ABSTRACT
Although the Kemalist reforms continued to build upon a process that begun a century earlier, they were perceived as revolutionary laws ( devrim kanunları ), that is, “authentically subversive of the old order, and . . . achieving what the Ottoman empire had not been able to realize in one hundred years”. 5 Posterity was handed down “the image of an authentic revolution, which regenerated Turkish society by shaping a modern, secular, civilizationoriented and spiritually reborn nation”. 6 The peak of this process was reached in 1937, when the principle of secularism ( laiklik ) was enshrined in the Turkish Constitution. 7
Nonetheless, it should not be neglected that what precisely happened in 1937 was the inscription of the “Six Arrows” ( altı ok ) of Kemalism into the Constitution. 8 Despite the emphasis on the principle of secularism as one of the Six Arrows, the importance of at least two other arrows should be stressed. One is nationalism ( milliyetçilik) , which in the context of the creation of the “new Turkey” grounded the process of molding the national identity of the new political community’s members. Ihsan Yılmaz has described them as “LASTus citizens”, that is, “Laïcist, Atatürkist, Sunni Muslim, and Turk”. 9 Every identitary manifestation that differed from these was thus prohibited or limited: religious or belief minorities, such as non-Muslims, 10 Alevis, 11 atheists, 12 members of Sufi brotherhoods, 13 and ethnic minorities, such as Kurds, were characterized as holding identities that were deemed inconsistent with the Kemalist identitary image. The same discrimination applied to the observant segments of the Sunni Muslim population, including the segment of women who wore the headscarf. This garment, which epitomized (and still epitomizes) Islam’s allegedly barbarian essence according to certain scholarly and popular opinions, 14 was regarded as conveying the image of a backward country and, as such, its use had to be prohibited or at least discouraged.
