The polarisation between religious conservative -or ‘pious’- and secular Turks has been a salient issue in Türkiye for a long time (Aydin-Düzgit & Balta, 2019; Kaya & Sunar, 2015). In 1973, Mardin highlighted the existing political cleavage between the urbanised secularist centre and the rural religious periphery in Türkiye that developed as a result of secularist reforms implemented at the start of the Republic. Later, Çarkoğlu and Toprak (2007) used Mardin’s theoretical framework in arguing that Turkish society has a dual structure; with urban, better-educated people with a relatively high-income level who do not feel extremely committed to religious values and who define themselves as secular on one side, and rural, less-educated people with a relatively low-income level who define themselves as Islamist and religious on the other.
A very potent question within this greater fault line used to be the headscarf debate (Toprak & Uslu, 2009; Kalaycıoğlu, 2009; Turam, 2008; Tarhan, 2011). Large scale protests were organised to advocate for lifting the ban of the headscarf in universities in the late 1990’s after veiled students were forcibly prevented from graduating in what is now referred to as “the 28th of February process” (Caglar, 2012). Universities more generally served as sites where the contestation of the headscarf took place (Cindoglu & Zincirci, 2008). Particularly interesting was the case of Leyla Sahin, an Istanbul University (IÜ) student who sued the Turkish state via the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in 1998 after her university also prohibited the headscarf. When the court ruled in favour of the Turkish state in 2004 (Columbia Global Freedom of Expression, 2024), it sparked even more outrage. Gaining from this conflict electorally, Erdogan’s government campaigned on and gradually managed lifting the headscarf ban in universities and other public institutions (Head, 2010; Al Jazeera, 2013).
Türkiye today doesn’t have a single university that prohibits wearing a headscarf (Edel, 2012). While this does not mean that the social conflict is over, large scale confrontation around the issue seems to have died down. Nevertheless, wearing or not wearing the headscarf can be seen as having political implications and many Turkish women who wear it experience it as an act of resistance and liberation, while many women who do not wish to wear it experience the pressure of wearing it as repressive of their rights and freedoms (Sandıkçı & Ger, 2015).
There is a large body of literature around the claim that polarisation persists between religious conservatives and secular progressives (Aydin-Düzgit & Balta, 2019; Somer, 2020; Ertugay, 2022; Esmer, 2019; Kaya & Sunar, 2015; Baran, 2010; Çarkoğlu & Toprak, 2007; Turam 2008). Affective polarisation has been proven to have a negative impact on the stability of democracies (Caluwaerts et al., 2023; McCoy et al., 2018; McCoy and Somer, 2019; Esmer, 2019; Arbatli & Rosenberg, 2021; Orhan, 2022), and Türkiye’s democracy has never been able to completely fit the originally intended Western liberal democratic ideal (Esmer, 2019; Turam, 2008). Türkiye, according to some authors, has reached levels of polarisation that should worry even optimists (Erdogan, 2016) with both sociocultural identities (being religious or secular) and partisan identities (supporting the ruling powers or the opposition) creating issue-based polarisation among youth. Contrary to expectations, however, this polarisation does not extend to an affective one, suggesting a complex, nuanced landscape of political engagement and potential for bridging divides (Uzun & Lüküslü, 2024).
Considering this, it makes the headscarf issue in a contemporary Turkish university context an interesting case when studying polarisation more generally, as it may reveal some dynamics about this nuanced landscape mentioned by Uzun & Lüküslü (2024). On top of this, an environment like IÜ is particularly interesting. As established above, universities generally were geographies of this contestation surrounding the headscarf (Cindoglu & Zincirci, 2008), but IÜ being the alma mater of Leyla Sahin, one of the universities that most strictly enforced the headscarf ban (TRT, 2023) and consequently the site of some of the larger protests about the headscarf (32. Gün, 2022) gives the institution a unique place within the history of this topic. Given the peculiarity that, among the youth, the polarising topics do not extend into an affective one, gaining a “deep” understanding of this peculiar political landscape through the qualitative method of in-depth interviews could provide relevant scientific and societal knowledge in helping to understand polarisation. Therefore, this paper asks the question: “How do veiled and non-veiled IÜ students regard the headscarf issue today?”.
This paper sheds light on how four veiled and six non-veiled IÜ students regard the state of polarisation around the headscarf in contemporary Türkiye. It goes on to show that the headscarf seems to have lost quite some weight among the youth, but that this does not mean that the divisions of the past or not still felt.
In the first chapter, the concept of polarisation, its significance in Türkiye and some historical and theoretical context is discussed. The second chapter elaborates, the qualitative methods used and the significance of the selected case (IÜ students). The third chapter discusses the five themes identified after analysing the data gathered through in-depth interviews. The fourth chapter discusses some of the limitations of the research, along with some roads for future research. The fifth and final chapter draws the main conclusions of this research.
Polarisation remains an essentially contested concept. This makes consensus around the dynamics of polarisation difficult to establish as scholars do not conceptualise or operationalise the concept in the same way (Levenduvsky, 2020; Bernaerts et al. 2023). However, some scholars have recently come to understand polarisation as a concept which can be approached from two different angles. Broadly, we can speak of polarisation as a binary phenomenon with a problematic and non-problematic subtype. Hetherington (2001) and later Aydin-Düzgit & Balta (2019) characterized it as the “ideological/policy-based and/or social distance between groups in society”. Bernaerts et al. (2023) state that multiple subtypes of polarisation are identifiable in the literature and elaborate that they can generally be categorized into idea-based polarisation and identity-based polarisation.
This first idea-based and “objective” realm of polarisation concerns the way different groups develop irreconcilable ideas regarding political and social reality. This polarisation expresses itself in attitudinal or ideological distance (Singer et al., 2019; Bernaerts, 2021; Bernaerts et al. 2023) and is argued to be necessary to a certain extent in democratic societies. Some level of idea-based polarisation is necessary to make party competition function well, as it indicates that voters have a meaningful choice between differentiated policy packages (Reiljan, 2020; Barber, 2015).
Idea-based polarisation is thus the distance between identifiable and opposing groups based on ideas.
Aside from this idea-based polarization there is an identity-based polarisation identified in the literature. This polarisation relates to a conflict in society between the very identity and self-image of the members of different groups. It focuses on intergroup dislike and conflict and related feelings of identity, in which the interaction between groups is much more emotional in nature and thus belongs to a more “subjective” realm (Bernaerts, 2021; Bernaerts et al. 2023). It is characterised and expressed through affective distance where groups have negative emotions or views regarding each other. This type of polarization can be further divided into moral polarisation and affective polarisation. The former is the tendency to view opposing partisans’ moral character negatively, and co-partisans’ moral character positively (Tappin & McKay, 2019). The latter concerns the application of this subjective polarisation to political parties, where one would have positive views of their own party and negative views of the other’s (Rogowski & Sutherland, 2016; Druckman & Levendusky, 2019; Crimston et al., 2022; Iyengar, Shanto, et al., 2019; Bernaerts, 2021).
Identity-based polarisation is therefore the distance between identifiable and opposing groups based on identity.
Identity-based polarisation (affective polarisation) is often a source of concern for scholars, as it has been proven to be harmful to democracies in a myriad of ways (Reilajn, 2020; Bernaerts et al., 2023; McCoy et al., 2018; McCoy and Somer, 2019; Esmer, 2019; Arbatli & Rosenberg, 2021; Orhan, 2022).
Polarisation also concerns groups of actors that can be organized into different levels. The literature describes supply-side polarisation -polarisation between actors on the elite level- and demand-side polarisation -polarisation in the electorate (Reiljan, 2020). We can thus differentiate polarisation between elites and between citizens. These two levels are, however, linked. While elites are more affectively polarised than the public, research shows that mass affective polarisation has increased on both the elite and public level, especially in Türkiye (Enders, 2021; Aydin-Düzgit & Balta, 2019)
While most of the literature on polarization has been focused on American and Western society (Fiorina, 2008; Reiljan, 2020; Tappin & McKay, 2019; Orhan, 2022; Arbatli & Rosenberg, 2021), Türkiye has in recent years -especially after the 2016 coup-attempt- taken the interest of scholars due to accounts of alarming levels of polarisation in the country (Aydin-Düzgit & Balta, 2019; Erdogan, 2016). Erdogan (2016) specifically warns that even optimists ought to be concerned.
Scholars agree that, in the Turkish context, the source of this polarisation in recent years is government-led and can be mainly attributed to the president Reccep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) rhetoric and dominant stance in the party system. This populist rhetoric has been characterized by an “us vs them” dynamic playing into the centre -periphery divide long-present in Turkish society (see infra). Particularly, it has been typical of AKP rhetoric to draw attention to the differences between the “Republican elites” of “the establishment”, politically represented by the Republican People’s Party (CHP) and “the people” whose volonté generale is politically represented by the AKP and Erdogan personally. This textbook populist distinction (Heywood, 2021:169) between the pure people representing a general will and the corrupt self-interested elite has been instrumental in the increasing polarization in Türkiye (Aydin-Düzgit & Balta, 2019).
While this rhetoric itself has been traced back to 2007 (Dinçsahin, 2012), certain institutional factors have also been identified to be relevant in explaining the state of polarisation Türkiye finds itself in today. The constant electioneering mode since the late 2000s; majoritarianism as a mode of governance, which restricts democratic space for the opposition (Özbudun, 2020); and the erosion of democratic institutions alongside increased partisanship in the media landscape (Hurriyet, 2015) have all played a role in aggravating polarisation. The sharp rise in polarisation in Türkiye is inextricably linked to the deterioration of democracy, rule of law and fundamental freedoms in the country at the hands of the AKP (Aydin-Düzgit & Balta, 2019).
A danger of extreme polarization is that it can affect interpersonal relationships (McCoy, 2018; Aydin-Düzgit & Balta, 2019). This ties us into the topic of Turkish women’s views about their veiled or non-veiled fellow citizens. Evidence shows that veiled women are more likely to vote for AKP, while non-veiled women are more likely to vote for non-AKP or CHP (Bayyurt & Caha, 2020). AKP rhetoric also has recently started to revisit the headscarf issue, this time with an increasingly polarising tone (Yarar, 2023). This could lead us to believe that the trend in rising affective polarisation more generally will be translated into the context of the headscarf debate, where non-veiled students would be put into the “Republican elite” category and veiled students into the category of “the people” with both holding negative views of each other. Indeed, both sociocultural identities (being religious or secular) and partisan identities (supporting the ruling powers or the opposition) create issue-based polarisation among youth. Contrary to expectations, however, this polarisation does not extend to an affective one, suggesting a complex, nuanced landscape of political engagement and potential for bridging divides (Uzun & Lüküslü, 2024). This landscape is the suggestion of quantitative research and therefore warrants a deeper, qualitative research to be conducted. However, first a discussion of the headscarf question’s theoretical and historical background is in order.
Theoretical and historical background on Türkiye’s headscarf issue
Expressed as concisely as possible; the modern Turkish state emerged out of the reforms promulgated in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ottoman empire, and reforms in the period of national independence under the leadership of Kemal Atatürk. These reforms were challenged in the late twentieth century by a revived assertion of Islam (Lapidus, 2014:524).
Originating in the final century of the Ottoman empire, debate has raged on between a traditionally Islamic approach and a more “modern” Western European approach. We see this go back to the Young Ottomans and the Young Turks of the late 19th century. These circles developed a branch of Turkish political thought that focused on constitutionalism and was inspired a lot by Western ideas on statecraft (Lapidus, 2014:529; Toprak, 2015). After the fall of the Ottoman empire, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk founded the Turkish Republic in 1923 following the Turkish War of Independence (1919-1923). From 1923 to 1950, the Turkish Republic was governed by Ataturk’s CHP (Lapidus, 2014:533).
Religion and related issues have been a topic of hot debate in the context of Turkish modernization since the inception of the Republic (Caglar, 2012). Within the ideological framework of Ataturk’s Kemalism, secularism held a dominant position (Toprak, 2005). The aim of the secularist Kemalist elites was to create a “modern” and, therefore, “Western” Republic that meant a rupture from the Ottoman past. The founding fathers of the republic believed Islam to be the root cause of the demise of the Ottoman empire. As admirers of the Western positivist tradition, they looked to forge a generation of new men and women that were free of the “shackles of Islam”, or any religion for that matter. Thus, modernizing religious reforms were introduced. The Shariat was abolished, women were given (close to) equal rights, polygamy was outlawed, Islamic codes of law gave way to secular ones, the Caliphate was abolished, and religious schools were banned (Toprak, 2005). Perhaps most notably for this study, there was a cosmetic nature to these reforms (Caglar, 2012). Wearing the veil was discouraged (Toprak, 2005). Clothing, and specifically the unveiling of women became emblematic of the project of Turkish modernization (Cindoglu & Zincirci, 2008).
Laiklik (the Turkish conception of secularism) in Turkish state discourse was not just a legal principle that promotes freedom of religion and the neutrality of the state. More than a dull separation of state and religion, it was seen as a form of life that established a modern society of rational, enlightened individuals and secured social cohesion and national unity. Wishing to remove religion from the public sphere, the headscarf contradicted laiklik, a theoretical cornerstone of the republic. This theory, then, served to justify strict state control over religion throughout Turkish history, expressing itself in the exclusion of religious symbols -with emphasis on the headscarf- from the public sphere (Tahran, 2011).
Mardin (1973) argues that these secularist Westernising reforms were welcomed by the -already secularist- entrepreneurial, bureaucratic and military elites of Türkiye, whilst the rural population in the periphery were more hesitant to accept them. Tahran (2011) also argues that while this exclusionary practice within the doctrine of laiklik imagines a homogenous public sphere where political equality is understood as public sameness, the way it was put into policy has not secured unity. Rather than homogeny, there has emerged a strong polarisation between Republicans and Islamic groups within modern Turkish society (Tahran, 2011).
Due to these polarising reforms, the Islamic movement has long been a part of Turkish Republican history and politicised the secular-religious divide. The discomfort of religious masses was a key factor in the landslide electoral victory of the Democrat Party (DP) after Türkiye switched to a multi-party system after WWII (Caglar, 2012). As the CHP became associated with despotic attempts at modernization, a political pattern established itself of conservatives’ support for centre-right parties against the CHP (Caglar, 2012).
After a considerable electoral victory in the 1995 election by Necmettin Erbakan’s Islamist right-wing Refah Parti (RP), fears of a ‘rising reactionary danger’ and a ‘necessity to protect the secular state’ started culminating within the Kemalist groupings in the Turkish state, namely the military-dominated National Security Council (NSC) (Caglar, 2012). On February 28th of 1997, the NSC issued the RP coalition government a list of measures to nullify this perceived Islamist reactionism. This pressure from the NSC, combined with pressure from the civilian component of the secularist establishment led to the collapse of the coalition government. The term “February 28 process” was coined to indicate the consequences and implications of the NSC decisions and the suspension of normal politics until the secular correction was completed (Cizre-Sakallioglu & Cinar, 2003).
The new government of Mesut Yilmaz established after the resignation of the RP coalition government was the start of a new phase. That of a cleansing of Islam from the public sphere. One of the areas where this cleansing would take place would be in education. The upward mobility of conservatives through education was choked off. Among many measures, equal opportunity for university entrance was denied for those coming from the religious Imam-Hatip secondary schools. Furthermore, the headscarf was formally banned in universities (Caglar, 2012). Considerable physical animosity was shown by the secularist establishment. Notably, veiled students were dragged out of their graduation ceremonies if they refused to take off their veil. In IÜ, “persuasion rooms” were created that aimed to convince veiled students to take off their veils. Those who didn’t, recieved a “T”-mark next to their name in all school lists, signifying “türban” or “tesettürlü” to mark students’ status as veiled (Gurbuz, 2009). This sparked large scale student protests in favor of freedom to wear the veil (32. Gün, 2022). In light of the ban, some veiled students went abroad to pursue their university education, but tens of thousands of abandoned the prospect of further studies all together (Toprak & Uslu, 2009).
The headscarf issue had already been politicised toward the early 1980’s with universities implementing prohibitions in different manners (Toprak & Uslu, 2009; Cindoglu & Zincirci, 2008), but the February 28 process ignited the oil barrel. The repression fuelled arguments on the Islamic side for the necessity of freedom of religion. They argued that wearing a headscarf ought to be a basic right and freedom in a democratic country (Akboga, 2014). IÜ student Leyla Sahin sued the Turkish state via the European Court of Human Rights after her university had prohibited the headscarf in 1998. She claimed her right to education was being limited. In 2004, however, the ECtHR ruled that the university was in her right to prohibit the headscarf (Global Freedom of Expression, 2024). “Why and how could one be a threat to freedom of education, religion, and consciousness by covering one’s hair?”, Prime Minister Erdogan asked in response to the ruling (Edel, 2012: 195). These kinds of appeals to liberal values to defend the interests of Muslims helped Erdogan gain a lot of support.
Meanwhile, the Islamic movement had split in the reformist AKP, led by Reccep Tayyip Erdogan, and the traditionalist Saadet Partisi (SP) after February 28. The former told a center-right story, but was suspected by secularists to have a hidden Islamic agenda Kaya & Sunar, 2015). Winning consecutive elections since 2002, AKP remains in power today at the national level. In those early years, however, it faced considerable resistance from the secularist establishment. In 2007, the Parliament passed a law to lift the headscarf ban. This law was later annulled by the Constitutional Court on the ground that it violated the principle of secularism in the constitution. AKP was accused of violating secularism, leading to the party being deprived of half of the grant provided by the Treasury (Toprak & Uslu, 2009). However, AKP stayed strong electorally. It was able to first relax the ban in 2010 (Head, 2010) and consequently completely lift it in 2013 (Al Jazeera, 2013).
Turam (2008) argued that these gender reforms of the AKP had aided in polarising Turkish women, with particular attention to ‘pious’ and ‘secularist’ groups being in opposition to each other. However, Toprak and Uslu (2009) seem to disagree by arguing that public opinion was rather favourable toward the veil and that it is predominantly an issue created artificially by the state rather than one emerging from the social sphere. Akboga (2020) also argues how both Kemalist and Islamist political elites have used the headscarf and appeals to women’s rights as political tools to aid in realizing their cultural and political goals. The public and political sphere being male-dominated, it made that veiled women were being spoken for, rather than actually having their own voice in debates. Kemalists wished the cleansing of religion from the public sphere and Islamists wished to include and gain support from those groups excluded politically by the Kemalist elite and to establish a new identity in oppostition to the secular one where religion holds a key position. In this top-down and male dominated conflict, what women actually thought about the matter seemed to matter less.
While we know that AKP’s reign over Türkiye has been particularly polarising in its own right as established above (Aydin-Düzgit & Balta, 2019), the lifting of the headscarf ban seems to have taken the issue out of the public debate. As mentioned above, there is not a single university prohibiting the headscarf today (Edel, 2012).
As contemporary literature has shown that, among Turkish youth, both sociocultural identities and partisan identities create issue-based polarization that does not transfer into affective polarization, a complex, nuanced landscape of political engagement with potential for bridging divides is suggested (Uzun & Lüküslü, 2024). Therefore, this paper aims to uncover what veiled and non-veiled Turkish IÜ students think about the headscarf today. Finding aspects of the conversation from both sides that quantitative studies might not have incorporated in their analyses, and to uncover how polarisation around the headscarf is felt and talked about could give us insight into what this nuanced political landscape looks like in a geography like IÜ that has made its mark within the history of this polarization, and could aid us in hopefully one day bridging this historic divide.
It has been repeatedly shown in quantitative studies that Türkiye is polarised (Erdogan, 2016; Aydin-Duzgit & Balta, 2019). However, recent research revealed that, among the youth, the issue-based polarisation does not transfer to an affective one. Therefore, the landscape of political engagement is nuanced and shows potential for building bridges (Uzun & Lüküslü, 2024). This paper, then, opted for a qualitative approach to try to uncover the unquantifiable aspects of this nuanced landscape with attention to the role of headscarf in the polarization between veiled and non-veiled IÜ students.
IÜ was chosen as a location primarily due to the researcher being an exchange student there, making accessibility possible. As university campuses are not open to the public in Türkiye, IÜ was the most feasible option to find students to interview. IÜ also being a public university was frequently mentioned by participants to be an important factor for the results. As it is not a fee-paying university, students come from very diverse backgrounds. On top of this, the university is reported to be attractive to the more religious conservative section of Turkish youth. This would mean that non-veiled students would be very likely to have had close contact with veiled students over a sustained period. This coexistence could provide interesting dynamics. Furthermore, IÜ has been one of the geographies where the contestation of the headscarf issue has manifested itself through massive student protests and even a ECtHR case, adding to the relevance of the case (Global Freedom of Expression, 2024; Cindoglu & Zincirci, 2008; 32. Gün, 2022).
Ten individual semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with four veiled and six non-veiled women. Individual interviews were preferable instead of focus groups because the latter run the risk of having participants give socially desirable answers (Acocella, 2012). It was important to create an environment of minimal confrontation, enabling the participants to fully disclose their perception of ‘the other’ without ‘the other’ being present. By doing individual interviews it enabled to uncover certain irregularities and diversities within the respective groups. Semi-structured interviews provided a flexible and natural conversation, whilst still staying within the boundaries of the research question at hand. In-depth interviews seek “deep” information (Johnson & Rowlands, 2012). Since youth in Türkiye make up a complex and nuanced political landscape (Uzun & Lüküslü, 2024), the use of in-depth interviews to reveal details and nuances of this landscape is relevant.
Participants were selected using the snowball method. The first two participants were approached personally, and all consequent participants reached out to by the first two participants. All participants signed an informed consent form and were informed about the context and purpose of the research beforehand. Aside from the first two participants, all others were contacted via WhatsApp. An outline of the initial message is provided in the appendix. The snowball method was preferable to promote the trustworthiness and legitimacy of the research. As a male and foreign exchange student to the university, the identity of the researcher could have created distrust in potential participants. The snowball method helped by providing a trusted “middleman” in the initial approach of a participant, only after which the researcher sought contact.
Despite this advantage, it did limit the variety in participants to some extent as they were from somewhat comparable social circles. All participants were young female students attending IÜ’s Beyazit campus and in their third year of a political science bachelor’s degree. Due to this relatively limited pool, direct access to women with more “extreme” perspectives on the issue was difficult to establish.
All interviews were conducted in a quiet corner of a café near the Beyazit campus. While participants were always free to choose their own preferred time and location, all agreed with the proposal to record the interviews in this café. All interviews were conducted in Turkish. The Turkish interview guide and its English translation are attached. All quotes were used after expressed consent with the use of the original and of its English translation.
The interview guide begins with some introductory questions to contextualize the participant. As Bryman (2016) proposes, these range from general questions (age, place of birth, current studies…). The next round tries to open the subject without it being too abrupt. Next, the topic is fleshed out in more detail, with questions pertaining to the participants personal viewpoints and experiences with the subject. Finally, the interview is concluded with a few summarizing questions and a chance for the participant to add anything they want to emphasise mentioned earlier or bring up that was not asked about. Consequently, the interviews were transcribed.
The interviews were coded and analysed via the NVivo software following the six-phase analytical process as described by Braun and Clarke (2019) and applied by Byrne (2022). Reflexive Thematic Analysis as described by Byrne (2022) was applied. As there were no other researchers to aid in a Coding Reliability Approach, and the researcher’s own “stock of knowledge” (Schutz, 1967; Johnson & Rowlands, 2012) influenced the analysis regardless of taken precautions, this paper emphasises the interpretative nature of qualitative research and data coding.
The first wave of coding started after the first seven interviews were conducted, with a process of simultaneous coding and interviewing during the final three interviews. Initially identified themes were not fundamentally challenged during or after the final three interviews.
After analysing the data using Braun and Clarke’s (2019) six-phase coding process (Byrne, 2022), five main themes were identified in the literature. These were: Changing times (a), Non-monolithic groups (b), Liberal tolerance (c), Compatibility? (d), and Remaining extremes (e). Below, each theme is discussed in detail.
The overarching theme found in the analysis was that of a certain change in time period. It was practically taken for granted that the large-scale social conflict of the 1990s and 2000s before the headscarf ban was lifted were “different times” to ones of today. This was a theme that reappeared in all the consequent themes as well and is therefore the key takeaway of this research. There was a strong sentiment throughout the interviews that, (1) public opinion had softened in recent years, (2) the young generation was more tolerant than (3) their elders.
Normative shift
Most fundamental about this change in time period was a shift in values, or what this paper calls a normative shift. It was consistently stated that acting on prejudices and seeking social conflict on grounds of the headscarf had come to be seen as, simply, rude. The past was characterized as a tense and polarized time, as opposed to a more relaxed contemporary environment. Respondents put it as such:
“I think there used to be such a prejudice in Türkiye. Everyone was talking about some kind of polarization. People were more sensitive back then.” – P1 Non-veiled
“Yeah, this stuff [prejudice] is now seen as rude at this point.” – P7 Non-veiled
In these two quotes from non-veiled students, the past is contrasted with the contemporary. Veiled participants also seemed to agree with this sentiment expressed by these two examples from non-veiled participants:
“Yeah, these old ways of thinking are horrible.” – P2 Veiled
Generational shift
Within the idea that we were in a different time period than when the headscarf issue was at its most relevant, there was a strong conviction that the young generation was playing a large role in the decrease of that conflict. Both veiled and non-veiled participants seemed to suggest that this was the case. A veiled student put it as:
“You know, in the young generation they have kind of gotten used to each other. There used to be more segregated groups at first.” – P4 Veiled
Consequently, a non-veiled student put it as:
“Honestly, in the young generation it is noticeable that wearing the headscarf or not is just not a problem anymore. In the generations before us we see this being a much more divisive issue.” – P3 Non-veiled
Older generation
Both sides of the older generation were described as having more divisive attitudes:
“Well there’s still this idea of the “CHP auntie”. People who grew up in that era of the Republic with the politics of back then. They saw those clashes first-hand. I don’t agree with them because you’re taking away somebodies’ freedom.”- P7 Non-veiled
(The “CHP auntie” is a comical reference in contemporary Turkish culture to those older secularist women in the country who still hold authoritative views.)
“But we have this on the veiled side too. The veiled side also can be judgemental of the non-veiled. For example, a high school friend of mine was wearing shorts and some veiled grandma in the summer village was giving her lip and telling her off about her [too revealing] clothes.” – P3 Non-veiled
The non-monolithic nature of the two groups at hand was also frequently discussed. Participants had difficulty speaking of a clearly defined “other”. While the classic stereotypes were still sometimes mentioned, they were always portrayed as false and outdated. While this may be so, it was still interesting to see what these old stereotypes consisted of.
Old stereotypes
The history of the republic was often mentioned when discussing these old stereotypes. Hence the extensive discussion of it in the literature section of this paper. The strong centre-periphery divide in Turkish society was essential in making sense of the situation. The sentiment of a more educated, wealthy, Western-oriented, progressive and secular elite pitted against a more Muslim, conservative, poor, regressive and uneducated periphery was what characterised these old tensions. When asked to explain some of these old stereotypes, a non-veiled participant said:
P1: “Well sometimes I can look at them as being regressive.”
R: As being overly religious perhaps?
P1: “Yeah, exactly.”
R: And that they get mad that you aren’t veiled?
P1: “Yeah, I sometimes have those old-school thoughts a little.” – P1 Non-veiled
- Inaccurate stereotypes
Despite the stereotypes being familiar to all, the sense that they were outdated underscored most mentions of them. Quite contrastingly in fact, someone wearing or not wearing a veil had practically ceased to be a predicting factor for personality, lifestyle or even social class and background. This participant stated the following:
“You know today we kind of have this thing… The headscarf doesn’t really 100%… If someone wears a veil you can’t say they are a certain way anymore. Therefore, it kind of… It has kind of lost its old meaning… Well not completely, but it doesn’t really give you anything precise anymore.” – P5 Veiled
On top of this, it would be wrong to assume that all veiled women feel like the members of their group that are perhaps closer to the stereotypes are at all similar to themselves. A veiled participant put it as:
“Me wearing the veil doesn’t mean that I feel like I belong in the veiled group because I feel out of place amongst veiled people.” – P2 Veiled
This is remarkable, as the “us versus them” dynamic within identity-based polarization seems to be losing meaning among these participants. This finding ties into the claim made by Uzun & Lüküslü (2024) that the youth seem not to be polarizing affectively in Türkiye.
Another essential theme consisted of a sentiment of tolerance within the young generation towards each other. Both veiled and non-veiled students expressed the sentiment that they could not dictate the other’s choice on what to do regarding the veil:
“You know, I always kind of think that as long as I don’t say anything to them, they can’t say anything to me.” – P4 Veiled
“Of course, its her own choice. I can’t go up to her and force her to open up at all and she can’t tell me to do anything either.” – P1 Non-veiled
Also common was the argument that wearing the veil was a human right, similar to Leyla Sahin’s argument toward the ECtHR:
“No, if she wants to wear it like that [burqa] she can. Freedom means freedom. This is a constitutional right. How could we even debate this. This is a humanitarian affair.” – P2 Veiled
This tolerance was further demonstrated in the mention of mixed friend groups. It was often the case that a veiled girl was best friends with a non-veiled girl. A sentiment of respect was persistent. Consequently, the veil was often mentioned to not be a factor at all anymore when friendships were being initiated:
“I don’t think so. It’s not a factor. Because the friend groups around campus, irrespective from if I know them or not, I see veiled girls walking with quite ‘openly’ dressed girls and getting coffee together and just being friends.” – P3 Non-veiled
Interestingly, the IÜ campus was mentioned to be a meeting ground where this historic divide was being bridged. A non-veiled participant who reported to be prejudiced in the past said:
“…I can absolutely say that my perspective changed after coming to IÜ… Campus is a great place for people to come together, talk and make conversation with each other.” – P6 Non-veiled
A certain new sense of liberal tolerance aside, it would be wrong to pretend that the issue has been completely resolved. While participants expressed different views in regards to the possibility of this polarization completely disappearing, a general theme was the fact that we were dealing with two different lifestyles. Wearing the veil comes with certain expectations. While we have established that not every veiled woman abides by these, it can still be expected that a good chunk of them do.
“Well, they don’t really overlap. Some activities that non-veiled girls like doing like concerts, bars and going out late at night are just not activities that veiled girls tend to do.” – P9 Non-veiled
This led to doubts among some participants if the lifestyles of the two groups would ever be fully compatible:
“…in order for either one to be fully compatible with the other, one needs to change. The non-veiled girl would have to become Muslim or the veiled girl would have to ignore all the criteria and act like she doesn’t wear the veil. Only like this can they be completely compatible.”- P5 Veiled
However, this more pessimistic view was also sometimes contrasted by a more hopeful one:
“For example, we’re at a café and my friend wants to go pray. I would probably walk with her until we would part ways at the mosque. I think at this point we’re very much able to live together.” – P10 Non-veiled
While the results of this paper are of a generally optimistic tone, some nuance is of order. It would be false to say that the conflict is over and irrelevant. Many participants both veiled and non-veiled expressed that their sentiment of tolerance for the other not shared by everyone, and that many still held old prejudices.
“I mean, of course this stuff still happens. There’s no doubt about that.” -P8 Veiled
“Its definitely still a thing. It hasn’t completely disappeared.” -P5 Veiled
One non-veiled participant expressed she had a preference to be friends with other non-veiled girls, but also held a sense of shame about this opinion and didn’t want to state it in the vicinity of veiled women. So much so that we had to physically move the location of where the interview was taking place to a more secluded area without veiled women in hearing distance:
“Well you know it’s a bit like this for me. When picking my close friends I would prefer them to not wear a veil. I don’t know why I can’t get rid of that.”
[Veiled women walk into the room]
“Talking about this here is actually a bit risky haha, but whatever.” – P1 Non-veiled
One veiled girl was publicly insulted on the sidewalk. Another reported she was refused a job because she was veiled.
Furthermore, veiled participants reported that they generally were watchful for prejudice from others, despite not encountering it as often as they may have expected:
It hasn’t happened yet, but it could. I keep an eye out for it. I keep it in the back of my mind. – P5 Veiled
Many reported that, while individual confrontation or exclusion practically never happened, sensations of being ‘out of place’ were not uncommon:
“Yeah, it wasn’t that they did anything specifically. But I did feel as though the environment I was in felt a bit unrelated to me. I felt like I indirectly wasn’t really being included.” P5 Veiled
“I mean, you feel it when you enter a place with only veiled girls. Theres a kind of tolerance, they don’t treat you badly, but you do feel some sensation of being a stranger.” – P9 Non-veiled
Certain school clubs, events, activities and neighbourhoods were mentioned to be places of belonging for predominantly one of the two groups, and consequently being places where one can feel out of place. Examples given were going to the bar as a veiled woman, going to the Eid feast as a non-veiled woman or attending a pro-Palestinian protest as a non-veiled woman.
Another participant also wanted to bring particular attention to the fact that neighbourhoods were strong indicators of this prevailing divide in Istanbul and Turkish society in general:
“Well, you kind of see that neighbourhoods even are a factor. If you go to Kadiköy everyone is kind of more progressive looking with tattoos and piercings and girls will be wearing more revealing clothes. In more conservative neighbourhoods like Fatih people will be a bit more reserved, the women veiled, and generally closer to religion.“– P3 Non-veiled
Nuanced open conflict
If open conflict did take place, however, it was motivated by the broader centre-periphery divide in Türkiye. On top of this, it was mentioned that something needed to act as a catalyst for such a conflict to erupt, and that it was never about simply the headscarf. Discussions were usually held between men and in a broader left-right context. One example was conservative students protesting an LGBTQ picnic on campus.
Therefore, while an overwhelming sentiment held that the young generation had become more tolerant and liberal, this potent social conflict clearly has not disappeared from Turkish society. It seems, however, that it has become less potent.
This paper analysed how veiled and non-veiled IÜ students regard the headscarf question today by conducting ten in-depth interviews with four veiled and six non-veiled students and, using the six-phase coding process of Braun and Clarke (2019; Byrne, 2022), came to identify five main themes from the transcribed interviews.
There are numerous limitations to this research paper. For starters, the headscarf is still a controversial topic, having caused extensive social conflict in the past. It being such a personal issue for many -especially veiled- women, it was suspected it could cause reluctance to participate in such a study. The participants willing to partake were then also those who felt comfortable talking about the issue, thus not providing a complete picture on the situation at hand. Furthermore, as this was qualitative research, the identity of the researcher may have had some implications as well. As a young adult male from a foreign country, the researcher’s presence and intentions could have been prone to being greeted with some scepticism.
As Türkiye is generally a socially conservative society and with no lack of intrusive policing, the request for an interview could have been interpreted as either a romantic advance or even an undercover investigation. Türkiye has a record for invasive police investigations and crackdowns on political dissidents.
There is also a sentiment that other countries generally try to meddle with the countries’ affairs and try to cause social unrest. Here, the Belgian nationality of the researcher and him being an exchange student could have also created some scepsis.
These elements of Turkish society could have impacted the selection of participants and thus also the findings. Therefore, particular attention was paid to stating intentions very clearly as a neutral scientific researcher. The snowball method was also useful in establishing an initial trust, as eight of the ten participants found out about the research via someone they already knew. The choice of a local and well-known café was also part of trying to arouse as little suspicion of malintent as possible. This being said, all but one of the participants were very comfortable and open towards participation in the research upon initial introduction.
Furthermore, the research is limited in the scale and location. Ten participants, with six non-veiled women and four veiled women, were interviewed. Location wise, the research is limited to the IÜ Beyazit campus. While this limitation is self-imposed and predominantly aids in finding participants who are similar other than their commitment to wearing a veil or not, IÜ as a public university .This means that there is a more diverse mix of students in terms of family background. This could mean that the university campus houses veiled and non-veiled students that have gotten used to interacting. This could differentiate it from the more homogenous student bodies of private universities in Istanbul like Sabanci, Koç, etc.
However, the most important limitation of this research is the limited access to participants with a potentially more extreme opinion on the subject matter. Multiple participants mentioned that having extremely exclusionary and polarizing attitudes were still a common occurrence, just not in their personal circles. Due to the fact that most participants were either friends or classmates, and the snowball method was utilized, practically all participants held very mild and tolerant views on the subject matter. This is interesting in its own right but does not a provide a complete picture of reality. Future research should therefore seek out these more extreme groups.
Limitations aside, this research did provide insight into how a milder, more tolerant, and seemingly not very (affectively) polarized section of the IÜ student population thinks about the headscarf issue. This sheds light upon the nuanced political landscape that Uzun & Lüküslü (2024) suggest holds potential for building bridges. It also at least partially adds to their conclusion that the youth is perhaps not as affectively polarised as we might be tempted to think.
In recent years, Türkiye has been shown to be a particularly polarized nation. Especially the historic centre-periphery fault line seems to be crucial to understanding the sociocultural and partisan conflicts of the country. A topic that has slightly faded from these discussions, however, is that of the headscarf. Being a topic of hot debate, especially after the 1997 February 28 process, the headscarf has left its mark on Turkish political history. Its prohibition in universities lead to tens of thousands of veiled students either quitting school altogether or leaving the country to pursue their education. Erdogan, who gained popularity partially by campaigning on this specific topic, gradually lifted the ban between 2008 and 2013. Consequently, the topic has lost some controversy. Seeing this partial loss of controversy as intriguing, this paper aimed to qualitatively analyse the role of the headscarf in the polarization between veiled and non-veiled IÜ students today.
It was reported that times had changed, and that they had become more tolerant. The young generation was seen as more progressive and tolerant than the older generations (on both sides) that experienced the hay-day of this conflict. Veiled and non-veiled women were seen as non-monolithic groups with no a priori meaning. Old stereotypes were mentioned but regarded as outdated frames of thought. Instead of stereotypes, a culture of tolerance seemed prevalent. The idea that nobody has a right to dictate anything about another’s life was mentioned frequently alongside a discourse highlighting human rights. The headscarf was reported not to be a factor anymore for friendships, with the IÜ campus serving as a meeting ground for diverse and otherwise unlikely friendships. These friendships’ depth was sometimes questioned. It was established that veiled and non-veiled women tended to have differing lifestyles, with some questioning if these would ever be totally compatible. Others told a more optimistic story of peaceful coexistence. The old divide, however, still somewhat remains. Multiple veiled participants had anecdotes of being discriminated against. Some participants mentioned they preferred friends from their own group. Others mentioned that, despite never being excluded openly and individually, certain places and situations made them feel out of place. Istanbul’s neighbourhoods were also mentioned to be great geographical expressions of this division. Open conflict around the headscarf specifically, however, seemed to be unlikely, with it only adding onto more divisive issues like LGBTQ rights, for example. The headscarf seems to have lost the weight it once had amongst the youth, but that does not mean that the divisions of the past are not still felt.
Please contact me at yunus.poblome@vub.be if you wish to access the data.
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