Producing the category of ‘Islamist’ women: a Deleuzian perspective

Abstract

When addressing the Muslim women question, one of the problematic issues is the centrality of a religious tradition or a political ideology as a primary subject of inquiry. Muslim women are seen as the embodiment of a singular tradition or ideology, as in the case of Turkey, where the contemporary headscarf-wearing women are represented as ‘Islamist’. In this project, I aim to problematise this stereotyping categorisation through ontological conceptualisations, inspired by the French thinker Gilles Deleuze. To implement the relational ontology of Deleuze, I examine headscarf contestations in Turkey through interviews conducted in two women’s organisations in Turkey: Capital City Women’s Platform (Baskent Kadin Platformu) and Hazar. I argue that the world constantly ‘becomes’ through flows of relations between multiple elements; therefore, it is a multiplicity, an intensity and fractured. With this Deleuzian ontology in mind, I consider the quotidian physical, material and social resources of my interviews with the aim of elucidating relations between a female body and the commodities produced by multiple socio-economic and political factors in Turkey. Then I address a Deleuzian understanding of categorisations such as class, gender, race and ideology. These categorisations, for Deleuze, are aggregations of multiplicities and fluidities forming specific fixations according to a range of ascribed characteristics, such as income, education, employment or dress codes. In this regard, I conclude that the label ‘Islamist’ restrains the relational and multiple characters of headscarf practices within a unifying category by attributing certain features to particular embodiments and materials.

Keywords

Categorisation Deleuze headscarf Muslim women relationality Turkey

Introduction

In relation to the narratives of the neo-colonial policies of war in the Middle East and the rising number of acts of terrorism, Muslim women are deemed as the embodiment of a monolithic tradition without the influence of historical factors (Lazreg, 1988: 84; Zine, 2002: 106).According to this narrative, Islam as a single religious tradition or Islamism as a political ideology, signified by its extremism and militarism, presumably constitutes every aspect of a Muslim woman’s life in an ahistorical context (Hopkins et al., 2007: 1). It is assumed that these women do not have other meaningful social relations than those they establish through religion, as if religion marks everything they do.

In the case of Turkey, this imaginary singular identity of Muslim women, specifically headscarf-wearing women, is expressed through the label ‘Islamist’ that positions headscarf-wearing women against modernity and progress (Kadioğlu, 1994: 149–150; Çınar, 2008: 891; Özçetin, 2009: 108; Akboğa, 2014: 620). Within the Turkish political context, Islamism is a vague term that can be synonymously used to refer to a political ideology based on Islamic ideals, fundamentalism, revivalism, traditionalism and conservatism as well as violence and extremism (Alam, 2009: 352). It is also positioned against Kemalism,¹ a particular interpretation of modernism and secularism (Çınar, 2008: 891) that predominated in the bureaucracy, education system, military and media in Turkey until the 2010s. ‘Islamist women’ is also a loose term within Turkey that refers to a heterogeneous group of women, including those that only wear a headscarf in public places as well as proponents of extremist and militant activists of Islamist politics (Arat, 1989: 123). Those that subscribe to the Kemalist interpretation of modernity and secularism at an individual or institutional level use the label Islamist to refer to women wearing the headscarf in public places (Akboğa, 2014: 620). Whether they had any interest in politics or not, headscarf-wearing women, especially university students and professionals in the 1980s and 1990s, were depicted as being representative of Islamist politics (Özçetin, 2009: 112).

This categorisation classifies those wearing the headscarf in Turkey within an imaginary political unity as if they were disconnected from material and socio-economic conditions as well as familial and corporeal histories that were unique for each woman. Consequently, the complexity of their embodiments was reduced by the Kemalist ideology into a unifying representation. This representation was then used to justify discrimination against headscarf-wearing women, such as the banning of these women from public places, such as schools, universities, public offices, military bases and the assembly (Scott, 2007: 2).²

To confront reductionist representations of Muslim women, many feminist scholars question the ways in which these representations are produced. For instance, Miriam Cooke (2007: 139–153) calls into question the idea of the collective identity of Muslim women by coining the term ‘The Muslimwoman’. She points out that this collective identity represents an essential embodiment of Islam by women and erases the aspects of other factors in Muslim women’s lives, including national, historical, social, political or material aspects (Cooke 2007: 140). Sonbol (2005: xix) also explains that instead of a wider perspective, in which religion is only one part of the picture, Muslim women are depicted as religion-based only, which is supposed to be solely representative of the realities of how women actually live. As Lazreg (1988: 94) argues, despite all historical and spatial differences, the imagined collective identity of Muslim women overlays individuality. In Under Western Eyes, Mohanty (2003: 499–505) emphasises the importance of being attentive to the connection between the local and the global, and draws attention to material and socio-economic complexity. Abu-Lughod (2002: 784) similarly illuminates how the historical specificities and the role of global politics are more pressing scholarly concerns than ‘culture’ and religious beliefs for understanding the suffering of Muslim women. Mahmood’s (2005) well-known ethnographic work on women in the Mosque movement in Egypt is one of the few attempts to conceptualise the desires, subjectivities and practices of Muslim women in their historicity.

Within Turkey, there are also works that address the stigmatisation of Muslim women, particularly headscarf-wearing women. Gökarıksel (2009: 660) points out the ways in which the signification of the headscarf in Turkey as Islamism erased the diversity of the women and a variety of their religious inspirations. Arat (1989: 123) also argues that the term ‘Islamist’ subsumed the heterogeneous group of headscarf-wearing women into a political ideology. Özçetin (2009: 106) addresses how the stigmatisation of headscarf-wearing women caused their exclusion from the wider women’s movement in Turkey.

On the legacy of this literature, I examine some of the ways in which such stereotyping obscures complexities and multiplicities of women’s experiences and embodiments. In order to problematise the labelling of women as ‘Islamist’ based on political discourses in Turkey, I use a relational ontology derived from Deleuzian works (Grosz, 1993; Buchanan, 1997; Currier, 2003; Potts, 2004; Shilling, 2004; Blackman, 2008; Duff, 2010; Fox, 2011; Puar, 2012).³ I apply ontological concepts derived from the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze to interviews conducted in two women’s organisations in Turkey – Capital City Women’s Platform (Baskent Kadin Platformu) and Hazar – between August 2017 and January 2018.

According to this Deleuzian ontology, the world constantly ‘becomes’ through flows of relations between multiple elements; therefore, it is a ‘multiplicity’, an ‘intensity’ and ‘fractured’ (Gatens, 1996: 61; Buchanan, 1997: 79–80; Clough, 2008: 15). Categorisations such as class, gender, race and ideology are aggregations of these multiplicities and fluidities (Fox, 2015: 308), forming specific fixations according to a range of ascribed characteristics, such as income, education, employment or dress codes. These categorisations are achieved by repressing the complexity and multiplicity that compose every being (Saldanha, 2013: 9–11).

Based on the Deleuzian conceptualisations of relationality and ‘multiplicity’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 2005: 239), by examining the quotidian physical, material, political and social resources, I aim to elucidate multiple relations between a female body and a headscarf which is continuously produced and reproduced by multiple elements such as available materials of dress, socio-economic and political conditions and psychosomatic and familial histories. I then argue that the label ‘Islamist’ conceals the relationality and ‘multiplicity’ of headscarf-wearing women’s embodiments within a unifying category and creates an imaginary homogeneity. I reject the idea of Islamism as an all-powerful constructivist force for the embodiments of the headscarf-wearing women in Turkey. However, I do not mean that Islamic traditions and Islamist ideology are inconsequential. Rather, I argue that these women have shifting relationships with the legacy of Islamic traditions and the body of Islamist politics as well as the social, economic, material and corporeal elements surrounding them. Neither do I claim to reveal the exact relations that constitute headscarf practices or all the implications of the headscarf within the Turkish context. Instead, I aim to address some of the possible relations in order to open a space for the discussion of the issue through the lenses of relationality and multiplicity.

Deleuzian ontology

In Deleuzian philosophy, any component of life – no matter how big or small, including biological and non-biological, material and immaterial, human and non-human – is a ‘body’. This philosophy stresses an idea of the social world being composed of modifications of relations between multiple bodies, which Deleuze calls ethology (1988: 125; Deleuze and Guattari, 2005: 336). The body, which refers to any component of life, is not an entity, essential quality or fixed position but is rather composed of multiple heterogeneous, continual and unfixed linkages between the human bodies, objects, materialities and structures – social, biological and psychological – that come together in conjunction or break away through disjunction (Deleuze and Guattari, 2005: 190-191).⁴According to this conceptualisation, the human body, including its biological and non-biological aspects, is not a steady organism with a stable sense of self but instead is formed through a temporary and chaotic network of connections and is always reassembling in different ways (Potts, 2004: 19; Deleuze and Guattari, 2005: 100; Duff, 2010: 628; Adkins, 2015: 24–25).

In such an account, the social and the psychological are not separable, and neither are the internal and the external, the material and the immaterial or the religious and the secular (Blackman and Venn, 2010: 10; Puar, 2012: 57). Instead, the constitution of relations holds a crucial place for an understanding of subjectivity and embodiment (Deleuze, 1988: 123). Within this ontological stance, Muslim or headscarf-wearing women cannot be thought of or known without their relations. The study of these women’s experiences and subjectivities needs to be transformed into a study of their bodies’ relations and multiplicities.

Fox and Ward (2008: 1010) argue that multiple resources available to a person might enhance or limit what a person can do. For instance, psychological insight and some cultural resources might extend possibilities, while social disadvantages, a lack of material resources and psychological drawbacks can limit the opportunities of what else a body can do. In a similar vein, cultural products, social abstractions and organisations, material tools and institutions available to a headscarf-wearing woman produce her relations with the headscarf and the ways in which the headscarf functions in her life. Therefore, rather than pre-figured features of these women’s subjectivities such as the categorisation of their practices in relation to certain political discourses, Deleuzian thought suggests focusing on their multiple and processual relations. Since every experience can and will be formed differently in the future, according to the relational forces at work at the time, relations of these women with the headscarf, as well as the ways in which the headscarf enhances and limits their agency, constantly emerge, shift and transform.

Although this formulation stresses the relational flux that constitutes bodies, this flux is neither free from dominant power structures nor supposes that an escape exists from oppressive relations of power. Deleuze (1990: 307) is attentive to the operations of power and is interested in knowing how power functions. Deleuze and Guattari’s two terms ‘molar’ and ‘molecular’ forces distinguish more stabilising forces from more nomadic ones (Deleuze and Guattari, 2005: 33–34). They define molar and molecular forces as two types of articulation (Deleuze and Guattari, 2005: 41). The molar divides, stabilises and regulates through codifications, significations and representations, usually creating oppositions between sexes, classes and races. On the other hand, the molecular creates relations bypassing the molar lines of thought and structures and produces change, reorganisation and transformation (Grosz, 1993: 176).

By examining molar and molecular relations, Shenila Khoja-Moolji (2015: 539–554) provides an example of this Deleuzian conceptualisation of power through the reading of the figure Malala Yousafzai, a fifteen-year-old girl who was shot in the head by a member of the Taliban in Pakistan in 2012. She argues that mainstream media coverages about Malala are produced through molar relations – such as media centres, monetary institutions and politics of pity and hatred – that represent Muslim women as oppressed or victimised and Muslim men as oppressors and threats. On the other hand, a molecular reading of Malala’s autobiography unravels the mainstream representations of her and evades the ‘binaries of victim/savior, oppressed/oppressor, and progressive/traditional’ (Khoja-Moolji, 2015: 540). The stories of Malala’s mother and grandmother reveal evidence of Muslim women’s enactment of agency and moments of working to establish their rights against local and global patriarchies through their local frameworks (Khoja-Moolji, 2015: 549). Through such molecular reading of Malala’s autobiography, Khoja-Moolji attempts to de-stabilise normative claims produced by molar forces about the collectivities of Muslim women. Shiva Zarabadi and Jessica Ringrose’s work on imaginaries of British Muslim schoolgirls also illuminates how certain structures, molar forces in Deleuzian terms, create stereotypical depictions of Muslim women by erasing multiplicity and complexity. They point out the ways in which the construction of the ‘jihadi bride’ positions Muslim girls in Britain in relation to the threat of radicalisation and informs regulations to surveil students based on stopping radicalisation and extremism (Zarabadi and Ringrose, 2018: 83–106). To think about how geopolitical forces and larger-scale events regulate bodies of Muslim girls in the classroom, Alyssa Niccolini (2016: 894) points to an event in which a Muslim schoolgirl was disciplined for reading lesbian erotica at a public high school in New York City. Through Deleuzian lenses, these works reveal how specific historical, economic and geopolitical conditions produce representations of Muslim women in particular ways. Their bodies and clothes function as an intensified ground for relations of forces. Although their embodiments and practices are produced by a flux of relations which are multiple, variable and floating, particular molar forces such as ideologies, institutional regulations and metanarratives reduce this multiplicity and complexity to fixed identities.

In terms of my subject, I point out similar reductionist understandings of headscarf-wearing women’s experiences in Turkey. Transformations in headscarf practices in Turkey, especially in the 1980s, were attributed to the manifestation of political interests by obscuring socio-economic and material resources and roles of individual histories that produced the changes in the ways in which the headscarf was used. Consequently, the headscarf exceeded its status as a piece of clothing and manifested as a subject category for women. As molar forces, fear and threat – which were propagated by state institutions, media and those who adopted the Kemalist interpretation of modernity – travelled in society and stuck to headscarf-wearing women’s bodies. The attachment of fear to the headscarf created the subjectification of a heterogeneous group of women as a supposedly singular and threatening population. In order to disrupt this monolithic representation, I aim to shed light first on alternative relations of power that made possible the changes in headscarf practices in Turkey, and then on the ways in which these multiple relations were ignored and manipulated by the Kemalist ideology to create a fixed category for headscarf-wearing women.

Method and data

To implement this relational ontology derived from Deleuzian theory, I examine the headscarf ban and contestations in Turkey, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s. This project is produced from interviews conducted in two women’s organisations in Turkey – Capital City Women’s Platform (Baskent Kadin Platformu) and Hazar – between August 2017 and January 2018 for my PhD dissertation. First, I contacted Hidayet Tuksal who is well known in Turkey for her research on women in Islamic traditions and her activism against the headscarf ban. On her invitation as one of the founders of CCWP, I visited the organisation in Ankara several times and was welcomed by the members there. Then, with Tuksal’s recommendation, I reached out to Hazar in Istanbul.

These two organisations were deliberately selected because of their experiences with the ban on the headscarf, among both practitioners of the headscarf and activists against the ban. The Capital City Women’s Platform (CCWP) was established in 1995 by a group of women. CCWP was the first women’s organisation in Turkey initiated by women who defined themselves as religious and aimed to connect with secular women’s organisations. In other words, it was the first attempt by religious women to connect with the larger body of the women’s movement in Turkey and the world. Through this interaction, they employed a nomenclature adopted from the legacy of feminism worldwide. The women I interviewed in the CCWP define themselves as ‘religious feminists’. They define their goal as ‘solving women’s problems that derive from both traditional gender roles in religion and the discrimination of religious women in modern spheres’.⁵ Because the ban on the headscarf intensified within two years after CCWP’s launch with the 1997 military coup, their activities in their early years focused on the discrimination caused by the ban. Therefore, they are one of the women’s organisations in Turkey which can provide the most relevant data for my case.

The other organisation, Hazar, was initiated as an informal reading group by a number of women who were uncomfortable with the post-military coup atmosphere in the 1990s that targeted headscarf-wearing women. Being primarily interested in the education of ‘religious women’, achieved by hosting academic panels, as one example, they also aim to contribute to social change in their programmes combating under-age marriage and drug addiction.⁶ My interviewees in Hazar stated that they engaged with, and benefited from, the legacy of feminism as a shared experience of women but do not define themselves as ‘feminists’, unlike the members of the CCWP. Instead, they prefer a religious framework for their activism. Another difference between Hazar and CCWP is that the members of Hazar are more aligned with the policies of Turkey’s Islamist political parties, the Refah Partisi (Welfare Party) and Justice and Development Party, despite their awareness of the unequal status of women within these parties. On the other hand, CCWP takes a more critical stand against these political parties, although there is no homogeneity among its members. Hence, Hazar exemplifies a different position from CCWP in terms of the engagement of headscarf-wearing women with the legacy of the women’s movement and with the body of the Islamist movement in Turkey. All women I interviewed in these two organisations were in their forties and fifties and have at least a bachelor’s degree.

Since the aim of this research is to destabilise imaginary singularities about headscarf-wearing women by pointing to the relationality of, and alternative realities in, their lives, I used multiple resources to explore different relations which produced reality. The use of interviews as the sole source of data is not sufficient to address the nexus that these women occupy within the flux of relations, since the interviewees may only have a limited awareness of the relations that produce their experiences, desires and actions. To overcome this methodological challenge, I believe that any type of data that helps to examine relations between bodies can be appropriated for this Deleuzian inquiry. Therefore, in addition to my interviews, I draw upon various resources, such as ethnographic observations of women in Turkey, autobiographies, analyses of historical and political contexts, material culture and women’s magazines.

Although I aim to depict alternative realities, I do not claim to offer an understanding of the headscarf that applies to all headscarf-wearing women in Turkey. Neither do I aim to examine all historical shifts of headscarf practices nor all aspects of the issue. Instead, I am concerned with problematising the stigmatisation of the headscarf in Turkey, particularly in the 1980s and the 1990s, because this period sheds light on the contemporary experiences of headscarf-wearing Muslim women around the world in terms of categorisation and stigmatisation. I point to only some of the possible relations that I see as relevant in my research in order to open a space to talk about a relational and multi-faceted understanding of their experiences and embodiments. In other words, through the examination of various resources, I aim to pay attention to the realities of headscarf-wearing women in Turkey, which became invisible, vague and pushed away from our attention due to certain political discourses.

Historical background of the Turkish case

When the Republic of Turkey was established in 1923, the construction of new gender images was an important means of displaying the image of the new Turkey (White, 2003: 150; Çınar, 2008: 891–910; Gökarıksel, 2009: 660). Since the founders aimed to convince Europe about the new identity of the Turkish nation, they enforced a European measure of modernity and enlightenment, especially for women. For the founding fathers and secular elites, who adopted the Orientalist view of Muslim women, the headscarf was the symbol of ‘women’s oppression’ and ‘Islam’s backwardness’ (White, 2003: 150; Gökarıksel, 2009: 660). Therefore, what women could wear was central to the construction of political discourse as well as to the construction of the nation as a whole (Çınar, 2008: 899).

In 1925, two years after the rise of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of Turkey, introduced a bill known as the ‘Hat Law’ that outlawed the Ottoman fez and made a top hat mandatory for men. Women were also encouraged to wear a hat instead of a headscarf. Ataturk and those elites around him embraced the civilising mission and became model citizens: Westernised, modern, secular and nationalist. To reinforce this image, they dressed in European-style clothing, appeared in coffeehouses and restaurants that served European dishes and socialised via Western-style activities such as horseback riding and playing golf (Çınar, 2008: 899). Any form of manner, lifestyle, dressing and social activity associated with the Ottoman past became ‘backward’ and an embarrassment to newly civilised Turkish citizens. The promotion of ‘civilised’ dress for women was also an important part of the narrative of the new Turkish state.⁷ Therefore, the headscarf, which was the symbol of backwardness and oppression for the founding fathers and elites, needed to be completely removed from the public scene (White, 2003: 150; Gökarıksel, 2009: 660).

Until the 1980s, only republican elites could relate to this Kemalist system of modernisation, while the majority was pushed out of the ‘modern’ sphere. However, with the rise of different social groups, new actors claimed agency in the public space (Akboğa, 2014: 619). Compared to rural people living in small towns or villages, middle-class and urban residents were more intensely exposed to the modernisation apparatuses of the state. The manners of modernity were infused into the life of these people more so than for those in rural communities. Those who came out of their rural and local environments into the modern-secular sphere later, especially after the 1950s, when authoritarian state apparatuses began to weaken because of the gradual increasing of liberalism, carried traditional and ‘Islamic’ behaviours, dressing and manners into the public sphere once again. This new urban population, especially headscarf-wearing university students, began to challenge the meaning of modernity in the imaginary of Kemalist secularism by ways of their actions in the educational field. Their increasing visibility at the universities contested the Kemalist sense of modernity, challenging the connotation of modernity as ‘Western’ and re-appropriating the mode of modernism by associating ‘Muslim’ with ‘modern’ (Göle, 1996: 98–108).

Kemalist organisations, both governmental and non-governmental, focused on political implementations of the headscarf which appeared in modern spaces, and considered it as a primarily political act. Therefore, headscarf-wearing women were labelled as ‘Islamists’. Regardless of their political engagements, those who believe, act, dress or socialise in a way that revived the buried tradition have been subsumed under the label ‘Islamist’, which turned into a unifying category (Akboğa, 2014: 620). Consequently, this ideological imagination led to the ban on the headscarf that applied to elected officials and civil servants as well as school and university students in a Muslim majority country until 2013 (Scott, 2007: 2).⁸ Whether these women had any interest in politics or not, all women who wore the contemporary type of headscarf were deemed as militant activists of ‘Islamism’. Even women who criticised Islamism could not escape the label of ‘Islamist’ due to the widespread categorisation of the headscarf as a political symbol (Özçetin, 2009: 112).

Even a scholar such as Nilüfer Göle, who is the author of the pioneering work on modernism and headscarf-wearing women in Turkey, Forbidden Modern, identifies these women in a broad sense as ‘Islamist’. Although Göle offers a radical critique by accepting the headscarf-wearing women as an alternative type of ‘modern’, she continues to relegate these women to the category of ‘Islamist’ (Göle, 1996: 1–18). In seeing the headscarf as a political symbol, Göle is not alone. Saktanber and Çorbacıoğlu (2008: 521) also provide an example of how transformations of headscarf practices, which were made possible by multiple elements, were reduced to the representation of a political ideology. By referring to the changes in headscarf practices, such as the ways in which the headscarf was set on the head, they claim that wearing a headscarf as a part of culture would not have constituted a social problem so long as it had not been associated with ‘Islamism’. However, the number of women in Turkey who wore an ‘Islamic headscarf’, according to Saktanbar and Çorbacıoğlu, increased significantly in the 1980s and 1990s. Therefore, the secular sections of Turkish society had concerns about the headscarf once it became visible in the public sphere. As with many others who have adopted a Kemalist understanding of modernity, with the distinction between the traditional and ‘Islamic’ headscarf, they refer to the transformation of types of the headscarf. The type called ‘Islamic’ was different from the traditional headscarf in terms of fabric and the way it was set on the head. It was also used in modern public places such as university campuses, unlike the traditional headscarf used in rural communities. While it was possible to understand these transformations of the traditional headscarf in many different ways, political symbolism was pointed out as the only motivation and reason behind the transformations of headscarf practices. To challenge the association of this ‘new’ type of headscarf merely with politics and discrimination against all women who wear it, in the following sections I point out some other possible elements and social conditions that produced the type of headscarf called ‘Islamic’.

Relationality of headscarf practices

In order to emphasise the relational transformation of headscarf practices, I consider the ways in which these embodiments were produced, transformed and complicated in relation to material and socio-economic elements available for use. I find the transformations in the materials of the headscarves important because, over the contestations of secular versus Islamist and traditional versus modern in Turkey, shifts in materials used were crucial to positioning a woman within the category of Islamist. In order to examine the shifts of materiality, I look into key socio-economic factors and commodities that relationally contributed to the production of new materials and types of headscarf.

For instance, since the Turkish economy was governed by statist and socialist economic policies and closed to a free market economy until the 1980s (Kandiyoti, 2012: 521), production mostly depended on state-led companies, such as Sumer Bank, in the textile sector. Because the secular state already ignored its religious population, while reform was being sought in the manifold production sector, the needs of religious life, such as religious clothing, were left untouched. As reflected in my interviewees’ narratives, women who wanted to cover their heads out of religious or traditional concerns either continued to use traditional methods for the production of the material or tried to adopt ‘modern’ clothes, which were not produced according to their needs.

During this time, rural Turkish women continued their traditional methods and habits and tailored their own clothes. However, as stated in the previous section, traditional Turkish Muslim clothing, especially head covers, had been stigmatised as a sign of backwardness and under-education. The traditional practices of rural women were not challenged, since they rarely left their rural environments, so they did not create new relations with alternative materials of the headscarf and alternative discourses such as Kemalist modernism. On the other hand, for women who entered into urban and modern places, the stigmatisation of the headscarf as backwardness produced the desire for a ‘reformation’ in their dressing style (Özçetin, 2009: 109–110). One of my interviewees in the CCWP, Zehra (pseudonym), reflected on this desire of being ‘modern’ by saying, ‘When I decided to wear a headscarf, I said that my headscarf must be modern, not like everyone else’s’. Many headscarf-wearing women like Zehra, who had recently joined the ‘modern’ urban life and secular space, were urged by their new relations (e.g. discourses of modernity and secularism, urban settings, new forms of community life, etc.) to reform their dressing styles and materials. These women wanted to distance themselves from the stigmatisation of the headscarf without abandoning the headscarf entirely. Although these women did not want to use the traditional pieces and materials of head-covers, they still wanted to practice modesty. Therefore, the first disconnection for these women occurred with the traditional style of dressing. However, the meaning of the traditional/religious dressing as a way of modesty survived and was transmitted into the future.

For instance, to create a sense of modesty, they wore trench coats produced for Western women’s needs in chilly and rainy weather since these coats provided a sense of modesty as an outdoor garment. According to the narratives in my interviews, the clothes produced for ‘Western’ and ‘civilised’ women were the most conveniently available, not only because of their styles and quality but also because of the meanings associated with these clothes, namely that they were ‘modern’ and ‘civilised’.

Within the encounter of women with the secular-modern sphere, headscarves were also reshaped through available materials and the discourses of the social environment. For a head-cover, the first generation of women living in urban settings of the new Republic used square foulards or small scarves that gave a sense of modernity and were usually produced by prestigious brands such as Vakko and Pierre Cardin. Vakko was created by a Turkish-Jewish entrepreneur, Vitali Hakko, who recognised Turkish women’s need for headscarves. In his book Hayatim Vakko, Hakko (1997) recounts his journey towards producing ‘modern’ headscarves. According to his autobiography, after the Hat Law in 1925, Hakko began making hats for women. He then realised that Turkish women did not wear hats in daily life, despite the political campaigns encouraging them to do so. Instead, Turkish women demanded headscarves that they had already used in different forms. Thus, he began making Vakko headscarves in modern styles and fabrics, calling the items ‘eşarp’ (a new name for the headscarf with no meaning in Turkish) instead of ‘başörtüsü’ (headscarf) in order to provide some sense of ‘modern’. These Vakko scarves, which turned into expensive and prestigious items, were largely sought by conservative and middle-class urban women (Hakko, 1997: 102–104).

Since this type of scarf was mostly made of silk or a silk-like material, it had a more stylish and ‘modern’ look, which helped urban headscarf-wearing women distance themselves from the stigmatisation of traditional headscarves and become more oriented within the modern sphere. Therefore, those interested in the headscarf, the first generation in modern spaces and urban life of the secular Republic, turned to this ‘modern’ type of headscarf that only covered the hair, or some part of it, and was usually tied under the chin, and they then combined this with a knee-length skirt or coat. These new headscarves were different from the traditional headscarves used in the countryside in terms of material. Since these new headscarves changed the boundaries of veiling by leaving the neck and shoulders open, they were also different from traditional clothes such as the ‘çarşaf’ (a garment similar to a burqa) and ‘poşu’ (similar to a keffiyeh) worn by traditional urban women, which provided a loose cover for the whole body.

This new materiality shaped and imposed certain types of veiling, especially in urban and secular spaces. Even when these women demanded other options, the material pieces did not allow for much differentiation unless they continued to use traditional items. Berna (pseudonym), in the CCWP, recalled how she noticed the lack of materials when she began to wear a headscarf, saying, ‘At that time, scarves on the market were very small and too expensive’. Ayse (pseudonym), also in the CCWP, shared this disappointment, saying, ‘When I was in high school, our scarves were really small. I wanted to cover my neck, but no matter how hard I tried, it was not big enough’.

These types of headscarves and forms of modesty, the first version of ‘modern’ modesty, shifted once again, especially after the 1980s, because of changes in commodities and market policies. In other words, the transformation of economic policies and the actors in the market in the 1980s and 1990s drove the transformation of headscarf practices, which I call the second-generation ‘modern’ headscarf.

Up until the 1980s, the public spaces in Turkey had been under the hegemonic surveillance of the secular state. Although the oppressive secularist ideology in Turkey ‘aggressively secularized and Westernized many aspects of society, including dress, Sunni Islam remained the core key identifier for Turkish identity’ (Mills and Gökariksel, 2014: 909; see also Özçetin, 2009: 109). The informal religious groups that lost their legitimacy after such orders were outlawed also maintained a low profile and survived through personal networks (Çınar, 2008: 904). After the 1980s, the liberal economic policies of Turgut Özal’s government opened the market for local religious entrepreneurs who had previously lacked access to capital and political support. This was a time when local entrepreneurs of excluded religious populations entered the social and economic sphere and developed their own organisations and modes of representation (Kandiyoti, 2012: 521). Their businesses thus began to contribute to economic production, new patterns of consumption and religious embodiment (Özçetin, 2009: 109).

For example, the first generation of modern scarves used by urban women were not big enough to cover the neck and shoulders. The new entrepreneurs, enabled by the free market economy, offered larger versions of these silk scarves and Western-style coats after the 1980s. These scarves now enabled women to cover their neck and shoulders. Just as Hakko had noticed the demand for modern-looking scarves in the 1930s, the new actors in the market noticed the demand for larger versions of ‘modern’ scarves and coats. These new commodities produced by local entrepreneurs did not carry prestigious labels. They were cheaper and more broadly available for middle- and lower-middle-class women, and therefore reached a wide population.

This shift in commodity changed the boundaries of veiling once again. When the commodity of the modern headscarf transformed into the second generation, which enabled women to cover the neck and shoulders, the boundaries of veiling returned to the previous line that traditional urban clothing drew, such as the çarşaf and poşu. In other words, the changes in the boundaries of veiling were closely related to the available materials and a locus of wider shifting socio-economic factors – including economic policies of the state, the owners of capital, the political atmosphere, demands in the market and discourses about modernity and religion.

With the change of materiality, the way a headscarf was set on the head also needed to be transformed. Ayse, in the CCWP, described her journey towards discovering the new style by saying, ‘I was trying to find a comfortable way’. According to her account, for the second-generation modern headscarves after the 1980s, which were larger than the previous generation, some women used a tie wrapped around their necks to hold the scarves steady. They soon discovered that a safety pin and, later on, a straight pin would be more comfortable than a tie tightly wrapped around the neck. She explained why she began to use a pin:

I realised a more comfortable way to use something [headscarf] that I have been using since my childhood. We realised that a pin keeps the headscarf fixed and this makes you feel more comfortable. We discovered comfort. If I cover my head, I would like it to stay nice. You know, it was slipping. Yes, I saw some people were using the pin, but I realised that I need to use it to keep my headscarf stable.

Along with the transformation in the size of the fabric, a pin also accompanied the new type of headscarf. According to the responses of my interviewees, women saw this type of headscarf as a contemporary form of dress for modesty and piety and a more comfortable way of applying headscarf traditions. This style was adopted by women in different social groups, such as professional women, students, women who lived in underserved neighbourhoods of cities and even the young generation in the countryside; it grew to be so popular that it became the most common type of head-cover in the country. However, the Kemalist ideology turned the pin into an important material to decide whether a headscarf-wearing woman was Islamist or not. Soon all women wearing the new type of headscarf, accompanied by a pin, were considered agents of a global Islamist project by this ideology, as discussed in the next section.

Producing the category of ‘Islamist’ women out of multiplicity and relationality

In this section, I point out some of the ways in which the Kemalist ideology reduced the complex relations of multiple elements that produced the transformation of headscarf practices, addressed in the previous section, to a fixed, even stigmatised category. As stated, the Deleuzian approach suggests seeing categorisations as a reduction of multiplicity and fractures of bodies into specific fixations. The multiplicity and relationality of bodies refer to the constant possibilities of alternative compositions. The organisation and classification of categories are selected from these multiple possibilities of becoming. These selections then are assumed to represent the ‘actual’ world (Gatens, 1996: 95).⁹

The act of naming is one of the ways in which categories are produced out of multiplicity and relationality, although the whole process cannot be reduced to expressions. The act of naming as a molar force orders relations in certain ways and imposes presuppositions and intelligible narratives upon bodies (Gatens, 1996: 180). In other words, in their myriad forms, expressions organise our perceptions of the world (Hemmings, 2005: 562). Specifically, the labels defining the materiality and practices of the headscarf contribute to the production of a stereotypical identity by erasing relational and multi-faced formations of these materials.

In the case of Turkey, the Turkish state played with the definitions of the words ‘türban’ (turban) and ‘başörtüsü’ (headscarf) to shape and manipulate the meanings associated with head-covering practices. As headscarf-wearing women became visible on university campuses in the 1980s when liberal policies of Turgut Özal’s government opened the modern space to excluded populations, the Council of Higher Education (Yuksek Ogretim Kurumu), which oversees all universities in Turkey, introduced a new term into the political discourse (Özçetin, 2009: 110). It passed a decree that a türban that covers the hair but not the neck and shoulders is not Islamic but rather a piece of modern clothing, so it could be worn on university campuses, unlike the başörtüsü, which was assumed to have an Islamic connotation. It aimed to create a new form of head covering that was ‘modern’ while not being overtly religious, since Kemalist secularism wanted to completely remove religion from public places. However, mostly because of restrictions on the headscarf, women adopted the type of head covering called the türban as a new method to cover their heads based on their religious concerns. For instance, students used the türban on university campuses and the headscarf off campus. When the Council saw that this differentiation did not eliminate religious head-covering practices, they passed another decree stating that the türban had actually replaced the headscarf, which came to symbolise certain ideological orientations (Özçetin, 2009: 110). Then, they changed the definition of the term türban. While the türban had previously referred to the item which covers the hair but not the neck and shoulders, unlike the headscarf, later the contemporary types of the headscarf, addressed in the previous section, were also included within the definition of the türban, with an assumed political connotation. Consequently, each woman who wore the contemporary types of head-covers was subsumed under the singular category of ‘Islamist’ (Arat, 1989: 123; Gökarıksel, 2009: 660).

This act of naming is one example of how the actors of a Kemalist ideology took an active role in the construction of the image of ‘Islamist’ through the naming of practices and materials. During public debates and discussions on the issue, opponents of the headscarf carefully avoided using the word başörtüsü and preferred türban (Saktanber and Çorbacıoğlu, 2008) in order to reinforce the category of ‘Islamist’. According to this ideological framing, contemporary headscarf-wearing women wear a türban, not a headscarf, therefore they are Islamist, even when practitioners reject both the name ‘türban’ and its supposed political symbolism (Akboğa, 2014: 620). This new name was useful to cut off the relation between traditional and modern headscarves, as though the modern version was produced merely by Islamist politics as something completely different from the traditional headscarf which people knew and had used for centuries.

Moreover, as Deleuze and Guattari argue, forms of human expression are not reducible to words but refer to a set of statements arising from a ‘regime of signs’, which is a complex state of things, material or immaterial, as a formative power (Deleuze and Guattari, 2005: 66–67). In other words, creating new expressions for certain practices is not a simple or singular act. Relating these expressions to other elements (bodies in Deleuzian terminology) – material or immaterial – is a crucial part of the formation of expressions.

In terms of creating the representation of ‘Islamist’ women in Turkey, the acts of naming, which changed the name from headscarf to turban, were associated with feelings of fear and threat. For example, fear about the Islamist state of Iran spread via continuous media coverage was employed to create a potential suspicion and sense of future threat for the headscarf in Turkey. An article by Sedef Öztürk (1988: 38–43) in Kaktüs, considered a socialist feminist magazine in Turkey, provides an example of how the fear about Iran, violence and extremism was used to create a sense of threat around the headscarf. Kaktüs was aligned with Kemalist modernism in terms of supporting the ban on headscarf-wearing women in public places, and employed a ‘feminist’ terminology informed by Kemalism to advocate against these women. Öztürk’s article discusses the attempts of headscarf-wearing women in Turkey to have a woman-inclusive reading of the Qur’an. She argues that headscarf-wearing women, who wanted to engage with the feminist movement in Turkey, were not even capable of engaging with real feminist concerns unless they abandoned Islam. While the article argues against the headscarf, it contributes to the production of fear and sense of threat around headscarf-wearing women. There is nothing in the wording of the article about the connection of these women to violence or Iran. However, it begins with a photograph showing veiled women holding a poster of Ayatollah Khomeini and ends with another image of women all in black burqas (or Arabic transliteration: burqu) and holding assault rifles. It is not explained where these photographs were taken or why the article related them to the Turkish women discussed in the article who wanted to wear a headscarf and provide a women-inclusive interpretation of Islam in Turkey. The article accompanied by these images implies that the commonality between the women discussed in the article and the women in the photographs is that both are called ‘Islamist’. Thus, it indirectly suggests that those who are violent Muslims and those who wear headscarves are all the same.

Through this association, which was also employed and continuously repeated in media coverage, fear became stuck to the bodies of headscarf-wearing women and became a modality of their subjectivation as the stories and narratives about Iran circulated. In other words, the act of naming and the association of fear with this name erased the multiple elements and their relations that produced the contemporary type of headscarf discussed in the previous section, and created an imagined political unity – a threatening one. As this fear circulated and spread through public debate and media coverage, it was perceived as reality; women who wore the headscarf had to explain that they were not potential violent militants of Islamism. One of my respondents, Ayse, recalled how the narratives about Iran in the 1980s and 1990s were associated with headscarf-wearing women in Turkey. Ayse says:

They were asking us if we took money from someone [Iran]. We could not grasp it. We did not even know much about Iran. I was also afraid of Iran because of the way it was introduced in Turkey. When I was called ‘Iranist’ I was afraid […] When someone asked me if I received money, I was shocked; I could not understand how they could think of this.

When the sense of fear about Iran stuck to the bodies of headscarf-wearing women, this feeling dominated, even erased, traces of all other relations that produced their veiled bodies. Consequently, each headscarf-wearing woman’s body became a signifier of a soon-to-come threat that would mean violence and extremism against secular achievements.

Even if some people in Turkey were supposedly inspired by the Islamist revolution in Iran in 1979, associating every woman who wore the headscarf or a style of the headscarf (specifically the one that emerged from the complex socio-economic and religious contexts discussed already) with being ‘Iranist’ is not a useful way to understand this controversial issue. However, no matter how many women, if any, subscribed to the spirit of the Iranian revolution, the narrative of being Iranist circulated in the society and helped relate certain meanings to certain practices; wearing a headscarf in a public space meant being Islamist. Since wearing a headscarf not only meant being Islamist but also Iranist, which implied ‘danger’ and ‘horror’ within the secularist discourse in Turkey, the Iranist label linked the headscarf with feelings of fear. With its link to multiple putative menaces, such as the labels of Iranist and Islamist, images of veiled women and assault rifles and narratives of paid spies (reflected in Ayse’s response), the complexity and multiplicity of headscarf practices were reduced to a single category, even a stigma, which tied a type of head-cover with supposedly political connotations and fear.

In summary, although the contemporary type of the headscarf was made possible by multiple elements, including the shifts in available materials and the social, political and economic changes, the molar force of Kemalist modernism and secularism stabilised the complexity of the headscarf as a fixed position which was a threatening political symbol. While this representation was produced by those who subscribed to Kemalist ideology, they referred to the transformations in the materials of the headscarf, such as using a pin to hold the headscarf steady, and these turned into markers of whether a headscarf-wearing woman was Islamist or not (Özçetin, 2009: 112). Consequently, the new commodity – the pin used for the headscarf – became the proof and symbol of an imagined political unity. Although there were material shifts in headscarf practices, explaining these shifts as a mere embodiment of a political ideology was an example of how multiple relations that produce the contemporary type of the headscarf were obscured and made invisible by certain molar forces.

Concluding remarks

In the Deleuzian ontology, each body, which might refer to any component of life, is constituted through complex relations. This ontology points out the relational configurations of life by linking biological and psychological processes to material objects and social structures while refusing to subordinate a person to a unity provided by consciousness, biological organism or social structures. This conceptualisation refutes identity and focuses on the movement of linkage and connection. Unity, identity or logics of binarisation are no longer organising principles, since everything has different compositions of multiplicity and rationality that continuously change, move, assemble and reassemble. Religious and secular or modern and traditional can no longer be explained in binary terms in which one is positioned against the other, as in the case of the shifts in headscarf practices. Rather, each connects with and becomes a part of the other. As such, it is impossible to definitively establish one as essentially superior and the other as essentially inferior.

This ontology is therefore useful for dissolving monolithic categories, such as ‘Islamist women’, and also for providing particular configurations of subjectivities, embodiments and experiences in relation to multiple elements surrounding specific groups of women. The categorisation of the headscarf-wearing women in Turkey as Islamist obscures the dynamism and complexity of headscarf practices and supposes the existence of a unified ideological space. However, Deleuzian ontology can shift our attention towards relational transformations in headscarf practices, with transformations in materiality, socio-political contexts and market policies. This conceptualisation can connect the material with the discursive, the local with the global and the secular with the religious. Moreover, such a conceptualisation can reveal the ways in which hegemonic structures, such as the Kemalist ideology, produce categories and stereotypes through the erasure of multiplicity and relationality. As such, to understand the function of religious practices and symbols, such as the headscarf, we need to understand the ways in which these practices are produced, made possible, shifted and manipulated in everyday life, instead of focusing on molar forces such as Islamism.

Footnotes

ORCID iD

Hesna Serra Aksel

Notes

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