Turkish Awakening (7 page)

My ex-flatmate Selin is, to all intents and purposes, a European woman, and more cosmopolitan than most. She is a single thirty-something entrepreneur who dates whoever takes her fancy, travels extensively all over the world and lives in the flat she bought by herself a few years ago in downtown Istanbul. Being a Turk born and bred, she also knows how to cook traditional dishes, how to modify her register and personal news when speaking to elderly family members, how to bargain with a tailor for best results, and more or less how to avoid becoming the subject of gossip. The last is particularly difficult. However much the qualities of independence are supposedly cherished by the ‘progressive’ classes in Turkey, I have found that women like Selin are generally treated with suspicion, especially by other, less free-spirited women. The gender gap is wider than most people care to admit, and Selin-types are thought to fall disconcertingly somewhere in the middle, with their decidedly masculine quality of self-sufficiency. Selin is perfectly aware of this and I know she sometimes feels torn between her background and her inclinations,
however exuberantly carefree her lifestyle demonstrates her to be.

This sounds like a very bleak picture, but it is changing. It was only about ten years ago that people started living separately from their parents before marriage, for example – and very few do, even now. The restrictions of living with one’s parents have obvious ramifications on the kind of independent adulthood young people can experience before settling into marriage, setting people like Selin apart. I am not considered a Turk in this respect and seem to be exempt from the same kind of judgement, which is mainly a relief, although it can be disconcerting to feel I am operating outside the realms of local social mores.

Nihal is another atypical friend of mine, whom I do not count as fully Turkish. She is half French, grew up in Paris and moved to Istanbul when she was twenty-two. We agree that it is difficult to have Turkish female friends, and she recently confided to me that, apart from me, all her female friends in Istanbul are lesbians. Two of them are, moreover, transsexuals. ‘I have a freak show of friends,’ she jokes. Apparently, one of the transsexuals likes Nihal because she treats her like a proper girl, not a sexually confused man. Of course, these are quite unusual examples, but it is telling that socially marginalised people feel much more comfortable with someone who is basically French than with a Turkish girl.

Far more entertaining than the middle-class Turkish female stereotype is the male equivalent: Macho Man. While being, of course, extremely manly, he is highly strung, dependent on his mother and vain. He will readily tell you that he is on a diet or considering a new tattoo. In Turkey there are
generally fewer stigmas surrounding the subject of personal presentation, and men are not afraid of vanity. This strikes me as an offshoot of the Middle Eastern propensity towards open displays of prosperity, wealth and, by extension, good looks. In Europe, vulgarity and overt personal displays are considered unseemly, whereas in the Middle East there is a much more straightforward attitude to personal advertisement.

Furthermore, what is deemed ‘manly’ is totally different in these two regions – European men like to differentiate themselves from women when it comes to personal care. Less is more, and Franz or Fred won’t necessarily feel comfortable advertising the amount of time or money they spend on their appearance. Turkish men, by contrast, do not consider it unmasculine to care about their looks; their masculine identity is secure if they are earning money and successful with women. If a Turkish man can spend money on a new suit, or a personal trainer, or an expensive scent, it means he has money to burn and that is the ultimate proof of success. He is the epitome of the L’Oréal slogan: ‘Because I’m worth it!’

Gender stereotypes are one thing in Turkey, but the general attitudes to sex – or the potential for sex – are more unsettling. For example, it is culturally accepted that men cheat, and that women do not. If one suggests to a Turkish philanderer or
kelebek
(butterfly) that his wife might be doing exactly the same thing as him, he is offended and incredulous. This is not an attitude unique to Turkey, but it goes noticeably unchallenged here.

The L’Oréal poster boys are jealously guarded. Unmarried women are a threat, especially foreign women. When introduced to a couple, you have to take particular care to court
the female contingent for a decent amount of time to show your good intentions, effectively ignoring the male until such time as you are deemed to be safe. It is tantamount to flirting with this woman as her partner looks on, because what you are doing is exaggerating your friendliness to the woman to make up for any attention subsequently paid to the man: a bizarre trial period of unbalanced, sexually tense diplomacy, which is not a promising start, I think, to any friendship. The whole exercise is very tiring and I tend to avoid the hassle by making friends with single men, thereby adding to my wanton foreign persona.

The rules of love in this country are intricate and stressful both for courter and courtee. Men will not give up and women will play all the games in the book. It is exhausting for all concerned. When a relationship is finally achieved, it has the qualities of a legal document drawn up by the senior partners of Slaughter and May. Unrelenting jealousy is taken as read; in fact, most Turks would probably be seriously affronted by an unconcerned partner, and immediately suspect foul play. If the couple are not together at the same social gathering, modern technology comes to their aid: constant messages from ‘
Aşkım
’ (‘My Love’) pop up on the BlackBerry, the real name of the sender lost in the mists of sentimentality of their interminable courtship. When they are together, silence and boredom reign. It is almost as if the girlfriend or boyfriend is a possession, something which must be safeguarded like a hard-won Hermès handbag, but not enjoyed once gained.

I was once in a club at an advanced hour of the night, music raging and dancers raving. It was a small, crowded space,
and I soon noticed a boy and a girl sitting on the sidelines. They were watching the dancing in bored silence, like onlookers at an awkward school prom. I realised that they were a couple but didn’t want to dance with each other for some reason. She could not dance with anyone else because he would get jealous, and he could not dance for the reciprocal reason. It was deadlock. Uncharitable though it sounds, sometimes it seems as though the only thing Turkish couples have in common is jealousy.

The world over, powerful women in business have the reputation of being uncommonly ferocious, having fought their way to the top of a male-heavy world. In Turkey, this is particularly true because not only are they fighting the statistics of a predominantly male workforce but also a much more inherently macho environment than their Western equivalents. Just as we are appalled watching
Mad Men
, or other television programmes which capture the atmosphere of dated, sexist working environments, so am I when observing Turkish office politics.

When I worked as an English coach for bankers in Istanbul, I was astonished by the difference between the men and women with whom I worked. While their levels of English were more or less the same, the men chattered blithely away, grammatical errors aplenty, while the women sat in silence and had to be invited by me to speak. This of course meant that the men got more practice and spoke more fluently, even if their errors continued (they rarely listened to corrections). The women spoke haltingly, using impressive vocabulary but seldom. It was obvious that they were not nearly as confident or as used to voicing their opinions as their male colleagues,
which irritated me no end and provoked me into unceremoniously silencing the men on a regular basis.

There is, as far as I know, no gender gap in salaries for equivalent jobs in Turkey, and many businesses are making an effort to promote female employees to counteract the current discrepancy between the sexes in top positions. This is an important example of the improvements being made in Turkey at the moment. Unfortunately, there is an apparently immovable dinosaur of a problem in the form of old-fashioned sexual dynamics. Women seem very happy to conform to their unthreatening, meek stereotype, and do very little to quash the expectations that they would rather go off and have a family instead of fighting the competition for their superior’s job.

Out of the chrysalis of this unpromising situation come a few Thatcheresque dragonflies who simply flatten the opposition en route to top positions at big companies and even heads of region for internationals. A friend of mine working for McKinsey came from London to Istanbul to interview for a job at a Turkish computer gaming firm. Confidently expecting that her dazzling CV and precocious position at McKinsey would count for something, she was unpleasantly surprised by her interrogation at the hands of the female CEO of the Turkish computer company.

‘What can you offer us? You can’t even speak Turkish. Do you understand the Turkish market? Explain yourself.’

As my friend related this, I had in my mind’s eye an image of a cross between the Queen of Hearts in
Alice in Wonderland
and Miss Trunchbull from
Matilda
. This lady does, in fact, have a reputation for being unpleasant, but I can think
of at least a couple of other Turkish she-dragons in top jobs who have the same aggressive manner. Whether or not she was such a bully in the playground, she has either developed this personality over time to cope with the pressure of outperforming male competition, or her natural aggression has made it possible for her to succeed on what is otherwise too brutal a playing field. It is probably a mixture of both.

The upshot of it was that my friend was intimidated and put off by this CEO and went back to London with a new appreciation for the working environment she had previously taken for granted. If she had been interviewed by a male CEO, she would most likely be working in Istanbul today, but she might also have felt isolated from a clique of female colleagues. When office politics become harder to negotiate than the job itself, you know there is a problem.

Visitors to Turkey are often confused by seeing covered and uncovered women socialising together. They ask questions like: ‘Don’t they despise each other?’ ‘Isn’t it awkward?’ ‘Doesn’t the headscarf-wearing woman look at the bare-headed girl and think: you’re going to hell?’ ‘Surely the uncovered girl thinks the covered one is backward?’

If this were the case, they wouldn’t be friends. There are definitely some religious women who wouldn’t choose to associate with nonreligious women, and vice versa, but the happy reality is that friendships like this do exist. It says a lot about our Islamophobic preconceptions that we expect them not to; in London as in Istanbul, I can be friends with a Jew or a communist, and we can find something in common beyond religious or political beliefs. I take these visitors’ incredulity as a sign that they see the headscarf as a kind of blinker, physically representing a mental blockage, an inability to recognise other people as worthy of trust or even interaction. Turks share a great deal beyond religion, if this is indeed a divisive subject: the ostensibly nonreligious Turkish woman might be a sincere believer who does not see the need to wear the headscarf; the headscarf-wearer might wear it from habit, but have private doubts or questions about Islam. Perhaps they are engaged in a passionate
theological discussion, perhaps not.

Headscarves are a hugely emotionally charged subject, variously taken as symbols of repression, freedom, feminism and chauvinism depending on individual viewpoint. I particularly object to the use of headscarves as a political tool, or a vehicle for social pressure, on either side of the debate. My personal feelings on the subject were tested shortly after I moved to Turkey.

In the bitter January of my arrival, I was walking along a shopping street with my scarf pulled up over my head to keep warm – I have done this since my teen years in London, and it simply didn’t occur to me to stop doing so in Istanbul. As I walked with my friend past the outdoor table of a café, one of those seated, a lady in a headscarf, looked and nodded at me in a subtle but unmistakable gesture of recognition and sisterhood. My Turkish companion, an uncovered girl, got no such look. I cannot quite explain why this was so unsettling – partly, of course, because it was unexpected and unmerited; this lady had totally mistaken me for someone religious and akin to herself in her beliefs. It was also that my friend was ignored in what otherwise might have been a straightforwardly friendly gesture that really bothered me. Most of all, the realisation hit home that, even in this most Western-seeming part of the country, a habit that I had formed for practical reasons in a secular country had suddenly taken on a religious and cultural significance. The lady’s recognition had been a form of congratulation, an acceptance into some kind of club – I felt like a fraud while resenting her mislabelling. While I had been prepared to modify my dress to fit in with conservative expectations (covering up in religious
areas, basically), I had not expected the opposite problem – that covering up for practical reasons would be automatically taken for religious intent. Hitting the covered nail on the head has turned out to be surprisingly difficult; for instance, when scrupulously dressing in my baggiest trousers and cardigans in the south-east of Turkey, where plenty of women wear fetchingly fitted outfits while keeping the mandatory headscarf, I stood out both as a
yabancı
and a terrible dresser.

One of the most ridiculous contradictions of the Middle East is the habit of pushing the limits of what is sartorially permissible for a woman, while keeping within the confines of superficial conservatism. I noticed this most in Lebanon, where women are often covered but at the same time exercise considerable freedom to show off both their body and a flashy fashion sense. I have seen many a young Arab girl dramatically made up and wearing an outfit that can only be described as provocative, despite the fact that she is also wearing a headscarf and no flesh is showing. The clingiest of long-sleeved nylon tops, cinched-in belt, spray-on jeans and tottering diamanté heels are – to a Western eye at least – at odds with a headscarf, though this is always colourful and usually matches either the clingy top or eye-shadow colour. The whole effect is bizarrely paradoxical and quite mesmerising.

Interestingly, I do not see this as often in Turkey, where covered girls seem to be conservative in both intention and dress, and do not seem to be fighting their covered state. I think this might be because there is a broader spectrum of Islamic expression in Turkey, in that many women who do not wear headscarves are still accepted as Muslim. In other Middle Eastern countries there is a stricter cultural code,
where Islam is synonymous with certain rules (like keeping covered as a woman). In Turkey, you can be both an uncovered woman and a Muslim, and that is one of its great strengths. However, secular Turks increasingly worry that the country is headed towards a more Middle Eastern mindset in which everything is black and white: no headscarf, no Muslim credibility.

I have a great deal of sympathy for those Lebanese girls. They are young, hormonal, and want to show themselves off – why on earth not? The fact that they manage to do this despite the intended restrictions of their conservative code of dress is actually a victory, but it is patently ridiculous and the restrictions can only serve to exacerbate the girls’ frustration. You see this kind of small-scale rebellion at every level of conservatism. I have observed Arab tourists in full burqas in Istanbul shopping malls with only their eyes showing – but what eyes! All the effort that would have been put into an outfit is concentrated on the only tiny strip showing us who this person is – eyes so immaculately dressed in mascara and eyeliner, eyebrows shaped to perfection, that the difference between this and the shapeless black sack she is wearing is almost, but not quite, comical. If, as in some cases, the eye area is covered by a mask or visor, you must look downward to the feet for some sign of personal identity or femininity – beautifully pedicured feet in exquisite Jimmy Choos or Manolos. I find these cases very sad, and quite different from the young girls who have managed to buck the system.

Significantly, there is a huge amount of money in the Islamic clothing industry, which is expanding fast in Turkey with the growth of the religiously conservative middle class.
Companies like Primo Moda advertise items for women such as the Hasema bathing suit, or ‘burkini’, which covers the body from top to toe, and long cotton sleeves for ‘when you wish you could wear that three-quarter-length shirt if only it were long-sleeved’. These kinds of brands declare themselves the champions of the ‘modest but fashionable woman’, which is fair enough, but what I cannot reconcile is the paradox between the nature of the clothing on sale and the alluring pose of the model in the photographs, the same pose you see in mainstream fashion shots everywhere. Clothes look better worn by attractive women with hands on hips and arch expressions, which is why the companies advertise them this way, but this is directly at odds with the ethos of modesty which supposedly defines the brand. The female form is a battleground in this kind of situation – the line between glamour and dowdiness is stretched and blurred in the quest for the acceptable yet attractive marriage of modesty and femininity. It is total hypocrisy.

Burqas, like headscarves, are a highly emotive subject in Turkey. There are, of course, critics of conservative Islam everywhere, but in Turkey overt displays of religion are seen by many as a terrible betrayal of the principles of the secularist, modern republic as envisaged by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. From 1923, he brought in a series of reforms to prohibit the wearing of traditional and religious clothing, starting with the fez (the famous ‘Hat Law’), and including, most significantly, the law relating to ‘Prohibited Garments’ in 1934. These garments included the veil and turban, and Western-style dress was actively promoted in their stead.

Burqa’ed women can be seen as far afield as Harrods or
the Champs-Elysées, but their significance in Turkey is different. There is the recent surge in Arab tourists to Turkey to account for the presence of these particular ladies, but the burqa’ed form in general is a relatively new sight in Turkey, stemming from a religious demographic steadily growing in confidence since the mid-eighties, after the coup in 1980. The rules governing the wearing of headscarves and burqas in public institutions have a long and chequered history in Turkey. Women have been turned away from universities, civil service positions and indeed government posts for wearing a headscarf, but throughout various periods in the last thirty years the rule has been ignored, bent and reinforced. In February 2008, the AKP put forward a bill to revoke the headscarf ban in universities, demanding that everyone should have an equal right to education, but five months later, Turkey’s Constitutional Court upheld the ban, arguing that secularism was an integral part of Turkey’s constitution. In 2010, the Higher Education Board (YÖK) sent a circular to universities telling them to ease up on the ‘no headscarf’ rule. Many universities complied, but many others insisted on observing the ban and prevented headscarved students entering lectures and classes. The most recent call for headscarf acceptance came in the controversial ‘Democratisation Package’ put forward by the AKP in October 2013, further escalating the legal back-and-forth between defenders and critics of the ban.

The burqa is by no means ubiquitous but is not uncommon in some parts of the country, including some parts of Istanbul, as I discussed in the opening chapters. While I have many sympathies with the Kemalist point of view, and admit
to finding burqas disturbing, I think headscarves are a different matter. I would not wear one out of choice myself, but I do think that a non-judgemental attitude is much healthier given the indisputable fact that the majority of the Turkish population is religious in practice as well as theory, and women from a religious background in many cases feel more comfortable and indeed more free to go about their business if they can wear a headscarf in public. I can even understand those who charge headscarf-banning authorities with the very crime of which they are accused; namely, repression. Reciprocally, I very much welcome not feeling judged for being uncovered in areas where most women wear a headscarf. It should work both ways; sometimes it does not.

My mother spent the weeks preceding my departure to Istanbul trying to convince me to leave all my summer clothes behind. She is scarred by her own experience of arriving in Ankara as a naïve, mini-skirted student in the sixties, fresh from provincial Northern Cyprus, excited to wear her fashionable new clothes in the capital city of Turkey. When she was walking down a busy street one day, a venerable old man called out to her. She stopped politely, waiting for him to approach, whereupon he slapped the back of her bare thigh so hard that she had a red handprint of shame to mark the rest of her journey. She does not want me to go through a similar experience, which is fair enough, but I have learned my own way.

A lot of the fear and hate that secular Turks feel for their religious counterparts is fuelled by the notion of rural Turkey, in particular the east, as a backward, fanatical society that drags the country back to the Dark Ages and stops it
from fulfilling its potential as an advanced state on a par with (the rest of) Europe. Religion should not be confused with poverty, obviously, but one can see why it is easy to unconsciously equate these impoverished, devout communities with the problems that plague them.

In my mind, the problem is not religion but a very deep-seated patriarchy, which makes it difficult for girls to participate fully in either school or an independent career. This situation self-perpetuates from generation to generation, mainly due to the socially cancerous effects of a generally poor education system. It is hard to make the distinction between patriarchy and conservative religion, particularly when it comes to girls being excluded from school, and this is not the place to attempt it. I can merely report what I have heard and observed.

Despite nationwide rules applying to school attendance, the number of girls in high school is significantly lower than boys in every region of Turkey, and particularly in the east. This is often due to very large family sizes which call for everyone to chip in to the agricultural labour central to many households’ livelihoods, and the care of the younger members of the family. The fact that girls (and in many cases boys too) attend just a couple of years of school and then drop out is obviously detrimental to their future prospects. Both in Antep and in Diyarbakır, I was struck by the sight of children climbing over the fences of school yards to play with their peers at break time, unnoticed by harassed teachers amid the mayhem. It was clearly a daily occurrence; a very sad token of what these kids were missing out on both in terms of camaraderie and formal education.

Beyond this root problem, there is a fundamental lack of autonomy that extends to these girls when they grow up. They are restricted in terms of financial independence, choice in marriage and opportunities to socialise. The ramifications of breaking free of these restrictions are occasionally reported in national media in the form of honour killings, for example. Again, this is widely viewed in the West as a phenomenon peculiar to Islam, but I think it is inextricably linked to the more archaic, regional mores of family identity and kinship, which are much harder for an outsider to understand and indeed to criticise. Either way, what is really needed is not criticism but an attempt to solve at least the basic problems.

The greatest beacon of hope I have seen in the east of Turkey is an organisation called the Turkish Grameen Microfinance Project (TGMP), which offers business loans to women all over the country, but most significantly to repressed women in the Kurdish and Arab communities in the south-east of Turkey. All across rural Turkey, from Antalya to the Black Sea, I have seen women working in fields, chopping wood, planting crops and hoeing. In cities, where the public eye is more present than in the countryside, women work in the home, raising huge families. Either way, Turkish women work just as hard as men, if not more so. The difference is that they do not get paid as men do, and that is why the TGMP is so revolutionary in that it gives them the chance to take financial responsibility and the potential to make a lot of profit from their own enterprise.