{"id":32229,"date":"2011-04-14T05:22:23","date_gmt":"2011-04-14T02:22:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.turkishforum.com.tr\/en\/content\/?p=32229"},"modified":"2014-01-06T01:18:24","modified_gmt":"2014-01-05T23:18:24","slug":"yes-to-moustaches-no-to-headscarves","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/2011\/04\/14\/yes-to-moustaches-no-to-headscarves\/","title":{"rendered":"Yes to Moustaches, No to Headscarves"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Ayla Albayrak<\/p>\n

\"AFP\/Getty
AFP\/Getty Images A Turkish woman with drawn moustache chants slogans during a 2009 protest.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A women\u2019s group has been number-crunching party lists submitted this week for Turkey\u2019s elections on June 12, to resolve the following question: Do you still need a moustache to enter parliament?<\/p>\n

Answer: It still helps.<\/p>\n

Ka-Der, a women\u2019s organization posed the moustache question ahead of the last elections in 2007. They got famous women, ranging from entertainers to businesswomen, to pose wearing fake moustaches on the covers of Turkish newspapers to persuade political parties to put forward more female candidates.<\/p>\n

That time, only 48 women made it to Turkey\u2019s 550-seat Parliament. As the next elections near, Ka-Der say the party lists suggest the number of women that make it into the legislature will nearly double \u2014 but still won\u2019t get close to the 50% level the group believe would match Turkey\u2019s claims to act as democratic role model for the Middle East.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe calculated that in the worst case scenario, 78 women will make it to the Parliament, and in the best case, that number would reach 110,\u201d said Cigdem Aydin, the head of Ka-Der in a telephone interview. \u201cWe are angry because so many capable women were wasted. Men see the political arena as a means to power, and they don\u2019t want to share that power with women.\u201d<\/p>\n

Several Turkish women lead huge family business dynasties and have made it onto Forbes Magazine\u2019s lists of the world\u2019s richest and most powerful people. A woman, Umit Boyner, heads Turkey\u2019s largest business lobby, TUSIAD. Moreover, almost half of university teaching staff in Turkey are women.<\/p>\n

Politics, however, remains a no-fly zone. One hurdle to getting women elected is that in rural areas in particular, many women vote according to their husbands wishes. Another, is that just as moustache is a plus in Turkish politics, an Islamic-style headscarf is a minus.<\/p>\n

Some 60% of Turkish women wear headscarves, but due to the staunchly secular character of the current constitution, women in state jobs are not allowed to cover their hair. That includes Parliament.<\/p>\n

A group of headscarf wearing women campaigned for the Islamic-leaning AK party to put them on its list of candidates for this election, using the slogan \u201cNo headscarves \u2014 no votes.\u201d But even the AK party, which is expected to remove headscarf restrictions when it redrafts the constitution after the elections, didn\u2019t want to tackle that taboo. It nominated just one candidate with a headscarf.<\/p>\n

That candidate is Gulderen Gultekin, a teacher from Antalya. The seaside city is secular territory, more famous for bikini-wearing tourists than headscarf-wearing women.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t count her,\u201d said Nesrin Semiz, who heads the campaign, because she can\u2019t win and probably wouldn\u2019t insist on wearing the headscarf even if she did. \u201cShe is a teacher and removes headscarf at work. She would remove in the parliament, too.\u201d<\/p>\n

Perhaps the candidate with fewest hurdles to overcome is the famous folk-pop singer, Ibrahim Tatlises. He is hugely popular, close to the ruling AK party, and will run for election in his hometown of Urfa, in eastern Turkey.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s more, he has a pretty impressive moustache.<\/p>\n

via Yes to Moustaches, No to Headscarves – Emerging Europe Real Time – WSJ.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Ayla Albayrak A women\u2019s group has been number-crunching party lists submitted this week for Turkey\u2019s elections on June 12, to resolve the following question: Do you still need a moustache to enter parliament? Answer: It still helps. Ka-Der, a women\u2019s organization posed the moustache question ahead of the last elections in 2007. They got […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":32231,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[89],"tags":[4257],"class_list":["post-32229","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-turkey","tag-headscarf"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32229","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32229"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32229\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32231"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32229"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32229"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32229"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}