Values, Equality and Differences in Liberal Democracies. Debates about Female Muslim Headscarves in Europe

2009-2-28
Saktanber, Ayşe
Show full item record
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
191
views
45
downloads
The VEIL Project focuses on the debates, conflicts and regulations concerning head- and body coverings of Muslim women in the public sphere, particularly in public institutions such as schools, universities and the courts. As a highly visible symbol of religious difference and conflicting values the Muslim headscarf has been the subject of heated debates across Europe and subjected to legal regulations in some European countries. One of our assumptions is that in debates about the headscarf fundamental values and norms of liberal democracies are not only re-negotiated but also collective identities re-constructed within the European integration process. Moreover, the issue reveals the gendered nature of values and norms that widely prevail in liberal democracies in Europe. VEIL compares policy and media debates in eight European countries and the European Union. The aims of the project are: first, to map out and compare the fundamental values and political principles of the main actors in the headscarf debates and second, to explain the differences and similarities in the conflicting values as expressed in the policies on Muslim headscarves. The project suggests a gender-critical frame analysis of policy documents (e.g. court verdicts, laws, parliamentary debates, media articles) using a comparative perspective for encoding values and norms. The project will also incorporate a comparative analysis, which focuses on citizenship regimes and immigration policies, on gender regimes and the relationship between the state and religious communities or institutions. The innovative potential of this interdisciplinary study of religious and cultural value systems consists in its policy-oriented social science approach and its gender-sensitive analysis of identity-building processes. Finally, the project will draft recommendations for national and European policymakers for dealing with cultural and religious diversity.
Values and religions in Europe, Citizens and governance in a knowledge-based society
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/52818
Department of Sociology, Project and Design

Suggestions

Challenging religious and Secularist Patriarchy Islamist Women s New Activism in Turkey
Aslan Akman, Canan (2011-01-01)
Since the late 1990s, following the state’s process of de-politicization and exclusion, educated Islamist women in the urban centers of Turkey have been active in raising Muslim women’s identity consciousness and generating solidarity with those affected by the headscarf ban. In the women’s organizations analyzed in this article, Islamist women are carving out a niche to challenge both secularist and Islamist patriarchal practices and discourse. This article contends that organized Islamist women have becom...
Perceptions and discourses on gender equality: the case of conservative women’s organizations in Turkey
Arberk Bozoğlu, Emine Feyza; Ergun Özbolat, Ayça; Department of Gender and Women's Studies (2020-10-22)
Civil society organizations and the realm of civil society as a whole play a core role in terms of gender politics; however this enactment burgeons differently in the Turkish context. The position of women’s civil society organizations have been transformed through the leading positions of conservative women’s organizations in the domain state and society relations, especially in terms of gender politics. The purpose of this thesis is to provide a current analysis of the role of conservative women’s organiz...
Civil society and state relations in Turkey: Opposing trajectories of two Islamist women's civil society organizations
Keysan, Asuman Ozgur; Özdemir, Zelal (Informa UK Limited, 2020-07-01)
The Islamic women's civil society organizations (CSOs) in Turkey entered a new phase with the lifting of the headscarf ban, which had long been the focus of Islamic women's activism against authoritarian gender policies in the country. Based on research conducted in 2012 and 2018 on two Islamist women's CSOs that have been active here during the last two decades, AKDER (Women's Rights Organization against Discrimination) and BKP (Capital City Women's Platform Association), this paper aims to understand thes...
Religious reasoning in politics: a discussion of public reason /
Sakarya, Sümeyye; Çırakman Deveci, Aslı; Department of Political Science and Public Administration (2017)
This thesis has the goal of exploring the proper place of religious reasoning in liberal politics, and the main research question of the thesis is: Should religious reasoning which means reliance on a religious ground in the decision-making process be allowed in politics? In the literature, almost all discussion of religious reasons has been carried out in relation to public reason: are religious reasons public reasons, can a religious justification be accepted as a public justification, what is the scope o...
Gender politics and education in the Gülen Movement
Göktürk Ağın, Duygun (2021-11-01)
In Turkey, women’s involvement in the Gülen Movement (known to its adherents as Hizmet (Service)), a global religious movement, contributes to extending the gendered forms of conservative-modern discourses within the practices of everyday life by introducing a new form of Islamic activism. This chapter traces the gender and pedagogical discourses of the Gülen Movement, based on ethnographic analysis of data collected in one of the Movement’s high schools in a conservative, provincial city in western Turkey....
Citation Formats
A. Saktanber, “Values, Equality and Differences in Liberal Democracies. Debates about Female Muslim Headscarves in Europe,” 2009. Accessed: 00, 2020. [Online]. Available: https://hdl.handle.net/11511/52818.
METU IIS - Integrated Information Service open@metu.edu.tr