The CHP's forced tolerance

The entry of headscarved deputies into the TBMM without encountering resistance has resolved yet another of Turkey's shameful knots. The winds that had been blowing for days after four AK Parti deputies, who had previously been uncovered, decided to cover their heads on returning from the Hajj were in fact showing that Turkey was facing a robustness test of the level democracy has reached in the country.

Thankfully, Turkey passed this test successfully. A symbolic step of a normalization process was taken amid, at worst, the grumbling of those who had earlier erected barricades of unbelievably desperate resistance against this step. The stance that the BDP and the MHP showed against this step was consistent with their earlier approaches. In any case, they were neither the cause of the ban nor its guardians. The ban was in fact being imposed on society for years by the CHP, even though it was in opposition and in the minority. With the hegemonic bloc made up of the military and judicial bureaucracy and their extensions in the media, the CHP has been the sole party responsible for the headscarf ban until now.

If the headscarf ban today has been lifted both in universities and in the public sector, it is because that bloc has dissolved and no longer has a hegemonic character. Had it trusted in the possibility or power of obstructing even a little, the CHP gave signs at every opportunity that it would never let the headscarf through in any way.

It never refrained from carrying every regulation or development in favor of the headscarf to the high judiciary until the last moment. Only after becoming sure that that door too was now closed does it now shamelessly go on behaving like an eternal subscriber of the freedoms bloc. It has explained even its reason for not putting up resistance to the headscarf not as a principled, pro-freedom stance but only by saying "let us not fall into the AK Parti's election trap." With this attitude, unless the CHP interrogates its former stances and apologizes to this nation, why should it deserve any thanks for having kept silent about those entering parliament with the headscarf?

The CHP's Muharrem İnce is said to have claimed that, with the stance the CHP took in the latest episode, they took from the AK Parti's hands the opportunity to exploit the headscarf. Oh, if only you had thought of taking this opportunity when the doors of the Constitutional Court were wide open to you!

Rest assured, the AK Parti gave you this opportunity many times, but the hatred of the headscarf lodged in the hearts of the CHP members continued, to the very last of their means, to exclude the headscarf and to impose discrimination against it as an official state policy. Moreover, to repeat, the CHP managed to do this while in opposition. What if it had also been in power!

The fact that, while in opposition, it was able to display the skill to impose on society so senseless a ban could even be counted as an achievement for the CHP. It would be fitting to add to this list of achievements the CHP's ability to accuse of dictatorship a party in power that has no practice comparable to this imposition of theirs.

That Şafak Pavey spoke on behalf of the CHP in parliament on such a day, with all the meanings attributed to her person, and what she said in that speech, show that nothing has changed on the CHP side. The people of Anatolia expressed such situations with a simple proverb: he sits because he cannot get up. The CHP sits because it cannot get up; seeing that it can no longer sustain the headscarf ban it had managed to impose while in opposition, it tries to present its own weakness or helplessness as a favor. And on top of that, as if it were the one granting this right, it attempts to lecture headscarved women through Pavey's mouth. The Bor market is over. Neither the headscarf nor normalization owes anything to the CHP's forced tolerance.

In essence, the headscarf ban at universities was for years in Turkey a practice that wasted the country's mind, its conscience and its human capital. For one thing, if such an interventionist attitude toward the headscarf appeared anywhere in the world, the country that should have met it as an attack and enmity against Muslims or Islam itself, and that would be expected to wage a struggle of rights and law against it, would be Turkey. That such a discriminatory practice could be carried out in such a country is itself an event hard to believe.

Today the absurdity of the very idea of a headscarf ban at universities has, I think, become evident even to those who applied it most fervently in the past. But what is thought-provoking is that this evidence has not stemmed from a change in those who applied the ban. That is, the former banners who today accept that the headscarf ban is no longer acceptable or enforceable did not arrive at this point through a softening or change that took place within themselves. On the contrary, they arrived at this point because their resistance was broken.

That the daily Hürriyet, which ran the regulation freeing the headscarf under the headline "411 hands rose to chaos," is not today showing fierce opposition to this development is not because it no longer thinks so, but, just like the CHP, because it knows that such a headline would no longer suffice to reproduce the ban. For that reason we cannot read this relative silence as a sign of an improvement in the direction of democratization.

Meanwhile, it was seen how apt it was that the deputies who performed the obligation of the Hajj brought the issue onto the agenda by covering. Thus the problem was settled without being postponed to a new parliamentary term. Yet had the deputies in question not made such a choice, an uncertainty under the shadow of this debate would probably have continued until the 2015 elections.