this is the case, what can we learn about the

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implementation of Islamic traditions in less extreme cases of Islamist mobilization, such as that

of AK Party predecessor, the Welfare Party?

Public and Private Dimensions of Welfare and AK Party Politics

The Welfare Party, itself founded in 1983 from two banned parties, shares much in

common with Islamist parties around the world. According to John Esposito, the “reassertion of

religiocultural identity in public as well as personal life” has been not only a goal of Islamic

revivalists but “a major factor in contemporary Muslim life and politics” during recent decades

(1998:309). The Welfare Party’s electoral victories represent regular Turks’ longing for Islam’s

return to the Turkish public sphere, even if, as Deniz Kandiyoti notes, Turkish Islam had enjoyed

relatively strong influence in Turkish society since the advent of multi-party elections in the

1950’s, which allowed ties between political parties and religious authorities and that, by the

1980’s, had made Islamic groups key players in civil society and welfare provision with

parallel—if non-transparent—political influence (2011). The Qur’an classes and municipal

meetings facilitated through Welfare and its patrons mirror the local entrenchment of parties like

the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt (Wickham 2002), but the relatively open Turkish state was far

more open to Welfare’s conversion of vernacular to electoral politics than Egypt’s authoritarian

state.

Much of Welfare’s success can also be explained by its great capacity for blurring the

traditional boundaries between public—which, according to Esra Özyurek, has been narrowly

read as equating to “state politics” in the Turkish context (2002:3)—and private. Jenny White

describes Welfare’s ultimate success as premised on an incredibly inclusive grassroots

movement that practiced politics at the levels of municipality, neighborhood, home and family

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(2002:175), mobilizing vernacular political and social practices toward electoral ends. The Party

utilized existing local imece [horizontal] and himaye [vertical] networks and effectively

mobilized lay men and women, many of whom ultimately felt so associated with the means of

mobilization that the eventual ban of the Welfare Party—in other words, failed ends—didn’t

matter to the overall movement (2002:5).

At the same time, Welfare offered Turkish people a refreshingly democratic form of

Politics-with-a-capital-P. By submitting the Party platform itself to the will of the people

conveyed in the data, ideas, and opinions collected at the grassroots level, the Party managed to

reflect the authentic beliefs and values of Turkish Muslim traditionalists from within the official

state, arguably the very first Party to do so in the history of the Turkish Republic. In summary,

the Welfare Party inverted the public and private spheres in two main ways: it personalized

Turkish politics while simultaneously returning Islam to the public sphere. The latter was

technically illegal, and secularists managed to ban the Party via the courts in 1996 following a

“soft coup” spearheaded by the military.

As Turkish political parties tend to do, Welfare rose from the ashes, materializing as the

slightly more moderate Virtue Party (1998-2001) and, finally, the self-proclaimed “conservative

democratic” AK Party, which broke ties with Welfare’s previous head, old school Islamist

Necmettin Erbakan, in favor of a new generation of moderate, Westernized professionals. The

AK Party is, however, the unquestionable heir to this powerful movement, and Erdoğan himself

(as Welfare mayor of Istanbul between 1994 and 1998) is the most visible link in the chain

connecting Welfare to Virtue through today’s AK. As such, while not officially an Islamist party,

AK’s triumph in the 2002 national elections nonetheless held the promise of the reclaiming of

the public sphere by pious Muslims in the eyes of many Turks. And since taking power, the AK

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Party has arguably given itself license—through the shrinking of the Turkish military (formerly a

stalwart defender of the secular Turkish state), continuing relations with major Western powers

(providing an impetus for non-indigenous reforms), and dedication to democracy and reflecting

the will of the country’s (Muslim traditionalist) majority—to implement a moderately Islamist or

traditionalist social agenda combined with a highly pragmatic approach to economics and foreign

policy, thus managing to please most groups most of the time, at least at first.

In an article titled “The Death of Islamism,” Jenny White quotes Mehmet Aydın, Islamist

scholar and AK MP, at the time the first AK Party government was forming. He states somewhat

contradictorily that “We [AK Party politicians] are religious people, but our actions in the public

sphere…do not have a religious side or theological meaning…There’s a link in our values. Just

because I’ve become a politician, I’m not about to leave the values I believe in by the wayside”

(White 2011:446). In the following section, I will offer an assessment of whether this statement

has held true through during three AK Party administrations, using the concept of public–private

boundaries to frame debates over the government regulation of private sphere issues relating to

home and family.

AK Party 2.0: A Clash of Traditions and Rights

Scholars and journalists have identified what they deem a significant “shift” towards an

Islamic-flavored conservatism in recent AK Party rhetoric. Prime Minister Erdoğan’s statements

are exemplified by his unapologetic admission during a July 2010 national women’s committee

meeting (organized by AK) that he does “not believe in the equality of men and women,” a

rather blatant nod to the Islamic concept of fitrat, which some interpret as attributing distinct

natures to the sexes (Kandiyoti 2011). Of course, the Prime Minister has “never made a secret of

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his conservative leanings” (Kandiyoti 2011). Acar and Altunok note the importance of seeing

past rhetoric and polarizing debates and determining whether or not they result in “specific

amendments to the existing legal framework” (2013:14), and it is to this end that we continue

with our assessment of AK Party governance.

The most remarkable aspects of (early) AK Party governance have been quite removed

from private and family issues. In Erdoğan’s first term, Turkey drew closer to NATO allies in

Europe and North America and pursued Özal’s old policy of neo-Ottoman soft power with new

vigor. The AK Party’s occasionally blatant plays to its conservative base—exemplified by a

(failed) last-ditch attempt by an AK-led legislature to re-insert legal penalties for adultery, Şaria

style, into a reformed Penal Code in 2004 (Kandiyoti 2011)—were tolerated by Turkey’s

Western allies in the larger-sum game of Turkish economic integration.

But if AK Party supporters and opposition alike benefited from the economic

liberalization, prosperity and, perhaps above all, stability of Erdoğan’s first term, the costs of this

stability have become increasingly apparent. Despite the AK Party’s supposed dedication to

democratic principles, Turkey jails the highest number of journalists per capita in the world and,

in Summer 2013, led a brutal crackdown on anti-government protests against, ironically,

increasing government authoritarianism. A paper could clearly be written on the Turkish

government’s attempts to control the Turkish public sphere, and, indeed, the gross abuses of

individual human rights involved there-in. For our purposes, a look at the AK Party’s record on

private sphere and family issues will be more illuminating for a couple of reasons. First, family

law had “enjoyed pride of place as the heart of Şaria” thanks to the centrality of the family in

Islamic society, leading Islamist groups across the Muslim world to dedicate special focus to

these issues. Second, such initiatives can be positively traced to AK Party leadership, in contrast

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to issues concerning the long duree of Turkish state security. Human rights violations of

Turkey’s Kurdish population also fall into this latter category and, therefore, will be left for a

future project.

Several legislative changes passed with AK Party leadership have affected individual

liberties in Turkey. The AK Party has mostly justified these changes through moralizing claims

promoting public decency and the greater, public good. For instance, while a 2005 Law on

Misdemeanors regulates “crimes against public morality and public order,” in practice is has

been used to target groups based on identity and private, not pulic, behavior. Under the law,

transgender individuals are frequently harassed at their places of residence, fined, and often

arrested over noise complaints or other bogus “disturbances” (Çakmak 2012:146). The AK Party

administration has also introduced regulations limiting gambling (2005, through the Law on

Misdemeanors, above) and the sale and consumption of alcohol in 2012.

The AK Party’s record on women’s rights is particularly ambiguous. Gender politics in

Turkey are an ongoing concern of EU accession talks (Füle 2013), as Turkey falls far behind not

only Europe but most of the world in gender equity measures. The AK Party did push pro-

women legislation through Parliament, though perhaps less out of desire and more in response to

“a particular alignment of external and internal factors” such as EU-mandated conditions and

pressure from women’s and human rights groups adept at playing to international as well as

Turkish audiences (Kandiyoti 2011). 2004 Penal Code reform (referred to above) ultimately

included the criminalization of marital rape and the removal of distinctions among virgins and

non-virgins, married and unmarried women, and sex workers that formerly determined length of

sentence for rape and sexual harassment, long-sought for by women’s groups.

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Women’s and human rights groups in Turkey have consistently framed women’s rights,

particularly reproductive rights, as issues of personal liberty and choice, fundamental tenets of

global liberalism. While the AK Party is itself no stranger to the political mobilization of

Western, liberal concepts or rights-based language, particularly in defense of religious freedoms

(White 2011), AK Party politicians have taken a rather different approach to women’s rights. In

the spirit of classical Islamic jurisprudence—or, rather, patriarchy?—they have tended to view

women according to their familial roles as wives and mothers and have framed women’s issues

accordingly (Acar & Altunok 2013). The Party’s orientation toward the preservation of family

values reflects that of the Welfare Party before it and of a host of parallel Islamist moments

elsewhere in the Muslim world. While AK Party-era gender politics is undoubtedly informed by

Turkish tradition—often characterized as fundamentally family- and clan-oriented—the specific

ways these are conveyed point frequently to Islamically-informed interpretation (see Erdoğan’s

reliance on the Islamic principle of firtrat, noted at the beginning of this section).

Tradition or culture and religion, of couse, are also far from distinct categories, and

regardless of its inspiration, the AK Party’s moralizing agenda is increasingly framed as anti-

women by opposition groups. A female student quoted by Voice of America in the wake of the

cohabitation controversy said that “all of them [AK Party initiatives] are about the women and

women’s body. I don’t think this issue [co-habitation] is about men. It’s only about women and a

woman's life.” Pinar Ilkkaracan, co-founder of the Turkish organization Women for Women’s

Rights and a leading feminist voice in the country, views the latest controversy as an extension

of the AK Party’s wider policy of “control of sexuality of women’s bodies” into the realm of

youth, especially girls. She specifically criticized Erdoğan’s use of the word “immoral” in

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reference to young people’s behavior, saying that Turkey is “a country where honor crimes are

taking place. Where girls can be killed because of honor” (Jones 2013).

The implications of AK Party politics for real women, as Ilkkaracan alludes, are quite

pronounced. Turkey garnered some rather unfortunate press in the wake of a study by Hacateppe

University that suggests 42% of Turkish women, and 47% of rural women, have experienced

domestic violence in their lifetimes (Park 2012). An example of a particularly tragic situation is

the 2012 case of Nevin Yıldırım, a 26-year-old mother of two who finally broke a cycle of

repeated rape and blackmail by shooting her attacker—a man who lived in her neighborhood—

10 times and then cutting off his head. Her own husband had been away on seasonal labor, and,

ominously, “there were people in the village who knew what was going on,” such as the friends

of the rapist to whom the man had bragged (Shafak 2012).

The case renewed the public debate on gender-based violence, precipitating much soul-

searching in reference to Turkey’s culture of impunity which still views violence against women

as a private affair. Further controversy ensued when a court struck down her appeal for an

abortion of the pregnancy resulting from rape, as she was found to be beyond the 10-week

window in which abortions may legally be performed. It is worth noting that while an earlier

2012 attempt by Prime Minister Erdoğan to outlaw abortion (later revised to introduce a new 4-

week window) was effectively tabled after the plans caused a firestorm of domestic and

international protest, the government has begun to prosecute doctors and women who stretch the

10-week window to, say, 12 weeks with fines and even jail-time (Shafak 2012).

Though championed by women’s organizations throughout Turkey after her ordeal

became public, Yıldırım—at least until she pulled the trigger—was miles from the archetypal

educated, progressive, and autonomous figure with which Turkish feminists identify. Indeed, she

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was so entrenched in traditional notions of women and family that she justified her deed in these

terms, claiming that her children wouldn’t be called “the whore’s kids” but “the children of a

woman who had cleansed her honor” (Shafak 2012). Evidently, she was also from the working

classes, where women are seldom offered the opportunity of making life choices informed by

either liberal or conservative ideologies.

Turkey’s “sky-rocketing” number of domestic violence cases is actually a positive sign,

indicating that more women are aware enough of their rights to seek help in protecting them.

Unfortunately, legislation passed in 1998 and updated in 2009 in partial accordance with the UN

Convention to Eliminate All Forms of Discrimination Against Women or CEDAW, has not

resulted in the parallel creation of women’s shelters and other services necessary, nor in specific

initiatives encouraging police forces to enforce. In addition, shame, the preservation of honor,

and fear of retaliation from one’s own family are major additional obstacles that have been at

worst enforced and at best gone mostly unchallenged by the AK Party’s family-centric rhetoric.

The 2009 domestic violence law, submitted by a civil society working group as the “Law on the

Prevention of Violence Against Women” was signed into force as the “Law on the Protection of

Family and the Prevention of Violence Against Women.” AK Party ideology—whether Islamic,

traditional, nationalist or some combination—symbolically turned the end to (gender-based)

violence into a secondary goal of the anti-domestic violence bill whose content was praised by

the European Union (Füle 2013). In June 2011, the Ministry of Women’s Issues was given a

similar makeover, transformed overnight into the Ministry on Family and Social Issues.

The government’s latest gesture towards addressing gender-based violence in Turkey

included a speech on International Women’s Day 2013 in which Erdoğan demanded that men

protect their wives, and a supporting message delivered via coordination by the Directorate of

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Religious Affairs in Sunni mosques throughout the country. For those devout Muslims for whom

non-violent treatment of wives is a new concept and obedience to the local imam is a more

powerful motivator than obedience to the law, perhaps this approach may do some good. For the

rest of us, the soft enforcement of women’s (legal) protection stands in stark contrast to

enthusiastic state-led efforts to harass sexual minorities, journalists, and political opponents with

the full force of the law and then some.

In his analysis of the 2001 reform of the Turkish Civil Code (which predates AK Party

administration), Ebru Erdem-Akçay finds that conservative arguments for and against sections of

the code did not follow strictly Islamist logic. Similarly, secular factions were also found to rely

on more conservative notions and religious and historical norms. Both camps aimed to

undermine the non-discriminatory nature of the reforms, appealing to the status quo “realities” of

Turkish society in their efforts to preserve traditional male privilege within the home (2013:88–

89). The characterization of such debates in terms of Islamist–secularist dichotomies, writes

Erdem-Akçay, unnecessarily subsumes women’s issues below polarizing party politics and

threatens opportunities for solidarity among all women (2013:89). I would argue that it also

hides the ways in which all of Turkey’s political parties work against civil rights and individual

liberties as they apply to women and minorities. Male privilege and male-centered Turkish

nationalism—enshrined in original 1926 Civil Code and many other aspects of law and society

since the founding of the Republic—continues to inform a patriarchal politics that resists

liberalization in important ways across parties.

With this in mind I will revisit the issue of co-ed habitation, something which would

seem to pale in comparison to gender-based violence or human rights abuses against journalists,

ethnic and sexual minorities. A closer analysis of the rhetoric surrounding the controversy will

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illuminate both AK Party willingness to regulate the private sphere behaviors and the new forms

that opposition against this regulation is taking. Online, student Twitter activities were organized

around several hashtags: #kızlıerkekli [which translates roughly as girls and boys or, perhaps,

girls’ and boys’], # kızlıerkekliyaşaklar [girls and boys forbidden], and #kızlıerkekliAynı

EvdeKalıyoruz [we are girls and boys staying in the same house].

As noted previously, many individuals have sent in photographs documenting girls and

boys living together. Several photo memes also poked fun at Erdoğan’s expense, while a series

of cartoons depicted a man in Islamic dress scolding those around him. Photographic responses

were substantial enough to inspire the creation of a website, www.kizlierkekli.com, in which

submissions are permanently displayed. Verbal responses most often ridiculed the infantilization

of Turkish citizens implied in the cohabitation crackdown. Twitter user @burakozorus writes, “I

saw some people at the wedding, I swear they were boys and girls sitting together. I called and

told on them.” @sedaokur suggests “Let’s remove the girls from the deck of cards… What are

they doing among all these men!” Pointing out an irony in the AK Party platform,

@YeraltiEdebiyati writes, “No kissing, sex is forbidden, but Reco wants three children. No

penetration, no development but he wants results.” Some online contributors even used the

opportunity to turn Erdoğan’s moralizing efforts back on him instead. One user posted a

photograph of a young girl with an old man in conservative garb, noting “14 year old girls

married in religious ceremony to 60 year old men, will you prosecute this?” The photo was

repeatedly circulated, also under the hashtag #kızlıerkekliyaşaklar. AK Party supporters

responded under two telling hashtags of their own, #kızınoluncaanlarsın [when–if you have a

daughter you will understand] and #yababanızduyarsa [what if your father knew].

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We can analyze this debate—and the currency of liberal versus traditional notions of

(girls’) rights—within the public–private framework. First, here and elsewhere, the AK Party is

being taken to task for its own moralizing claims. The further the Party moves into implementing

its moralizing agenda, the more it opens itself to the same moralizing scrutiny, even by its

moderate Muslim base. And moral issues are increasingly receiving recognition as symbolizing

something far more important than the old Islamist–secularist framework. Students on Twitter

and in street protests have explicitly connected the current controversy to the Gezi Park protests

of Summer 2013 and an even longer continuum of events supporting the conclusion that the

Party is not the champion of democracy it claims to be.

Importantly, AK Party supporters frame their responses in traditional, patriarchal terms

that resituate both women and men respondents within a familial metaphor that actively

disempowers women. The first hashtag, #kızınoluncaanlarsın, reminds female students of their

ultimate role as mothers and suggests the kind of protective, infantilizing parenting that both

male and female students should aspire to one day. The second, #yababanızduyarsa, clearly

directed at female students, takes a threatening tone, hinting at either violent reprimand—which

has certainly been experienced by many of these “girls”—or the shame that the student will bring

down on herself and her family. Importantly, it is unclear whether many of these girls’ fathers, or

families, or future husbands, do know about their living arrangements. The internet, something

of a “pseudo” public sphere, is likely a safer space for many of these young women to express

their identities and desires than home and family.

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Conclusion

The moralistic ideology of today’s AK Party is increasingly reminiscent of the Welfare

and Virtue Parties that came before it, both substantively and in regards to the amount of public

controversy it draws from opposition groups. Ironically, it seems that the AK Party has begun its

(symbolic?) return to its Islamist roots just as opponents have begun to re-frame their opposition.

Rather than continuing with old tropes that accuse the AK Party of Islamism, they are protesting

what they deem to be the administration’s growing authoritarian bent and pointing out all the

ways that Erdoğan’s Islamic traditionalism is out of touch, rather than in touch, with Turkish

reality. The AK Party does indeed reflect Turkish society, but in its most stagnant and

deterministic form.

As might be expected, the longer the AK Party has stayed in power, the more it has been

equated with the state. Third-term Prime Minister Erdoğan and fellow Party leaders increasingly

run the risk of being accused, as their secularist predecessors were, of being out of touch with the

majority of Turkish citizens. In fall 2013, there was some buzz surrounding an official state

survey distributed to all citizens with the threat that a heavy fine would be levied on those who

failed to complete it. The survey was intended as an extension of the personalized citizen

feedback possible in the days of the Welfare movement, but many of those citizens weren’t

buying it. And instead of merely surveying people on (public) issues the administration might

address, the questionnaire also covered relationships, consumer habits and personal religious

beliefs and practices. Opponents questioned whether, in an environment of increased state

regulation of the private sphere, the government could guarantee that individual citizens would

not be penalized for their responses.

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20

Recently, Erdoğan has pitted himself against students—Turkey’s savviest and most

active opposition bloc that gained some legitimacy even among older generations during the

Summer 2013 protests–and women, for whom the stakes of the AK Party’s moralizing efforts are

increasingly clear, both through the efforts of women’s groups and human rights organizations

and the self-evident nature of some moves. Erdoğan’s opponents are particularly powerful

because they cross-cut previously-defined boundaries between secularist and Islamist, liberal and

conservative, now encompasses not only traditional opposition groups but many members of

Erdoğan’s base have been changed over the past ten years, some in direct response to AK Party

policies.

A much wider segment of the population now attends Turkish institutions of higher

education (or are exposed ), with most of the added population drawing from conservative

Muslim society. One of the Erdoğan administration’s most successful and least controversial

policies, the 2003 Haydi Kızlar Okula (Come on Girls, Let's go to School) initiative spearheaded

by Erdoğan’s wife Emine has increased the percentage of girls enrolled in primary school from

91% to 99% and the percentage of girls enrolled in secondary school from 72% to 98%. He has

ensured that the proportion of university students who are female will only increase in the

coming years.

And, as a Turkish friend recently pointed out to me, Erdoğan’s comments in November

2013 would never have occurred had it not been for his own administration’s push to expand

higher education in Turkey. The AK Party doubled the number of student positions in the

country’s public universities, adding or significantly expanding approximately one hundred

institutions and inviting the more “traditional” segments of Turkish society to participate in

something that was once a privilege of the (largely secular) elite. Erdoğan has surely received

Rebecca Mueller 16 Dec 2013

21

complaints about co-habitation and the piety of female students from parents, for whom the

decision to allow their daughters to attend university in the first place is a substantial step. (One

wonders whether Erdoğan considered merely assuring his base that single-sex housing options

were universally available, rather than stirring controversy.) Beyond the current debate, the

expansion of higher education is likely to create transformative opportunities for men and

women of all political persuasions. “Girls and boys” as well as Islamists and secularists,

urbanites and rural people, Turks and Kurds, elites and working class students studying together

is valuable in its own right.

Islamist women, too, have been greatly shaped by their political experiences since the

rise of the Welfare Party in the mid-1990’s, when the hope of greater political (and societal?)

participation among many did not materialize into leadership positions within the party (White

2002). The başörtü debate has been largely discussed as a polarizing issue that served to further

splinter a women’s movement that was already largely one-sided, if not downright elitist.

However, in contrast to the out-of-touch organizing efforts described by White in 1990’s Istanbul

(2002), groups in the 2000’s focused more on inclusivity and many secularist feminists did

indeed support their sisters’ right to veil. In return, many Islamist women—in the vein of liberal

Islamist civil society organizations described by Jeremy Walton (2013)—are now firmly situated

within a liberal interpretation of rights and liberties that extend to other groups. During the 2012

abortion ban protests, one female Islamist opinion leader even defended Turkish women’s right

to mahremet, an Islamic term for privacy.

It is women voters in particular who are likely to decide the fate of Erdoğan, his AK

Party colleagues, and the electoral future of Turkey. In 2013, women in Turkey make up 14% of

Parliament and occupy just 1% of mayoral positions across the country. However, because

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Turkey indeed functions as a democracy with free and fair elections, the absence of women’s

voices in political parties can be trumped at the ballots. In a barely-shrouded pro-patriarchy (if

not anti-women) agenda, conservative parties like the AKP may well find themselves newly

accused of being “out of touch” with 50% of its base.

And recently, there have been signs of growing solidarity between so-called opposite

camps. As alluded to above, women in başörtü joined the ranks of traditional Kemalists in 2012

pro-choice protests, participating in marches and signing a petition that garnered 50,000 national

and international signatures and the support of over 300 Turkish organizations (Say No Abortion

Ban 2012). In April, CHP [Republican People’s Party] MP Kamer Genç virulently attacked the

Turkish Minister of Family and Social Policies, Fatma Şahin, alleging on the floor of Parliament

that, were it not for Atatürk, Minister Şahin would be one of multiple wives of a wealthy Sheikh.

(The wider discussion involved the commemoration of the century-old Battle of Cannakkale.)

After Şahin responded with her own strong words, CHP Deputy Chairman of the Parliament

Güldal Mumcu also came to Şahin’s defense, submitting a motion to reprimand Genç for

violating the Parliament’s statutes on courtesy (Hurriyet 2013).

This incident is illustrative of my point about a changing climate of cooperation, but the

two women are rather symbolic in their own right. In 2003, Şahin became the first female MP

elected from Gaziantep and the southeast Anatolia region of Turkey and, in 2007, the first female

to be elected for two consecutive terms (Şahin 2013). Mumcu was elected as MP from Izmir in

2007 in 2011 and has served as Deputy Chairman of Parliament both terms, only the second

woman to do so. They both wear power suits and uncovered heads, and, more importantly, each

represents the product of ninety years of “modern, secular democracy” in Turkey, where it seems

Rebecca Mueller 16 Dec 2013

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that secularist and traditionalist politicians have taken equally long to accept women into the

public sphere.

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