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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.
Rebecca Mueller 16 Dec 2013
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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.
Rebecca Mueller 16 Dec 2013
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
Rebecca Mueller 16 Dec 2013
22
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
23
that secularist and traditionalist politicians have taken equally long to accept women into the
public sphere.
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