Özet:

The headscarf has been one of the controversial issues in Turkish politics. Secular elites have viewed the headscarf as a threat to the secular structure of the state and used various anti-democratic tools to ban the headscarf at public institutions. On the other hand, Islamist politics put a special emphasis on the headscarf in its discourse and struggled with the headscarf bans. Using a historical perspective and drawing on the existing research and discussions on the headscarf, this article investigated how the headscarf is expressed and used both by Islamic and secular politics, how the headscarf was transformed into a political symbol especially by male politicians, the headscarf bans, the attitudes of women who belong to different political camps towards the headscarf, and how and why these women differ from or resemble each other. 

Anahtar Kelimeler: