Turkey is banning headscarves in Universities and offical buildings.
Is this what secularism means? Banning personal expressions of faith in public places? Not my understanding. Or are Turkish officials misunderstanding France’s xenophobic nationalism in secularist clothing as being what it takes to be accepted by Europe as one of them and allowed into the club?
The Turkish ban on headscarves has been in place long before the french one.
Back to the 1920’s in fact, along with a ban on the fez and Arabic script. These were all the work of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, one of the more benevolent of the twetieth century’s despots, and a man obsessed with modernizing and westernizing his country. He is the reason Turkey is largely free of the insanity that plagues so many Islamic countries.
Here’s the wiki bio:
Here’s a somewhat propogandistic page, but it gives a flavor of how Ataturk is regarded in Turkey. (I lived in Istanbul as a child.) :
I found all religious symbols frightening as a child, whether crosses dangling on teacher’s chests or stars of David on lunch pails, or stacks of Rosecrutian “non-religious” religious pamphlets on the guidence councellor’s credenza, next to the tracts of other faiths and the ROTC.
I was an athiest, but had to hide it when any of those were present.
I find it hard to believe you were "athiest ", at least the way I am.
Sorry for the nitpick, but it’s annoying to see it spelled the way you just did.
So if it wasn’t imitation of the French, how did Ataturk get the idea that secularism means suppression of religious expression by individuals? It clearly is not, in this case, a situation of distate for “the other”.
I wouldn’t know, but it’s interesting to note that the three leaders most well known for having implemented a sudden and drastic westernization and modernization plan in their countries, in different eras, Peter the Great in Russia, the Meiji emperor in Japan and Mustapha Kemal in Turkey, all deemed necessary to also impose european clothes and appearance.
That’s because western clothes and western culture were seen as neccesary for modernization. They were saying in all three cases, let’s get rid of our primitive cultural traditions and become modern.