The Burden of Culture on Women in Turkey by Yiğit Kapusuz

“Look sweetheart, it’s not that we don’t trust you or that you did something wrong,  but we can’t just let you go out on your own... Well, with your brother it’s different...” These  were the exact words many young women across Turkey hear. Many are told that they should  be careful when they go out on their own, or not permitted to go out at all. Unfortunately, this  isn’t a simple familial thing, rather a systematic one. And just like all systematic issues, it can’t be solved with the snap of a finger and most of the time, the ordinary Turkish women  has to be the one who pays the price. 

Now, before I start going into detail about these problems, I need to first call out my  own duplicity. It is very hard to define who an “ordinary” Turkish woman is. Spanning a  territory of almost 770 thousand kilometers, Turkey is extremely diverse. A life of a  businesswoman who lives in a big city like İstanbul is vastly different from that of a woman  who lives in the far away corners of Anatolia. It is this versatility in the environment that  women live in which makes it difficult to tackle. However, most women in Turkey still live  under the same system that is built to oppress them. 

During its foundation, the Republic of Turkey and its leader, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk,  did everything to create a new system which would hold women on the same level as men.  Unfortunately, as years passed by and Turkey got caught in the crossfire between east and  west, and with the fear of change, the people of Turkey started going back to their traditional  values and incorporated them more and more into the system. 

What’s peculiar about Turkish culture, is that it is a mixture of multiple cultures.  When you look into traditional Turkish values, you can see traces of Central Asian, Persian,  Eastern European, North African and Caucasian cultures. This is because Turks were  originally nomadic people from Central Asia and the borrowed elements of culture from the 

lands they’ve lived. However, none of these cultures has had a long-lasting impact as the one  that Islamic, and thus Arabic culture has left on Turkish culture. 

Women had a very important role in Central Asian Turkish cultures. The wife of the  Khan (Han), the Hatun, regularly attended ceremonies, held authority over the land, which  sometimes would surpass the authority of the Khan, and most importantly, was viewed as an  equal to her husband. In Turkic mythology, women were seen as the principal reason in the  creation of Earth. In comparison, Ottoman Sultans would not marry their wives and women  held no official authority in the Ottoman Divan. 

What changed between these periods was the conversion to Islam. Many Muslims use  Islam as a tool to persecute women. The myth that women were created from the ribcage of  men, the enforcement of modest clothing as to not disturb men, the fact that many girls are  not educated because it is believed that their only purpose is to get married and bear children  are all beliefs many Muslims hold which they attribute to Islam. Now, I do have to clarify that  it is not certain that these beliefs are actually a part of Islam, however this does not stop  conservatives in charge to create sexist laws which they claim as Islamic. 

Femicides are a serious issue in Turkey, but more often than not, the killers not get the  punishment they deserve. Innocent women who were murdered are blamed for their own  death; “She should’ve worn something more modest, like a headscarf. She had it coming”.  Women are told to obey their husbands, if they wish to get into heaven. To bear the burden of  looking after the house and their children. In big cities, women are constantly harassed  because of the way they look, dress, act, not only by men, but also by fellow women who use  Islam as a tool to bring down other women. 

It is the subservience that traditional Islamic and Turkish gender roles enforce upon  women which is the main threat to the lives of women in Turkey; a system that pushes women down and tells them to deal with it. The biggest challenge women in Turkey face is  the system that blames them for their own problems.