With the “democratization package” that Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced on Sept. 30, Turkey's observant, conservative women have gained the right to wear head scarves to work in state institutions. This means that such women, banned from the public space for almost a century, since Atatürk’s authoritarian cultural revolution, will now be able work in public sector jobs, such as teaching. For decades, Turkish secularists, as zealous defenders of a zealous from of laïcité — French-style secularism — have always feared and argued that covered heads automatically turn into closed minds. Does this latest development mean that Turkish society will become increasingly close-minded? 

Well, not necessarily, if the women in question think like Turkan Yilmaz, who teaches at Istanbul’s Sabri Taskin Education and Application School, which serves children with learning disabilities. Yilmaz used to wear an Islamic headscarf everywhere except her job — until Erdogan’s reform set her free. Now she not only enjoys her newly gained freedom, but also advocates freedom for those who have ways of life very different from hers. In an Oct. 10 interview with Radikal, she said, “When we were struggling with the ban on the headscarf, many non-veiled women gave us support. So, [individual] choices should be respected. People can wear miniskirts or shorts if they want to. The decision about who should wear what should be made not by the state, but the individual.”

This unmistakably liberal view, which defends individual choice against official or collective mores, is shared by other observant Muslims in Turkey, some of whom, like Yilmaz, wear the traditional headscarf. One such Muslim is Fatma Bostan Unsal, a political scientist and one of the 64 founding members of the governing Justice and Development Party (AKP). In an interview with Taraf on Oct. 14, Unsal criticized AKP Speaker Hüseyin Çelik's comments on the “décolletage” of a television host that led to her scandalous firing.

“Discrimination against a woman who wears décolletage [a low-cut neckline] is discrimination against me as well,” Unsal said. She then went on to discuss an issue that many conservatives consider taboo — the rights of lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgenders (LGBT). Unsal, in full Islamic attire, said, “All human rights are valid for them as well — the right to life, the right to own property. But they are being driven from their homes. What a shame! The new legal protection against hate crimes should cover them as well. In fact, they are the number one targets of hate crimes. They are more threatened than those [of us] who wear the headscarf.”