Mocking Head Scarves
Early this month a 92-year-old Turkish scholar, Muazzez Ilmiye Cig, an expert on Sumerian civilization, was acquitted by an Istanbul court of criticizing the head scarf as a poor symbol of women’s morality and religious devotion, since 5000 years ago it was used by temple prostitutes to distinguish themselves while having ritual sex with young men in fertility rite celebrations. Had she and her publisher been convicted, according to the November 2 New York Times, they would have faced up to one and a half years in jail. Ms Cig sees her trial as a display of strength of the secular tradition within Turkey against the Fundamentalists.
Head scarves are common in public on Muslim women in Turkey but are banned from government offices and universities to protect the secular nature of the state. Ms Cig has also criticized the Turkish prime minister’s wife for wearing the head scarf, which excludes her from attending state functions.
Having been raised in a small Protestant sect that taught that worshipping Christian women should wear head coverings in church services as a sign of submission to men and their total muteness before God, I’ve come to see the head scarf or Sunday-go-to-meetin’ hat as an out-of-place and out-of-date cultural symbol that causes more harm that it does good. Even if it is a positive thing to take a profane cultural icon and to Christianize it, or Muslimize it, religions need to do a better job of shedding symbols and religious activities when the effects of those iconic behaviors become negative within new cultural contexts.
Or scorn-producing, as the case may be. The trial is likely to be just another in a long list of such trials mentioned by the European Union as they continue to consider Turkey for membership, which Turkey very much wants. Why, the reasoning would go, would the submission and subjection of women even be considered, let alone seen as a good, worth fighting in court about?
The more hierarchicalists get out of their religious spheres’ squabbling and into the public eye, the more such scorn they will run into. There are no upsides to this issue for women, and the upsides for men are dubious at best.
