By Katie Silver

A magazine for the modern, fashion-conscious Muslim woman is proving that when it comes to Turkey, you don’t need bikinis, breasts and legs to sell issues.

Outraged when he saw photos of transsexuals in a magazine, devout Muslim Ibrahim Burak Birer, 31 decided to create a magazine in Istanbul that would contest the ‘diktat of nudity’.

With his friend Mehmet Volkan Atay, 32, he created Alâ, a magazine described as the avant-garde of ‘veiled’ fashion.

The first issue: Released in June, Alâ has been described as the ‘Vogue of veiled fashion’. It appeals to the modern, education, fashion-conscious Muslim woman

The magazine only shows women in headscarves

Alâ, which is Turkish for ‘the most beautiful of the beautiful’, only shows models in headscarves and will only advertise clothing that conforms to Islamic customs.

‘Cosmopolitan, Elle, Vogue, Marie Claire, it’s all about sex and naked skin,’ says Mr Birer. ‘The motto is that sex sells. But we, and millions of women around the world, believe that fashion can also be different.’

Despite having only six issues under their belt, the magazine has been so successful that they have needed to increase circulation multiple times.

The magazine now has a circulation of 30,000 with some 5,000 subscriptions are sent abroad.

‘We had no experience with magazines before that. We’re marketing people,’ Mr Atay told SpiegelOnline. ‘We specialised in recognising market niches.’

1,500 of the subscriptions are sent to Germany alone where the magazine has a big following amongst devout Turkish migrants.

As a result, entrepreneurial Mr Birer and Mr Atay said they could definitely foresee coming out with a German Alâ in the future.

The magazine has been very successful with a circulation of 30,000

And not just a Muslim product, it would be marketed to all females since the ‘battle against nudity’ is important to all women, Mr Birer said.

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Selling for 9 lira, or £3.20, it has been described as ‘the Vogue of the veiled’ by German magazine Radikal.

Atay and Birer have found a product for an increasingly prevalent part of Muslim society: the educated, fashion-focused woman with disposable income who still believes in wearing the veil.

Creating the magazine: Mr Brier and Mr Atay attribute their success to finding an untapped market

Creating the magazine: Mr Brier and Mr Atay attribute their success to finding an untapped market. Their backgrounds are in marketing, not magazine publishing

Cosmopolitan

Scarlett Johansson

Mr Birer was fed up of the ‘dikat of nudity’ in found in others women’s magazines such as Cosmopolitan and Vogue

But the men have faced objections from their own camp with one theologian complaining that women should be submissively behind rather than putting themselves forward.

‘That’s not our understanding of Islam,’ says Mr Atay. ’We don’t believe that women should hide themselves. Even the veiled have a right to stylish fashion.’

via Alâ: Turkish fashion magazine created for women who wear headscarves | Mail Online.

“What has been achieved in those (Arab) countries was possible because women stood side by side with their male partners” he remarked. On Friday in his statement at the “Change in Muslim Societies and the Role of Women International Conference” in Istanbul, Ihsanoglu stressed that only through women’s increased participation in political, social and other spheres the societies will make headway towards dynamic progress, says an OIC report Friday.

He on the occasion highlighted the major efforts by OIC to enhance the role of Muslim women in member countries of his 57-state Organisation.

In this connection he referred to the first ever Ministerial Conference on Women’s Role held earlier in Istanbul establishment of the functional Department of Family Affairs in the OIC General Secretariat as part of implementation of the Ten Year OIC Program of Action was another forward step. It is the OIC’s commitment for advancement of women in Muslim societies, he reminded.

He also referred to the establishment of an OIC Independent Permanent Commission on Human Rights (IPCHR) as a very significant development in the Organisation which constitutes a welcome sign for mainstream human rights, including rights of women.

Four of the total 18 members of the Commission are women, a testimony to the OIC’s gender equality commitment. “I firmly believe that the four women members of the IPCHR can play a commendable role in strengthening the rights of women in Muslim societies” he asserted.

AH/IINA

via OIC/Women: OIC enhances Muslim women’s role.

The closest example to the Tunisian experience is Turkey but Tunisia does not need secularism, the leader of the Tunisian Islamist Ennahda party Rached Ghannouchi said in a recent interview with Hürriyet Daily News.

“We need democracy and development in Tunisia and we strongly believe in the compatibility between Islam and democracy, between Islam and modernity. So we do not need secularism in Tunisia,” Ghannouchi said in an interview Dec. 23.

After forming the new Cabinet in Tunisia two months after the country’s first free elections, Ghannouchi visited Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in the Prime Minister’s Office in Istanbul Dec. 23.

After a meeting with Erdoğan lasting an hour and a half, Ghannouchi said, “We expect many things from Turkey. We expect our relations will strengthen and cooperation will increase for the common interests of both countries, because we believe the closest experience to Tunisia is Turkish experience. We share many common elements and we expect our cooperation will develop in all fields.”

They also talked about the “main problems of the Muslim world,” Ghannouchi said. “Like what happened in Syria, in Libya, in Egypt, etcetera. and in the other countries where there are problems. We share many ideas on those issues.”

Regarding secularism, “There are some different contexts between Tunisia and Turkey in this field. We respect the choices of our friends in Turkey and they respect ours,” Ghannouchi said. Erdoğan’s message during his speech in Tunisia did not involve secularism, she added. “Erdoğan has not talked about secularism in Tunisia; he talked about secularism in Egypt.”

Ghannouchi also referred to the concerns over a radical Islamist sect called the “Salafis” in Tunisia. “Salafis in Tunisia is a new phenomenon. They do not express themselves in politics and they are minorities. They are part of our nation, they are citizens and they have the full right to express themselves as long as they do not use violence,” Ghannouchi said.

‘I guarantee women’s rights’

Ghannouchi refused claims there are concerns amongst some Tunisian women about losing their previously gained rights. “Most of Tunisian women are convinced Nahda does not constitute any threat to their rights. Out of 49 women in the Tunisian assembly, 42 of them are Nahda members. So Tunisian women believe Nahda does not form any threat to their rights; I guarantee their rights,” Ghannouchi said.

Ghannouchi said from now on their main aim would be realizing the goals of the revolution in Tunisia.

Tunisia’s Prime Minister Hamadi Jebali unveiled his new Cabinet Dec. 22, two months after the country’s first free elections, and vowed to make job creation and reparations to victims of the ousted regime among his key priorities.

The creation of a new government is a major milestone in Tunisia, following the popular revolt against Ben Ali that began in December 2010, and triggered what became known as the Arab spring; a series of uprisings across the Arab world that led to the overthrow of several veteran dictators.

Saturday, 24 December 2011

HDN

“They are trying to make Istanbul into Teheran,” an old man tells me on the street. This beautiful city that hinges Europe and Asia across the Bosphorus lives its private contradictions in public space. At the bus stop, a boy kisses the neck of his mini-skirted girlfriend, while next to them stand two young women whose every strand of hair is secreted away inside colorful headscarves. At the airport, women in décolleté slink on the cat walk advertising the local fashion industry on a big overhead screen while pious Turkish mothers in coats that drop to their toes hustle their children toward the turnstiles. In Turkey, secular nationalism and Islam fight their fiercest battles over and upon women’s bodies.

I have come here with my seminar from New York University-Abu Dhabi to see and listen to the “Turkish way.” In the Muslim world, there are signal events that everybody watches as signposts of possibility — the Algerian revolution of 1959, the Six Day War in 1967, the Iranian revolution in 1979, the Palestinian intifada in 1987, and then here in Turkey the repeated election of an Islamic party to govern a democratic republic in 2002, 2007 and 2011. For most, particularly in places like Tunis or Cairo where the “Arab Spring” rocked regimes in 2011 followed by the election of Muslim parties, the Turkish case is scrutinized for how political Islam might live by the rules of liberal democracy. We have come instead to learn from the Turks about what this resurgent political Islam means for women. The two are related.

We have arrived on the anniversary of the death of Kemal Ataturk in 1938, the man who in 1923 carved the Turkish republic out of the Islamic Ottoman empire, abandoning Arabic, initially even in the call to prayer, forcing the Muslim brotherhoods underground, forbidding religious instruction in the schools. The Turkish republicans blamed Islam for the weakness of its state, for the Ottomans’ inability to stand up to the armed might and wealth of the West.

Women’s subordination and segregation were for them emblems of Islam’s backwardness.

It was the kind, not the fact, of male power the Turkish nationalists wanted to change. The Turkish nationalists saw the Ottomans through Western eyes as too enslaved to pleasure, made passive and feminized by the way they were able to control women. The new Civil Code abolished polygamy and the right of husbands to unilateral divorce. In 1934, the Turkish Republic proclaimed its modernity by granting women the right to vote on the one hand and by forbidding their veiling on the other. In Ankara, the country’s new capital positioned far from Islamic Ottoman Istanbul, cops waiting at the train station turned back traditionally dressed village women deemed too pious for the new sacred center of the secular republic. The price for women entering the public sphere was to leave their religiously inspired modesty at the city’s gates.

Over the decades this drum-beat never stopped. Indeed it intensified. For the last three decades, Turkish women wearing the headscarf were forbidden from attending schools and universities, from working in government offices, from getting a passport with their heads covered. But just now, with 70 percent of Turkish women in scarves and a majority Islamic party firmly in control, the state has given way on schools and universities, even if it is not yet completely official.

The secular Turks, the inheritors of Kemal Ataturk’s republican nationalism, are nervous. Mouth to mouth they broadcast a continuous stream of little stories, of the new pious political class not being able to even look at their loose-haired female employees, of faculty posts at state universities not being funded by the Ministry of Education because of continued opposition by some academic departments — notably education — to the admission of headscarved women, of proposed internet censorship of those who search for prohibited sexual material, of critical journalists and students being put away in prison. A religious man hit a young athletic woman stretching her legs in a public bus, we are told by an astounded secular woman. “And nobody did anything!” Can we believe that?

You can also see the secular republican’s anxiety in the defiant displays of their loyalty. Pictures of Ataturk are showing up in people’s homes and shops, Ates Altinordu, a professor at Sibanci University tells us. They wear pins with his likeness. Men at the gym work out with Ataturk’s distinctive signature tattooed on their bodies.

Turkey’s Muslim party, The Justice and Development Party, or Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, has just scored its largest electoral victory ever, winning half of all the votes. There is nothing Islamic in its name, but it likes to be known as the AK Party, meaning “white” or “clean” in Turkish. You can tell where people stand by whether they spell out the letters or say the word. Dirty easily morphs into impure. Everybody is still talking about how Prime Minister Erdogan, who began his march to power with his election as Istanbul’s service-oriented mayor in 1994, recently “cleaned” up the city in what came to be known as “the table operation.” This is the man who wants to build a mosque right in Taksim, the city’s secular central square in which a statue of Ataturk stands. Last August as Ramadan approached, when Muslims are prohibited during daylight hours from eating or drinking, even water, Erdogan had the municipality send its men up and down sidewalks at Istanbul’s center picking up restaurant tables and chairs and throwing them into trucks, sometimes even when people were sitting at them, drinking their raki, the licorice-tasting alcohol made milky by adding water and then ice. The local eateries counted on those tables; thousands of waiters lost their jobs.

The government’s supporters all tell us it was about congestion and noise, that alleyways were turning into open bars, that the Prime Minister’s cars couldn’t even get through because the bar and restaurant tables had forced the pedestrians into the streets. Residents complained. The secular denizens with whom we talked on the inside of these same eateries in the central Beyoglu neighborhood tell other stories. One says that some Turkish men rose from their seats, glasses in hand, and toasted to the Prime Minister’s headscarfed wife’s health, a double affront to an abstemious Muslim husband. A young woman, raki glass in hand, claims that their sovereign leader just can’t stand the public pleasure of young people like her. Another tells us that when Erdogan’s entourage took a wrong turn and got stuck in the center of the gentrified district, he was asked: “What are you doing here? You don’t belong here.” His response made it clear: It was they who did not belong.

While the hard-drinking, freedom-loving, secular Istanbulu fear what they see as a stealth move to create a puritanical Islamic state, the truth is that democracy came to Turkey because of these same religious political forces. Since 1960, Turkey has suffered five actual or attempted military coups, the last three against the increasingly popular Islamic parties. In 1997, in the so-called “soft coup” the military forced the Islamist Refah party, newly elected and part of the coalition government, to resign. Erdogan, Istanbul’s popular mayor, was thrown into prison for “inciting religious hatred” and calling for the “overthrow of the government” because he read a poem:

The mosques are our barracks
The domes our helmets
The minarets our bayonets
And the faithful our soldiers.

The Turkish military has long served as a shadow government outside parliamentary control, stepping in as a guarantor of the state’s secularity. In the aftermath of the Iranian revolution in 1979, keeping signs of Islamic piety out of the public sphere seemed particularly urgent. The Shah had modeled his regime on that of Ataturk; now Ataturk’s heirs feared their neighbor’s fate. Islamism was on the rise. Turkish university students were reading Sayyid Qutb, the intellectual light of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood who provided a theological warrant for Muslims to rebel against secular, and hence apostate, Muslim rulers, and Ali Shariati, the revolutionary Iranian Islamist thinker who denounced the Western model of sexual emancipation for women and promoted wearing of the hijab. Islam was political, transnational and dangerous. One had to be on guard. Force was required to defend the state against the political deployment of God. It was not enough that Turkish imams were forbidden from disparaging the state.

Political Islam came to Turkey through its cities. Istanbul’s population has ballooned 13 times since 1950, then a forested, hilly metropole of 1 million. Millions of traditional, pious families from the villages and towns of the Anatolian heartIand poured in, building up its outer suburbs. By the 1980s, the daughters of traditional mothers who wore headscarves because they had always done so in their patriarchal world were entering the city’s secondary schools and universities. As elsewhere in the Muslim world, many of these young people were looking for the way, for the “pure” Islam that would redeem their honor and their value in a secularizing state that disparaged them. They had grown up with people looking down on their newcomer parents as irtijah, “backward” or “reactionary,” as coarse and uncultivated. It was these young women who started showing up at school wearing headscarves. It offered them a way to move in the anonymous metropole jostling with strange men. Their chic, silk headscarves marked them as women who, unlike their mothers, had chosen their modesty. They were modern and on the way up. They refused the traditional binaries of the Republican state: Religious girls could be modern, too.

Turkey’s military junta would have none of it. “[I]t is known,” the Council of State declared in 1984, “that some of our daughters and women…wear headscarves just to oppose the principles of the secular Republic, showing that they adopt the idea of a religious state. For those people, the headscarf is no longer an innocent habit, but a symbol of a world view that opposes women’s liberty and the fundamental principles of our Republic.” After the coup d’etat in 1980 women who insisted on wearing the headscarf were expelled from school or not admitted. Headscarves were collected at the school gates; men lost jobs and promotions because of the way their wives dressed at home.

In 1999, Merve Kavakci, newly elected member of parliament, was ejected from the chambers when she sought to take her oath of office wearing a headscarf to cries of “terrorist” and “bad mother.” Denounced by the country’s president as “an agent provocateur,” she was subsequently stripped of her citizenship for concealing her dual American-Turkish citizenship. The chief prosecutor compared her Islamist party to a “vampire sucking only on blood.” In 2000, Nuray Bezirgan, a Turkish female student, wore a headscarf at her college final exams. A Turkish court sentenced her to six months in jail for “obstructing the education of others.”

Many pious Muslim women never got their education. The current President’s wife was denied admission for her Masters degree because she wore a headscarf. Those that did matriculate, explains Fatih Ceran, an editor and writer at Zaman, speaking of the predominantly religious female employees at the country’s preeminent conservative paper, are “ashamed of what they had to do to get their education to be able to work at Zaman.”

“Families who would not send their daughters to school in another city,” he explains to us, sent their daughters to Europe and beyond. Prime Minister Erdogan’s daughters went to America for college, one to UC Berkeley.

Istanbul’s universities are today filled with girls wearing headscarves. This public mark of piety very much divides their social world. Although each side accepts the other, it doesn’t feel accepted by them. “I don’t have prejudice towards them,” a young male student wearing blue jeans we met on Istiklal, the main walking street, chuckled. “I just feel like if I look at them, they’ll think I’m a pervert.” And reciprocally, a young woman wearing an elegant chocolate-colored scarf, who tells us how pious Muslim students will pray secretly at school to avoid judgment, declares: “I care about being a modern person, even though the women don’t accept me as such.”

Entering an underwear shop in the old city, the bras and panties on display include things every bit as saucy as what is on offer at Victoria’s Secret in the United States. To my surprise a covered woman sales clerk greets us at the counter. Do young religious women buy these things, I ask, pointing at the more risqué items? What religious women wear on their heads, the owner interjects, has nothing do with what they wear under their clothes. The young girls come with their mothers, the saleswoman informs me. They are offended that we would be surprised.

The headscarf is old news; it is rapidly becoming normalized. The AK government dropped its suit against the state once it came to power. You can’t sue yourself. The issue will be finally resolved when a new constitution is put in place.

But in the meantime, young Muslim women (and men), the children of the generation who felt the brunt of forced secularity, are busy creating a new modernity. Often raised by mothers who were first brought into the public sphere by the Islamic parties, able now to go comfortably to university in their headscarves, they are empowered and forthright, the kinds of young women who expect to choose their own lives.

My students and I first caught up with them at a café in Fatih, a densely built, conservative religious neighborhood where all the women are scarved and produce is sold from stands on the street. The cobblestoned neighborhood is centered around the Fatiah Camii, the Ottoman mosque housing the grave of Mehmed II who conquered Christian Constantinople in the 15th century. The young people here tell us they don’t tend to go to Istiklal, whose name means “liberty,” the walking street thronged with young secular Istanbulu who drink at the clubs and cafes. Café society in Fatih is exclusively for men who drink endless cups of tea, smoke, play backgammon and watch sports matches on TV. But we have entered a new kind of cafe that has flowered in Istanbul where up-and-coming Muslim writers and poets come to work, that attracts young pious, educated Muslims of both sexes.

We pepper two young female patrons, fashionably dressed in trench coats and colored headscarves, with questions about their lives. Both university students, they claim there are still some secular professors who give them lower grades because they wear scarves. Contrary to traditional practice, this café is a place where young women come to socialize with members of the opposite sex who are not family members or even friends without it being considered immodest, a violation of the Islamic laws against “mixing.”

The young women at the café refuse the standard divisions. “We are trying not to identify ourselves in terms of ‘modern’ or ‘traditional,’” a woman wearing a red headscarf asserts. “We are Muslim, living now in this city.” Their relations with young men are chaste, modest, made legitimate by playing out here among the believers where everybody can see and understands the world the way they do. It is not Islam versus the West for them. On Facebook, they report their “activities” as liking “the feeling when you read the Quran.” But they also listen to Elvis, Bob Dylan and Cold Play.

Is it right that a Muslim husband should be able to forbid his wife from working outside the home, we inquire? The ethnographic accounts of working class Islamist party activists are filled with stories of women who cannot even visit a friend without permission of their husbands. Indeed the Directorate of Religious Affairs now discourages women from being alone outside their homes with men who are not their relatives, lest they fall into sin. This religious guidance is not exactly compatible with women working.

But this is not how these women understand their world. They insist they have rights, too. “In Islam, there is only one authority and it’s not the husband. It is Allah,” a young woman, wearing high-top tennis shoes, a dark coat and a green scarf, tartly replies. “I will choose [my husband] carefully.”

Democracy is about the right to choose. Turkey is at a critical cusp. But I cannot help feeling that with the proliferation of young women like these, the future of Turkey’s democracy is in good hands.

(To be continued)

http://callingistanbul2011.blogspot.com/

Photography by Roger Friedland, Nasser Siadat and Charlotte Wang

Baku, Fineko/abc.az. International conference “Role of women in changing Muslim society” will be held in Istanbul on 21-25 December by the Parliamentary Assembly of the OIC (Organization of Islamic Conference) and the Ministry of Family & Social Policy of Turkey.

Azerbaijan’s Milli Majlis reports that at the conference to be opened by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan the country will be represented by MP Govhar Bakhshaliyeva.

The conference will cover national experience of formation of mechanisms of gender equality, women’s participation in politics and strengthening of democracy, women’s rights in changing Middle East and North Africa, Islam and democracy, establishment of gender equality institutions.

The foreign media report that precisely women provided victory of radical Islamic parties in the last elections in Morocco, Tunisia and Egypt (in this country, the electoral process will end on 10 January). Neither the OIC nor Turkey do want to stay away and miss the implications of the political awakening of the orthodox Muslim women.

via Azerbaijan Business Center – New political role of women in Islamic world to be raised in Istanbul on 21-25 December.

Turkish women pray in the courtyard of the Fatih mosque in Istanbul, Turkey, (File Photo)

InTurkey’s largest city, a revolution is occurring in its mosques. A project has been launched to make the mosques female friendly. But the initiative is not without controversy.

Kadriye Avci Erdemli is talking with one of Istanbul’s Imams over the state of the women’s section of his mosque. The small area is filthy and cramped. Erdemli is Istanbul’s deputy muftu, the city’s second most senior official responsible for administering the Islamic faith. She is in charge of a radical program to make mosques female friendly.

“This is the first project of its kind in the Muslim world.” she said. “When a woman steps into a mosque she is entering the house of God and she should experience the same sacred treatment. In front of God, men and women are equal.”

Since March, Erdemli has sent out scores of teams to visit some 3,000 mosques in Istanbul to assess the facilities for women. Erdemli says the discoveries are shocking. “Many mosques had no toilets for women or indeed any place for them to wash,” she says. “The areas for women were either filthy or used as storage depots,” she said.

But it’s not just about cleaning up the mosques. Partitions separating men and women, whether it’s a wall or a curtain, are also meant to come down, although women will not be praying side-by-side with men, but behind them. The mosques have until February to implement the changes.

But change isn’t always easy, especially in the realm of religion. And for the past couple of months Erdemli has held almost 40 meetings with imams and religious officials across the city to explain the reforms are in compliance with the Koran.

On the streets of Istanbul there appears to be broad support for the changes among religious women. Thirty-year-old Ayse Gul is typical. “The women’s sections are much smaller than the men’s – they’re almost like spaces left over, at the back or in the corner. It’s time women got more and cleaner areas to pray in,” she said.

Ayse Gul is part of Turkey’s rapidly growing Islamic middle class which emerged under the decade long rule of the pro Islamic AK party.

The AK party has also lifted or eased restrictions in education and employment for women wearing islamic headscarves.

Professor Istar Gozaydin an expert on religious affairs at Istanbul’s Dogus University says the opening up of mosques to women is being fueled by the growing number of professional women. “We see more and more (Islamic) women are getting educated in the universities women are attending work place and they’ve been able to become more visible in the society. Previously they were more in their homes previously took their traditional roles taking care of the kids. Now more and more women are participating in the professional lives. And they want to be part of the mosque system,” he said.

But not all are happy with such developments. Islamic newspaper columnists have strongly criticized the initiative accusing it of encouraging women to leave the home and adopting western lifestyles. And their criticism is being echoed by the male faithful.

The call to prayer at Istanbul’s Suleymania mosque summons worshippers. Many here have misgivings about the initiative. Fifty-year-old Mehmet Gul is a local shopkeeper who says, “I think the place for women is their home. They should practice their prayers at home. The mosques are not big enough even for men,” he says. “Especially on Friday prayers and during religious festivities there is not enough room for men. It’s not good for women to come.”

But even some women have reservations, especially over removing curtains and walls separating the male and female worshippers.

“Women must be separated from the men. There has to be a curtain. This is the religious code of conduct,” said one woman. “The women are “mahrem”, [or] forbidden, and the men should not be able to see them.”

Deputy Muftu Erdemli acknowledges there is still much work to do in winning over the hearts and minds of the faithful, even among some women. But she’s also convinced there can be no turning back.

via Istanbul Working to Make Mosques More Female-Friendly | Middle East | English.

The "Beautification of Mosques for Women” project in Istanbul discovered sectioned-off areas that were filthy, cold and unsanitary. Istanbul’s mosques are now under strict instructions to clean up and provide equal facilities for both men and women by February 2012. (Photos: Jonathan Lewis & Constanze Letsch)

“This is about mosques being a space for women,” declared Kadriye Avci Erdemli, Istanbul’s deputy mufti, the city’s second most powerful administrator of the Islamic faith. “When a woman enters a mosque, she is entering the house of God and she should experience the same sacred treatment. In front of God, men and women are equal; they have the same rights to practice their religion.”

As part of the “Beautification of Mosques for Women” project, Erdemli sent 30 teams to visit all of Istanbul’s mosques and report back on the facilities for women. What the teams found was shocking, she claimed. “Many of the mosques have no toilets for women, no place for women to wash before praying,” Erdemli recounted. “Most of the places allocated for women were used as storage places, and those that weren’t were usually filthy and freezing cold in winter.”

Istanbul’s mosques are now under strict instructions to clean up and provide equal facilities for both men and women by February 2012. But it’s not only a push for cleanliness and improved sanitation that is underway. The way mosques are arranged is also being changed, according to Erdemli. “In most mosques, the women’s area was divided by a curtain or a wall, and this is not fair,” she elaborated. “They are sacred places and women have the right to take advantage of their spiritual feeling as well.”

Unlike men, women are not required under Islam to attend a mosque; their presence is allowed, but, traditionally, female Muslim believers have prayed more frequently at home. Practices, however, can vary from country to country, and from mosque to mosque. In Istanbul’s mosques, to reflect the beautification project’s goal of equal worship space, “all the curtains and walls are coming down,” Erdemli said. “But segregation will remain; men and children will pray in front of women.”

Starting in late December, inspections will start to check if mosques are complying with instructions. Since the program began in March, Erdemli has addressed over 5,000 of the city’s imams and religious staff to explain the theological reason for why mosques are for women as much as they are for men. On the streets of Istanbul, there appears to be broad support for the program among religious women. “Sure, it would be beautiful. It would be much better,” said one 30-year-old woman, who gave her name as Münevver. “In some places, the spaces for women are clean, but in others they are filthy.”

The Diyanet, the state-run administrative body for Turkey’s mosques, has not only given its complete support to the project, but also provided a theological justification. In November, the head of the Diyanet, Mehmet Gomez, gave an uncompromising speech, in which he acknowledged the problem of misogyny in Islam. “There are some wrong, incomplete, biased interpretations that do not reflect the general principles of our noble religion,” Hürriyet Daily News on December 7 reported Gomez as saying.

All are not happy with this gender revolution. “I hope all these increasing efforts are not aimed at removing the obstacles for a woman to come out of her home, and first go out to the mosque, and then to find a job; all by finding legitimacy within [the Islamic] religion,” grumbled leading Islamic columnist Ali Bulac on December 3 in the Zaman newspaper.

The column provoked a storm of reaction. The outcry, interestingly, was louder coming from practicing Islamic women than from secular feminists. In her December 6 column for the daily Yeni Safak, Islamic columnist Ozlem Albayrak termed Bulac’s attitude a form of “persecution against women.”

The heated polemic is just the latest example of an important change in Turkish society. Istar Gozaydin, a law professor at Istanbul’s Dogus University and an expert on the Diyanet, argues that the rise of a new conservative Islamic middle class on the coattails of the decade-long rule of the Islamic-rooted Justice and Development Party has eased both formal and informal restrictions on Islamic women in education and state workplaces. “We see more and more women getting educated in the universities, more women in the workplace,” Gozaydin said. “They’ve been able to become more visible in society. And they want to be a part of the mosque system as opposed to praying at home.”

Although the percentage of women in Turkey’s workplaces and university student bodies may appear relatively low, the figures are trending upward. A 2010 World Bank report on gender equality reported that 30 percent of Turkish women work. According to official data for the same year, women accounted for 44 percent of Turkish university students.

Erdemli has her sights on the Beautification of Mosques for Women project becoming an inspiration for the rest of Turkey. She maintains, though, that its goal is not revolution, but simply bringing the Muslim faith back to its roots. “All we are doing is taking Islam to back before it was corrupted and misinterpreted, when women and men were treated equally,” she said.

Editor’s note:

Dorian Jones is a freelance reporter based in Istanbul.

via Turkey: Making Mosques a Place for Women | EurasiaNet.org.

If you want to understand the Islamic forces that are gaining strength in Egypt and scaring people here and abroad, let me tell you about my dinner in the home of Muslim Brotherhood activists.

First, meet my hostess: Sondos Asem, a 24-year-old woman who is pretty much the opposite of the stereotypical bearded Brotherhood activist. Sondos is a middle-class graduate of the American University in Cairo, where I studied in the early 1980s (“that’s before I was born,” she said wonderingly, making me feel particularly decrepit).

She speaks perfect English, is writing a master’s thesis on social media, and helps run the Brotherhood’s English-language Twitter feed, @Ikhwanweb.

The Muslim Brotherhood has emerged as the dominant political party in parliamentary voting because of people like Sondos and her family. My interviews with supporters suggest that the Brotherhood is far more complex than the caricature that scares many Americans.

Sondos rails at the Western presumption that the Muslim Brotherhood would oppress women. She notes that her own mother, Manal Abul Hassan, is one of many female Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated candidates running for Parliament.

“It’s a big misconception that the Muslim Brotherhood marginalizes women,” Sondos said. “Fifty percent of the Brotherhood are women.”

I told Sondos that Westerners are fearful partly because they have watched the authorities oppress women in the name of Islam in countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iran and Afghanistan.

“I don’t think Egypt can ever be compared to Saudi Arabia or Iran or Afghanistan,” she replied. “We, as Egyptians, are religiously very moderate.” A much better model for Egypt, she said, is Turkey, where an Islamic party is presiding over an economic boom.

I asked about female circumcision, also called female genital mutilation, which is inflicted on the overwhelming majority of girls in Egypt. It is particularly common in conservative religious households and, to its credit, the Mubarak government made some effort to stop the practice. Many worry that a more democratic government won’t challenge a practice that has broad support.

“The Muslim Brotherhood is against the brutal practice of female circumcision,” Sondos said bluntly. She insisted that women over all would benefit from Brotherhood policies that focus on the poor: “We believe that a solution of women’s problems in Egyptian society is to solve the real causes, which are illiteracy, poverty and lack of education.”

I asked skeptically about alcohol, peace with Israel, and the veil. Sondos, who wears a hijab, insisted that the Brotherhood wasn’t considering any changes in these areas and that its priority is simply jobs.

“Egyptians are now concerned about economic conditions,” she said. “They want to reform their economic system and to have jobs. They want to eliminate corruption.” Noting that alcohol supports the tourism industry, she added: “I don’t think any upcoming government will focus on banning anything.”

I told her that I would feel more reassured if some of my liberal Egyptian friends were not so wary of the Brotherhood. Some warn that the Brotherhood may be soothing today but that it has a violent and intolerant streak — and is utterly inexperienced in managing a modern economy.

Sondos looked exasperated. “We embrace moderate Islam,” she said. “We are not the ultra-conservatives that people in the West envision.”

I heard similar reassurances from other Brotherhood figures I interviewed, and I’m not sure what to think. But opinions vary, and I’m struck by the optimism I heard in some secular quarters: from Dr. Nawal El Saadawi, an 80-year-old leftist who is a hero of Egyptian feminism, and from Ahmed Zewail, the Egyptian-American scientist who won a Nobel Prize and is passionate about education.

Amr Moussa, a former foreign minister and Arab League secretary general who is a front-runner in the race for president, was similarly optimistic. He told me that whatever unfolds, Egypt will continue to seek good relations with the United States and will unquestionably stand by its peace treaty with Israel.

“You cannot conduct an adventurous foreign policy when you rebuild a country,” he said. “We must have the best of relations with the United States.”

When I raised American concerns that Egypt under the Muslim Brotherhood and the more extremist Salafis might replicate Iran, he was dismissive: “The experience of Iran will not be repeated in Egypt.”

I think he’s right. Revolutions are often messy, and it took Americans seven years from their victory in the American Revolution at Yorktown to get a ratified Constitution. Indonesia, after its 1998 revolution, felt very much like Egypt does today. It endured upheavals from a fundamentalist Islamic current, yet it pulled through.

So a bit of nervousness is fine, but let’s not overdo the hand-wringing — or lose perspective. What’s historic in Egypt today is not so much the rise of any one party as the apparent slow emergence of democracy in the heart of the Arab world.

via Joining a Dinner in a Muslim Brotherhood Home – NYTimes.com.

The Daily Star

Turkish women were among the first in Europe to exercise political rights with the establishment of the Republic of Turkey in 1924, but 87 years later Turkey ranks 122nd of the 135 countries in the 2011 Global Gender Gap Index.

Women’s rights in Turkey have a complicated track record. Turkish women gained many of their current social, cultural and political rights in the 1920s and 1930s after the establishment of the Turkish republic. In 1934, before France and Switzerland, Turkey recognized women’s right to vote and run for public office. And along with political rights, a number of important legal reforms in the 1920s and 1930s aimed to provide Turkish women with equal rights in the educational, family, work, social and legal spheres.

Today, however, there are pressing problems when it comes to gender equality in Turkey. These problems do not harm only women, but also men and society at large.

Gender equality is now the cornerstone of democratization and of Turkey’s bid to join the EU, as well as a major concern of an increasingly strong women’s movement. A number of legal steps, particularly affecting the constitution, civil law and penal law, have been taken during the last decade to align Turkey’s domestic law with its international commitments.

The 2004 amendment to Article 10 of the 1982 constitution, for example, added a specific provision prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex. The Turkish Penal Code was also amended in 2004 so that crimes against women are understood within the framework of crimes against humanity, and to introduce life imprisonment for the perpetrators of so-called “honor” killings. And at present, the government is drafting a comprehensive new law on violence against women.

Despite this legal framework, it is difficult to talk about real social equality for women. While the current government is proud to underline that Turkey is amongst the top 20 fastest growing economies in the world, its poor ranking in the 2011 Global Gender Gap Index suggests a different story. The areas where gender inequality is most pronounced are economic participation and opportunity – in which Turkey ranks 132 out of 135, and educational attainment – in which it ranks 106 out of 135.

While the global rate for female labor market participation is 52 percent, Turkey’s fluctuates at 24-28 percent, less than half of the world average. Moreover, female employment rates have been decreasing since the 1990s, due to massive migration from rural to urban areas, which implies that women previously working in agriculture and now living in cities have recourse predominantly to jobs in the informal sector, or remain unemployed due to a lack of skills and education. And women make up the majority of the illiterate population of Turkey, with around 4 million illiterate women today.

Turkey’s experience over the last 10 years clearly demonstrates that legal equality does not inevitably lead to real equality. There are examples of good practices, including nationwide campaigns and initiatives to encourage families to send girls to schools supported by increasingly active women’s NGOs. Nevertheless, their impact remains limited due to economic hardship and patriarchal social values.

Many families still do not send their girls to school because girls take on household duties from an early age. Formal education for girls is thus not prioritized, a problem compounded in rural areas by transportation problems.

There is a serious need for the political will to translate legal reforms into real, practical gender equality in all aspects of life. Providing training and education for women, to empower them to become strong and independent, is a first important step. Therefore, improving the formal education system and lifelong learning opportunities for women is very important.

Men should also be included in the effort to promote gender equality in order to challenge existing mindsets and values. Incorporating gender equality classes in the formal education system and providing gender equality training – particularly for military, police and legal services personnel – could be important first steps in this respect.

While government efforts to combat violence against women have been noteworthy, they will only be useful if they are complemented by concrete initiatives on other fronts, namely, women’s economic independence and social participation.

Idil Aybars is an assistant professor of sociology at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey. THE DAILY STAR publishes this commentary in collaboration with the Common Ground News Service (www.commongroundnews.org).

A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on November 30, 2011, on page 7.

via THE DAILY STAR :: Opinion :: Commentary :: Seeking real equality for Turkey’s women.

By MAIL FOREIGN SERVICE

Women with attractive eyes may be forced to cover them up under Saudi Arabia’s latest repressive measure, it was reported yesterday.

The ultra-conservative Islamic state has said it has the right to stop women revealing ‘tempting’ eyes in public.

A spokesperson for Saudi Arabia’s Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, Sheikh Motlab al Nabet, said a proposal to enshrine the measure in law has been tabled.

'Tempting' eyes: Muslim women could be forced to cover up even their eyes if a 'right' of the Saudi state is enforced

Women in Saudi Arabia already have to wear a long black cloak, called an abaya, cover their hair and, in some regions, conceal their faces while in public.

If they do not, they face punishments including fines and public floggings.

One report on the Bikya Masr news website suggested the proposal was made after a member of the committee was attracted by a woman’s eyes as he walked along a street, provoking a fight.

More…

• Foolish act of bravery? Egyptian activist risks her life after posting full frontal nude shot online sparking outrage among Muslims
• The modern slave trade: Taken on holiday and forced to wed a stranger

The woman was walking with her husband who ended up being stabbed twice in the hand after the altercation.

The virtue and vice committee has repeatedly been accused of human rights violations.

Founded in 1940, its function is to ensure Islamic laws are not broken in public in Saudi Arabia.

In 2002, the committee refused to allow female students out of a burning school in the holy city of Mecca because they were not wearing correct head cover.

The decision is thought to have contributed to the high death toll of 15.

They are also banned from driving by religious edict and cannot travel without authorisation from their male guardians.

In September, a Saudi women sentenced to 10 lashes for defying the driving ban was only spared when King Abdullah stepped in to stop the public flogging.

Also in September, the king announced that women would be given the right to vote for the first time and run in the country’s 2015 local elections.

www.dailymail.co.uk, 19th November 2011