Anti-Veiling Campaigns in the Muslim World

Gender, Modernism and the Politics of Dress

Stephanie Cronin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781134653058
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In recent years bitter controversies have erupted across Europe and the Middle East about women's veiling, and especially their wearing of the face-veil or niqab. Yet the deeper issues contained within these controversies – secularism versus religious belief, individual freedom versus social or family coercion, identity versus integration – are not new but are strikingly prefigured by earlier conflicts. This book examines the state-sponsored anti-veiling campaigns which swept across wide swathes of the Muslim world in the interwar period, especially in Turkey and the Balkans, Iran, Afghanistan and the Soviet republics of the Caucasus and Central Asia. It shows how veiling was officially discouraged and ridiculed as backward and, although it was rarely banned, veiling was politicized and turned into a rallying-point for a wider opposition. Asking a number of questions about this earlier anti-veiling discourse and the policies flowing from it, and the reactions which it provoked, the book illuminates and contextualizes contemporary debates about gender, Islam and modernism.

Part I
Turkey

1 From face veil to cloche hat

The backward Ottoman versus new Turkish woman in urban public discourse

Kathryn Libal

It is rumoured that a general order to unveil may be passed but whether this be true or not, the famous injunction of Kamal Ataturk to the women of Turkey uttered in the early days of the Republic has already been widely followed. “Show your faces to the world, and look the world in the face.” The essential fact about the veil in Turkey to-day is not that some women still retain the veil but that wearing it has become entirely a matter of personal choice and hence it has lost its traditional significance.¹

Although Ruth Woodsmall, a social worker who spent more than a decade in Istanbul working for the Young Women’s Christian Association, exaggerated the extent to which women’s dress in public had become a matter of individual choice, her assessment that the veil had lost some of its “traditional significance” for many women by the mid-1930s was fair. Her quote of President Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who was overwhelmingly regarded as the champion of women’s rights in the early republic, underscored the idea that women’s participation in the new republic was critical—the labors of women, as citizen subjects, both within the household and public sphere were vital to assuring the young country’s progress.

Turkey’s republican regime of the 1920s–1930s is renowned for its modernizing and secularizing reforms, many of which targeted women as objects of social transformation.² State-sponsored efforts to accord women new rights in the public sphere, sometimes labeled as state feminism,³ included efforts to encourage women to give up traditional forms of dress and head and body coverings.⁴ Yet the state did not criminalize veiling at the national level or launch a high-profile campaign to force rapidly a shift to a particular mode of dress among all women in the young country.⁵ Instead, officials at the national level promoted a change to Western-style dress, especially among the growing middle class and urban elite, through education, popular media, and consumerism. Regulations were instituted in the workplace, and pressure to conform for public figures was intense.⁶ Yet in the 1930s a diversity of head and body coverings persisted, even among republican elites. Clothing practices in public ranged from being bare-headed to wearing tightly bound fashionable scarf wraps covering much of the hair. Amongst the middle class and elites in urban areas in particular, the manto, or long coat, supplanted the çarşaf, or more traditional outerwear.

Although officials did regulate and even criminalize some specific women’s covering practices at a local level in the 1930s, as Murat Metinsoy and Sevgi Adak address in their chapters (Chapter 3 and Chapter 2, respectively) for this volume, in this chapter I examine pervasive and less overtly coercive techniques. Blurring the lines of what may be cast as an “official anti-veiling” campaign, I focus on promoting public support among the emerging middle class and elites through early republican public culture. I outline the construction of two dominant opposing figures—the backward Ottoman vs. modern Turkish woman—as they were deployed in popular culture, professional journals, publications of the “people’s houses,” and in photographs. Drawing upon domestic and international discourses on Turkish women’s emancipation, I highlight some of the widespread cultural assumptions about women’s position prior to the founding of the republic and an emerging imaginary of the “modern Turkish woman” that undergirded the “woman question” (kadın meselesi) and feminism in the 1930s. Some of the highest stakes within this debate concerned reformist condemnation of middle-class or elite women who did not conform to expectations of the figure of the Turkish woman. Even among educated elites debating modernizing reforms, significant contention existed about the meanings of so-called traditional covering practices and Western women’s attire.⁷ In sum, the question of how middle- and upper-class women dressed in this era operated as “shorthand” for contention over women’s roles within all realms of life, both public and private—their access to education, political participation, rights within the workplace, and roles within the household as wives and mothers. And for some activists of the era, campaigning to change how women dressed diverted from more pressing questions of poverty and hardships that working class and rural women faced, including recognition within their communities and society as citizens with legitimate claims on the state for support.

The symbolic work of “modernizing” women’s dress in the early republic

By the time the Turkish republic was founded in 1923, women in urban locales had already shifted dress practices considerably from what had been “traditional” conservative urban women’s dress in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The peçe and çarşaf appear most often in discussions of “backward” dress among urban and town women. As Hale Yılmaz notes in her work on efforts to regulate women’s dress at local levels in the 1930s, the çarşaf referred to a woman’s clothing worn outdoors, “consisting of a top piece covering the head and the upper part of the body, and a skirt covering the body from the waist to the feet.”⁸ The peçe, or face cover, could be worn with the çarşaf. During the 1930s these articles of clothing are often referred to together, though they were two separate pieces of clothing and not necessarily worn at the same time.

Eradicating the peçe and çarşaf—visible signs of “women’s liberation”—was symbolically critical to state authorities and social reformers as an measure of modernity and progress. Officials were deeply invested in portraying Turkey as a modern society and securing its legitimacy as a nation-state within the West. As Çınar notes, since the nineteenth-century clothing served as a means of conveying national belonging; as early Turkish republican leaders sought to build a new state and craft a citizenry loyal to that state, clothing and dress practices became one social field through which to establish a sense of nationhood. Revolution (inkılap) entailed creating “a sharp break from the Ottoman past, an inscription of a historical rupture, an insistence on disjunctive change, on a revolutionary diversion from Ottoman ways.”⁹ The “national self could be constituted as new and modern” against the image of the traditional, the backward, and the degenerate Ottoman past.

Ruth Woodsmall noted in her widely published travelogue that a vanguard of civil servants and wives of officials were having an effect even in more remote towns and “typical cities of the Interior,” where social change was still slow with regard to dress, marriage practices, gender relations, and expectations regarding education for girls. She notes based on observations while traveling throughout the country in the early to mid-1930s:

In the towns off the railway line, perhaps a large majority and in a railway centre probably half of the women are still veiled. In all of these places there is, of course, the advanced minority, the so-called ‘foreign groups’ of unveiled teachers, wives of officials and business men from Istanbul, who lead quite a separate social life. The prevailing atmosphere is conservative but the presence of this ‘foreign’ group undoubtedly has its effect; for each year the number of veils in the Interior decreases.¹⁰

Women’s attire in public was a touchstone of Turkish modernity in the early republic—and, like men’s attire, sartorial practices were a matter of public policy and political campaigning.¹¹ Yet state officials were aware of the dangers of bald enforcement of regulations and standards for women’s dress, wary of being accused of employing “terroristic methods” of reform,¹² even while seeking to promote a public image of Turkish transformation, development, and progress both domestically and internationally. Shortly after the Turkish republic was founded, Halide Edip Adıvar, prominent writer and activist who gained renown during the Turkish War of Independence (Greco-Turkish War), became a strong critic of Atatürk’s one-party regime and heavy-handed reforms. Although she ostensibly deplored dictatorial and “terroristic methods” to impel social change, Halide Edip mused about whether or not such change could have happened otherwise. She asserted that “On the whole, within the last twenty years women in Turkey as elsewhere have profited by changes more than men,” citing the replacement of Sharia law with a civil code and women’s greater access to education and work in professions. But, Adıvar derided efforts to enforce the “Hat Law” passed in 1925:

In a week it made the Turks don European hats (the only part of the city dwellers’ outfit which had not been westernized) and made them look like westerners, although the manner in which it was accomplished was utterly un-western. The westernization of Turks is not and should not be a quest of mere external imitation and gesture. It is a much deeper and more significant process. To tell the Turk to don a certain headdress and ‘get civilized’ or be hanged or imprisoned, is absurd, to say the least.¹³

Reformist zeal to convey an image of modernization at work through changing men or women’s outerwear is clearly reflected in nationalist publications of the 1930s. The image of the “new Turkish woman” freed from the kafes,¹⁴ peçe, and çarşaf was unabashedly grounded in a nationalist effort to establish the legitimacy of Atatürk’s and the Republic People’s Party’s authority. The regime waged a “campaign of propaganda” on two fronts—domestically to hasten Westernization of dress, and internationally to counter Orientalist discourses on the backwardness or weakness of the Turks and secure inclusion within the club of “civilized” nation-states.

Turkish nation-state making was a defensive measure in a global era of heightened militarism and nationalis...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Note on transliteration
• Introduction: coercion or empowerment? Anti-veiling campaigns: a comparative perspective
• I Turkey
• II Iran and Afghanistan
• III Soviet Central Asia and the Caucasus
• IV The Balkans
• Bibliography
• Index