This discursive period should be understood in relation to a paradigm shift resulting from several significant transformations in the late 1980s and early 1990s that were highly influential in the social context of Turkey and Middle Eastern studies. Following the disintegration of the Soviet Union, a new era of globalization was marked by the expansion of neoliberalism to post-Soviet and Muslim countries around the world. With this trend, Muslim countries started to discuss Islam’s compatibility with capitalism, neoliberalism and modernity (Moudouros, 2014). This era of globalization also saw a rise in the emphasis on diversity, identity and locality. The neoliberal global mass culture resulted in the rise of Islamism as a reactionary identity movement and Islamic culture’s adopting consumerism as a way of expressing identity. The development of communication technologies and mass media significantly enhanced the globalization of Islamic culture and Islamist movements (Esposito, 1998).

The crisis of representation in the social sciences that was highly influential in the emergence of postmodern, poststructuralist and postcolonial theory during the 1980s was even more evident in the 1990s by the end of the Cold War. This was when the developmentalist theories collapsed, and the paradigms that rested on the shared legacy of Enlightenment were subject to erosion. It became evident that all these theories and paradigms rested on the exclusion of non-Western subjects from subjecthood (Kandiyoti, 2002, p. 281). As Seidman (1994) states, while poststructuralist philosophers such as Derrida, Foucault and Lyotard were questioning the foundational discourse and paradigm of knowledge of Enlightenment, other areas of specialisation, such as feminist theory, queer theory, anthropology, urban studies and history, were also addressing the crisis of representation in those fields (Seidman, 1994, p. 9). At the same time, there was a paradigm shift in studying the non-Western world. Particularly for feminist theory and discussions in the Middle East, the shift meant that the argument that women “constituted a category sharing a common oppression” failed, and discussions of indigenous feminism began (Kandiyoti, 1996, p. 15).

The beginnings of the academic interest in women and Islamism in Turkey in the 1980s and early 1990s can be associated with this paradigm shift. Although the initial publications of ethnographic studies on women who defined themselves in relation to Islamism and who were widely categorized in the academic and media discourse as Islamist women emerged in the mid-1990s, the fieldwork for many of these studies began in the late 1980s. The desire to represent Islamist women, who had neither been represented in the political sphere nor in the academic discourse, was an interruption to both the gender-blind perspectives in academia and the developmentalist approaches to Islamism in Turkey. The discussions of women’s rights in Islam and Islamist feminism reflect a shift in Middle East women’s studies. At that time, there was also a methodological change that involved reflexivity and sensitivity towards feminist ethnography and gave women a voice.

The authors of the time can be categorized into the three groups that Kandiyoti (1996) regarded as the source of the third wave of feminism in the Middle East: Western scholars who studied the Middle East within the framework of various paradigms of academic feminism, such as Jenny B. White and Catharina Raudvere; Western-trained Middle Eastern scholars who were expatriates or lived in Turkey and wrote about both Turkey and Western academia, including Yeşim Arat, Yael-Navaro Yashin and Ayşe Saktanber; and locally trained scholars like Aynur İlyasoğlu and Kenan Çayır. In most of their studies, we observe a challenge to the reductionist Orientalist representations of victimized Muslim women and a shift to a focus on these women’s agency. In addition, there were two Western-trained scholars from the field of marketing, Özlem Sandıkçı and Güliz Ger, who produced several very influential publications on the Islamic clothing industry, and two Western scholars, Michael Humphreys and Andrew D. Brown, who produced a work on Islamic veiling and institutional identity. The marketing studies conducted by the former group were particularly significant, as they constituted knowledge in a different sphere.

The most significant and distinguishing aspect of the knowledge of women and Islam in this period is its emphasis on encounters between Islamism and the secular social order. There has been an attempt to define and regulate the place of religion and, more specifically, the Islamic tradition, in modern Turkish society since the Republic’s early years. For secular state ideology, the answer was undoubtedly found in the domestic sphere; it was an issue of private life. As Islamist movements in the Middle East and Turkey gradually gained prevalence, the answer was no longer clear. Islamic traditions believed to belong to the Ottoman past were given no role in the foundation and development of the modern Turkish Republic and were surfacing from the private realm into public life. Because of the dominant secular ideology of the state and the pervasiveness of leftist movements that focused on class inequalities, the relationship between gender and religion was not an issue of interest in Turkish academia until the 1990s.

Toprak (1981) was one of the few scholars in the 1980s who suggested that reforms relating to women’s emancipation in Turkey could not go beyond the state ideology of Westernization and could not be influential in transforming traditional sex roles bound by Islam that prevailed in the majority of Turkish women’s lives. While the rural population, the periphery, remained almost unaffected by the reforms, liberated urban women in the cities were caught between the equal status conferred by the law and the traditional values concerning women’s place in society. This group of urban women, who benefited from the reforms and also internalized the Islamic ethic, refrained from promiscuity and challenging male authority. Furthermore, Toprak described the emergence of a third group that had an Islamic cultural orientation, a counter-elite at the centre, who were mostly associated with the National Salvation Party. (Milli Selamet Partis, MSP).Footnote 1 As she claimed:

Kemalist reforms concerning the emancipation of women have not only failed to penetrate the periphery but are also being challenged at the centre … The Islamic framework concerning sex differences is operative at both elite and mass levels. At the mass level, the Islamic concept of women has never been seriously challenged. (Toprak, 1981, p. 292)

Her analysis puts forward how Westernization and modernization encountered resistance from both urban and rural populations and how this resistance enhanced the preservation of the widespread gender hierarchy based on Islamism and traditionalism. Moreover, the emerging counter-elite that Toprak observed during the early 1980s grew in number and influence during the 1990s in the urban setting. Most of the studies published in the second and third discursive periods focused on the women of this counter-elite.

The second discursive period, which started with the work of Aynur İlyasoğlu, Örtülü Kimlik (Veiled Identity), in 1994 and lasted until 2006, can be characterized by an interest in the new urban Islamist women and their identity formation processes. In the studies analysed in the previous section, women were depicted as dependent figures, influenced, controlled and dominated by Islam and patriarchy. In this period, we witness the emergence of Islamist women as a distinct category in analysis and research, and this new category appears to be the most distinguishing feature of the studies in this period. It is even possible to talk about the beginnings of the objectification of Islamist women, as the number of studies increased year by year.

During the 1990s and early 2000s, the Islamist movement was gaining strength despite the secular state still being strong. The political agenda, dominated by discussions on the Islamist threat and the increasing presence of women in tesettür in public spaces and politics, directed attention to this new social group. Together with the strengthening of the feminist movements and scholarship in the 1990s, sociological, political and anthropological studies mainly addressed these new pious Muslim women who became, as Saktanber puts it, the other as a Muslim in Turkey (Saktanber, 1994). The first section of this chapter analyses publications focusing on their experiences and identity formation processes. In addition to Saktanber’s (1994) and White’s (J. White B., 2002b) articles, I also include Çayır’s (2000) study, which analysed Islamist women’s identities within the context of a civil society organization.

As the field studies on women and Islam in culture and daily life in Turkey show, the emergence of the identity of middle-class, pious Muslim women was an urban phenomenon. These new groups of urban women have been subject to the complexities of the conflicts between rapid modernization and globalization and the internal dynamics of the Islamist movement while growing in number and producing a strong and distinctive cultural capital of their own, starting from the early 1990s. Unfortunately, there are not many comprehensive book-length ethnographies about new Muslim women. Ayşe Saktanber’s study, Living Islam: Women, Religion and the Politicization of Culture in Turkey (2002a), conducted in an urban, middle-class Islamist community, is an important work in this sense and is thus analysed in the second section of this book. Tuğal (2004) states, “For the past fifteen years, scholars have over-reacted to the dominant Kemalist paradigm, which pictured proponents of Islamism as poor, rural and thus ignorant, and have alternatively portrayed them as middle class, upwardly mobile, and conscious” (p. 517). Saktanber’s approach may not be an overreaction; rather, it is a reference point for this new portrayal of Muslim women in the sociological discourse in Turkey. The second book that I include in this section is an ethnography of a community of urban Muslim women by Catharina Raudvere. The Book and the Roses: Sufi Women, Visibility and Zikir in Contemporary Istanbul (2002) is a study on a group of middle-class, educated Sufi women who founded a religious endowment and thus gained visibility, recognition and power. However, as Galin (2007) explains in her review, “They have to battle both the male-dominated Muslim community and the mainstream secular society that limit their sphere of action. Therefore, Raudvere aptly asks how these women express their spirituality. How do they gain legitimacy for their rituals?” (p. 114). I believe that reading Saktanber’s and Raudvere’s studies together is important, as they portray women within their closed Islamic communities in two big cities and their efforts and experiences in creating an Islamic way of living within the boundaries of their communities.

The issue of Muslim women’s headscarf, especially in public spaces, in state institutions and at universities, started to be analysed in various field works in this discursive period (İlyasoğlu, 1994; Navaro-Yashin, 2002; Sandıkçı & Ger, 2005; White, 1999). The headscarf has been emblematic of the tensions between secularism and Islamism in Turkish political life and modernization, Islamist movements and feminist discussions. It has been part of the public debate as the primary symbol of an Islamic identity, a source of dispute in terms of different interpretations of democratic rights and freedoms and a central theme in feminist discussions about the possibility of covering women’s emancipation under patriarchal Islam. The issue surfaced in the early 1980s, when Islam became more visible in public spaces, when students wearing headscarves at the universities clashed with the secularist state order and ideology, which perpetuated the polarization between Islamists and secularists in Turkey. Moreover, as Göle (1996) states, veiling is also an expression of the problematic relationship between contemporary Islamist movements and Western modernity, embodied in women. Veiling in its contemporary form conveys the political concerns of the Islamist movements in general and the approval of Muslim women’s identities in particular. It is the most distinctive feature of the modern Islamist movement, which is built on the tension between Islamism, traditionalism and modernism (Göle, 1996). Finally, but no less importantly, the role of covered women in the contemporary self-definition of the secularist/Kemalist women in opposition to Islamism in Turkey cannot be underestimated. This section critically examines how the role of covering in this polarization is analysed and its implications in terms of women’s discursive representation within the framework of different feminist standpoints. The agency of covered women is a central question. Representations of the veil both as passive submission to the Islamic and patriarchal way of life, and as an active choice that enables modern Muslim women to participate in public life without sacrificing their modesty constitute the two extreme viewpoints in this discussion. The emergence of discussions about Islamist women and covering can be seen as the outcome of the power struggle between secularism and Islamism in Turkey. As mentioned in my overview of Foucault’s discussion of power and knowledge, the production of knowledge results from an “institutionalized imbalance in power relations” (Mills, 2003, p. 69). Thus, the increasing number of publications on this issue is a reflection of Islamist women’s demand for more power from the state authority of the secularization project.

The 1990s were also very significant for the Turkish feminist movement because women’s civil social activism became more organized, and the movement divided, as the Kurdish and Islamist feminists challenged previously dominant, secular, nationalist Kemalist feminism. Moreover, as Sancar (2012) notes, there was a shift in focus in the feminist discourse from women’s revolution to women’s victimization and women’s issues as a result of the discussions relating to democracy and women’s rights. We can observe reflections of the new agenda in studies on the issues related to women’s covering, which viewed Islamist women’s headscarves as a matter of religious freedom and women’s struggle with both Islamist and secular patriarchy.

The growth in Islamic enterprises loyal to the Islamist political movement provided financial support to the Islamist parties and formed a new Islamist market that offered consumption choices to Islamic customers, allowing them to express their religious identity. The tesettür business, which started to create its own design and fashion in the 1990s, has become the most prominent, visible and debated sector within the market. It is evident that studies discussing tesettür as a consumption pattern were related to this economic trend, which had social and cultural manifestations.

The new Muslim woman was also studied in the social sciences during this period as a political figure who actively participated and played a vital role in the success of the Islamist movement. The last section covers two significant publications that specifically studied Islamist women in the political sphere (Arat, 2005; Saktanber, 2002b). The role of women in the Islamist political movement in Turkey deserves special focus, even though there is only a limited number of research works on this role in this period. Yeşim Arat’s research about the Ladies’ Commissions of the Islamist Welfare Party (Refah Partisi, RP) and its leading figures provided valuable insight into this issue. In Rethinking Islam and Liberal Democracy: Islamist Women in Turkish Politics (2005), Arat draws challenging portraits of Muslim women that went beyond the well-known dichotomies of Western feminist literature.

4.1 The New Identity as the Other

In the neoliberal globalization era, with its emphasis on identity and locality, the Islamist movement was analysed as an identity issue in Turkey, and the relationship between women and Islam was the subject of many ethnographic studies as an issue of new identity formation.

The first study in this section is an article by Turkish sociologist Ayşe Saktanber, “Becoming the ‘Other’ as a Muslim in Turkey: Turkish Women vs. Islamist Women” (1994), which approaches the subject by focusing on the othering process in the formation of Islamist identity. Saktanber’s ethnographic research was part of her PhD thesis at the Middle East Technical University (METU) in Ankara, Turkey, which received support from the Social Science Research Council in New York and the Center for Islamic Societies and Civilizations at Washington University in Missouri. This study was conducted in an urban complex in Ankara founded by a group of middle-class people whose aim was to construct an urban space to live Islam in a conscious way. Saktanber has worked on issues of gender and contemporary Islam in Turkey, and, therefore, the study should be read as part of the literature on sociology, gender studies and the sociology of Islam in Turkey. For this reason, it diverges significantly from anthropological studies in the first discursive period in terms of its theoretical discussions and conceptual tools. The emphasis in the article on othering should be thought of in relation to the polarization between secularists and Islamists and the encounters of the Islamist movement with the secular state order. I analyse her ethnography in detail through her book Living Islam in the following section. Here, I would like to focus on her representation of Muslim women’s identity.

In her theoretical framework, she employs Anthony Giddens’s concept of life politics in discussing how self-identity is formed through creating ways of living that entail self-actualization and the “politics of public presentation of the self” (Saktanber, 1994, p. 99). She then integrates Tzvetan Todorov’s and Michael Gardiner’s discussions of Mikhail Bakhtin’s theorization of the formation of the self, which claim that this formation necessitates a “continuous dialogue with the other” (Gardiner, 1992, cited in Saktanber, 1994, p. 105). She states her aim is “to explain how Muslim women’s identity is subjectively constituted through reflexive social action in the process of becoming the ‘other’ in contemporary Turkish society” (p. 104) and “to explore the ways Muslim women become crucial agents in the daily articulation and reproduction of Islamic ideologies and the development of various strategies—what I term strategies of containment and resistance vis-à-vis the secular ethics of modernity” (p. 105). Her interruption to the understanding of women’s identity “vis-à-vis modernity, be they Muslims or not” is on the grounds that it makes women “objects of history” (pp. 104–105). She draws attention to Muslim women’s self-narratives of being subject to othering and the sense of injury and pride that this process causes.

Following the theoretical introduction, she presents the self-narratives of two women in her study and accounts from their life stories that explain their routes to becoming conscious Muslims by emphasizing the efforts and individual choices that made the transformation of their identity possible. In the following section, she describes the urban complex that she studied by explaining the ideologies and social practices that the community adopts to live Islam as conscious Muslims in a modern and globalizing social context and differentiate themselves from Western others. The next section of her book elucidates Saktanber’s standpoint on the dialogical nature of the identity of Muslim women as she dwells on the beliefs of Muslim women in her study about women’s status in Islam. She notes that women create an “intellectually active milieu intended to facilitate consolidation of an alternative Islamic lifestyle while at the same time strengthening their faith in Islam” through reception days, organizing seminars and panels (p. 115). Challenging Nancy Tapper’s arguments about women’s inferiority, she argues that these activities not only strengthen them with respect to men but also bestow a personhood status on them in the community that enables them to develop opinions about the status of women in Islam and other ideologies, primarily feminism. While praising women’s rights in Islam, she negates feminism as a myth of emancipation that actually involves the exploitation of women. She emphasizes the “relationship of complementarity” of men and women in Islam instead of the discourse of equality, and contends that takva, approaching God through faith and worship, is the means to superiority, and his judgements must be accepted as they are (p. 118). Yet Islam assigns to men the duty to protect women, whom it defines as the source of life and source of desire: humans sent to earth to realize God’s will in the myth of Adem (Adam) and Havva (Eve). She calls the practices of polygamy and husbands’ right to inflict violence on their wives and control their movements and socialization the “blind spots” of this discourse of complementarity (p. 120). Saktanber’s emphasis on the determining role of faith is more evident in her notion of a “discourse of gratitude”, which Muslim women develop as a strategy to cope with the resentment caused by restraints on their worship and public status due to their physiological condition (p. 122). This discourse is based on thankfulness and is contrary to unfaithfulness and the questioning of authority. She draws attention to the divergence of women on the basis of their traditionalist and open-minded interpretations of gratitude and modesty, which defend questioning and eliminating the traditional patriarchal restrictions from Islam. Her analysis ends with the conclusion that all practices and actions of women, like men, have the goal of preparing for the other world and winning God’s favour.

In the process of constituting a Muslim identity, then, the third, the superaddressee in the Bakthinian sense, is ultimately God. Hence the deeds and thoughts of Muslim women are shaped “prior to all speech”, by an image, God, whose absolutely just and responsive understanding is presumed. After all, Muslims are people who stand before God torn between hope and despair. (Saktanber, 1994, p. 124)

In the conclusion section, Saktanber presents the ways in which traditional gender roles are defined in different spheres of life in Turkey: the legal code, women’s magazines, politics and the state. She argues that many critical issues in the feminist discourse have not been addressed and were not given priority until the political context of the early 1990s, which witnessed both a challenge to Islamist politics and the active role of Islamist women in the movement, who adopted many features of the women’s rights discourse. She sees this context as an opportunity for both Turkish and Muslim women “to question the androcentric frame of references of Western democracy, civil society and rational individuality” (p. 130).

The study is based on a rich theoretical discussion on the fundamental role of the other in identity formation and how it is related to what she calls the “politics of public presentation of the self” (p. 99). She defines the “dual sense of injury/pride as a central feature of the identity of the Muslim woman in her self-narrations as she becomes the ‘other’” (pp. 105–106). I think that we can see the conceptualization of injury as another version of the discourse of the victimization of Muslim women in First World feminism, but this time it is not the patriarchy or Islam but the secular social order that is to blame. Pride refers to their agency, formed through their individual choice to follow the path of Islam.

Saktanber prefers to call the women in her fieldwork Muslims rather than Islamists because they are uncomfortable with the latter term. She quotes one of these women: “Why do they call us İslamcı (Islamist), Ayşe Hanım? It sounds like köfteci. Aren’t we all Muslims? Why do they set us apart like that?” (p. 106). In the footnote, she explains the statement:

In Turkish the suffix ‘-cı’ or ‘-ci’ refers to the seller or producer when attached to the name of any particular commodity. Thus, köfteci is someone who sells köfte (a Turkish food). Thus, Muslim woman’s humorous utterance shows the incongruity in the usage of the term İslamcı, as if the person is selling Islam! (p. 106)

This seems like a minor detail in the representation of Muslim women, but it has several connotations. First, it exhibits Saktanber’s intervention in the use of the term Islamist in academic and political discourse by reproducing the voice of the women who become the object of this discourse. In addition, it reflects a woman’s sentiments about the othering to which she is subject due to an inappropriate label. Third, since the woman sees unity in being Muslim, it makes us meditate on what creates divergence as we read the self-narratives of the women in the book.

The subjectivities of Muslim women are defined in the article with reference to the constituents of their identity, which are simultaneously structured by the Islamic faith and the process of becoming the other that comprises the effects of the social forces of secularism, modernism, Westernization and globalization acting on the dialogical process of formation of the self. From the perspective of postcolonial theory, it is apparent that there is significant emphasis on Muslim women’s agency and individual choice in the development of their subjectivity and realization of an Islamic way of life. At the same time, there is also an emphasis on their submissiveness to Islamic orthodoxy, which Saktanber illustrates in her ideas about the issues of women’s status in Islam with the notions of “complementarity discourse” and “discourse of gratitude”, even though she introduces the notion as a “series of strategies to decrease the unpleasant effects of Islamic rules which tend to restrain the scope of behaviour and self-actualisation of Muslim women in a modern social context” (p. 122). I believe that it is a difficult task to differentiate faith from strategy in women’s accounts, and we can read it as Saktanber’s inference or hope that these women actually question the male dominance that restrains their lives but refrain from openly expressing it.

Jenny B. White conducted a study during this discursive period on the new Islamist identity. She is an anthropologist from the US and a renowned scholar of Turkish studies, with numerous books and articles based on her fieldwork in Turkey. “The Islamist Paradox” is published as a book chapter in Fragments of Culture: The Everyday of Modern Turkey (2002) edited by Deniz Kandiyoti and Ayşe Saktanber. It is based on the author’s ethnographic research conducted between 1994 and 2002 in the Ümraniye district of Istanbul.Footnote 2 White aims to discuss the rhetoric of the Islamist movement that attempts to create an elite Islamist identity and argues that, in practice, this identity is very much fragmented on the basis of gender and class, which contrasts with the rhetorical emphasis on the unity of the Muslim people. She argues that “cultural identity, socioeconomic class and politics are, in fact, inextricably entwined in the everyday context of political action. As a consequence, Islamists are faced with the paradox of trying to create an elite Islamist identity within a populist movement” (p. 191). In addition, Islamist women’s attempts to live the lifestyle of a new Islamic woman are dependent on the economic limitations of their class. She specifies three “contradictory impulses” in the Islamist movement: “A populist non-recognition of class, status, and to some extent, gender cleavages in the party; the attempt to situate itself as the party of the poor and the disadvantaged; and the attempt to re-classify Islamic symbols as elite cultural markers” (White, 2002a, p. 192). Thus, White draws attention to the complexity of Islamist mobilization and the inadequacy of the accounts of identity politics that were widely in circulation in the political discourse of Turkey throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and suggests that there is a need to see the relationship between social class and political mobilization.

In the section titled “The Culture of Politics”, White introduces her arguments about how attempts to create an Islamist elite obscure class differences. She argues that, in reality, the economic elite of the Islamist movement is different from the so-called Islamist elite of Ümraniye, which she describes as a working-class neighbourhood. Yet, as she explains, the Virtue Party (Fazilet Partisi, FP) has a strategy to hide the distinctions in the “mystique of egalitarianism” by “extending the label ‘elite’ socially downwards to make it accessible to anyone wearing Islamic dress and engaged in political activism or attending university” (p. 198). Then she describes a FP rally in İzmit, presenting the messages of unity and populism in the political symbolism of the party and the contradictions that take place during the event, in which Istanbul’s Mayor Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and party leader Recai Kutan are invited to meet FP activists. A video was shown, containing images of Prime Minister Mesut Yılmaz from the Motherland Party (Anavatan Partisi, ANAP) at a luxurious dinner, followed by images of poor children collecting scraps from garbage. After the video, the mayor gave a speech loaded with messages of equality, human rights and democracy. White also describes the dramatic and enthusiastic atmosphere of the rally, the special segregation of the audience—yet she sits in the men’s section with four other women, right behind Erdoğan and Kutan—and the eloquence of Erdoğan’s speech. The next section, titled “The Politics of Culture”, presents the characteristics of the rally that distinguish it from the rallies of other political parties: “segregation of the audience, homogeneity of the dress [and the] complete absence of markers of social class in the audience” (p. 205). She notes that the connotations of the film in the rally are the juxtaposition of “covered/uncovered, sharing/keeping, equality/unequal differentiation”, together with “narratives of loss and desire” (p. 205). Within this symbolic framework, women are associated with desire—a point also illustrated in Saktanber’s article with the myth of Havva—and women’s virtue is associated with the virtue of the nation. This is the grounds for the political symbolism of the FP that links covering (kapatmak) both women and the desire, the need, for equal economic opportunities and political justice.Footnote 3

In the section in which she describes the henna ceremony—a traditional gathering of women before a wedding—White elaborates on the notion of tesettür, the Islamic dress code particularly for women, which mainly symbolizes virtue, morality, space segregation and modesty, requiring the covering of the head, neck and body. In her account of the ceremony, she explains tesettür as a complex practice which has many other associations with Islamic elitism, upward mobility, urban lifestyles and possessing Islamic knowledge, in contrast with the traditionalism and ignorance of village life, and claims that there is a significant heterogeneity in the practices and meanings of tesettür among women. The henna ceremony depicts the social dynamics of the formation of an elite Islamist identity with the aim of the orthodoxization of Islamic practices and highlights the process of “de-proletarianisation” to evade working-class backgrounds through religious education and becoming conscious Muslims (p. 208). She highlights the similarities between the Islamist movement in Turkey and Khomeinism in Iran and argues, “The contradictions between the interests of an Islamic elite and those of the masses were obscured by Islamic symbolism, imagery and rhetoric representing the unity of all Muslims and a classless Islamic society characterized by social justice” (p. 209). She then highlights the viewpoints of activist men and women in the Welfare Party (Refah Partisi, RP) and the FP on the issue of women’s rights to illustrate the contradiction between Islamist activism and cultural values. Based on her interviews with activists in the party in Ümraniye, she shows that while women tend to perceive the Islamist movement as a means through which they can demand more autonomy for Muslim women, men want to perpetuate traditional gender roles and increase their own autonomy and authority.

White’s study concludes that the contradictions arising from the gap between party rhetoric; the cultural, gender and class facets of its activism; and daily practice indicate that identity politics is an inadequate concept for explaining the Islamist movement. In this sense, it is significant because it adds new dimensions to debates on Islamist identity, which mainly bring the elements of faith and othering to the fore. The strength of her elaboration on the importance of class differences in the actualization of rhetoric on an elite Islamist identity lies in her emphasis on the social dynamics that act on the formation of an identity through the contradictions that she addresses. There is no reference to Islamic texts or knowledge in her analysis of the ethnographic data. Thus, it is evident that she acknowledges the invalidity of essentialist understandings of Muslim women’s identity.

It is also important that White views the rhetoric of an elite Islamist identity as a distinct category of analysis that articulates a set of symbols and functions as a mobilizing tool in political Islam. The women in the study are not described as figures who passively adopt the rhetoric but as agents who demand more autonomy and power vis-à-vis men as they take part in political activities that publicize it. Even though she attributes agency to the women in her study, she notes that the internal power structure of the movement is so androcentric that women cannot achieve the social status they desire. Women’s lack of economic power and education are also equally important factors that reduce their chances of social advancement and make them more vulnerable in the gender hierarchy. The subjectivities of women are shaped by the social context in which these opposing factors collide. When we consider the arguments surrounding women’s political activism, the demand for upward mobility through their individual choices of adopting tesettür and White’s methodological standpoint, which gives women a voice, we can state that she does not attribute a subaltern status to women in this study; yet she observes them as subalterns insofar as “socioeconomic class continues to be important as an organizing principle, although not as a ‘consciously felt subaltern collective identity’” (Kearney, 1996, p. 174, quoted in White, p. 2014).

Ayşe Saktanber’s emphasis on the process of becoming the other as a constitutive aspect of Islamist identity can also be traced to White’s study. However, White observes the economic grounds in this process because the movement predominantly spreads messages about economic inequalities in society and the party’s solidarity with the poor, whom they call “mağdur kesim (victim sector)”, the ones neglected by Western, liberal, modernist political movements (p. 198).

White presents the fragmented nature of the movement by shattering the myth of the unity of Muslims by focusing on the gap between lower-class female activists and the economic elite. This approach articulates a socioeconomic aspect of the discussions of the modern–traditional and secular–Islamic dichotomies. However, I cannot regard this as an attempt to challenge binarism because it not only reproduces the discursive formations that associate Islam with traditionalism in terms of gender roles but also suggests that this association is class bound. She explains that a tendency to defend women’s traditional gender roles with increasing conservatism is observed both among the supporters and the party members, especially among men, and the Islamist movement finds support largely in the lower classes. Even the female activists who believe that they have achieved more autonomy and self-realization within the political sphere, education and work do not challenge this traditionalism entirely when they claim that “women’s first responsibility is to make a home for her husband and children” (p. 211).

The last significant point is that White’s analysis of the symbolic meanings of covering and desire in the political discourse of the FP echoes Carol Delaney’s (1991) analysis of covering in the previous discursive period, with an extension to the fields of economic and political justice. This excerpt demonstrates White’s viewpoint on the film shown in the rally and illustrates my point:

Women are the central locus of desire, not only in the traditional sense of sexual shame and danger but in an expanded referential sense of political, social and economic desire. Likewise, virtue is demonstrated not only by covering (kapatmak) the female body to eradicate men’s longing, and marrying to channel it, but also by covering and taking care of (kapatmak is also used in this sense) the needs of the poor through assistance … Loss does not refer only to loss of virginity and honour, but also to hunger and injustice. Longing is for economic and political justice, not only physical union. Women’s virtue becomes national virtue. Desire, projected onto the political screen, structures the aims of Islamist elite with the lifestyle of the urban poor, who fear poverty and sexual dishonour and who subsist by means of strong norms of mutual assistance and the control of women’s bodies and movement. It is the resonance of the political message with local desire that fuels emotion and support for Virtue. (White, 2002a, p. 205)

In contrast to the anthropological studies of the first discursive period, White’s arguments and approach to the social and political context in Turkey are dynamic and multidimensional. Instead of studying the status of Muslim women in relation to beliefs and traditions, she aims to understand them in relation to the contemporary dynamics of the Islamist movement in Turkey and integrates a class dimension into her analysis. The category of Muslim women, which is widely used in Middle East women’s studies, corresponds to the category of Islamist women in this study, mainly because their identity is perceived within the collective identity of the Islamist movement. Another indication of the Islamist paradox’s overlap with contemporary critiques in the social sciences is the reflexivity and multivocality in the study. White puts forward her identity as a Western researcher by contrasting it with that of the crowd in the FP rally. Her seat among a male audience in the segregated seating plan in the stadium highlights her distinction as a woman in an androcentric environment and as a non-Muslim who is not dressed like the other women. We can hear multiple voices in the article, but most of these voices are those of prominent male leaders in the Islamist movement. I consider this preference to be a result of White’s purpose of underlining the patriarchal discourse and hierarchy in the movement. Such ethnographical data about women that she presents, appear in the sections on Ümraniye to elaborate on the social, cultural and class meanings of tesettür clothing. According to Minh-Ha, White’s methodological approach cannot be regarded as “speaking nearby” Islamist women but can still be regarded as a counterexample to “speaking about” Islamist women (Chen, 1992, p. 87).

The article targets a Western audience but is comparable with the works of Turkish scholars, some of which I also review in this study. For instance, while disagreeing with Ayşe Ayata and Binnaz Toprak on the subject of the use of identity politics in Turkey (Ayata, 1997; Toprak, 1994, cited in White, 2002a, p. 191), White refers to Aynur İlyasoğlu’s argument on the self-representation of the Islamist movement through style as a key symbol in her description of Islamist elites (İlyasoğlu, 1994). She also refers several times to Nilüfer Göle’s study Forbidden Modern (1996), in her description of this new social group. White agrees with their depictions of the group, which are characterized by their high level of education and urban lifestyle and therefore circulate a discursive formation about the identity of Muslim women in the Islamist movement. This discursive formation indicates a major change in the representation of Muslim women, who are no longer depicted as rural, backward, uneducated and victims of tradition; this reflects a discursive reaction to Orientalist stereotypes and also the tendency to see these urban Islamist women as the power behind the political rise of the Islamist movement.

One shortcoming of White’s analysis is her neglect of the impact of the global market economy in Istanbul, which not only shapes the class structure in the city but also influences the rhetoric and organization of the Islamist movement. The economic power of the Islamic capital that created the new Islamic upper class and was the driving force of the Islamist movement cannot be understood without thinking about it in relation to the globalization of Islam in the late 1990s, which includes its integration into the global market economy. At the same time, the party rhetoric about the liberal upper classes of the country is a major critique of global mass culture.

Kenan Çayır’s study on Islamist women in civil society is the last study in this section that portrays their identities. “İslamcı Bir Sivil Toplum Örgütü: Gökkuşağı İstanbul Kadın Platformu (An Islamist Civil Society Organization: Rainbow Istanbul Women’s Platform)” was published in İslamın Yeni Kamusal Yüzleri (New Public Faces of Islam) (2000), edited by Nilüfer Göle. The book is an edited volume based on a workshop organized at the Boğaziçi University in Istanbul with Göle and her students from the sociology department at the university. At the time of the publication of the book, Çayır had a master’s degree from this department, and this chapter is based on his thesis, which was supervised by Göle. Göle describes the book as the product of a workshop that tried to understand the transformation of the Islamist movement and its different faces, discourses and lifestyles, which became visible in public spaces. She observes an individualization in the dynamics of Islamic culture and states that “the Muslim identity no longer needs to refer to a collective Islamism” (Göle, 2000, p. 11).

The study, which is conducted in Rainbow Istanbul Women’s Platform, is an attempt to understand the identity of the Islamist women in the 1990s and to compare it with its characteristics in the 1980s. The study asks “[w]hat style of language these women develop, how they define the status of women in social life, what types of roles they suggest for women in private and public life, how they position themselves in the quotidian and how they construct their identities” (Çayır, 2000, pp. 41–42). Çayır reminds us that the 1980s were the years in which the headscarf issue was on the agenda of the country, fuelled by the demands of covered university students whose discourse was interwoven with anti-modernism and radical Islamism. On the other hand, the 1990s were the years in which these women became university graduate professionals who raised questions about the status and roles of women in the domestic and public spheres, both in the Islamist movement and in Turkish society. The study is based on surveys, in-depth interviews, the bulletins of the platform and observations in the platform’s panels.

Before sharing the details of the profile and discourse of the platform, Çayır argues that the visibility of the covered students in the universities in the 1980s resulted in discussions about women’s status in society, modernity, equality, laicism and public space as well as traditional Islamism that associates women with the private sphere. Like Saktanber (1994), he states that in this context, the identity of Islamist woman “was defined with a reactionary attitude developed against tradition or Kemalism, in other words, in reference to the ‘other’” (p. 43). It was in the 1990s that Islamist women’s status in the movement was questioned, and their visibility was related to their lifestyles and social practices (p. 44). Çayır evaluates the development of the Islamist women’s movement in Turkey within the framework of the new social movements of the 1990s, which are distinct from the movements of the 1970s and 1980s, with their demands for the recognition of differences, equality, social recognition and participation. He also suggests that while the concepts of oppressor and oppressed were primarily discussed in the preceding decade, during the 1990s, subjects like Islamic holidays, celebrations and weddings were discussed because Islamic lifestyles were no longer marginal and were more visible. Therefore, agreeing with Nilüfer Göle, he argues that instead of perceiving Islamism as a transient reactionary movement and categorizing Islamist women as passive/active, traditional/modern, it is necessary to analyse the daily practices of the movement and the identities of its actors (Göle, 1997, p. 69, cited in Çayır, 2000, p. 44). This point is Çayır’s main challenge to binarism in the existing discourses. In addition, with respect to the Rainbow Istanbul Women’s Platform, he discusses whether we should understand the visibility of Islamist women as a reaction to economic and political problems or in relation to the new politics that expresses the construction of an identity and demands equality and the reflection of new lifestyles, values and norms, and whether Islamist women reinforce the totalitarian aspect of Islamism or widen the scope of civil society by bringing their practices to the public domain (p. 50).

The platform, which is the first platform of Islamists in Turkey, is composed of 41 civil society organizations, attended several national and international congresses, is knowledgeable about laws relating to women and unites women’s organizations that are nationalist and active in fields like art, education and culture. Most of the members of the platform are university graduates, professionals and married women from Istanbul, and the platform rejects any connections with the RP. One of the main themes that comes to the fore in the platform is the concept of identity, which is discussed in reference to the members’ roles as mothers and their domestic and public roles, which they idealize by referring to the golden age of Islam. The other, which is either defined as feminist or Kemalist, is another theme that the platform debates. They have a critical attitude towards gender inequalities within the movement, and Çayır sees potential in the platform to transform gender relations among Islamists. He also suggests that Islamist women become subjects and individuals by engaging in struggles against these others and cooperation among themselves. “Redefinition of women’s domestic roles”, particularly exaltation of their roles as mothers, is an important subject in the platform, a subject that involves the education of mothers in religion and the social sciences to develop a “scientific” motherhood (p. 61). The platform also redefines the private sphere in a way that enables women to be “productive while fulfilling their roles as mothers and housewives” (p. 62). When it comes to the issue of the visibility of Islamist women in public spaces, Çayır argues that they regard their “veiled identities”Footnote 4 as a means of participating in social life (p. 64). He also states that these women defend the equal rights of women in the public sphere and justify these demands by giving examples from the early years of Islam and the societal need for women professionals who can understand and serve other women. In the conclusion, he underlines the agency of Islamist women who can challenge the borders of the public space defined by Kemalist modernization and expand the civil space with “their veiled bodies and distinct social practices” (p. 67).

In the depiction of the Islamist women in the Rainbow Platform, we see how their identity is formed within a social movement that aims to redefine women’s roles and the borders of public and private spaces. The Islamist women’s movement and the Islamist woman as an individual are explored in relation to one another and with respect to their transformations in the 1980s and 1990s. This approach is far from essentialist; it enables us to perceive it as a collective identity and presents its changing dynamics. However, Çayır suggests that Islamic belief still has an influence on identity formation, which results in women holding conservative ideas about their role in family life. I believe that this is significantly dependent on women’s access to the means of self-realization and career development. For instance, we learn from the accounts of Sibel Eraslan, the former head of the RP Ladies’ Commission of Istanbul, that she and other politically active Islamist women were not traditional mothers and wives at all. Therefore, there is a conflict in their attempt to redefine the private space in a way that women can be productive at home and will not need to work outside the home. The agency of Islamist women that Çayır underlines is also manifested in their attempts to challenge gender inequalities. In this case, references to Islam and its practices in its golden age function as empowering tools. When it comes to the subjectivity of women in the movement, Çayır introduces the notion of visibility in addition to the other and domestic roles. I will discuss the notion of visibility in the next section in more detail, but here, I would like to note that visibility has become a core aspect of Islamist women’s recognition in the public sphere. In regard to Islamist women’s other, he mentions Islamist men in addition to the widely circulated truth that feminists and Kemalists are considered the primary other. With their stance against Islamist men in the movement who pay lower wages to covered women or who do not promote Islamist women to higher posts, Çayır represents them as agents who have the potential to change relationships between Islamist men and women.

In representations of Islamist women, the author suggests that traditional and modern are integral to their identities and self-definitions. Women’s modernity is described by their participation in the public sphere, work life and civil society as well as their demands for gender equality. Their traditionalism is evident in their references to the importance of women as mothers, their references to the golden age of Islam and their views about jobs that are suitable for women. Based on these tendencies, Çayır prefers to see them as subjects still in transformation instead of categorizing them as traditional or modern and states “The question of whether women as ‘actors of history’ will bring totalitarian side of Islam forward or bring a more individualist understanding of Islam through becoming a ‘subject’ lingers on our minds” (p. 59).

In these three studies, which aim to understand the identity of Islamist women who are the actors in the Islamist movement in Turkey, the concept of othering is a common point that needs further elaboration. The articulations of a self/other problematic as a fundamental aspect of Islamist women’s identity formation mark a major shift in the discourse on women and Islam in Turkey. It is a change from perceiving and representing Muslim women within the boundaries of Islamic beliefs and practices to understanding them in relation to their conflicts and struggles with the dynamics of the social order and the political context in which they live. As I postulate, based on the studies of the second and third periods, the shift initiated by Saktanber led several other scholars to study Islamist women’s identity in relation to feminist women, Kemalist women and Islamist men, that is, the others. State secularism and the secular social order in Turkey should also be included as contextual factors that act on the self/other problematic of Islamist women. Islamist women’s status in the public and private spheres, their culture, their daily life, their political participation and their rights have started to be analysed with respect to the axis of their oppositional attitudes, reconciliations, dialogues or victimizations with respect to these others. The specificity of the Turkish setting in understanding the relationship between women and Islam in Turkey, unlike in any other Middle Eastern country, creates the necessity to address the issue of othering. Referring to the processes of othering makes it possible to debate the issue of the areas in which the power struggles of Islamist women coalesce, namely their public participation and demands for equal rights on the basis of gender and religious beliefs. However, it also creates the risk of reductionism, which divides Turkish women into two groups: Islamists and Kemalists. Feminists can be named the third group, but their emphasis on secularism makes it possible to categorize them together with Kemalists as a single other for Islamists. Such a simplistic portrayal does not come close to representing the heterogeneity of Turkish women and reproduces all the paradigms of the East–West dichotomies. Even though it may seem like a paradox when we consider the profound effect of the conflict between Islamism and secularism on Islamist women’s identities, the alternative path of producing knowledge about Islamist women’s identity can raise questions about its encounters and dialogues with women who do not define themselves as primarily Kemalists and feminists and who do not have reactionary attitudes towards Islamists.

The second major point of commonality in the studies is that the identity of Islamist women is studied both as an individual identity and as a collective identity of the Islamist movement, which indicates a shift from describing them within their patriarchal families, household duties and roles as wives and mothers to describing them as individuals and actors in the Islamist movement. While the former, which was prominent in the studies of the first discursive period, is the approach of Orientalism and First World feminism, the latter is an aspect of the counter-discourse that challenges essentialist and Eurocentric representations of Muslim women. However, I also attribute this shift to the changes in the places in which the research was conducted and the fields of study in which the researchers worked. The formation of both collective and individual identities of Islamist women was possible in the globalizing capitalist, liberal, urban context that demands that its dwellers participate in public life through education and work in order to survive economically and provides a conducive environment for diverse identities, civil society organizations and political movements to flourish. Therefore, a change in focus from a rural context to an urban context in studying religious identities brought these aspects of urban life to shape individual and collective identities. But how can we explain this change in focus? The preference of the anthropologists in the first period was to analyse the relationship between women and Islam with reference to Islamic traditions, thus reflecting the colonial anthropological approach that perceives Muslim societies as traditional, rural and shaped by the patriarchal family structure. Even in the ethnography by Julie Marcus, which was conducted in İzmir, we cannot observe Muslim women’s lives in relation to the city and their individuality, but rather in relation to their gender roles within the family. However, in this period, the works of sociologists and political scientists, most of whom are native researchers, dwelt upon the urban context and observed Islamic identities in relation to modernity. Jenny B. White’s interest in the urban context can be explained by the shift in anthropology to studying the modernization dynamics in Muslim societies as a result of critiques of postcolonial theory and Middle Eastern scholars.

Up to this point, I have tried to shed light on some of the representations of Islamist women’s identities and introduce the main themes that are at stake in the discourse on this identity. The discursive formation of the constitutive role of being and/or becoming the other in Turkish society, adherence to traditional gender roles despite the relative autonomy and self-realization gained through education and work, the aim of achieving orthodoxy in Islam, becoming şuurlu (conscious) Muslims and the role of covering are commonly circulated in these representations. The following sections present how these discursive formations are linked to specific subjects discussed in the ethnographic studies.

4.2 Pious Muslim Women in Semi-Public Spaces of Islamism

The ethnographies analysed in this section are selected and grouped together for two reasons. First, both were conducted in closed religious communities. Second, they provide insight into how urbanization and modernization are experienced by women in these religious communities, how their religious activities and mobility are influenced by these factors, and the role of the spatial organization of the communities. The research in these two ethnographies took place in Istanbul and Ankara, two metropolitan cities in Turkey.

The term visibility emerged as a key explanatory concept for understanding the public participation of Islamist women in Turkey. Before reviewing how it is articulated in the analysis, it is useful to contemplate some of the theoretical discussions on seeing, visibility, recognition and power in social sciences and philosophy. Andrea Brighenti (2007) presents an elaborate discussion on visibility as a separate category of analysis in the social sciences. He begins by explaining the relational character of visibility, which comprises the mostly asymmetrical connection between seeing and being seen. Referring to Erwin Goffman’s theorization, he states that normalcy bears in itself a condition of invisibility and transparency, being “unmarked, unnoticed, unthematized, untheorized” (Goffman, 1971, cited in Brighenti, 2007, p. 326). This perspective explains why the public participation of Islamist women, who are noticed through their Islamic headscarf in a sphere which normalcy has a secular character, becomes an issue. Thus, “when something becomes more visible or less visible than before”, Brighenti suggests asking, “Who is acting and reacting on the properties of the field, which specific relationships are being shaped?” (p. 326). There is no doubt that vision is related to power; it empowers the seeing subject, and, conversely, being seen means being within reach and under the control of the actor who sees. Therefore, the visibility of Islamist women in the discourse should raise questions about the power relationships between them and the social actors to whom they are visible. Since seeing is conditioned by social and interactional ways of creating meaning, he argues that Foucault’s (1969/2002) differentiation between the visible and the articulable in relation to the discursive realm should be reconsidered, as these two are always together. In other words, how we see things is bound by discourse, and the discursive realm is not independent of how we see things. For the context of this study, there are three pillars of analysis regarding the implications of this theory: how Islamist women are seen in public space, how the author explains this visibility and how the author sees these women. Visibility has a strong association with recognition, and recognition has social consequences, especially for minority groups. Brighenti notes that this association is not linear; various degrees of visibility have different outcomes. Below the threshold of “fair visibility”, there is an issue of being unnoticed, ignored, excluded, unseen and invisible, while above the threshold, there is a zone of “super-visibility”, which is visibility to such a degree that the visible subject is paralysed. On the basis of the works analysed in this study, it can be argued that in the 1980s and 1990s, the visibility of pious Muslim women in Turkey gradually shifted above the threshold, approaching a zone of super-visibility in certain social and political contexts. For instance, in 1999, Merve Kavakçı, the first member of parliament from the Islam-oriented FP to wear a headscarf, encountered harsh protests from secular parliamentarians and was ultimately barred from her position. In addition, gender is a critical aspect of the issue of visibility, especially when the person who sees is male and the visible person is female. The discourse about veiling and Islam extensively discusses the codes of behaviour and dress and the extent of mobility of Muslim women, and, thus, the definitions of public and private spheres are determined to protect the honour of these women from the male gaze. Nevertheless, many scholars have observed that these codes and definitions are constantly being negotiated and transformed as modernization and globalization penetrate Islamic culture and lifestyles. Brighenti also claims that “the issue of access to the places of visibility is a political question” for women to be represented and their voices heard, but the modes of access determine how they are represented (p. 333). While visibility is empowering when it brings about social recognition, in the disciplinary context of surveillance, it is disempowering, as discussed by Foucault (1975/1977).

The Book and the Roses: Sufi Women, Visibility and Zikir (2002) is an ethnography by Catharina Raudvere, a Swedish researcher of the history of religions. The study locates visibility at the core of its analysis. In the first pages of the book, she writes about how her interest in the Sufi women of Istanbul arose when she saw a video at a seminar on a zikir ritualFootnote 5 in a religious community in Istanbul, and she remembers herself questioning the place of women in this practice, as they were watching the worship from behind a lattice. Under the influence of this scene and putting aside mysticism, Orientalist connotations and the global popularity of Sufism, she explores Sufi women’s religious practices, especially zikir, and activism in the ethnography she conducted in the Gönenli Mehmet Efendi Endowment over 14 months from 1993 to May 1998. The notion of women’s religious activism is central in the book. Raudvere notes that the recent religious activism of women has brought a new space to the agenda, a semi-public space in which women from diverse backgrounds can come together. She explains the aim of the book as studying the collective activities of women in these semi-public spaces rather than discussing religious experiences in Sufi rituals. She acknowledges the importance of the political context in Turkey in studying religious activism in general and women’s Sufi groups in particular. With this study, in contrast to existing studies that neglect the social practices and interactions that take place within these communities, she presents an analysis of Sufi tarikats. She argues that the gatherings of these communities that take place in homes should be analysed as social activities rather than religious ones. In this sense, The Book and the Roses diverges from classic Islamic studies, which I briefly described in my review of the Orientalist discourse, and views religious communities as dynamic and interactive social groups that are not isolated from the political context in which they find themselves.

The book is also a manifestation of the paradigm shift caused by the new era of globalization in the 1990s, which emphasized diversity, identity and locality by setting aside the grand narratives and theories of developmentalism. As a scholar of the history of religion, Raudvere’s focus on the collective identity of a small Sufi community in Turkey was a break from classical studies on Sufism and Islam that disregarded diversity between Islamic societies. In addition, as I present below, it was a challenge to developmentalist and secular feminist arguments that view religion and piety as obstacles to women’s empowerment and assume that secular social order and education will create enlightened individuals who will not be religious or traditionalist. Lastly, Raudvere pays special attention to the force of globalization and the influence of the urban context in analysing the relationship of endowment with the outside world, meeting the challenge caused by the blurring of the boundaries of indigenousness in the global era.

Raudvere firstly explains the political and cultural history of religious communities in Turkey from the 1920s to the 1990s. After reviewing the existing literature on Middle East women’s studies of religious practices and Sufism, she introduces the endowment and her methodology of feminist ethnography. The endowment comprises urban, middle-class, educated young women who are trying to find a way to preserve and practise a religious tradition in an increasingly globalized city. This is the new Islamist woman that we encounter in the related discourse. She argues that studies of Muslim women in the 1940s and 1950s give the impression that women are less pious, less knowledgeable and less strict than men when it comes to religious obligations (Fernea & Fernea, 1972, cited in Raudvere, 2002). This viewpoint was primarily caused by the restrictions on women’s religious participation in mosques and was partially due to the researchers being male, which limited the visibility of women in the homes they visited during the research. However, since the 1970s, there has been increasing interest in the religious lives of women; Islam was no longer seen as the sole explanatory element, and factors such as ethnicity, social class and age started to take a central role in the analysis of ethnographic data.

Raudvere notes that during the 1920s, the early years of the Turkish Republic and the secularization reforms, all religious institutions related to Sufism were closed down, so it was not possible for an organization of religious women to remain active in that era. An important implication of these bans is that they made Sufi women even more invisible than they had previously been. However, gradually, these bans were unofficially and officially eased, and tarikats (religious cults) continued their activities. Raudvere argues that the endowment she studied was under the influence of both secular state ideology and centuries-old Sufi tradition and history. The semi-public space that she examines is vakıf (endowment), a term that refers to the women’s group as both a social and a spatial organization, a meeting place for their religious and charitable activities. The establishment of the endowment made them visible and respected in their social environment, attributed legitimacy to their activities and bestowed upon them a certain power as Sufi women. Throughout the book, she uses the words Islamist and Muslim interchangeably and Islamism to refer to political Islam, being very much aware of the dichotomies between Kemalism, secularism, Westernization and Islamism.

Rather than individual identities, Raudvere deals with the collective identity of Muslim women who define themselves as conscious Muslims, activists and charitable women. She notes that the endowment pursued a battle, an ideological struggle against two sectors of society: patriarchal Islamist men and people who did not define themselves as religious. As I mentioned in my theoretical framework, this point is widely stressed in the discourse of Middle East women’s studies and is also stated in most of the studies that I analyse in this chapter. Within this context, she aimed to find out how they achieved their legitimacy and preserved their authority.

Contrary to the thesis of the victimization of women by the processes of globalization and urbanization, Raudvere presents “religious women activists as an operative part of these changes” (p. 83), claiming that the emergence of religious women’s groups in public has an empowering effect on women and a developmental effect on society. Although the Gönenli women, who experience globalization through the impact of media and tourists, are critical of the global flow, they are described as being connected to the world. In the social context, which witnesses the clash between the homogenizing and authoritarian pressures of Sunni orthodox religious teachings and calls for the recognition of the heterogeneity of religious groups (such as Alevis), this group of women is empowered to organize activities and hold meetings in mosques. Thus, they benefit from the space that urbanization and globalization generate for diversity, while declaring their independence from other groups and organizations. Moreover, unlike many other religious groups, the Gönenli endowment does not claim any political power, although its public religious activism is considerable.

As an outcome of urbanization, many women worked outside of the home, and for religious women who had limited mobility in the past, this meant travelling to distant sections of the city and meeting people in various professions while still obeying the religious codes of behaviour and dress. Raudvere claims that. contrary to expectations, religious women are very active in the city, going to work and participating in religious activities. She suggests, “This new visibility runs counter to the routine dichotomy public–private, men–women that is prevalent in many secularization/modernization theories” (p. 85).

In the second chapter, titled “Gönenli’s Group: Sufi Women Constructing Rooms of Their Own”, she explores the establishment of the endowment, its relationship with the outside world, its activities, its religious leader, Gönenli Mehmet Efendi, and his significance for the group. She emphasizes the strong stand that Gönenli women took not only against state authority on religious activities but also against certain aspects of Islam that confine women within the boundaries of the household, in the private sphere. She paints a vivid picture of Muslim women’s agency with respect to the semi-public space that they created, the independent religious practices (gatherings and worships) to which they adhered, the charitable activities they organized in this space and the business activities they conducted through a small shop in the neighbourhood. The Gönenli endowment, a gendered religious space outside the private sphere, or a semi-public space in Raudvere’s terms, constitutes an example of a gendered space that enabled women to engage in religious practices and social activities outside of their homes yet, given its organization, it was isolated enough to preserve its dignity in Islamic terms. Women are carefully visible in their activism and mobile in the urban context, yet the privacy of religious gatherings is respected.

In addition, by giving a detailed account of pilgrimage (hac) tours to Mecca, which the vakıf organized, Raudvere shows that the women enjoyed significant mobility with this journey. “Even married women with family responsibilities” and “women unaccompanied by a close male relative” (p. 128) gained a respectable status and engaged in globalized Islam by meeting—although personal interaction was limited due to language barriers—other Muslims from around the world, bringing back souvenirs of hac and socializing extensively at homecoming gatherings organized to show them respect. Women who went on hac also shared their sacred memories with the group, thereby creating “social memory” (p. 130). In addition, the tours were greatly appreciated, as they enabled many low-income women to fulfil their religious obligations; for this reason, they were outstanding achievements and thus enhanced collecting funds. Furthermore, when it was not common to see female theologians assigned to public duties, the gendered space of the endowment gave women in the group, who mostly graduated from religious high schools and divinity faculties, the opportunity to share their theological knowledge. Raudvere notes that all these enabling activities were not without challenges and difficulties. The women had to negotiate them with a disapproving neighbourhood, especially with men.

Raudvere associates the empowerment of women in the Gönenli with the religious authority they selected to guide the endowment spiritually. The group’s identity is closely allied with and defined by the leadership of Gönenli Mehmet Efendi, whom the women call hoca. Gönenli Mehmet Efendi, as described in the second part of the chapter, is recognized by his piousness, decades of religious teaching, independent stand from Sufi groups and other religious communities, long-term commitment to sermons for women and his adaptation to the circumstances of the modernizing Republic. She explains that this status of the deceased hoca leaves women “vulnerable”, especially in the public space (p. 164). They receive objections from the men in their families regarding the issue of protecting women’s honour when they are in the endowment and questioning their connections with a deceased theological guide. Outside the home, they encounter the disapproval of visitors from Islamist groups who imply that the endowment is a public space and women should behave accordingly. In addition, they are criticised in Sufi circles for the validity of the zikir practices of the group, to which they pay utmost attention. It seems that they meet and overcome these challenges while protecting and spreading hoca’s teachings. Meanwhile, they continue charitable activities and worship practices in an effort to balance Sunni theology and Sufi rituals. Clearly, Gönenli’s character, teachings and services solidified the foundations of the group’s identity and offered women a stance that allowed them to differentiate themselves from other religious groups.

In the last chapter, the author examines the zikir ritual in the Gönenli Mehmet Efendi endowment and ends with a description of women’s zikir in Halveti Cerrahi Tarikat in Istanbul. It is the most vibrant chapter of the book, with its exhaustive description of rituals. Raudvere notes that women’s worshipping practices in Islam should always take place in homes or in sexually segregated spaces and adds that women’s religious activities in Turkey are mostly hidden. Another reason for hiding zikir from the public is its illegality. Therefore, Gönenli women, like other Sufi groups, do not publicly announce this. Zikir in this endowment is a ritual that attributes a local identity and respectability to the group and is a manifestation of harmony and commitment among the core members of the endowment. So, not every member can attend zikir, only a select group of women who are considered to have achieved religious maturity and have a proven long-lasting devotion to Allah and to the endowment. Perhaps more importantly, this ritual grants an authority, a leading role, to women to organize the most honourable practice of worship. Even though there is a person who leads zikir, according to Raudvere’s account, the lack of hierarchy in the group is the most distinctive difference between women’s and men’s practice in tarikats.

The Book and the Roses is a significant contribution to the ethnographic knowledge of Islam in Turkey. Based on extensive fieldwork, the author provides detailed information specifically about Sufi rituals and worships. The strength of the book lies in the successful articulation of the discussions of the modernization, visibility and mobility of Muslim women in an urban context and the analysis of the Gönenli endowment, which is presented as a symbol of women’s agency and self-realization.

Raudvere seems to reveal her will to know in the introduction, when she explains that she owes her curiosity about her research subject to the video she saw of zikir. The gender segregation causing men to participate in zikir in the room and women to participate from a closed gallery caught her attention. In addition, she states that her impressions of Sufism were based on Annemarie Schimmel’s (Schimmel, 1975, 1978, 1998 cited in Raudvere, 2002) literary approach to Sufism, which highlighted poetry, miniatures and music. Even though in this introduction, she evokes a Western feminist standpoint and an Orientalist curiosity, Raudvere diverges from these discourses with her attention to women’s agency and religious activism. While she attempts to differentiate her status from the Western gaze mystified by zikir, she cautiously refrains from revealing her personal standpoint, beliefs and feelings, both in the field and in the book. She introduces herself to the group merely as a Swedish researcher, even if the group insists on seeing her as a Westerner, a Christian and a respected guest. Considering the extensive space she gives to examples of reflexive anthropology in the methodological introduction to the study, as Anne-Sofie Roald (2005) also notes in her review, this choice leads to a curiosity in the reader about the perspectives she employs in her data selection and how she experiences and analyses the field (Roald, 2005). Raudvere’s strivings for neutrality can be read, for instance, when she explains her status as a researcher in observing zikir.

I make no claims to be drawing on my experience of the ritual—I have been an observer and a guest—nor do I claim to have had access to the women’s inner experiences. My interest lies in what is expressed in words and bodily movements, and how symbols are communicated during and after the ceremony. (…) The present study asks how these women expressed themselves. It is impossible not to be affected by the rhythm, the sighs, and the repetitive songs. But my chief experience cannot become the main instrument for reading meanings into other women’s life-worlds, or be used as a tool for understanding of the local meaning of a ritual. (Raudvere, 2002, p. 184)

The way Raudvere represents Sufi women in her study should be analysed with respect to their visibility and agency in creating a semi-public space. At this point, it is helpful to unpack how she contextualizes visibility. She opens the book with a scene in which women, who are invisible behind a lattice, watch a zikir of men in a tarikat. She then describes the spatial organization of the Gönenli endowment, which avoids the male gaze, and explains the ambitions of the women to be visible in their charitable and religious activities but invisible individually to the male gaze. It could be suggested that she invites the reader to comprehend the different aspects of power that act on various cases of invisibility/visibility. In the first case, it is apparent that the Islamic organization of space defines women’s place—literally and hierarchically—in zikir in that tarikat. It is their invisibility in zikir that attracts the attention of Raudvere as a researcher and leads to the visibility of the Gönenli women in the academic discourse on Sufi women. In the gendered semi-public space of the endowment, religious codes of honour are followed by abstaining from the sexual aspect of visibility that objectifies women. The visibility of the activities of the group as a whole in the public sphere—while trying to avoid the surveillance of the secular state—is a source of empowerment and recognition. Women’s personal mobility and public visibility in work and religious practices in a metropolitan city means being seen in public spaces governed by secular codes. Developing a multifaceted approach to being seen, Raudvere goes beyond the unidimensional approach of the colonial Orientalist discourse and its focus on unveiling Muslim women to save them from their seclusion. As she discusses in the introduction, within the scope of the previous episteme, the veil signifies a barrier between the Western gaze and the ultimate reality of the Middle East and Islam in this discourse. Raudvere shifts the argument from the seeing–covering dichotomy to include the processes of modernization and urbanization, the mobility of women and the empowering and disempowering aspects of the visibility of Islamist women. In this sense, it is a radical break from the previous discursive period.

According to this portrayal, the Gönenli women are not only empowered to resist patriarchal domination to a large extent, but also to confront the arguments that suggest that Islam is the main source of women’s subordination. It is a thought-provoking case of a group of pious women who define themselves as conscious Muslims and gather through their Sufi orientation to establish an endowment that suggests new paths of mobility and activism for the other Muslim women in Fatih, which is a neighbourhood known for its history of religiosity, conservatism and Islamic communities. A strong agency and independence that takes its strength from belief contradicts the Orientalist and colonial narratives of passive Muslim women subordinated by Islam. This is ultimately an anti-Orientalist representation of Muslim women. Contrary to the extensive use of the public–private dichotomy in previous discourse on women and Islam, Raudvere introduces an alternative example that challenges the applicability of the dichotomy. The establishment of the vakıf illustrates an outcome, a product and a sign of Sufi women’s agency in the public sphere. Yet it is neither organized nor treated as a public space unless men are present, which happens very rarely. The vakıf both provides a secluded, “home-like” place for religious rites and other activities of the endowment and serves as a path that connects women to the outer world, as a means for them to achieve mobility and receive appreciation (p. 121). It neither fully supports the argument that women’s emancipation can be achieved through participation in the public sphere nor the argument that women are oppressed in the private sphere. The space that the group uses and transforms for various functions is not described as oppressive in the book. Raudvere eloquently describes its special qualities:

The establishment of a formal vakıf situated in an apartment with a home-like interior design made it impossible for the women to keep up any absolute distinction between public and domestic space. This absence of a formal demarcation apparently served as part of the strategy applied by the women as they balanced on the threshold to public spaces. The women acted jointly as an institution, although a small one, with the prime goal of protecting the visiting individuals from any criticism or slander. (p. 121)

When it comes to the modern–traditional dichotomy, Raudvere highlights that women in the endowment define themselves as traditionalists who associate modernity with the West; they have a completely negative attitude towards modernization. However, she contextualizes their activism within the social sphere of modern urban life when she mentions that the women are middle-class and educated and integrated into or subject to globalization by means of the hac tours they organise, their use of internet technology and the different lifestyles they encounter as they become mobile in the city. She also notes that the spiritual leader of the endowment, Gönenli Mehmet Efendi, could be defined as a modern hodja whose life story did not conflict with modernization and the development processes of the Turkish Republic; indeed, he adopted a Western style of dress in public spaces in the early years of the Republic, delivered sermons to women and worked as a state imam in Istanbul for his entire working life.

Raudvere’s perception of the Gönenli Endowment as a group of empowered and emancipated women is clear in the closing remark of the third chapter: “The women at the vakıf merkezi had achieved what Virginia Woolf long ago pointed out as necessities for intellectually emancipated women: money, and a room of one’s own” (p. 229). Hence, it cannot be argued that she perceives the Muslim women she describes as subalterns, yet she does not give a voice to the women that she studies for two reasons: firstly, the women disapprove of any recording of their voices for religious reasons, therefore, Raudvere must rely on her written notes; secondly, Raudvere tends to give priority to observation from a methodological standpoint. Despite her detailed ethnographic account and observation notes on the endowment and zikir rituals, the lack of the women’s own words and expressions of their thoughts and feelings remains a gap in their representation.

Ayşe Saktanber’s book, Living Islam: Women, Religion and the Politization of Culture in Turkey (2002a) significantly challenges the widely circulated “truth” that attributes a political character to the Islamist movement and invalidates the distinction between political Islam and cultural Islam, with its stress on everyday life, by suggesting that living Islam is a continuity between the public and private. Saktanber describes her aim as one of shedding light on the questions that the Islamists themselves ask about living Islam in Turkey instead of going after the widely asked questions: the discrepancies between Islam and secular society, the reasons for choosing an Islamic way of life and the dissatisfaction with Westernization and modernization. Placing gender at the core of her research, she asks “why women are the target of Islamic revivalism and how they came to be the chief actors in the effort to build an Islamic way of life” (p. xxv). She conducted her fieldwork from 1989 to 1993 in Ankara in a site (residential area) created and constructed by the collective efforts of a group of Islamists dominantly from National Vision (Milli Görüş)Footnote 6 and some prominent members of the Nakşibendi order’s Zahid Kotku branch, in order to live Islam as şuurlu (conscious) Muslims. During her research she observed how women become core symbols of the Islamist movement and how they organise their everyday lives in the domestic space while making an effort to express Islamism publicly by altering the meaning of private. She integrates Pierre Bourdieu’s (1984/1989) theory of taste into her analysis to exhibit the ways in which Islamists differentiate themselves from other middle-class sectors of society. In addition, she aims to examine the othering of Islamist women by Turkish modernization and the ways in which Islamist women cope with this process. Saktanber attributes central importance to the active participation of women in Muslim societies in “reshaping the conditions of political participation, cultural difference, freedom of expression and thereby democracy” rather than being “passive recipients” (p. 18). Her introduction of the concept of “politization of culture” is a refined argument about the political attempts to expand the private to the social sphere for the “actualization of a middle-class ethos for an Islamic social order” (p. 18) and generate new content and meaning to this sphere. Islamist women, through organizing the private sphere, are active participants in these attempts aimed at ultimately creating an Islamist social order.

In Chapter One, titled “A Signpost of Islamic Revitalization: Women”, Saktanber first reviews how women are perceived in Muslim societies and Islamic ideologies and draws attention to the emergence and development of studies on women and Islam in Turkey in relation to Islamic revivalism. She recounts the story of her access to the site in the second chapter and provides details on the way she presented her identity and gained consent and trust despite women’s concerns about preserving the seclusion of the site and their privacy. Lastly, she explains her methodology, which she describes as ethno-sociology composed of survey questionnaires, in-depth interviews, focus group interviews, participant observation and surveys of “literary publications, television programmes, and movies on video in order to better evaluate the discourses that partly shape the imagery of the inhabitants of the site” (p. 92). In the third chapter, she provides a “sociological profile” of her informants and interviewees, the majority of whom are women. In the fourth chapter, she addresses the “assumptions which lie behind the demand to live Islam as “conscious Muslims” as a challenge to the processes of Turkish modernization, Westernization and secularization (p. 126). In Chapters Five and Six, Saktanber presents her analysis of the ethnographic data. She first examines the ideological, political and emotional references and the boundaries of the religious community’s imagination of an ideal Islamic society. She then provides further details about elements related to inventing an Islamic way of life by focusing on the process of Muslim women’s identity formation in the community through their self-narratives.

Living Islam is a study that is built upon a rich theoretical framework, comprehensive information about the historical, social and political background of the Islamist movement in Turkey and a multidimensional approach to the role of women in inventing an Islamic way of life, as the political sphere extends to the private. It stands out as an important reference book in Middle East women’s studies due to its elaboration of the specificities of the Turkish context. However, the middle-class nature of the study seems to lead her to define the Islamist movement as a middle-class phenomenon and underestimate its existence in the upper and lower classes, something to which Jenny White (2002a) draws attention. Cihan Tuğal (2004) also mentions this point by arguing that there is a tendency in the academic discourse to fail to consider the “creative (not simply ‘rural’ and ‘ignorant’) input of non-middle-class sectors” and states, “Living Islam reproduces this new academic common sense to the extent that it treats Islamism as a new ‘middle class ethos’ without reflecting in-depth on the fact that this study is conducted within the confines of a place that is exclusively and intentionally middle-class” (2004, p. 517).

When it comes to the representation of Muslim women, seclusion should be considered as one of the central concepts. The site, with its mosque, school and awqaf (plural form of waqf, or vakıf, charitable endowment), is constructed in a secluded space to live Islam as conscious Muslims (p. 61). The seclusion works to preserve the dignity of the community, which includes the dignity of women on the basis of Islamic norms. Thus, even though their aim was to construct a model of an ideal Islamic society, being accused of challenging secular state authority is not a concern for this site because they do not believe that they are doing anything wrong; rather, they are simply living in accordance with the principles of Islam. Their essential concern is with contamination resulting from the influence of nonbelievers, and harming Islam by revealing their private lives to others. In this sense, seclusion is also at the centre of their perceptions and feelings about the others of society: secularists. Being open to others resulted in the abuse and misuse of information about their private lives by secularists. The reasons behind the seclusion parallel women’s reasons for not participating in Saktanber’s study. Constructing a model of an Islamic society that is similar to the ideal one during the age of the Prophet Muhammad is an equally fundamental motive for establishing a secluded site. Saktanber’s conceptualization and description of this space is another interruption of the public–private dichotomy. The site can be regarded as a semi-public space, like the Gönenli Mehmet Efendi Endowment in Raudvere’s ethnography, created for the purpose of having an isolated place organized on Islamic principles. The bonds of solidarity and trust between the inhabitants function like social ties within a religious community, even though the community and political affiliations of the inhabitants are diverse. It is not an easily accessible place, although at certain times, such as when well-known community leaders preach sermons, its mosque receives large numbers of guests. The inhabitants organize religious activities and theological seminars and discussions, as well as charitable activities. There is also a lot of socializing between the families through informal visits. The site can be regarded as the culmination of the othering and isolation from the secular social order, as well as a result of the othering to which the inhabitants have been subjected.

Saktanber explains the three assumptions behind her preference for women as research participants. First, she perceives women as the main agents of family life. Second, she argues that Islamist women in everyday life are the active representatives of the Islamic lifestyle; they are the “main actors in the task of rendering Islam into a living social practice, and this gives them a crucial role in the daily articulation and reproduction of Islamic ideologies” (p. 98). Third, she states that so-called Islamist women have become symbols and representatives of the Islamist movement for both secularists and followers of the movement. The research group, selected via snowball sampling, consisted of 25 families (120 people). Although the interviews were primarily conducted with women and their teenage daughters, 20% of the interviewees were male. The group is described as married women and men living in nuclear families. Most of them were in their 30s and 40s, with husbands an average of four years older than their wives. All marriages were arranged, official marriages with religious recognition. There was a significant disparity in the level of formal education between the husbands and wives, with only four women being university graduates and the men being predominantly university graduates. Nevertheless, Saktanber emphasizes that all the women had received informal religious education, either in Qur’an courses or from private teachers at home, to varying degrees. The majority of the women were housewives due to their level of education and preferences for living a religiously modest life, and the few women who did work were preachers, Qur’an teachers, secondary-level teachers or private teachers at home. In contrast to the women, the men had greater ability owing to their higher level of education and more opportunities to work outside the home. The families had an average of three children and imbuing the children with an Islamic consciousness was of the utmost importance to the parents. As Saktanber notes, girls were mostly sent to religious schools “where they will not be forced to bare their heads”, and these schools will “prepare them for their roles as future mothers” (p. 110), while the mothers preferred to send their sons to private high schools. For both boys and girls, religious education had central importance in terms of the cultural capital that the families shared. The majority of the interviewees who were born in different cities in Turkey moved to the capital city when they got married, and the majority of the children were the first generation to be born in a metropolitan city.

This profile of conscious Muslims is significantly different from the portraits of Islamist women in the studies discussed in this period. Instead of educated, working women who are active participants in public life while enjoying considerable mobility and openly or indirectly demanding more rights and freedoms for covered women in the public sphere, in Living Islam we encounter pious women who remain within the boundaries of traditional gender roles by giving priority to domestic life and religiosity in creating an Islamic way of life. In this study, women’s agency and achievements in the quotidian and domestic space in realizing an ideal Islamic society appear as key success factors for the Islamist movement, in contrast to the path arising from the struggles of Islamist women in the public space. In previous studies, the empowerment of Islamist women came along with their stepping out of the domestic space and making their identity visible by simultaneously challenging the norms of patriarchal Islam and secularism. However, in Saktanber’s study, the empowerment of women is defined in terms of their roles as wives and mothers and their piousness in the domestic space. Their subjectivities are shaped by these roles, in addition to the impact of othering, and their agency is defined in terms of their roles in realizing an Islamic way of life.

The differences between this study and the other ethnographic studies of the new pious Muslim women can be attributed to the contextual differences between Istanbul and Ankara. The former is the largest city in Turkey, with a cosmopolitan social structure, high level of globalization, economic development dominated by private business and cultural diversity accompanied by an income gap, competition and rapidly increasing population due to migration. Ankara, the capital city of Turkey, is the central location for state institutions and universities and is characterized by a modest social and cultural life. During the years of Saktanber’s study, Ankara was still considered the symbolic centre of secularist state ideology. This may result in differences not only in the attitudes of the Islamist movement in these two cities, but also in women’s perceptions of their identities in society. Even though such an inference is beyond the research question of this book, I suggest that it should be regarded as a factor in contextualizing the findings of this study and analysing the social dynamics that affect Islamist women’s identities.

Richard Sennett’s theorization of the politics of resentment is articulated in Saktanber’s analysis of women’s expressed relief that they live in an Islamic social environment away from the harassments and criticisms of others (Sennett, 1992, cited in Saktanber, 2002a). The politics of resentment, “is a way of playing on the anger of people who feel excluded from the circles of the privileged (without however, aiming to destroy the privilege itself), and on the envy and shame arising from status injuries” (Saktanber, 2002a, p.175). The two modern aspects of this theory are relevant to Saktanber’s analysis of her research, namely, the beliefs held by the people of lower status about the unfairness of the means of achieving power, and the “anti-urban bias” that leads to a “fraternity” of the inner group against the outside and the “emotional withdrawal from society” of those on the outside of this inner group (pp. 176–177). She argues that the formation of a “counter-society” by Islamic activists is associated with this resentment (Sivan, 1985, cited in Saktanber, 2002a, p. 180). Within this framework, which places a significant emphasis on the isolation of the excluded sections of society, she introduces how the Islamic way of life was invented in the site. The families that are described as middle and lower class share many aspects of the lifestyle of others in their class in terms of decor, cooking, indoor clothing and receiving guests and social activities, such as charitable activities, voluntary associations, intellectual seminars and meetings. What differentiates these families living in the site is their rejection of habits like drinking alcohol, dancing, gambling, celebrating Western and Christian holidays, investing in financial institutions and receiving interest and similar non-Islamic practices. Women follow the rules of tesettür, especially in the presence of unrelated men. They pay attention to maintaining a balance between modern urban life and Islamic rules when raising their children. When mentioning that home has central importance in the Islamic way of life, Saktanber claims that “for the kind of trust involved in the attachment of members of an Islamic community to their living space, the protection of women and children from the outside world is a central issue” (p. 195). The most significant aspects of living in this site are presented through long excerpts from the in-depth interviews with the women, specifically the sense of security and trust in the social environment, “the possibility of self-actualisation as a conscious Muslim without the fear of being harassed” (p. 201), the civil inattention to obeying Islamic rules on behaving modestly in public and a hospitable and friendly social environment based on solidarity. She suggests that these aspects, which maintain privacy and Islamic seclusion, also give women a greater sense of freedom. The political successes of the Islamist movement in Turkey lead to a more open social life in the site. These features of the site make it a safe space that gives women a freedom of mobility and socialization within its borders, but at the same time, a social mechanism of surveillance that regulates and controls their activities and behaviour. What needs to be underlined is that Saktanber’s profile of Muslim women is an analysis that scrutinizes the established contentions about the oppression of Muslim women through their seclusion in the private sphere.

In the self-narratives of Muslim women, Saktanber selects as the subjects of her study women’s consciousness and agency in transforming their lives in a truly Islamic way, the mutual respect between spouses and the cultural capital of Islam that they share, and women’s stressful sentiments and experiences about being covered in a secular society. A sense of individual choice, freedom and pride in following the Islamic path and contentment with their marriages are evident in the narratives, whereas their relationships with the outside are a source of tension in the women’s lives because of the reactions of others to being an Islamist. Saktanber notes that the label Islamist, which has connotations of ignorance of secular public opinion, is harshly rejected by the women who define themselves only as conscious Muslims who put practical and intellectual effort into living Islam. This is a new way of identification, which is also mentioned by Raudvere (2002) as pertaining to the women in the Gönenli Mehmet Efendi Endowment, an identity that differentiates them from secular Muslims and others who have weaker knowledge of Islam. These narratives of women claim that true Islam is the only key to women’s emancipation and happiness, as İlyasoğlu (1994) shows in her study. As a result, there are no supporters of Western-oriented theories of feminism among these women. Yet, women’s rights in Islam and feminism emerge as frequently discussed issues in their intellectual and religious meetings because they compare the status of women in Islam with other ideologies. For instance, they believe that Islam gives women the right to choose between working outside the home and staying at home, which contrasts with Western feminism, which locates the emancipation of women in the achievement of economic independence. They argue that this is not only inconsistent with women’s nature, but also turns them into sexual objects. They emphasize that when a Muslim woman complies with the rules of sexual segregation and veiling, it is not to obey men, but to obey the rules of God, who knows what is best for humans. Men are not regarded as superior to women since “superiority could only be obtained by taqwa (takva, piety) that is, by getting closer to God through worship and being always conscientious in the application of His rules” (p. 220). In addition, women are believed to be the source of life, and thus it is the men’s duty to protect women. At this point in the analysis, Saktanber (2002a) restates her response in her article ‘Becoming the other as a Muslim in Turkey’:

Thus, this discourse, like any other, had some blind spots. It could not, for example, explain polygyny, nor could it deal with the ‘right’ of husbands to punish their wives by beating them ‘even softly’, and to control their physical movements and the circumstances under which they might receive visitors. When pressed to answer, Muslim women immediately resorted to ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’, always bringing up the conditions under which such controls could become necessary. (2002a, p. 222)

These women, who simultaneously disapprove of violence against women, defend monogamy and believe in gender equality, may not be considered empowered and emancipated from a feminist perspective. It is important to note, too, that their seclusion in the private space may not always be their preference but may be a result of their low level of formal education, which could be a discouraging factor in seeking ways to challenge the official and unofficial restrictions on their participation in work outside the home. Indeed, some excerpts indicate that some women with higher levels of education are more supportive of women’s public participation and do not refrain from challenging male authority. Mothers want their daughters to receive a better education than they had. In this sense, the Muslim women in the study are represented as neither homogenous in their attitudes towards women’s public participation nor submissive to patriarchal interpretations of Islam.

Throughout the book, Saktanber maintains her feminist standpoint:

as a sociologist who is deeply concerned about gender inequalities and sees them as some of the most fundamental problems in society to be investigated, without however, essentializing the issue, I have always perceived those women who cover their heads first as women, before becoming conscious of and distracted by their headscarves. (2002a, pp. xxiv–xxv)

Thus, she not only devotes many sections to contextualizing her study but also pays attention to giving a voice to the women, and this attitude makes the study significantly reflexive and multi-vocal. Despite the manifest and repeated emphasis on their agency, we cannot argue that Muslim women are subalterns in Living Islam.

Living Islam shares some critical points with The Book and the Roses. In both studies, seclusion is a factor that enhances the development of a sense of community and generates an environment for the self-realization of Muslim women where they are agents of creating a culture of living Islam as conscious Muslims. The boundaries between public and private are blurred in the semi-public spaces—the site in Saktanber’s study and in the endowment in Raudvere’s study—where private is no longer limited to the domestic space. As I have already discussed, the issue of visibility plays a central role in the agency of the women in the Gönenli Endowment. It is also important in the agency of the women in the site, as they become invisible to the others while becoming visible in their efforts within the community as agents of creating a moral order of Islam in a modern and secular society. In both studies, visibility outside the communities means challenging secularism, which perceives Islamist women, who are more visible than Islamist men with their tesettür, as a threat, an “unintended consequence of Turkish modernization” (Saktanber, 2002a, p. 18). However, in both studies, women’s strivings for self-realization are within the limits of Islamic rules, and they do not aim to challenge or alter the patriarchal practises, norms and traditions that are justified on religious grounds. The answer to the question of how far women’s agency in producing an Islamic lifestyle in obedience to codes of Islamic morality can be considered empowerment is rather positive for Raudvere. Saktanber’s postulates that women have become objects of both Islamic and secular ideologies, exerting control over the private sphere, which is mainly organized by women (2002a, pp. 236–237).

4.3 Studies on Veiling/Headscarf/Head Covering/Tesettür

Veiling, headscarf, head covering and tesettür are all used in this discourse to refer to pious Muslim women’s Islamic attire. I acknowledge that they have different meanings in conceptual discussions and the ways different groups of pious Muslim women use them. I am loyal to the author’s choice where applicable and prefer the word covering when I present my own approach.

The ethnographic discourse on veiling during this period focuses on a wide range of aspects related to this subject. It is studied as an essential element of Islamist women’s identity (İlyasoğlu, 1994), as an expression of individualism and agency (Genel & Karaosmanoğlu, 2006), as a marker of upward social mobility (White, 1999) and as a commodity through which Islamist women express their taste, style, individuality and class. Even though each approach may have shortcomings or blind spots, the diversity in the ways in which veiling is analysed indicates that the practice is no longer merely perceived in academic discourse on the axis of oppression and empowerment, and a counter-discourse has been produced against the Orientalist representations of covered women as objects of desire.

Örtülü Kimlik: İslamcı Kadın Kimliğinin Oluşum Öğeleri (Veiled identity: Elements of the Formation of Islamist Women’s Identity) (1994) is a book published in Turkish by Aynur İlyasoğlu, a Turkish scholar who received her PhD at Marmara University in Turkey. The book is the publication of her doctoral thesis and is based on the author’s analysis of literary texts by Islamist authors and her case study in the religious neighbourhoods of Istanbul. In-depth interviews with covered, educated women and participant observation constitute her field research. Observing the co-existence of traditionalism and modernity, she asks how covered women who attempt to construct a new identity are able to re-establish the definitions and categories introduced by modernity. She argues that for these women, the veil is a manifestation of the redefinition of the transitivity/intransitivity between the public and private spheres. Among the key concepts of this study are the strategies of distinctionFootnote 7 that İlyasoğlu uses to define the techniques used by Islamist women to emphasize their beliefs and distinctiveness while enabling them to participate in public life. These strategies are functional in the sense that they enable these women to create their own paths to modernization. She observes three dimensions in covering or tesettür: religious codes, codes of honour and aesthetic elements.

She begins her analysis with a comparative history of the interplays between the questions of women, the state and reformist ideologies in Egypt, Iran and Turkey. She claims that themes like improving women’s conditions and the education of women are those that politically prominent men used to transform themselves into modern men through a pro-feminist ideology during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With regard to the Turkish republican reforms, she states that the legal framework surrounding the question of women was designed by men, who were the leading force in the reforms. Noting that dress has been a symbol of cultural polarization in Turkey since the late Ottoman period, she highlights the symbolic meanings of tesettür for Islamist distinction in the context of cultural polarization between urban and rural, modern and traditional.

She briefly discusses the body and sexuality in Islam and argues that the body is the outcome of the interplay between the self and identity. She then provides an overview of how the body and sexuality are perceived and regulated in Islam, explaining that Islam defines the legitimate sphere of sexuality as solely within marriage and the private sphere and requires its neutralization in the public sphere. Ten, which partially refers to skin and complexion, is the embodiment of sexual instincts, desires and sensitivities, and the body is the focal point of interactions between ten and the self. Veiling or tesettür provides reconciliation at the borders of the private and public space between body/ten and body/self.

Before presenting her case study, İlyasoğlu examines Islamic womanhood in literary texts. She analyses two texts by two Islamist authors, suggesting that they reveal an auto portrait of Islamist women, reflecting their state of womanhood and their construction of the image of the Islamist woman. İlyasoğlu then presents an analysis of the data from her fieldwork. As she explains, the will to know behind the study arose from her need to know covered women who are culturally and ideologically distant, although they live in the same society. By making this statement, she positions herself as an outsider to this group. The places that she selected for her fieldwork also reflect her approach and self-positioning. She conducted interviews and made observations in several districts on Istanbul’s Anatolian side with which she was not familiar and which are widely known to be conservative. Finally, İlyasoğlu explains the logic of mediation between public and private spaces. She suggests the discursive categories of modern women and Islamist women in her argument that the private space is expected to change as a modern woman participates in public life, whereas the private space expands into the public space when an Islamist woman steps into the public space; veiling, or tesettür, emerges as the symbol of mediation between these spaces. The notion of public morality, which is one of the central issues for the Islamist movement, is also incorporated into this mediation.

In this study, İlyasoğlu paints a portrait of covered women by examining their interactions with modernity. The book is a contribution to the knowledge produced on the new Muslim women in terms of narrating their experiences and thoughts in relation to the contemporary social dynamics, concerns and tensions of Islamism. To some extent, it fulfils its aim of drawing attention to the inapplicability of the binaries attached to the categories of modern and traditional in understanding middle-class, covered women living in Istanbul. However, the book’s arguments, which exhibit postcolonial feminist influences, evidenced by her emphasis on the agency of the women in tesettür, have several shortcomings. As I illustrate below, with its overemphasis on covering, the study falls into the trap of essentialism. In addition, she reproduces the discursive formations that construct secular and Islamist women as opposing identities.

One of the major shortcomings is found in the chapter titled “Cinsellik ve Beden Üzerine” (“On Sexuality and Body”), which dwells on the link between women’s sexuality, the body and covering. This link has two important implications. First, it constructs the female body as a sexual object that needs to be controlled and covered with tesettür. Even though the concept of ten applies to both male and female bodies, it is the female body that must be fully covered, according to Islamic principles. İlyasoğlu explains this inequality between the sexes by stating, “Regulating the covering of female body by rules is due to perceiving it as a sensitive being up to every cell of its physical existence” (p. 67). This statement reproduces the arguments of Carol Delaney about covering, which I discussed in my analysis of The Seed and the Soil (1991). Second, defining women’s identity on the basis of their social relations and interactions through the dress code they adopt is a limited and unitary approach that can lead to the suggestion of simplistic categorizations of covered and open women. In addition, women’s subjectivities are defined by İlyasoğlu based on their decision to veil, which actually initiates the discussion on the issue of the modern–traditional dichotomy.

In her endeavour to get to know the Turkish women in tesettür better, and overcome the distance between herself and them, she conducts interviews and observation in Istanbul’s predominantly Islamist neighbourhoods, such as Fatih, Şehzadebaşı and Cerrahpaşa. She states that in selecting her research group, she needed to determine the degree to which the ideal types of traditional woman and modern woman corresponded with reality. According to the polarized typology in which covered women are associated with the category of traditional, paid work was suggested as an indicator of modernism. Aiming to blur this categorization, İlyasoğlu selected her group of respondents from working women. The characteristics of this research group—that is, urban, working, covered and modern women—are seen in many other studies in this discursive period. As she mentions, the characteristics of her research group are consistent with Göle’s (1996) arguments that women’s adopting an Islamic way of life is an urban phenomenon. Furthermore, this study shows that the decision to veil tends to be made while pursuing a university education, in the social environment of the university. İlyasoğlu suggests that this fact further blurs the dividing lines between the categories of modern and traditional women.

The women in the research group were the first generation of university graduates and professionals in their families, meaning that they mark a radical shift in gender roles when compared with previous generations. Their mothers were primary school graduates and had no work experience. Accordingly, as İlyasoğlu states, we can think that in determining the limits of a new identity of being an educated, working, covered woman, there is a comparatively loosely defined area of mobility. Their mothers’ support for their education and career is also noteworthy in the sense that it challenges traditional gender role models. İlyasoğlu then presents accounts of the problems that her respondents encountered due to being covered in their work lives. She argues that being harshly excluded from the public sector, these women continued their careers in a closed, religious social environment and this led, first, to isolation from the rest of society, and second, to strengthening their Islamist identity. Accordingly, we can argue that while the decisions to cover, study at university and work are presented as factors that enhance the agency of Muslim women, their self-actualization was limited by the dominantly secular social environment.

When it comes to their husbands and marriages, the majority of respondents stated that they met their husbands during their university years, at work or within a group of friends and that their husbands shared household responsibilities. Based on this information, İlyasoğlu suggests that categorical judgements about the “enslavement of women in Islamic marriages” should be open to discussion. In addition, women in the research group stated that their husbands were university graduates, worked in high status jobs for the state or private sector or were self-employed. She concludes that these couples form part of an elite group, which supports the argument that the new Islamist elite are no longer solely on the margins of society. Although her definition of elite needs clarification, this is one of the discursive formations circulated in the knowledge about the new Islamist identity. As I have already discussed, Jenny White (2002a) develops the idea and suggests that the Islamist elite identity spreads from the economic elites of the upper classes to the lower classes through adopting tesettür and acquiring Islamic knowledge.

From the conclusions relating to work life, it is clear that being covered was a major factor in the women’s decisions about work. Half the respondents had professional jobs, most of them worked in environments that allowed covering and only a minority (civil servants) uncovered in their workplace. When asked about their motivations for having a professional job, they highlighted the altruistic aspects of working, such as being helpful in society and helping people; however, they simultaneously aimed to progress in their careers. For İlyasoğlu, this explanation seemed like a reconciliation between, or a continuity with the conditions of modern life and the Islamist worldview on women. These women not only demanded status in public life, but also differentiated their identity from other modern working women with the meaning they attributed to their work. This argument reproduces the cultural and discursive othering in the categories of covered and secular women, mainly because the assumption is that the so-called modern working woman only works for financial reasons, which is simplistic in its exclusion of the possibility that other working women may also have idealistic motivations for their work. For a study that aims to question binarism and essentialism in the use of the categories traditional and modern, this is a shortcoming in the analysis. While examining the various aspects of the new Islamist identity, the rest of society is approached superficially and viewed as a homogenous unit. This gap prevents the study from reflecting on the continuities and meeting points between the categories of modern and traditional.

İlyasoğlu’s analysis of the data on her respondents’ decisions to veil is also significant. We learn that half of them decided to veil during their university education in 1980 and 1981. As she describes, these years correspond to the military regime in Turkey, which had a totalitarian project to eradicate right-wing and left-wing movements and support Islamists in replacing their ideologies. The respondents meeting other covered students at university emerged as an important factor in their decision to cover. As previously discussed, the tendency to adopt a new style of tesettür is specific to cities. İlyasoğlu explains that her respondents suggested that the reasons behind this tendency were primarily related to wrongdoing in society, the peace that comes with belief and the limitations of the materialistic worldview. To conclude the chapter, she refers to the case study of Arlene Elowe Macleod on a group of covered lower-middle-class working women in Egypt in 1983 and argues that by focusing on the role of veiling as a sign of protest and association with traditional patriarchal gender roles, Macleod fails to mention its role in the struggle against hegemony. I think that Kibria’s critique of Macleod’s study is relevant. She states:

While Macleod focuses on the women’s ideological need to affirm their traditional gender identities, studies of conservative women’s movements around the world suggest that it is often the economic attractions of the patriarchal family system that lead women to forms of protest that are traditional in character. (Kibria, 1994, p. 254)

It is also evident that İlyasoğlu fails to contextualize the rise of Islamism in universities during the 1980s; indeed it is not clear why Turkish society in the 1980s was a suitable environment for the unprecedented flourishing of an Islamist identity. Why was it specifically Islamism and not any other political thought or ideology that was seen as a remedy for the women who started veiling in their university years? The major question seems to be, why was the military regime a conducive political environment for Islamism? This question has been widely ignored, omitted or silenced in this discursive period, and I believe that the story of the emergence of the new Islamist identity is never complete without searching for an answer to it. As I discussed in the Chap. 2, Lindisfarne (2010) suggests that to find the answer, it is necessary to take the role of American imperialism into account. The capitalist–Orientalist paradigm articulated in American imperialist works and aimed at naturalizing the hierarchy between the First and Third World, associates femininity with the East and “superstition, tradition and primitiveness with Islam” (Lindisfarne, 2010, p. 28). Turkey’s membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Turkish army’s close relationship with the US are major factors that should not be underestimated in the analysis of the rise of Islamist movements in Turkey. Lindisfarne (2010) connects these pieces on the basis of class inequalities and argues that veiling is not only a means of protest against American imperialism, Western middle-class values, feminism and the modernization project of the Turkish state but also defends certain patriarchal aspects of Islam. She rightfully claims that this perspective turns attention away from all other social inequalities. Another possible perspective is that American imperialism supported the rise of Islamism in the Middle East, leading to an association between religion and traditionalism in this region and justifying the naturalization of the hierarchy between the First and Third Worlds. Thus, a particular way of analysing gender and religion in the Middle East was imposed upon the social sciences (Lindisfarne, 2010, p. 28).

In conclusion, İlyasoğlu argues that the new Islamist identity functions as a shield that protects the self socially and culturally. Signifying a body closed in on itself, the women in tesettür internalize a new identity that simultaneously distinguishes them from Islamist men, secular women and the dichotomies of Western modernism and local Islamism. Islamist women strive to create a place for themselves in public life while preserving their Islamic beliefs, creating their own versions of modernity and stepping out of traditional gender roles defined by patriarchal domination. As Saktanber argues, the identity of covered women is studied “as something to be compared and contrasted with the assumed identity of modern Turkish women in general, and Kemalist women in particular” (2002a, pp. 52–53). I believe that this representation of Muslim women reproduces in an essentialist way the discourse that constructs Islamist and secular identities as the ultimate others. Finally, it neglects the question of the extent to which Kemalism was successful in delivering its promises to women (Acar, 1990, 1991, cited in Saktanber, 2002a, p. 53). It takes the identity of secular modern Turkish women as unquestionably liberated, which is a problematic assumption (Kandiyoti, 1987).

Another study that particularly focused on the constitutive role of dress in the formation of identity was by Michael Humphreys and Andrew D. Brown (2002). Their article, “Dress and Identity: a Turkish Case Study”, is based on the authors’ ethnographic study at an all-female department of the vocational school of a university in Ankara between February 1995 and May 1996. The aim of the research was to draw attention to the question, “How is dress linked to contests regarding group and organisation identity?” in management studies and attempted to understand “how people come to understand and attribute meaning to their work organisations” in identity narratives (pp. 927–928). Thus, in this study, we encounter an academic perspective different from that in sociology, anthropology and political science, but I view it as part of the discourse on women and Islam in Turkey because it explores the meanings of the headscarf as a political symbol and instrument.

After briefly reviewing the literature on the role of discursive power in the formation of individual identities, narrative identity, the pluralistic nature of organisational identity, the role of dress as an expression and symbol of identity and the meanings attributed to headscarf, the authors reveal their standpoint: “The headscarf is, of itself, neither liberating nor oppressive, and that the power relations with which it is associated are situated not only in the meaning with which it is invested but also in the circumstances under which it is worn” (Franks, 2000, p. 918 cited in Humphreys & Brown, 2002, p. 931).

Their research methods included semi-structured, formal interviews and informal conversations with students, former and present faculty members and administrative staff, in addition to observation and reviews of a wide range of documents and texts, including web pages, letters, memos, scholarly articles, magazines and newspapers. Considering their status, which they define as male, Western, English, Christian researchers, in an environment of the cross-cultural ethnography of an all-female faculty in a secular Muslim country, the dynamics of othering, cultural distance and the power relationships between the ethnographer and the informants become even more critical in their study. They also underline “the need for critical self-reflexivity” and “producing ‘thick description’” (Geertz, 1973, cited in Humphreys & Brown, 2002, p. 933) as elements of their methodological approach and contextualize their work within the “crises of representation and legitimation” that ethnographers face in seeking to account for the experience of the other authentically (Denzin & Lincoln, 1994, p. 576, cited in Humphreys & Brown, 2002, p. 933).

In the Prolegomena section, they aim to present concise information about the history of the headscarf issue in Turkey, starting in the early republican years. However, they wrongly state that the veil was banned by Atatürk with the so-called 1925 Hat Laws (Humphreys & Brown, 2002, p. 934), which actually only related to the adoption of hats for men and did not address women’s attire. Mentioning the headscarf ban for state officers and university students in the 1980s and 1990s and the rise of Islamism, they state that their respondents wanted their narratives to be understood in this context. The following section, which relates to the identity narrative of the faculty, is based on the accounts of the faculty staff who narrated the story of the vocational school by referring to the mission stated in its 40th anniversary prospectus: “which was founded in 1934 in order to ‘train women according to the principles of Atatürk’ and to instil in our students ‘patriotism and national ethics’” (p. 936). According to the narratives, the founding principle of the institution, which was administered by a director appointed by the Ministry of Education, had been central to its identity until it was subsumed into Hero UniversityFootnote 8 and was thus subject to YÖK (Higher Education Council) supervision. The student profile started to change as the previous selection procedure was replaced with central university examinations. As a result, students from the lower classes who achieved a lower level of education than students from the upper classes were able to, and did, enrol in the faculty, and some of these new students wore headscarves. The academic staff, who defined themselves as secularist and Kemalist, were utterly disappointed with this change and feared that Islamism would ultimately change the identity of the institution.

In Ankara when I was a student, we were like models for the rest of the people, but today the school is full of people wearing scarves. The mentality has changed and we are going backwards and the fundamentalists are now getting a hold on training and education in Turkey—Art professor. (Humphreys & Brown, 2002, p. 937)

While we acknowledge that ‘It’s what is in the head that counts not what is on the head’ (ex-student and ex-member of staff), we nevertheless see the wearing of headscarves as an affront to Atatürk: ‘He Atatürk] was the true prophet—but we are not allowed to talk like that anymore’—head of textiles. (Humphreys & Brown, 2002, p. 938)

Humphreys and Brown (2002) then go on to discuss this narrative and examine the influence of the existence of oppositional identities on the identity of the organization, particularly the co-existence of Kemalist and Islamist identities in the faculty.

I am not in a position to review articles in the field of managerial sciences; however, there are critical points that need to be raised since they also produce knowledge related to women and Islam in Turkey. First, there are very limited references to Turkish scholars, both in the discussion of the political background of the issue and in the analyses of Kemalist and Islamist identities. They ignore a vast range of publications, and this results in their failure to overcome their distance from the research subject. Second, they represent Kemalist and Islamist identities at the faculty with sharp distinctions, and view them as homogenous and essential categories. Putting too much stress on their oppositional character, they fail to see their interactions and potential for change. Finally, and most importantly, we do not hear the voices of the students, particularly covered students, who are otherised by both the faculty and the authors. They are completely silenced; we do not hear their stories, experiences, feelings about studying at a Kemalist institution or about having to deal with changing policies regarding the headscarf. We only hear their stories through the observations and experiences of the staff. They are represented not as agents but as intruders on organizational identity. Moreover, according to this extremely simplistic representation, which turns covered students into subalterns, it seems as if being covered is the sole determining factor, the only component of their Islamist identity.

Humphreys and Brown’s study reproduces the most common binary oppositions to Orientalism. The juxtaposition of the modernity and progress associated with Kemalism and the traditionalism and backwardness associated with Islamism is manifest not only in the narratives of the faculty staff but also in the discursive formations of the article. It seems that the authors’ references to poststructuralist and postcolonial approaches in other field studies were replaced by a Eurocentric attitude towards Islam in the way they analyse their own field.

Yael Navaro-Yashin’s (2002) article, “The Market for Identities: Secularism, Islamism, Commodities”, which is published as a chapter in Fragments of Culture, addresses the subject of Islamist identity and veiling from the point of view of consumerism. Navaro-Yashin was born in Istanbul and received her Bachelor of Arts (BA) in sociology from Brandeis University (1991) and PhD in anthropology from Princeton University (1998) in the US. The study is an “ethnography of consumerism and contemporary politics of culture” that questions the binarism that associates the Islamist lifestyle with culture and the secularist/Westernist lifestyle with consumption (p. 221). Based on fieldwork she conducted in Istanbul “in the Islamist veiling sector, in marketplaces for religious commodities, in public centres for the manifestation of politics of identity, and among secularists” in the mid-1990s (p. 222), she examines the manufacturing of the veil and the portrait of Atatürk as a means to express and construct Islamist and secularist/Westernist identities, respectively. By arguing that the commodification of symbols of the Islamist and secularist cultures was already occurring, she exposes the politics of culture that is transformed into “a war over symbols” (p. 223).

Navaro-Yashin highlights the Özal period of the 1980s as the economic and political background of the commodification of identities, while the economy was fuelled by privatization, the influx of foreign companies and the development of the free market. Both secular and Islamist businesspeople benefited from these developments, but the expansion and success of this latter group, which was composed of smaller companies from Anatolia, were rapid and striking. Thus, the culture of consumerism of Islamism could also find commodities to meet every need and taste of Muslims in those companies. She notes that it was during the rise of Islamism and these economic developments that the market for tesettür attire was created, and the tesettür companies offering veils and overcoats in fashionable designs were founded. Their styles soon became fashionable among covered students and working women, and the brands were compared based on their qualities and style.

On the other front of the market war, Navaro-Yashin presents “secularist commodities” (p. 228), describing the leading secular clothing companies in Turkey as competing with European brands. In the mid-1990s, these companies began to express their identity as one of producing a secular and modern lifestyle and following Atatürk’s vision and values. Another group of commodities that took a leading role in the war was Atatürk paraphernalia, which was released following the election victory of the RP in 1994 and enjoyed significant demand from Atatürkist people, especially the private sector. Navaro-Yashin argues that “As new goods were put on the market by companies trying to lure their customers towards innovation, new forms of “being” or “identity” were shaped as well. Business began to craft and sell ‘Turkish authenticity’ whether secularist or Islamist” (p. 230).

After describing the first shopping malls in Istanbul, which were opened in the 1980s and early 1990s and presented themselves as modern, Western and European Atatürkist spaces for shopping, and mentioning the Islamist reaction to the malls’ upper-class consumerist culture, she depicts the department store of one of the biggest Islamist clothing brands, Tekbir.Footnote 9 As an indication of her reflexive and multivocal methodology, she presents long quotes from her interview with the department store’s owner about the company and his views about veiling and his customers. She then shares her impressions and analysis of the brand’s fashion show in which famous, secular, Westernist Turkish models took the stage and the symbols of authenticity, modernity, modesty and femininity were juxtaposed. To conclude the chapter, Navaro-Yashin repeats her arguments that secularists and Islamists were involved in the same capitalist consumption market and that contemporary identity politics evolved in this market context, which is connected with the international market economy. She also underlines that, as actors in this market, Islamists are as effective as secularists.

“The Market for identities: Secularism, Islamism, Commodities” is a study that offers a significant depth of analysis to the relationship between consumerism and the formation of political identities. The way it problematizes the deep-seated binarism in its analysis of Islamism and secularism by perceiving Islamism as an identity isolated from modernity and globalization is skilfully supported by evidence from the field. It should be considered a reference work on the subject of covering, fashion and Islamism.

Navaro-Yashin’s study shows that the alterity of Islamist identity vanishes in the world of consumption. Fashion and design mediate Islamic practice and the commodified symbolism of the market economy. Islamist women’s identity is not represented as an essential other, but as an identity sharing similar aspirations, such as the desire to look elegant and fashionable, with the secularist–Westernist identity. In this sense, it presents an alternative argument to the studies that focus on the fundamental role of othering that shapes Islamist women’s identities and emphasizes the polarization between Islamists and others. According to this representation, consumption patterns and lifestyle become essential elements in the subjectivity of Islamist women, just as is in the subjectivity of secularist–Westernist women. Moreover, the capacity to consume becomes a marker of agency. Although I agree with Navaro-Yashin that the global consumer culture has played a remarkable role and had a significant impact in the 1980s and 1990s, which is also noted by Bauman (1998), I do not think that it can be an all-encompassing explanation of the formation of Islamist women’s identity. However, it is important that the focal point of this study indicates the formation of a discursive framework in the representation of Muslim women, a framework that directs attention away from references to faith and politics towards the material world of consumption as a marker of identity. One major shortcoming of focusing on the symbolism of consumption lies in trivializing its implications for gender equality. It should not be ignored that the relationship between consumption and identity is mostly about the distinctiveness of women’s identities; it does not play the same determining and distinguishing role in men’s identities. The study does not address the point that, unlike the veil, Atatürk paraphernalia were not gender specific. Therefore, I believe that women are represented as being more subject to the currents directed by the global market economy, and Islamist women’s identities are even more vulnerable to this economy.

Another book chapter based on Jenny B. White’s fieldwork in Ümraniye, Istanbul, is “Islamic Chic”, published in Istanbul: Between the Global and the Local (1999) edited by Çağlar Keyder, is part of the early discourse on Islamism and fashion. The chapter begins with a scene on a bus in 1987 in which three girls in tesettür are discussing a TV series about the Turkish War of Independence and stating that their favourite scenes were the ones with horses and Ottoman tents. White notes that besides praising Atatürk’s deeds, the series included references to Islam, which was an unusual thing to see on state television until the 1980s because of the need to protect republican values. However, she also notes that Islam was always part of the daily lives of Turkish people.

She then provides some background information on secularization reforms in Turkey and the historical process that allowed for the rise of Islamism. She explains that after the 1980 military coup, which was the third coup (the two previous coups were in 1960 and 1971), Islam was supported by the military and, later, by the Özal government “as a coherent mould to shape society away from feared socialist and communist designs” (p. 78) and “as an alternative to Kurdish separatism” (p. 79). At the same time, the Turkish economy was opened to the world market, and this development led to income inequalities and domestic migration to big cities, particularly Istanbul, which was considered “the Turkish gateway to the world” (p. 79). The creation of wealth brought with it the aspirations of many for upward mobility. These aspirations and hopes that followed the path of faith were expressed through Islamic symbols, such as Islamic dress. White argues that the political and economic power of people in Islamist circles made Islamism respectable and Islamic symbols chic. It is in this context that tesettür fashion emerged and Islamic chic “spilled to the streets” (p. 80). White underlines the differences within the Islamist groups by showing the diversity of its followers, symbols and values and demonstrates that not all the bearers of the symbols have a political affiliation to the Islamist political party (RP). By comparing two weddings in Ümraniye, one in a mosque hall and the other in a restaurant, she illustrates her argument that women’s covering styles depend very much on economic conditions, wearing tesettür does not necessarily denote support of the RP and sometimes tesettür is adopted as an urban version of rural traditional clothing style. However, there is a group of Muslim elites who “want to make an impression” and want “to recapture the fashion belonging to the upper classes” as they socialize in modern daily life (p. 82).

White then describes and contrasts the attitudes and activities of a civil society, secularist NGO—the Association for the Promotion of Modern Living (Çağdaş Yaşamı Destekleme Vakfı)—and Islamist civil society groups. While the agenda of the former is dominated by defending the secularist lifestyle, the latter is described by White as having an attitude that is “counter-elite and…[countercultural]”, more mobilized and active, occupying central positions in the state, economy and media, and prioritizing face-to-face interactions with potential supporters, particularly the residents of lower-class neighbourhoods in big cities (p. 87). Considering the new urban classes, she states, “They are people who until recently had been at the margins of a nation dominated by secularist elites. They have a desire, as much as these elites, to participate in the material welfare of a modern nation” (p. 88). The last section illustrates this argument by recounting the story of the changing lifestyle of a lower-class family who had lived in a squatter neighbourhood of Istanbul until they achieved a relatively better economic status. The family was modest and traditional, but not overly religious. The two daughters chose two diverse paths to modernization and upward social mobility in Istanbul. One adopted a modern and open style of dress, resisted an arranged marriage and eloped, but ended up in a traditional marriage, while her sister adopted the tesettür.

In White’s study, the concepts of power, social mobility, social class, consumption and desire come to the fore in a social context that is constantly transforming due to the currents of migration and urbanization, the dynamics of civil society and the market economy. The agency and subjectivities of the women in tesettür are shaped by the simultaneous effects of all these factors; this constitutes a significantly more complex explanation than the stereotype of the covered Islamist woman whose sole motive is to support political Islam. In White’s examples from the field, we see that for Muslim women who are at the margins of society, upward social mobility is expressed with tesettür, and economic prosperity is expressed with a better quality and more fashionable scarf and attire, despite the critical attitudes of Islamist intellectual elites. White explains that the emergence of the “new era of Islamic respectability” is the outcome of the economic, social and political achievements of Islamist groups (p. 80). Thus, women who become Islamic chic seem to have a higher status and more economic power than other pious Muslim women. Accordingly, while their subjectivities are changed by social mobility, their agency is led by the desire to achieve a better life. White also notes that through civil societal groups “Islamists women have also become mobilised. Taking part in Islamist activities has allowed religious women of the lower classes to attend university and become upwardly mobile and politically active” (p. 87). However, White does not mention here (although she does in her later article, “The Islamist Paradox” [2002b]) that in many cases, this mobilization is controlled by men, or, at least, it cannot fully challenge the traditional gender roles imposed on women by the Islamist discourse. For instance, in the case of women’s activism in the RP before its election success in 1994, women’s mobilization did not result in higher positions for women in the party because the male members believed that a woman’s primary role was in the private sphere. We also do not know whether adopting tesettür brings more social control to women in spite of achieving a higher status.

White perceives Islamism as a modern ideology, whether it is political, social or personal. Therefore, she does not associate it with traditionalism, nor does she have an essentialist perspective of it. In fact, she writes, “The Islamists are actively engaged in formulating Islamic thought, sometimes with reference to Western literature and thought, to fit modern problems. Many are active seekers of an alternative Islamic Road to modernity” (p. 80). This is another example of the statements about Islamism’s alternative modernity that were in circulation during this discursive period. Seeing it as an alternative, as a countermovement, discursively locates it at the margins of society, which also characterizes the knowledge of women and Islam in this period.

Sandıkçı and Ger (2005) provide one of the most detailed accounts of Islamic consumption culture and covering in their article “Aesthetics, Ethics, and Politics of the Turkish Headscarf”. The analytical perspectives of these Turkish scholars are quite different from those of other studies dealing with tesettür, as both were scholars in the field of marketing. Özlem Sandıkçı received her BA at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, Master of Business Administration (MBA) at Birmingham University in the UK and her PhD at Pennsylvania State University in the United States. Güliz Ger received her MBA at METU and her PhD at Northwestern University in the US. Their paper, which focuses on the practice of head covering and reveals that its dynamics relate to fashion, taste and aesthetics, suggests that a solely political and symbolic approach to the headscarf neglects the material and aesthetic aspects embodied in the practice and “the struggle between remaining faithful to the Koranic principles on religiously appropriate dressing and constructing a fashionable, beautiful and modern appearance” (p. 61).

Like several other authors’ analyses in this period, they mention the neoliberal Özal period as a turning point in political Islam and an intensification of the polarization between secularists and Islamists. In line with other descriptions of the new identity of Islamist women, they write, “It was primarily the young, urban and educated women who wore the türban (a large scarf that tightly covers the head, ears, the neck and the bosom)” and explain that the 1990s were years in which “an Islamist bourgeoisie with a taste for conspicuous consumption began to emerge” (p. 62). The market started to offer a variety of clothes and styles for Islamist women, and in addition to its political symbolism, the türban became “an object of material culture, subject to various consumption and production dynamics” (p. 62). The ethnographic study by Sandıkçı and Ger of the relationship between head covering practices, faith and fashion is shaped by these concerns. They define their informants as “middle- and upper-middle-class, urban, educated Islamist women covered by their own will, who exhibit, and sometimes openly admit, their interest in fashion and being fashionable” (p. 63). Their data collection involved in-depth interviews in Ankara and Istanbul, interviews at Islamist clothing shops, observation of fashion shows, hotels and other spaces frequented by Islamist women, photographs taken by the authors and visuals from printed media. The variety of field methods used in this study enabled the authors to provide a detailed account of the urban practice of covering.

It is significant that Sandıkçı and Ger quote passages from the Qur’an that explain appropriate behaviours and clothing and reveal that the essential principle is modesty. The passages are useful because they give the reader a point of reference about the faith dimension of the practice and draw attention to the gap between Islamic rules and how they are interpreted and practised. However, unlike the studies in the first discursive period, these are not taken as reference points to explain the status of modern covered women. On the contrary, the study illustrates the inappropriateness and insufficiency of essentialist readings of Islamic principles to understand contemporary rites and practices. Sandıkçı and Ger note that even though the principle applies to both men and women, it is particularly women’s dress that is at stake because they are more likely to arouse desire in men than vice versa. In addition, they illustrate that there is neither consensus about the particular codes and rules for modesty nor about the practice of tesettür. Thus, the authors highlight the fact that tesettür has become a matter of individual choice and interpretation shaped by “a creative and resourceful negotiation of the subjective meanings, social influences and the fashion dynamics” (p. 66). This point of view challenges the essentialist interpretations of covering and integrates a multi-dimensional analysis into the knowledge of covering practices. The study, therefore, also describes the influences that shape women’s subjectivities. The authors then continue by exploring the details of fashion design and the major social influences in the styles of headscarves, such as that worn by the prime minister’s wife or one seen on a popular TV series, by analysing the accounts of covered women and shopkeepers in tesettür shops. According to these accounts, covered women’s attempts to be both faithful and fashionable start with their selecting a scarf that suits their face and clothing and continues with acquiring the ability to tie it in a “düzgün (straight, shapely, smooth, rounded and symmetrical)” (p. 73) way and learning how to take care of it correctly. In light of these efforts, Sandıkçı and Ger noted that, paradoxically, the work of covering the hair has come to resemble the hair grooming rituals described by McCracken (1988, cited in Sandıkçı & Ger, 2005, p. 75). Another paradox is that Islam does not approve of wastefulness and luxury, but the practice of head covering has started to resemble this, as the participants in the study admitted that they had many headscarves and were willing to pay higher prices for certain brands. They justified the effort and expenditure on the grounds that Islam wants its believers “to be clean, well-groomed and pleasant looking” (p. 76).

With their analysis of the practice of head covering, they suggest that there are spaces in which fashion and Islam coexist in complicated, heterogeneous and unstable ways. Taking fashion as a modern phenomenon, they argue that the headscarf becomes an object that not only shatters the “linear and structural reading of the relationship between Western fashion and modernity” but also makes covered women “subjects as well as objects of modernisation” (p. 78). Sandıkçı and Ger restate the widely circulated argument that while veiling gives a sense of empowerment to those who adopt it as an individual choice, it also perpetuates the argument that women are the source of temptation and must thus be covered. The authors rightly point out that male control over women’s bodies and autonomy is not specific to Islam but is also prevalent in fashion. Thus, I think that the limits on women’s agency stem from their efforts to look pleasant in a way that also expresses their faithfulness to Islamic principles and the market forces of modernity that make certain commodities desirable in their attempt to achieve this ideal. The authors do not underestimate the androcentric nature of these factors, while also attributing agency to women through their powers of negotiation. As they write, “What happens initially as a contradiction emerges as a creative and skilful negotiation of the principles of Islam and the ideals of beauty and fashion. Paradoxically, the headscarf offers women possibilities as well as limitations in constructing a modern identity” (p. 80).

The research that analyses veiling and tesettür as a field of consumption has created a significant discourse and disagreement within Middle East women’s studies, particularly within the ethnographic discourse on women and Islam in Turkey. This research reproduces and develops the arguments in Middle East women’s studies of this period that veiling is a modern, contemporary and urban phenomenon and is a conscious individual choice, which is not traditionally oppressive but liberating (Göle, 1996). However, these studies tend to undermine the role of Islamic fundamentalism, which preserves the divine limits on gender roles and thus smooths the oppressiveness of fundamentalism by discussing covering as a part of a consumption culture (Ahmed, 2005, cited in Moghissi, 1999). Second, as I have already argued, this research tends to undermine the fact that pious, covered Muslim women also became objectified as capitalism and the fashion industry became intertwined with the Islamic market. Finally, particularly with respect to the ethnographic work of Sandıkçı and Ger, there is a need to address how producing knowledge about culture has become part of Eurocentric and capitalist modes of knowledge production. As Bahl and Dirlik (2000) warned, the repudiation of Eurocentrism is not possible without a critique of the metanarrative of capitalism and will serve to obscure “the hegemony of Eurocentric modernity through the agency of capitalism” (Bahl & Dirlik, 2000, p. 9). If we assume that studies on consumption and tesettür aim to challenge Eurocentrism in creating a counter-discourse about Muslim women by focusing on their new urban Islamic culture, we need to question to what extent they criticize capitalism. As Bahl and Dirlik argue:

Cultural knowledge of this kind, however is intended not to recognise and respect the culture of others, but to render more efficient the management of a ‘multicultural’ workforce and the marketing of commodities. The new recognition of non-Euro-American cultures, in other words, implies not an end to eurocentrism, but appropriating Eurocentric modernity cultures that are rendered into capitalist modernity. (Bahl & Dirlik, 2000, p. 9)

With respect to the peculiarity of the Turkish context in relation to the discourse on covering, the headscarf ban should be considered a factor that deeply affected the identity formation of urban, covered, educated women. As Elizabeth Özdalga shows in her study, The Veiling Issue, Official Secularism and Popular Islam in Modern Turkey (1998)—which presents accounts of covered women who were subject to the ban in their university years or work life—they had to cope with significant psychological pressures because of the choice they were forced to make between self-realization and their faith in Allah. In one of the cases presented in the studies, an informant who studied in the Faculty of Law tells the story of another covered student who had to leave university because of the ban and was forced by her family to get married if she did not comply with the rules and pursue her education. Since the girl suffered from depression, the informant wanted to contact her.

So, one day I decided to take my own mother and my sister along and pay a visit to their home. If we made it into a regular family visit the mother wouldn’t be able to reject us. We talked to the mother about our friend’s depressed situation and asked what she really wanted to do with her. ‘Do you want to kill your own daughter?’ we asked. After that visit the girl broke her silence, but this time she started to speak a lot, in an abnormal way. She would come to the university and enter the lectures, with her Islamic garb on, even though she knew it was forbidden. And that was not all: she would monopolise the discussion, interrupt the teachers and behave in a way that was crude and very awkward compared to her usual manner. (Özdalga, 1998, p. 58)

A covered mathematics teacher at a state high school who was pressured by the school administration to unveil and was threatened with dismissal recounts her stressful experience in the early 1980s as follows:

These administrators pushed on, as if I were totally ignorant. They were not only threatening to fire me, but to withdraw my teacher’s certificate as well. During one of these encounters I said, ‘You cannot dismiss me, and if you do, I know my rights. If you are going to fight against me, I’ll fight back. Then I’ll apply to the European Commission of Human Rights, since you are violating my rights as an individual’.

This time the person in charge seemed baffled. ‘Where have you learned all these things?’ he asked. ‘I have studied law,’ I said, ‘And I have a degree from the Faculty of Political Science’. Upon hearing this, the director became more careful, since he realised that the person in front of him was not daft, but this did not prevent the whole encounter from turning into a fierce duel of words.

Just imagine! At that time, I was pregnant, and as if my delicate condition did not matter at all, the bickering went on for about an hour.

When I left the place, I was very upset. I wasn’t able to keep my tears back anymore. I went down toward Sultan Ahmed [the Blue Mosque], and there a garbage collector saw me and asked, ‘Oh dear, why are you crying?’ ‘I can’t help it,’ I replied, ‘I’m being dismissed from work’. Then I sat in the mosque crying for two hours without being able to stop. Thus, my tensions and feelings were discharged. (Özdalga, 1998, pp. 69–70)

Similar to the decision to adopt an Islamic way of clothing, the new urban covered women’s attitudes towards the headscarf ban, which was not officially but culturally extended to many other areas of social life, and the strategies they use to cope with the problems that this caused have direct influence on their agency and subjectivities.Footnote 10 From a postcolonial feminist point of view, the subaltern status of these women changed as they became agents who actively developed ways of dealing with the pressures of secular state ideology and Islamic fundamentalism that hindered their self-realization, as they had their own voices and made those voices heard. I think that this transformation is reflected in the academic studies of this period, which became more and more willing to hear and represent them. The headscarf issue has been an extensive part of the political discourse with which Islamist women engage, which I consider in the next section.

4.4 Islamist Women in Politics

The visibility of the pious, covered Muslim women in the public sphere was such a widely debated issue in the field of politics that it played an effective role in the success of the Islamist movement; thus, women’s place in political Islam attracted academic interest. In this section, I aim to trace Islamist women’s representations in the studies focusing on women in the Islamist politics of first the RP and then FP. These studies are critical in the sense that they portray Islamist women’s activism in the political sphere in Turkey, which was dominated by men and secularism.

Rethinking Islam and Liberal Democracy: Islamist Women in Turkish Politics by Yeşim Arat (2005) is an illuminating study of the Ladies’ Commission of the RP. Arat is a Western-trained Turkish scholar who received her BA in politics at Yale College and PhD at Princeton University in the US. Using qualitative methods, mainly in-depth interviews, she aims to “examine the conflictual relationship between secularism and Islam in a liberal democracy” (p. 1) and show that Islamist women’s activism both challenged what was attributed to Islamism by the secular state and what Islam can involve in a secular political order. Arat claims that through the experiences of the RP women “we can assess how religion can assume new meanings, threaten or expand the boundaries of secular democracy, and reshape socio-political reality” and maintains that “liberal democracy could enrich itself by accommodating these groups rather than excluding them” (p. 2). From the introduction of the book, it is clear that the role that she attributes to the female activists of the RP is significantly transformative. In addition, she underlines that it is important to focus on women’s activism not only because the Turkish modernization project and Islamist discourse define themselves on the basis of women’s roles and status, but also because women are marginalized in the political field despite their expanded social rights (pp. 7–8).

She explains that her will to know arose from the success of the Ladies’ Commission of the Party and their striking political activism. As she writes:

The intensity and extent of Refah women activists’ engagement in politics was striking even beyond the Turkish context. It had long been argued that women lacked interest in politics. Even though feminist literature clearly contested the claim and argued that women were more involved and interested in politics than the orthodox political scientists assumed, women have not been militant activists in large numbers within the party ranks. Women have been known to support conservative causes (for example, the New Right in the United States) and to be actively involved in Islamist movements (such as the Iranian Revolution). However, in Turkey, there was an Islamist political party in a secular democratic polity through which women engaged in politics. (Arat, 2005, p. 9)

It is necessary to pay attention to some implied binarisms in this explanation. By juxtaposing the terms women and militant activist, and cases from the US and Iran and cases from the Islamist political party and secular democratic polity, she highlights several polarizations and otherings. She actually pinpoints the contemporary location of the local and global power struggles that shaped her academic interest and indicates that the study targets Western as well as non-Western readers. In addition to challenging the previous Orientalist representations of Muslim women in the field of anthropology, she announces that this study will challenge representations of women by orthodox political scientists.

The first chapter examines women’s rights and status throughout the modernization history of Turkey by focusing on the headscarf issue as a manifestation of the tension between secularism and Islamism in order to contextualize Islamist women’s activism. The chapter also outlines the divergence in the standpoints of feminists and Islamists. The second chapter first examines the RP and the conditions that gave rise to its increasing appeal since it was founded in 1983 and then provides information about the emergence, evolution, goals and organization of the Ladies’ Commission. In the following chapter, Arat explores the diverse background of the women in the commission, who shatter the assumption of the secularists that the Republic bestowed autonomy and rights on women so that they would not be drawn to Islamism. Through the life stories of the activist women, we learn about their motivations to join the commission. Arat summarizes the main reasons as follows:

For some, coercive policies of the state and the illiberal environment at school or at home, particularly over the headscarf issue, precipitated the process of engagement with the party. For others, the lure of the active party organization and the help, solidarity, or the promise of an ideal community that its members extended was crucial in recruitment. In either case, there was neither violence nor repression on the part of the Islamists who recruited women to their ranks. Ironically, secular repression or the defensive measures of the secular establishment in public or private life had the unintended consequence of making the Islamists more attractive. For those coming from traditionally religious families, as much as others coming from more secular backgrounds, becoming a party member and working for the party was a means of self-realization. (Arat, 2005, p. 67)

As these reasons show, the strongest point that the chapter makes about the individuality of women is that the assumptions about the “false consciousness” of the previously secularist women who are in the commission cannot be relevant “without establishing an essentialist conception of the ‘right consciousness’” (p. 68). The second important point is that despite the success of the commission, its members were excluded from decision-making positions and ultimately dismissed from the FP, which was founded to replace the RP. Arat demonstrates that the exclusion of women resulted from an overlap between the dominant gendered traditionalism in the movement and the women’s belief that they were working for God rather than to achieve positions in the party.

In the fourth chapter, “Mobilising for the Party: From the Personal into the Political”, we look more closely at the activities of Refah women and see how they benefit from the porous nature of the boundaries between the political and the private and between the secular and the religious. The activities of the commission range from educational seminars to picnics, from weddings to condolence visits and from tea chats to school visits, through which the women exhibit a friendly and tolerant attitude and establish networks. The mobilization of the Welfare women was possible owing to their success in bringing political issues into the private spheres that they visited and highlighting the demands and thoughts expressed in the private spheres to the party politicians. Arat focuses on the worldviews of the women in the commissions and what they think about Islam to comprehend the way in which these views allow them to work successfully as a community. She also notes that “Trying to understand what Islamists believe might be a step toward expanding democratic inclusion, if not solving all the tensions between Islam and democracy” (Arat, 2005, p. 90).

In conclusion, Arat repeats her argument that, as the case of the Islamist women proves, “the development of liberalism in a Muslim context is not only possible but also necessary” (p. 109). In addition, she argues that their case is important because it shows that the state cannot maintain its secular ideology in the presence of these activists. The Islamist women who were educated in a secular system could live and express their identities in Islamist politics, yet these politics were quite different from the threatening Islamism defined by the state. They were able to challenge the assumption that women were excluded from politics by means of the public–private divide. I believe this is one of the most significant contributions of the study to the discourse on women and Islam in Turkey. Finally, she concludes that in the secular Turkish context “liberalism infiltrated Islam, at least partially, in the way some women lived Islam…it expanded the reach of liberalism and deepened its practice even when it only partially shaped the lives of women who lived Islam through politics” (pp. 113–114). In her review, Çınar (2006) contends that this argument is not fully illustrated and clarified in the study, and we cannot fully understand how women were able to liberalize Islamist and secularist discourse (p. 488). On this point, I disagree with her. I think that the diverse backgrounds of the female activists enable them not only to integrate a more liberal attitude and discourse into the movement but also, through their public relations activities, bring Islamism into the non-Islamic sphere.

Beyond its argumentation about the changing borders between liberalism, Islamism and secularism, Rethinking Islam and Liberal Democracy challenges the essentialist categories of Muslim women victimized by Islam with its portraits of the female activists of the RP. It portrays Islamist women as active agents and empowered women who have successfully created a space in Islamist politics by bringing political issues into the private sphere and private concerns into the political sphere. Being responsive to different demands and needs, tolerant of different political views and respectful of human rights (particularly relating to religious freedom and headscarf issues), these women gained support in, and attracted attention from a wide range of sectors in society. Their subjectivities were shaped by their liberal interpretations of Islam and their resistance to how secularism defined and perceived Islamist women. Arat repeatedly mentions women’s emphasis on their autonomous individuality and their freedom in choosing an Islamic way of life. The headscarf issue is particularly critical in terms of their identities and subjectivities, since all the women believed that it was God’s command and women are “neither too weak nor too strong” to wear it (p. 104). Defending the right to wear the headscarf is stated in the book as women’s main reason for engaging in political activism. Arat notes that their resentment of the headscarf ban in the universities was primarily due to the obstruction of their and their children’s secular education, not because they were being denied the right to engage in religious practices (p. 104). Thus, we can reach the conclusion that self-realization and career development are prioritized over religious practices. However, the victimization resulting from the headscarf ban turned into a political expression of their identities in the Ladies’ Commission of the RP.

The study also reveals that the Ladies’ Commission was surrounded by the patriarchal traditionalism of the party. First, the decision to name the commission the Ladies’ rather than the Women’s Commission was made by male party members. The exclusionary meaning of the name implied a high-class character, and many women opposed the name because it does not embrace the lower classes. However, another equally important problem was that “being called a lady meant you had to conform to certain socially acceptable norms and values, the commissions reflected the conservative bias the party had toward women (p. 29). Second, Arat mentions that the party programme did not refer to women but rather to family, ladies and mothers, that is, to women’s traditional gender roles. A reflection of this attitude was manifested in the headscarf issue. Their support for the covered women was not expressed as a women’s issue but as an issue of religious freedom, and this indicates that the party clearly refrained from using a feminist discourse. Third, women’s dependence on the male members of the party for the funding of their large projects and utilities such as cars, auditoriums and videos, allowed them to exert auto-censure while making decisions about these activities. Finally, there was an evident glass ceiling that prevented women from achieving higher positions in the party, and the party finally dismissed the women after achieving success in the election. Women’s struggles with these issues can be viewed as a conflict between traditionalism and liberalism, which was not resolved within the short life span of the Ladies’ Commissions, and I believe that this conflict is more critical than the modern–traditional dichotomy, which is challenged to a large degree by the new urban identity of Islamist women.

Another study on women in Islamist politics in this period, “Whose Virtue is This? The Virtue Party and Women in Islamist Politics in Turkey”, was conducted by Ayşe Saktanber and is published in Right-Wing Women: From Conservatives to Extremists around the World, edited by Paola Bacchetta and Margaret Power (2002b). In this study, Saktanber examines the symbolic feminization of the party politics of the FP by conducting interviews with leading members of the Ankara Greater Municipality Ladies’ Commission of the FP, and its predecessor the RP, and with female members of parliament of the FP; by reading the party’s publications; and by examining media coverage from that time (p. 71). By conducting an analysis similar to Arat’s in Rethinking Islam and Liberal Democracy, Saktanber shows that women’s activism did not result in a change in party politics, discourse and attitudes surrounding gender issues. As Saktanber was not as optimistic as Arat, she found women’s activism in the party to be symbolic rather than potentially transformative.

After reviewing the history of women’s status and rights in the modernization process of the republic, Saktanber highlights that the public debates between secularists and Islamists over university students wearing headscarves in the 1980s trivialized other issues of gender in the country and describes how veiling was seen as a threat to the secular principles of the republic in those years. Saktanber then argues that the spread of education in the republican years resulted in the formation of secular elites as well as Islamist elites (Mardin, 1989, cited in Saktanber, 2002a, p. 73) who developed the Islamist ideology that not only structured political Islamism but also accommodated “a discourse of gender complementarity” through the selective use of women’s rights, which did not challenge the Islamic definition of gender roles (p. 73). The Islamist movement tailored a discourse that suggested the need to redefine modernity and democratization in a way that enhanced the mobilization of women in Islamist politics. Saktanber has a sceptical approach to these redefinitions and scrutinizes their impact. Following the rise of feminist movements in Turkey in the 1980s, women started to take part in party politics, which also comprised “the new and rapid politization of provincial middle- and lower-middle-class women” who primarily defined themselves as Muslim (p. 75). Economic liberalism in the 1980s was the backdrop to the “symbolic feminisation” of the right-wing movements (pp. 75–76).

Saktanber describes the discourse of the FP as tender, referring to symbolism it employed connoting love, affection, fraternity, gentleness and poetic romanticism, but argues that the social and political activities of the party were not as gentle as the discourse, especially for its female activists. In the section on the hardships that women faced in their efforts to ensure the success of the RP and FP, she refers to Arat’s findings on the well-organized and widespread structure and propaganda activities of the Ladies’ Commission and the exclusionary attitude of the RP towards prominent female activists (Arat, 1998, 1999, cited in Saktanber, 2002a, p. 78). Despite their success in the 1994 election, which made Tayyip Erdoğan the mayor of Istanbul, the party banned women candidates in the parliamentary elections by referring to the headscarf ban in parliament and women’s inability to gain support for their candidacy from male delegates. Saktanber notes that women in the party did not resent this decision and continued to support the party even more eagerly. In 1999, Merve Kavakçı was elected to the parliament, provoking very harsh reactions when she came into the parliament to take her oath wearing her headscarf. Despite the discussions she triggered about the Islamic threat to the secular republic, Saktanber states, “She gave an edge to the ascendancy of what I call the symbolic feminisation of Turkish right-wing politics: the gaining of political credit both by and over women, hence guaranteeing an image of being modern, liberal, and democratic” (p. 80).

The next section portrays women in the commission by explaining their ideological grounds and forms of political attachment. Saktanber observes that faith is women’s primary motivation for working for the party, yet it is also the main factor that makes them vulnerable to gendered practices and approaches. Because of their faith, women willingly support men in both the political and the private sphere while at the same time achieving a state of personhood as women who play an active role “in the advancement of their community in addition to the role they play in the family” (p. 80). This study claims that women’s subjectivities are shaped by the roles assigned to them by their faith, which requires them to support men in both the domestic and political spheres; their individualities are not the priority. In addition, the framework in which they define their individual identities is not based on equality, but on the Islamic notion of equity and complementarity between the sexes. Saktanber argues that women’s innate character, defined in the Islamic faith as caring mothers, is what legitimizes their voluntary efforts in the movement. Their devotion to God makes them more submissive to gender inequalities, but also more trustworthy in the eyes of the people that they reach. Combined with the common culture of womanhood that they utilize, they successfully convince potential supporters of the movement.Footnote 11 Saktanber concludes that even though these activist women engage in a wide range of public activities, their ultimate aim remains to build an Islamic order rather than to achieve gender equality or question the moral codes that subordinate women. Saktanber does not expect to see a change in this ideological framework. In other words, what this study suggests is that women’s agency, which leads them to activism in Islamist politics, neither brings further opportunities for advancement in their careers nor encourages them to interrupt the perpetuation of gender inequalities in the political and private spheres. From the perspective of party politics, they continue to be objects rather than subjects of Islamist politics.

4.5 Concluding Remarks

In this discursive period, it is possible to observe the shifts and transformations in the three spheres that I have used to frame my analysis. With respect to the first sphere, which comprises changes at a global level in the era of neoliberal globalization, the focus on individual and collective Islamist identities should be viewed as the most prominent feature. In line with the celebration of diversity, the emphasis on locality and individuality and the critique of developmentalist approaches to non-Western cultures in the new era of globalization after the late 1980s, the studies on women and Islam in Turkey started to focus on the identities of Islamist women and aimed to understand them by leaving behind the previous ethnocentric stereotypes that associate Islam with traditionalism and backwardness. The focus on the new identity of the urban, middle- and lower-middle-class Islamist women is what characterizes this discursive period and is in contrast to the Orientalist representations of Muslim women in the preceding period as passive believers in, and victims of the traditional gender hierarchy.

One major novelty and shortcoming is that this identity is described largely in reference to others. Allusions to these others, primarily referred to as feminists and Kemalists, are commonly circulated, and significant emphasis is placed on how these others play a constitutive role in identity formation. In contrast to the first discursive period, in which we encountered the epistemological othering of Muslim women through the Orientalist discourse produced about them, the discourse in this period examines their ontological othering and makes it an integral part of their representation. Nevertheless, I believe that too much emphasis on its role in identity formation results in overlooking the possibility of co-existence, interaction or merging of these so-called opposing ideologies. As Bhabha’s (1994/2004) theorization of hybridity suggests, our assumptions about the homogeneity, authenticity and purity of cultural systems and statements are doomed to fail when we consider the “contradictory and ambivalent space of enunciation” in which they are constructed (p. 55). Such hybridity is recognised in the discourse with respect to Islamist women’s adoption of modernity, frequently describing it as an alternative style of modernity. Bhabha explains this condition as follows:

Such cultures of a postcolonial contra-modernity may be contingent to modernity, discontinuous or in contention with it, resistant to its oppressive, assimilationist technologies; but they also deploy the cultural hybridity of their borderline to ‘translate’, and therefore reinscribe, the social imaginary of both metropolis and modernity. (Bhabha, 1994/2004, p. 9)

Feminists and Kemalists are mostly viewed as the ultimate others against whom Islamist women construct their identities; nonetheless, the influence of feminist discourse is evident in the way Islamist women refer to women’s rights in Islam, despite their reflection of Islamist feminism, and the influence of Kemalist reforms is evident in the desires of many covered students to pursue their education at secular universities. This point of view rarely exists in the studies that I analysed in this chapter, apart from those by Yeşim Arat (2005) and Ayşe Saktanber (2002a).

An outcome of the discourse on othering is that the search for common ground on which to bring major gender issues to the fore proceeded slowly. From this perspective, it can be argued that it is not women but the patriarchal discourse that benefits from presenting Islam and Islamism as being counter to modernity, feminism and secularism because it weakens women’s ability to develop common responses to gender inequalities. Furthermore, it creates the risk of reproducing essentialist categorizations and neglecting the potential for transformation. Last but not least, this opposition reduced the diversity of women’s identities in Turkey to two camps and thus neglected the presence and influence of women who did not define themselves as primarily Muslim–Islamist or secular–Kemalist in the contemporary politics and culture of Turkey. Raising questions about Muslim–Islamist women’s dialogues with these women would open up new areas of discussion, reveal new social dynamics that influence the formation of Islamist identities and challenge the discourse of othering which mainly describes Islamist identities that remain isolated within their collectivities.

Another prominent discursive formation in this period refers to consumption as a constitutive element and an expression of identity. In addition to factors such as rapid urbanization, economic liberalization and the increasing popularity of the Islamist movement among both the lower and upper classes, the determining role of consumption is also connected to the culture of globalization that promotes it, which has become an end in itself and makes the ability to consume a marker of stratification (Bauman, 1998, pp. 92–99). Thus, including consumption culture in the contextualization of the formation of Islamist women’s identities is closely related to this particular aspect of globalization. First, the power of the structures of the consumption culture results in the practice of covering’s becoming not only a commodity but also a means to achieve the desire for upward social mobility and to express loyalty to an increasingly popular political movement. Second, it becomes the way in which the relationship between pious Muslim women and modernity is perceived and analysed in academic discourse. The shortcomings of focusing on consumption as a marker of Islamist identity lie in underestimating the moral codes of behaviour that it entails and the role of these codes in the way women make their life choices.

The social and political context in Turkey during the period in which these studies were published is also a critically influential factor in the way knowledge about women and Islam was produced. As explained in almost all the studies, in these years, secularists and Kemalists feared the Islamist threat in the country, and these fears dominated the political discussions and deeply affected the social encounters between the members of the two sides. In particular, the headscarf issue and the Merve Kavakçı case triggered harsh attitudes among secularist and Kemalist women towards headscarved women and political Islam. The perceived threat was even more serious when the RP and then the FP achieved significant success in the elections. The subject attracted a great deal of academic interest, and Turkish scholars started to conduct research to understand the nature of the transformation of the Islamist movement and the status and role of women in this transformation. Influenced by the political polarization between the two camps, little attention was paid to the hybridities and grey zones in the ethnographic knowledge produced about the identity formation of new Muslim women. In Foucault’s terms, this political context influenced the archive, “the set of rules which at a given period and for a given society define…the limits and forms of sayable” (Foucault, 1991, p. 59), and also the will for truth, the set of exclusionary practices that determines which statements will be circulated as true (1981, p. 56). Therefore, if I return to my point about the overemphasis on othering, I would argue that the political context determined what could be suggested or thought about Islamist women’s identities, and, evidently, the possible dialogues and interactions of Islamist women with women who defined themselves as neither Islamist nor Kemalist remained outside of the ethnographic discourse.

Another outcome of the structural power of the political context lies in a decrease in the ability to understand the relationship between women and Islam, which ultimately led to a lack of understanding of Islamist women. I believe that it is equally important to direct attention to how the relationship of women who do not primarily define themselves as Muslim or Islamist with Islam was affected by the increasing presence of Islamism in the country’s agenda and in public life. How did these social changes influence their religious practices, beliefs and values? Did the rise of Islamism make these women more religious or cause a change in their attitudes about being religious? These questions continue to be left out of the ethnographic discourse on women and Islam in the third period.

The third outcome is an overemphasis on the collective identity of Islamism, while neglecting other possible collective identities to which Islamist women may feel a sense of belonging. In the first period, women were described within the family and kinship structures, and thus, a shift of focus from the individual to the collective Islamist identity is a major change in the discourse. Although several studies note that women’s gender roles as mothers and wives continued to be of primary importance in the Islamist movement, most ethnographic studies do not specifically define women within their familial units. Therefore, another possible set of research questions on the subject of Islamist women could address their associations with other collectivities, such as civil society organizations, neighbourhood communities, leisure activity groups, hobby courses and clubs, alumni associations and the like. Given that the new identity of Islamist women is an urban phenomenon, it is not possible to ignore the influence of these communities.

Shifts in scholarship in Middle East women’s studies can also be observed. As I have presented in my theoretical discussion, the agency and the subjectivity of Muslim women have constituted a significant part of the literature on covering, modernity, feminism and fundamentalism in this field. The agency of Islamist women is strongly emphasized in almost all the publications analysed in this chapter. Choosing an Islamic way of life is explained as a conscious choice, which brings two main sources of difficulty: male domination and a lack of gender equality in Islamism. Women overcoming the pressure and difficulties resulting from either patriarchy or secular state ideology are represented as success stories or examples that challenge the Orientalist discourse.

The issue of veiling/tesettür/headscarf is at the heart of the discourse in this period. Ayşe Kadıoğlu (1994) provides a vital interjection in the debates on the Islamic practice of covering. She argues that these debates “shifted the argument away from universal feminist claims regarding private and public role dichotomies” to women’s viewpoints, and this hindered the “development of feminist movements from below in Turkey” (p. 647). I agree with Kadıoğlu that the debates shifted the feminist focus away from various other oppressions and subordinations faced by women in domestic and public spaces. The studies by Yeşim Arat (2005), Kenan Çayır (2000), Ayşe Saktanber (2002a) and Jenny White (1999) show that her latter argument either did an injustice or failed to foresee Islamist women’s activism in politics and civil society. On the relationship between the practice of covering and women’s agency and empowerment, I also agree with Sandıkçı and Ger’s concerns:

While the women who cover by choice feel a sense of empowerment provided by the choices and personalization they make, the practice itself reinforces the assumption held by some of the interpreters of Islam that women arouse temptation and threaten male honour. While women view covering as a conscious personal choice in search of a modern Islamic identity of an elite status, male control over female sexuality and presence in the public space has primacy over women’s autonomy and control over their bodies (Sandıkcı & Ger, 2005, p. 80).

Unlike the previous discursive period, it is not easy to describe their discourse as overtly Orientalist or postmodernist, considering the methodologies, theoretical frameworks and feminist standpoints in the studies. The representation of Muslim women as subalterns is no longer prevalent. Analyses of the ethnographic data are contextualised and are more refined and sophisticated than in the first period, and this is manifest, as I have highlighted in my analysis of the studies, in the challenging of the well-established binaries: public–private and traditional–modern.