The return of suppressed legal reason

After the response sent by the YÖK presidency to Istanbul University, to the effect that, following an incident, students cannot under any circumstances be expelled from class by faculty members because of their dress, the headscarf problem has been carried to a very important point.

This move by YÖK is in fact still the most correct stance, despite the many years of headscarf ban that have passed in between and despite the Constitutional Court and Council of State decisions that intervened in the meantime. Because there is still no text in current laws that bans the headscarf, and there is also a provision that explicitly states that "dress is free at universities." From the very beginning the Constitutional Court, with an authority it invented for itself that was not its duty, exceeded the limits drawn for it in the laws and created a ban "like a legislator."

Since that day, the usurpation of the right to education of hundreds of thousands of people through an openly discriminatory practice has been treated as an ordinary legal practice, and the "banality of evil" has been made to be taken for granted by the whole society.

Yet however much this evil became banal, in the end the real logic of law, suppressed, would return from where it had been repressed and condemn what had been done as an unlawfulness whose price would inevitably be paid. Sooner or later this legal normalization would take place, and those who deprived people of their education because of the headscarf would give account against the laws and against the conscience of humanity.

The extraordinariness and abnormality of the evil that seemed ordinary and banal yesterday is becoming more clearly visible with each passing day.

Who can say that the circulation of power has no effect on this return of this view in this form? Kadir Gürsel of Milliyet, in replying to Ahmet Hakan, found it very objectionable to link the matter to power. Yet unfortunately the situation is largely nothing but this. Of course there is no point in turning this into a show of power, but let us put our hands on our conscience and ask: while there is no provision in the laws that bans the headscarf, what was it that could keep a ban going despite the laws, if not the reality of a crude and despotic power?

The headscarf was made valid in an unlawful way, de facto and by crude force. Even the amendments made in the Constitution (Articles 10 and 42) to further reinforce the absence, and indeed the impossibility, of this ban had not been able to create a new situation in the face of this power. In fact there was no change that could be made to neutralize that power. All that needed to be done was to prevent the use of a power not derived from the laws. Preventing this power was in any case a legal necessity. At this stage there is no point in raising a concern about revanchism. We are talking about the restoration of a right. How absurd it is to advance against it the imaginary and illusory fears of possible others.

Phrases constantly cited during these debates, such as "social consensus" or "inter-institutional accord," carried no message other than allegiance to those powers. Those who asked for consensus had no intention at all of lifting this blockade they had set up over the law, because the ban they had managed to maintain over the headscarf gave them the feeling that they continued to be the ultimate owners of this system. The headscarf really was a political symbol, but not just any: from their standpoint, a political symbol that represented their own political power by means of its prohibition...

The point reached today on the headscarf ban is also in part a sign of the loss of that power. The demand for consensus and law, which already exists in abundance in society, has set the situation right through legitimate political channels. From this hour on, the CHP's still being busy drawing red lines under the guise of consensus in the face of this social demand will only leave it a little further behind in the face of the returning logic of law. The CHP must see where the world and Turkey are heading.

Let us accept that the CHP leadership's drawing near to this line of consensus is not something that can be easily explained and settled in the eyes of its own ideological base. That is why a margin must be allowed the CHP for floundering. This new discourse carries serious risks for the CHP, but one more thing must be accepted: it was again CHP politics itself that made the CHP base so antipathetic on the headscarf issue. It was above all the CHP's party leadership itself that politicized the headscarf issue and used it as a discourse of hatred and fear. The CHP now has the extra responsibility of correcting this discourse, which it itself spearheaded among its base.

Meanwhile, since the occasion has arisen, a point must also be mentioned. Everywhere in the world, anti-headscarf views and practices are seen as the absolute sign of "hostility to Islam, of Islamophobia." In Turkey, whose people are Muslim, in the face of banning the headscarf or defending a ban, the religious mass has, despite everything, behaved with good sense and has not easily carried the debate to this level.