What business do parents have with the state's children?

How thoroughly we have absorbed an authoritarian-patriarchal power that ignores the preferences even of people of university age when it comes to dress, that when the subject turns to children, those who have been singing the song of freedom for years have fallen silent. Not merely silent; they have even begun to accompany the march summoned by the authoritarian state.

We are all following closely. The CHP made lifting the headscarf ban at universities conditional on no such demand coming afterwards for secondary education. How it can make such a condition, from whom it demands this pledge, and who can give this pledge... It is as if politics were being done in outer space. The AK Parti as a party has no intention or claim at present to represent such demands, but it has neither the right nor the means to pledge that such a demand will not come. Indeed, as it moves away from representing this demand, it is understood that these demands will look for a chance to be represented on other grounds.

That these demands for representation are immediately perceived as provocation at this stage of the solution and the debate is a symptom of how heavy the burdens and how deep the sicknesses our democracy is in. The aim of those making them may indeed be provocation; we cannot know. Our strongest evidence that it is provocation is the timing of the demand. Frankly, that those making this demand are members of Mustazaf-Der carries meaning, but even if it had been someone else, the timing was enough to create the perception of provocation.

Fine, but doesn't this field's being so open to provocation largely show how low our level of democracy runs? It runs so low that we can give up, all at once, our most basic human right regarding which religion and custom we will instill in our child. This right is a basic human right, whether or not the UN has accepted it, but thankfully the Convention on the Rights of the Child, to which Turkey is also a party and which entered into force in 1990, makes the parent the sole rights-holder in deciding which religious and ethical values children are bound to and with which culture they will be raised.

A child's being raised after a certain age within a certain religious or cultural mold, being trained to live his life with his head covered or uncovered, are choices that, from a secular viewpoint, must be met with equal distance. It is clear that the headscarf, a symbol of Islam, is also adopted within a kind of education and socialization process, like all other cultural or religious molds...

AK Parti MP Prof. Zafer Üskül, Chair of the Parliament's Human Rights Committee, says that children can be taken by the state from the hands of parents who insist on sending their children to school with a headscarf. So he sees putting a headscarf on a child as equivalent to child abuse. Frankly, it is impossible to understand or accept this. The choices between a child's covering or uncovering his head from a certain age have categorically no difference from one another in terms of the attitude a secular state should adopt. Even so, to treat the first as child abuse or a crime against the child shows how deeply an orientalist perspective (let us not say Islamophobia here) has penetrated beneath or above our consciousness.

The orientalist prejudice that has penetrated deep into our minds makes us receive Western dress as normal and others as abnormal and even as an expression of perversion.

Another prejudice is more about statist authoritarianism. In fact a claim that dominates the whole of the Turkish National Education system was made to be felt, rubbed in our faces, especially on February 28 with the eight-year education regulation. Parents could not educate their children as they wished, because parents in any case produce and raise children on behalf of the state, for the state, and hand them over when the state wants. They could not give them Quran courses until age 15, they would put them through the education the state wanted, and when they turned 20, they would apply the henna of the martyr and send them off to military service. The parent is obliged only to babysit the child on behalf of the state, in the name of the state and for the state.

I found İsmet Berkan's piece in yesterday's Hürriyet, titled "Is your child yours or the State's?", very apt and meaningful. Like Berkan, who says he was struck by this thought in the February 28 years, I too had written in those years that with these regulations the state was in fact constantly trying to give us this message. Yet now, also under the pressure of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the state has to abandon this understanding.

In fact the state is abandoning it, but we too need to accustom ourselves to this understanding.

Look, the attitude of the Kurdish fathers who do not send their children to school to boycott mother-tongue education, or of the Alevi parents who have their children boycott the religion course, can be received as "civil disobedience," and the attitude of children who throw stones as a matter of empathy, but we are asked to receive the matter of the child who covers her head as a matter of "child abuse."

Don't you think there is something strange in this?