Explorations
Digging for Energy in Distant Lands
Many Turks still shop at traditional-style markets.
Dispatch 4: Tradition and Changes
IZMIR—Today I braved my way down the streets of Izmir—a western port city of more than three million people—wearing shorts. Part of me feared the glares and the mutterings of "orospu" ("whore") I received when I did the same thing at the age of 13. My Turkish father hadn't given me a hint about the rules of comporting myself as an adolescent girl in his country. During my visit that summer, my second trip to Turkey, I stayed with relatives I hardly knew. We made the most of the few words of Turkish and English we knew between us, but the lack of language and my ignorance of Turkish custom caused me to make regular gaffes.
This morning I was just being lazy. This trip I had seen plenty of evidence that Turks in metropolitan areas had grown more tolerant of tourists' casual ways—Turks and tourists alike were wearing shorts, sleeveless tops, and sandals. My plan was to spend the day at a nearby resort town, where shorts and bathing suits are de rigueur. But I had to walk a block to the bank first. I didn't get any glares, but I saw no other women dressed as I was. European casual and business suits are the norm in this urban center. As in most Turkish cities, women's fashion here tends to fall in the middle of a spectrum that ranges from the modest button-down robes and headscarves favored by the rural women of central Anatolia and the sarongs, shorts, and bikinis you see at the Mediterranean and Aegean vacation spots.
It's not uncommon to see headscarves, even in cosmopolitan cities.
Tonight, dining al fresco on grilled sea bass and spaghetti bolognese and watching the sun set in brilliant reds over the port's hazy horizon, I asked my Uncle Turgut about headscarves. Turgut, a rotund and robust man approaching 70, is actually a childhood friend of my father. His father, a successful businessman, was a close friend of my grandfather's, a high-ranking general in the young republic's army. His family name goes back generations in this city. When I told Esra I'd be staying with him in Izmir, her hometown, she said, "My high school is named after him!" My uncle had built the school and named it after his father. Turgut's children lived with my family on and off for many years when we were growing up, making him one of my closest relatives. And as a key figure in Turkey's local and national economy for the past 45 years, he's also an expert on the political and economic status of the country.
We had just finished our appetizers of roasted eggplant and stuffed green peppers and were sitting back to enjoy our Turkish-brewed Efes beer. I told him that in America, many people see headscarves as an individual expression of religious beliefs, a right we hold dear. Others see them as a sign of repression. What did he think? My uncle, educated at UCLA many years ago, said wearing a headscarf in Turkey means more than most Americans could immediately understand.
"When [Kemal] Ataturk formed our country in 1923, he made these things illegal, the headscarf, the long coverings, all of the religious clothing," he explained. "He did this because these are things that reminded people of the Ottomans, of the empire, the old days. It reminded them of the past, and we wanted to go forward, not backward."
The symbolism of headscarves is not lost on Esra Eren's generation. Back in State College I had asked her about the current political situation in Turkey. She said she had heard stories from around the country of women dressing more conservatively. The newly-elected government was nominally secular and expounded positive economic programs, but it had strong backing from religious leaders, she said. Here in Turkey I had heard similar descriptions.
A modern tram runs on city streets.Photo by Suzan Erem
Under the Turkish constitution, the armed forces are the guardian of the republic. To Americans, this set-up may seem tailor-made for maintaining a covert military dictatorship. But the Turks I know, from secretaries to businessmen, cherish this system: It protects them from their government swinging too far right or left, they say. In three out of the last four elections since 1992, they note, an energized minority has been able to install a more fundamentalist government.
The first few times this happened, the military reacted by either threatening to ban or banning outright the fundamentalist party in power. Each election season it came back in a new form, under a new name. This time, however, military leaders announced through the media and to civic organizations that the armed forces will not intervene again without the support of the citizenry.
The current AK (White) party won the last election with only 35 percent of the vote, my uncle said. "But smaller parties have to get at least ten percent," he explained. "If they don't get ten percent, their votes get put together," i.e., added to the leading party's total. In this way, the AK party now enjoys a 65 percent majority in the parliament. Some say the party simply out-organized its rivals and effectively pointed up the weaknesses of the incumbents. Others say the AK party was well-financed by other Muslim countries, and thus able to send organizers into the countryside, plying villagers with money and paying women to don the more extensive headscarf.
Modern Turkish cities are a mix of old and new, traditional and modern.
Twenty years ago, moving back toward a religiously-based political system would have been unthinkable to most Turks. The failure of the Ottomans and the almost cult-like affection for Ataturk was still strong in everyone's hearts and minds. But Eren said students from her university were recently invited onto a television show to debate whether women should be able to wear headscarves to the university. When the university team was told they would have to argue in favor of headscarves, they declined, she added. A recently published novel, Snow, by popular Turkish author Orhan Pamuk, has caused a stir for its treatment of Turkey's 80-year struggle to find a balance between religion and secularism.
Though Eren's hometown is a cosmopolitan city of millions, signs of increasing traditionalism are evident, from the increased presence of headscarves to gender-based bus seating. It is enough to make many modern Turks, who proudly support their secular government, worry about their appearance to the western world—particularly the European Union which Turkey hopes to join. But this same traditionalism may also be a comfort to those who fear losing their national and religious identity to a new global economy.