Academic: Interact with the Women Underneath the Headscarf!

 Grand professors are expressing their worries. They are scared of young women with headscarves entering university!

I am not interested in the debate about “headcovering” and “türban”, i.e. where the permissible headcovering will need to be tied. I want to touch on a different, but basic question. Let me write about what will be debated in the future. Why are university lecturers afraid of young women wearing headscarves coming to university?

I await them with interest

As a university lecturer, I am not afraid of headcarved women. On the contrary, I await them with interest and longing. Just as I like all of my students, I am not at all afraid of the 18-25-year-old young women who cover their heads and believe in a different world.

Whether their heads are covered or not, our children are my treasures. They are all of our children. With all their tricks to get grades but avoid classes, their competitions in cheating the lecturers, they remind me of my youth…

Questions I want to discuss

What do those young people, wearing a türban or tying the cover under their chin, think, what do they experience?What is free thought, religion, belief? Before they came to university, how did people shape their minds? Are there specific sects and communities behind these choices? Or are they on an ethereal search? If they want to make sure of a comfortable space in the other world, why do they neglect this world? Or how do they trick others and themselves?

Why has the interest in the secrets of the world which generally increases with age been turned towards closing and fear in these young minds? How far do these fears obstruct a free search? If there are specific sects and communities behind their world of thought, what ideologies and teachings do those leading these organisations use to distance them from this world?

I am waiting with quiet patience to discuss these and a thousand other thoughts with them. If only I could also discuss them with my students who do not cover…

The reason why I do not discuss these issues with students who do not cover is that there is a presupposition that they have overcome these questions and that time for scientific work leaves no time. […] If I have students with headscarves, then I would have to start not with the question of the freedom to wear a headscarf, but the basics of free thought. That does not matter, we would spend some time on that, but we would gain our children.
So, what makes me angry about the current debate?

What do you achieve by going to complain to Atatürk? 

The attempts to go to Atatürk and complain with formulas like “222A, the second day of the second month at 2 o’clock at Atatürk’s Mausoleum.” If you go to Atatürk and complain about the men who try to collect votes by wrapping the türban around women’sbodies, what do you achieve?

If we trusted our minds more than those of the fanatics who have shaped the (headscarved) girls in this way and have sent them to university…
Then our duty is to teach our students the knowledge which social history has brought us, as well as analytical thought…

Instead of university lecturers saying, “Don’t take those young people into university, if they come, I will not enter the classroom”, let them roll up their sleeves and teach them to be questioning, not to get carried away with the superstitions called belief.

Teach them rather than exclude them 

I am saying, if the headscarf is a religious symbol, are we less talented, less informed, lazier and less rational than those fanatics who teach the young women about this symbol?

Let the young women with headscarves come into our classes. Let us teach them about life, science and the realities which the human mind has reached. Let us try and wipe the dirt and rust of the fanatic and bigoted teachings of the Koran courses, (religious) Imam Hatip schools, family and peer pressure, and other environments from their brains.

Let us not be afraid of those sending these young women to university. Let those fanatics, bigots and sect leaders be afraid. Let those fake religious leaders, who have taken the beautiful girls’ souls, bodies and minds hostage be afraid of sending these minds to universities, to platforms of free thought.

So, fellow university lecturers…it is too easy to run to Atatürk and complain. Are you ready to do a little more work? You won’t solve the problem by running to the Mausoleum. You will if you work, talk and teach. (FÖ/TK/AG)

Füsun Özbilgen is a lecturer at the Communications Faculty at Galatsaray University, Istanbul. Her article has been shortened slightly.