ABSTRACT
In recent years, there have been major public debates in several European countries about the acceptability of Muslim females wearing a headscarf or hijab. Excluding religiously devoted Muslim women from education and public services in some countries raises serious human rights violations in societies that would otherwise qualify as liberal democracies. In this chapter I explore the recent Turkish headscarf controversy that led Turkey to political turmoil to show its complex implications on domestic and transnational legal order. The Turkish headscarf controversy is one of the earlier and deeply complex cases. Furthermore, the Turkish reliance on secularism to justify denying women who wear headscarves into public spaces became a model legal argument for European courts. Turkey is a unique example from the perspective of secularism and religiosity because despite its “strictly secular” governmental structure, the overwhelming majority of its population adheres to what I call “societal Islam.”
