In Turkey, women's issues gain visibility

ANKARA, Turkey — On an ice-cold January morning in Turkey’s monochrome capital, Aylin Nazliaka marched into the city’s boxy concrete courthouse in a burst of graceful rage. A crowd of cameras descended on her — a reception more fit for a pop star than a Turkish parliamentarian.

“She’s our champion for women,” a gushing 26-year-old explained, while deliberating on an Instagram filter for a selfie with Nazliaka. “She’s our soldier.”

But Nazliaka, a parliamentarian for Turkey’s main opposition party, the Republican People’s Party (CHP), was not just there for a flip-of-the-hair photo opportunity. She was about to wage the latest battle in her protracted war against Turkey’s patriarchy.

Her opponent was Nureddin Yildiz, a popular Islamic scholar who recently voiced support for arranged child marriage. Nazliaka and her allies filed a lawsuit against Yildiz for his remarks, which followed his assertion that women working outside the home encourage their husbands to be unfaithful.

“I could be at this courthouse every day,” said an exasperated Nazliaka, amid exchanging niceties with courthouse guards whom she has come to know over the years. "I could file court cases against psychopaths using religion, against Turkey’s patriarchy every day.”

She has struck a chord in a country where few women display her distinct style of fierceness. Last summer the firebrand made local headlines when she launched a tirade during a session of parliament, lambasting the country’s ruling Islamic-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP) for failing to aggressively tackle domestic violence, a rampant issue in Turkey. She became so incensed that she threatened to throw one of her high-heeled shoes at her fellow deputies.

The exchange birthed a Twitter hashtag, “My slipper is coming,” in which Turkish women posted pictures of shoes and rallied for equal rights.

“Women aren’t facing a glass ceiling in Turkey,” Nazliaka said, shuffling between her cellphone and court documents while picking up her 6-year-old son from school. “It’s concrete.”

The charismatic Nazliaka represents a high-octane, largely secular approach to women’s rights in a country that defies simple categorizations of modern and conservative, Western and Islamic. Over the past decade, Turkey’s city centers have transformed into dynamic hybrids of social conservatism and cosmopolitanism, teeming with shiny Range Rovers, chic organic eateries and high-end designer boutiques. The country is 98 percent Muslim, is a European Union aspirant and is often lauded as a model for its more contentious Muslim-majority neighbors in the region.

But for many Turkish women who felt disenfranchised under a previous era of forced secularization — which included a ban on women’s wearing the Islamic headscarf in some public spaces like universities — the president is a kind of savior.

At the AKP’s Ladies Leadership Academy in Istanbul one Saturday afternoon, 19-year-old Feyza Yildirm praised the party’s 13-year rule. “Women’s visibility has increased under the AKP,” she said. “We now have anchors on TV who wear headscarves … We now have women leaders who represent us.” Sporting a Chanel handbag and a stylish trench coat, she is the personification of the urban Muslim bourgeoisie, a demographic that has ascended and wildly prospered under the AKP’s rule. “We feel we finally have a place in society … That’s democracy.”

Turkey’s parliamentary elections this month indicated a potentially significant change in the contours of that democracy. The AKP won the most seats but lost its majority for the first time in 13 years. The outcome has been interpreted as a referendum on its rule and especially its record on gender and minority issues. Nazliaka’s CHP won 25 percent of the vote, and the Kurdish People’s Democracy Party (HDP), which passed the parliamentary threshold for the first time by winning 13 percent, widened its base by running on a platform for expanded minority rights. The HDP had more women on its tickets than any other, and a man and a woman share every leadership position in the party. In coming weeks, the AKP will be obliged to form a coalition government with one of these groups — a development that could be a boon for gender equality in Turkey. Yet improving the status of women is a problem that runs deeper than party politics.

“Women’s rights as a concept doesn’t really have resonance for people in Turkey,” said anthropologist Jenny B. White. “Turkish women have always been seen not as individuals but family members … as sisters and wives. The main thing that’s needed isn’t necessarily political or entirely the AKP’s fault. You need to change public attitudes about women.” And the hardest part about changing attitudes toward women might be changing their attitudes toward one another.

One late winter evening in Uskudar, a conservative district on Istanbul’s Asian shore, scores of young Turks gathered at a café tucked behind historic mosques for live rock music. Clad in a headscarf and thick black-rimmed glasses, a young musician sat in a corner strumming an electric guitar as big as her frame.

Nebiye Ari, 26, adroitly weaved through the crowds, serving tea and meeting with members of the group she founded, Muslims Against Violence Toward Women.

“Since I was a child, I grew up with warnings like ‘You’re a girl … You have to be this way … You have to think this way,’” she said, recalling a strict upbringing in Konya, a conservative city in central Turkey. “I grew up with so many expectations, I often wished I were a boy.”

While Ari and her friends said they grew up feeling disenfranchised under the previous secular governments, they also resent Erdogan for capitalizing on the chasm between Muslim women and the country’s more secular, feminist groups. The president, she said, cares only about women of his kind — that is, veiled and pious.

During the Gezi Park anti-government protests in 2013, Erdogan repeatedly referred to the danger facing “our sisters in headscarves,” as if to distinguish between veiled women and secular female protesters.

In a separate incident before the demonstrations, he speculated about whether an arrested female protestor was a kiz (a girl, her virginity implied) or a kadin (a sexually experienced woman). Turkish language is packed with layers of such categorization; the AKP’s Lady’s Leadership Academy specifically uses bayan (ladies) because kadin (women) connotes sexual experience.

Critics say these attempts to play on religious differences are politically motivated. “The AKP ultimately divides the women’s movement in hopes to destroy it,” said Banu Paker, a leader of Turkey’s Socialist Feminist Collective. “Building solidarity among women is difficult.”

Ari agreed. Because she doesn’t subscribe to a “Western feminist approach,” she has found it difficult to find allies among secular feminists. “We join [feminist] protests and support them, and they patronize us,” she said, adding that secular women see pious, veiled Muslim activists “as though we’re foreigners or aliens from a different planet.” When she participated in the anti-government Gezi Park protests two years ago, she said, she feared that demonstrators might attack her because of her veil.

“We’re stuck in the middle,” she said. “We’re people between, neither for nor anti-Gezi. Both sides put pressure on us. Both sides think we’re traitors.”

While bringing these women’s groups together has proved difficult, White sees the increasingly visible issue of violence against women as a unifying point. Every political party included it in its campaign platform last year, and demonstrations surrounding the issue have mushroomed over the past year. Just last week, hundreds gathered in the Aegean province of Mugla to protest the death of a young girl who was found dead in a canal on June 17. Such momentum suggests that greater collaboration across Turkey’s ideological divides might be possible after all.

In February, news reverberated across the country of the brutal murder of a 20-year-old student, Ozgecan Aslan, who was stabbed in a minibus in southern Turkey while resisting a rape attempt. On a gray afternoon that month, a sea of women descended on one of Istanbul’s busiest streets, Istiklal Caddesi, which winds into Gezi Park.