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July 1, 2006

Turkey: Mrs Ataturk And The Muslim Headscarf

Turkey continues to hold the memory of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (1881-1938) in such high esteem that a clause in the penal code still means that to criticize the founder of modern Turkey, a person can receive a jail sentence of 15 years. We provide a sketch of his life and achievements, and his transforming a backward Islamist nation into a secular one, in our Special Report on Turkey and the European Union.

Official Turkish accounts state that when Ataturk died on November 10, 1938, it was following a short illness. What is not mentioned is that this illness was cirrhosis of the liver, brought on by excessive drinking.

And for a man who brought a large nation from the medievalism of the Ottomans and sharia law into secularism, as well as being a military hero during the Dardanelles campaign, in all of his 57 years he was only married for two years, and though he adopted eight children, seven girls and a boy, he never sired children during his short marriage.

The woman he married was Latife Hanim Usaklgil, born in 1898, who was the daughter of a wealthy merchant from Izmir on the western coast of Turkey. The couple had met four months previously, on September 11, 1922 while Ataturk was in Izmir, at the head of the Turkish Army. In this, his last major military campaign, Ataturk was suppressing the last substantial Islamist stronghold to remain in the nation. Latife visited him at his headquarters, and offered him the ability to stay at her family estate in Goztepe. The relationship flourished.

Ataturk was devoted to his mother, who had raised him and his sister single-handedly after his father died in the 1880s. Shortly after his mother died on 14 January 1923, Latife and Ataturk became wed in a civil ceremony. The marriage took place on 29 January, and though Western women wear veils at weddings, Latife's face was uncovered.

The same year, their eight children were adopted, but after an apparently stormy relationship, Ataturk divorced Latife on 5 August 1925.

In the Presidential villa, the only items which remain of Latife are a dressing set of hairbrushes and other items, still laid out before a mirror in Ataturk's bedroom.

After the divorce, Latife became a recluse, written out of history books, or mentioned as a footnote only, dying eventually in 1975.

But who was Latife Ataturk? When she was married to Kemal, she was urging Turkish women to throw off the hijab, the Muslim headscarf, yet in several photographs she is depicted wearing one of these items, even in the presence of her secularist husband.

There was a chance to find out more about the private life of Latife and Kemal Ataturk, as her diary entries, and the letters exchanged between her and her husband still exist. In 1980, a court had banned the publication of their contents in the Turkish media. When this edict drew to an end, in February 2005 Turkish officials decided that the documents would remain a secret. The Turkish History Foundation announced that Latife's family had demanded that the documents should be kept secret.

According to the BBC< some Turks thought it would cast a more personal light on the brief marriage, while others believed they contained revelations which would damage the reputation of a national icon.

Some of Ataturk's aides recorded that Latife was argumentative and was annoyed by her husband's drinking. Occasionally she would tell him off in public. Fluent in several languages and educated in the West, the BBC states that her "never wearing the veil is believed to have inspired many of Ataturk's reforms".

Today's UK Independent describes how, eighty years ago, Mrs Ataturk encouraged her countrywomen to emancipate themselves by throwing away their veils, even though Emine Erdogan, the wife of the current Islamist Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is never seen in public without her hijab.

Finally, a new book describing the private lives of Latife has been produced, the product of 25 years' research. It has been on sale for two weeks, and already has sold 20,000 copies. The author is Ipek Calislar.

Calislar's book gives Latife far more credit for influencing modern Turkey than conventional historians have allowed her. A campaigning suffragette, Latife was described by the contemporary New York Times thus: "Her clothes are a pledge of reform. Her riding breeches indicate her intention of sweeping away harem conventions."

Latife lobbied for laws to allow women to vote, and at one stage she even sought to become an MP, but was snubbed by Ataturk as a result. In the first year of the marriage, on October 29, 1923, the Grand National Assembly proclaimed the Republic of Turkey, with Ataturk named as President. The following year, Sharia law was abolished, and the Ottoman Caliphate evaporated into a mere memory. Islam was suppressed and madrassas were closed. In 1924 a new constitution was introduced, which remains to this day. In 1925, (here almost certainly with the help of Latife), western dress was encouraged in favour of traditional costumes, and the Western Calendar (as opposed the lunar 19 year Islamic system) was introduced.

On February 25, 1925, while Latife was still married, the Grand National Assembly banned all religious activities in politics. Less than a month later, the southeastern regions of Turkey, mainly Kurdish, rebelled against the "godless" government in Ankara, forcing Ataturk to introduce the Maintenance of Order law. For the next four years, this law was employed to suppress any Islamist organisations which threatened his secularist reforms.

How much Latife may have contributed to this crusading energy which Kemal Ataturk pushed into making his reforms may never fully be known, but the period during his marriage saw perhaps more dramatic and radical change than the subsequent years.

But now, it appears that Erdogan is trying to turn the clock back, and his greatest support comes from the southeast of Turkey, the same regions where in 1924 the Islamists tried to derail secularism. Ironically, as well as being supported by many traditional Islamists in this region, Turkey is also threatened by terror groups from the same heartland, the PKK, who are still mounting bombing campaigns.

Erdogan is the Prime Minister, and the current President of Turkey, occupying the same position once held by Kemal Ataturk is the fiercely secularist Ahmet Necdet Sezer. We wrote on June 12 of the battle between traditional secularism and the attempted reversion to Islamism, as exemplified by Emine Erdogan and her husband, currently dividing Turkey.

Next year, there will be elections for the presidency, and Erdogan has made it plain that he intends to stand. In 2002 when it came to power, his party, the Justice and Development Party or AKP pledged to remove the ban on the headscarf in public institutions, such as schools, universities and even the president's palace, introduced during the time that Latife was married to Kemal Ataturk.

Emine Erdogan, who like other wives of AKP party members, is never seen without her hijab, and she has never attended any functions at the presidential palace. She often speaks publicly about the issue of the hijab, and is an ardent campaigner for the ban on headscarves in schools to be removed. She claims that because of the ban, many girls are not sent to school and educationally suffer. Instead of enforcing an obligation that all children attend school, she manipulates the argument to pretend she is in favour of women's rights and equality.

Women were given the vote and granted the right to hold public office in 1934, four years before Ataturk died. But Recep Tayyip and Emine Erdogan are conspiring to do away with the secularist reforms of Ataturk. Where the national hero had aligned his nation with the values of the west, the Erdogans and the AKP are trying to align the nation with the Islamic ummah, and the nation is in conflict.

Deniz Baykal, leader of the main opposition People's Republican Party (CHP) is a secularist and states of Erdogan's presidential ambitions: "Turkey cannot have a president whose wife wears a headscarf." He views the hijab as a sign of "backwardness".

The deputy leader of the CHP is a woman, Canan Aritman. She recently wrote to Emine Erdogan a letter, which she made public, in which she said: "The way you dress while on trips abroad where you are representing the Republic of Turkey offends Turkish women. I respect your personal preference. But women in the modern Republic of Turkey have accepted a non-veiled, contemporary Western style of dress. If you must go on visits abroad with your husband, be like a contemporary Turkish woman. If you can't be that way then please stay at home."

The real truth about Latife Ataturk may never be known, but one thing is certain. She was brave, forward-thinking, and an iconoclast. According to the new book by Ipek Calislar, she helped to push her husband's reforms forward, to take a country out of the dark ages of the Ottomans. In 1923, when she was married, literacy in Turkey was below 10%. WIthin 15 years, more than a third of the population had become literate.

The issue of the hijab has divided parliament and the press, and came to a head on May 17, when an Islamist lawyer shot five judges at the Council of State in Ankara, on account of rulings which were made there, concerning the hijab. One judge, Mustafa Yucel Ozbilgin, died from his injuries. The issue of the hijab is one that goes to the very heart of the dilemma for Turkish citizens. Faced with the demands of joining Europe, which is officially secular, or moving backwards to traditional Islamism as practiced a century ago, there will be more conflict and anxiety ahead.

Posted by Giraldus Cambrensis at July 1, 2006 5:32 AM

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