Does the CHP want a harem-selamlık on 29 October?

If Kılıçdaroğlu wants to rescue the CHP from the gloom that has closed in on it, his job is difficult, and very difficult at that. Whether he really has such a wish is of course a separate matter of debate. He has not yet managed to inspire confidence about how determined he is in the openings he wants to make. He speaks easily, makes big promises easily, makes accusations just as easily, and then just as easily ignores and disowns his own words, so it is not clear whether he really wants to transform the CHP, or whether, with this rhetoric (more precisely, demagogy), he wants to equip the CHP with a maneuvering ability that can close its gaps discursively while it stays settled on the same policies, unchanged.

But if we assume that he really wants the CHP to change from its present state, his job is truly harder. Because the CHP's problems are not problems that begin and end with the party leadership. There is a problem of a rigid ideological worldview, spread throughout the whole base, in the way it looks at basic human issues. Even when he gives a little favor to a discourse of normalization on the headscarf, it is seen that this base immediately shows its reaction.

It is understood that even the red-lined tolerance that has been insistently recalled for several months, "exclusive to universities," concerning the headscarf opening expressed in the person of Kılıçdaroğlu has not yet been accepted within the party leadership. On the occasion of the Presidency's invitation for spouses to the October 29 reception, it was seen how hanging by a thread the atmosphere formed on this subject was. Kılıçdaroğlu's saying "there is still a lot of time until October 29" shows the pain within the party. CHP MP Muharrem İnce, for his part, without caring what situation he would put his own Chairman in, has already announced the dominant ideological stance within the party with a kind of show of force.

The reaction the CHP members showed to the President's invitation for spouses shows, however you look at it, how far the CHP is from politics. Though it wants to be a candidate for power in Turkey, it neither sees nor tries to see what situations the stance it has taken on the headscarf puts it in. Yet their attitudes on the headscarf make the CHP comic in some contexts, extremely strange in some respects and "foreign" in others.

Whether at universities, in working life, or in whatever context, the direct equivalent, in the eyes of the Muslim public, of those who ban the headscarf or defend this ban is "enmity toward religion" and "hatred of Islam." Perhaps no one has said this so openly until now, but the secret of the CHP's never having been able to open itself to a certain mass of the public lies in this knowledge.

CHP members can still go on seeing the headscarf merely as a sign worn out of the stubbornness of a few women with bad political intentions. Evidently they suppose the matter would be settled if these stubborn and ill-intentioned women gave up their stubbornness. The CHP is so foreign to society and to society's world of meaning and does nothing at all to dispel this foreignness. Even when it seems to have realized the importance of making an opening, when it sets the matter on a thousand and one bargains, it reinforces this perception rather than dispelling it. If it moved a little away from the debates inside Turkey and looked at Europe, America or anywhere in the world, it would see that the headscarf is not an event of today or peculiar to the political environment of this country.

As the president of the Diyanet also summed up, the headscarf, as a 1400-year-old sign of Islam, is seen today everywhere in the world as the most natural sign of Islam. That is why everywhere in the world every action directed against the headscarf is perceived as an action directly against Islam, and negative actions are evaluated within the scope of Islamophobia, that is, hatred and enmity toward Islam. In Turkey, too, the perception does not develop differently. This is the equivalent of those who impose or defend the headscarf ban. That is why it is in the CHP's own interest to work out what Islam means for this country and where it itself stands in the eyes of this people. Time is passing, and for a political party this lost time cannot be made up.

Meanwhile, that the CHP does not notice how comical a position it puts itself in by wanting its October 29 reception to be separate for the protocol (generally made up of men, as is known) and for the spouses, on the grounds that headscarved women will come too, is a further gravity. The name of this is, formally, haremlik-selamlık, and that it is the CHP that wants it is like a divine punishment.

For years the CHP members regarded the headscarf as a reason for covering women up and for haremlik-selamlık practices. This logic has always been behind their defense of the headscarf ban. Yet with this attitude they want to send back to the harem the woman who wants to enter the public space, that is, the selamlık area; indeed, they insist on it.

I call this "God's cudgel"; what do you call it?