Jill Rees: Welcome Press

Turkey is a Moslem country, with over 98% of the population Moslem. It’s a Moslem country in the same way that England is Church of England, that is to say that everyone is a Moslem but that doesn’t mean they all practise all that strongly. The Call to Prayer is ubiquitous, but most people ignore it, indeed hardly hear it any more.  Many of the women wear the headscarf, although whether for extremely religious reasons, for fashion, or so that men don’t hassle them is different in each case. But if a woman works in a public service, she is obliged by law to take the headscarf off, and to bare her head, and women find this incredibly offensive.

Since it is only women who wear the headscarf, the laws and obligations pertaining to them, affect only women, and where oppression is in place, it is the oppression of women, and not of Moslems. This is an important distinction, which might enable us to understand the true nature of this issue, becoming as it is an international one. France, like Turkey, has secular regulations against wearing the headscarf in government buildings and public posts.

The law is actually ostensibly against all religious symbols, but everyone knows it is really only Islam that worries everyone, and then only how women express Islam. This prejudice against the headscarf is an attack on the liberty of women, and not Moslems.

When I was a child in the north of England in the 1960s it was still de rigueur for women to wear a headscarf outdoors, and especially was considered a sign of a good Christian woman with moral standards. This is the sense in which Turkish women who wear the headscarf choose to wear it. Gradually, along with hats and indeed church-going, the headscarf has slowly died out in the UK among Christian women, and appears to have disappeared even from memory.

Women in Islam have many freedoms that other women don’t have, such as the right to keep their own property, and women in non-Moslem countries are largely unaware of this. I imagine that Western men don’t want their own women to find out about it, lest they start claiming their property back! Whatever the rights and limitations available to women in Moslem countries may be, women in other countries in the present time seem to have the worst of all possible worlds.

From an early age, girls have to be passive and to look cute. As teenagers, they are ogled at and perved at by strangers throughout their daily life, and the headscarf takes this inconvenience away. On the other hand, is it impossible for men to act appropriately towards young women, whatever they are wearing? It seems quite strange to women that men declare themselves to be unaccountable, and, although they often claim that they are the stronger sex, unashamedly lack  self-control when it comes to harassing women.

In Germany, Austria and the Netherlands, and possibly other countries too, the men are completely in control of themselves and hold women in the highest esteem. In these countries, women will not get looked at askance, whether they are wearing mini skirts, piercings in their faces, showing their mid-riff, which is in fashion currently in the North, colouring their hair…Whatever their appearance, they are treated equally.

These countries nevertheless have unequal situations for women in the workplace, where salarial and promotional inequities have still not been vanquished, yet the social attitude is one of being accepted as free citizens. In those countries, women are able to walk around unmolested, drink alone in bars, eat alone in restaurants, use public transport, go to the cinema and walk home at night without fear. In all the northern democratic countries, it is perfectly acceptable and not even unusual for a woman to decide to live on her own, instead of marrying and having children. She can rise to managerial level at work, and have free relationships with men on her own terms.

Of course, all is not perfect, for in these nations too, the remnants of historical racism are sadly still apparent. In order to be harassed there, it suffices to wear the headscarf! In the countries which have bought into Bush’s ‘Axis of evil’ principle of world politics, to wear the headscarf is akin to an act of terrorism.  It is odd that, in the countries where fewer people are Moslem and where the headscarf is relatively rare, the right to wear it is more defended than in Islamic countries!

The UK has a long history of religious tolerance dating back to the time of Martin Luther, when Protestants were systematically burned in other European countries. Although there were outbreaks of violence and oppression in the UK too, Queen Elizabeth I ensured that Protestants and Catholics alike are protected in the UK. Later, the Protestants themselves split into many churches, such as Methodists and Baptists, and all were afforded protection in the UK.

In the 1960s the Sikh population of Uganda were expelled by Amin Dada, and many came to the UK. They so inspired the people of the UK by their kindness, politeness and genuineness, that when the issue of wearing the turban came up, the UK was extremely receptive. Sikh men grow their hair in honour of God, and tie it with a turban worn high on their heads.

Many of the new immigrants worked as bus conductors, which required the wearing of a cap as part of the uniform. Sikhs asked to be excused from wearing the cap, as they could not fit it on over their turban. The UK agreed, and from that moment the wearing of religious symbols and clothing has been held as sacrosanct in the UK. Although certain workers have been asked to remove the full burka, such as an infant school teacher as it was deemed necessary for the children she was teaching to see her mouth to aid their speech, generally the headscarf can be freely worn everywhere.

So the odd paradox remains: that in the UK where the headscarf is noticed and frowned upon, women have the right to ear it; yet in Turkey, a Moslem country, women must bare their heads for school and public sector jobs.

In primitive tribes the iconic wearing of various items of clothing and accessories has an imbedded meaning, surely as we become more modern, the wearing of the headscarf as other forms of unofficial dress, should be regarded fairly indifferently. As men are no longer required to wear a suit and tie, even for quite official positions, surely it makes no sense to kick up a fuss about the headscarf? Let us stop attaching such importance to appearance, and trying to control what people wear, although it is mainly women who are still subject to this type of oppression.

Freedom for the individual is an essential part of a modern democratic nation, and Turkey, in its attempt to become acceptable to the West as it struggles to enter into the European Union, has yet to grasp this most liberal of concepts: that there is nothing to fear but fear itself. The enlightenment of modern democracy lies in the right of the individual, and in respect for the individual. One’s religion is entirely a matter of individual conscience, and as the Moslem nations become more modern, people’s attitude to the wearing of the headscarf will become more and more indifferent. This can only be beneficial both to Islam and to secular society.

1272 words ©Jill Rees 16 July 2008

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Tags: Fashion, hair, headscarf, Islam, Moslem, secular, secular government, Turkey, woman.

The architect Le Corbusier wanted to create a building which, while using less space, would be a great community place to live. Thanks to an invite from my friend Arnaud, I’ve just been able to stay in one of the apartments in the Cite Radieuse in Nantes, France.From the road the building looks side on like any other high rise apartment block, except the signs have been sending you to “Cite Radieuse” for some time. As you turn into the car park, the great block rises up among woodland. You look, and a shiver of pleasure as you realise that the facade isn’t at all uniform. Each window is built back, and in differing patterns over the building, and painted in the primary colours which are a feature of the Corbu experience. It’s more reminiscent of kids building blocks than a city high rise.

You can’t look up as you go round towards the entrance, because your attention is taken by, of all things, a water feature, a little duck pond where the concrete pillars stand on the ground. Grass banks with ducks waddling on them and waterlilies covering the lake and you’re won over. My friend warns me to keep an eye for little ducklings running across the path. A Japaneses bridge crosses into a garden where people can walk their dogs. Carrying on you walk under a concrete shape which I decided looked like a giraffe and my host informed me is in fact called the giraffe and is the fire escape, shaped like a giraffe so you don’t feel scared.

A couple of teenagers talk quietly in the entrance hall as we cross to the lifts. This is the bit that’s grotty, enclosed metal lift with the ubiquitous smell of panicked dog wee. Arnaud pushed the button for the first floor and we went up two floors. That’s because the apartments are set in an irregular fashion, each one taking up two floors. The corridors are called streets, and are lit at each person’s doorway with different coloured lights, the whole street having panels in the primary colours. people greet each other and are all calm and quiet.

In Arnaud’s apartment, you go into the entrance and kitchen, then the sitting room. Stairs lead down to the living room and three bedrooms. The loo and bathroom have porthole doors like a boat. You notice that they’re quite small only when you bump your elbow, visually it still feels like an adventure, like when you went to France on the ferry for your summer holidays. You feel really relaxed and safe in the Corbu, with its surrounding views of trees and parks, the light moving round as the day passes to set in glorious colour from the sitting room window. Being set back, the bedrooms have terraces and are sheltered from full sunlight by a concrete shade. they are insulated from noise by the thick walls and the being set back, and also by their unique positioning. Above the bedrooms are Arnaud’s and the person in the apartment opposite’s sitting rooms and kitchen, and the person opposite’s bedrooms are above Arnaud’s kitchen. When you’re asleep at night you can’t hear anything of neighbours, and in the day you can’t hear anything from their living space either.

The kitchen and dining area are open in the modern style we’re quite used to now but was new at the time, the proportions make it really easy to cook - you don’t bump into anything, and there’s a delivery hatch in case you feel the urge to order groceries by email. How did Le Corbusier plan that?

Sleeping in the Corbu is like being in another womb, such is the feeling of quiet and peace and safety. Everything is human sized and built for living in in peace. The apartments face West/East, apart from a few South facing ones at the end, and the sun rushes in through the bedroom window in the morning to wake you up, and in to the lounge in the evening to light up your evenings, or into the other side for the neighbour. Like a church, the morning light streams through the apartment and when the windows are open the breezed refreshes everything. On one side the two bedrooms are separated by a sliding partition which can make one or two rooms depending on your needs, if you have a small child or later need a larger space. The sliding door makes a blackboard for the child to play on.

The children playing outside play quietly and there’s no fighting. At the top of the entire building is the Nursery School, which seems made for this place with its primary coloured return to infancy. The dogs are friendly even if they don’t like the lift. The inhabitants speak calmly and move slowly. there are people from all walks of life, and these apartments are at low rents, they are genuinely for the people.

The people who live here really like it and wouldn’t move for the world. some have bought their apartments. I myself left feeling incredibly relaxed and with a vision of the sort of environment I would like to live in.

It seems still misunderstood how people can live together in harmony in small spaces if the architecture is thought out and built with people lives and needs in mind. What a shame Le Corbusier isn’t really taken seriously to this day, so that designers of social housing and city housing aren’t constructing lovely friendly community areas for us to live in.

You can arrange to visit the Cite Radieuse and look in some apartments for yourself. Click on the website Cite Radieuse to visit virtually or pop along to the town hall in Reze, Nantes for a guided tour.

copyright Jill Rees 2007

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