The effect of the conflict between secularism and Islamism in modern Turkey on women as portrayed by the head-scarf girls and the suicide girls in Orhan Pamuk’s Snow

This piece was originally written for a class on societies in the Middle-East (Lähis-Ida ühiskonnad) in Tallinn University in Spring 2019. Contains major plot spoilers.

Orhan Pamuk’s Snow is his first truly political novel, in which he grapples with the century old conflict between secularism and Islamism in Turkey through the story of an old and forgotten city on the edge of the country. It is shown through the perspective of a secular poet from Istanbul who finds himself snowed in in Kars, as he spends three days in the city discussing religion, politics, love and life with the local Islamists, secularists, revolutionaries and women. One of the most common themes of their discussions are the so-called “head-scarf girls” - girls who have refused to take off their headscarves after orders from Ankara banned head-scarves in schools - as well as the suicide epidemic among young girls that recently spread to Kars. Looking at the recent history of Turkey, it is clear that head-scarves have functioned as an important symbol for both sides of the political conflict - the secularists consider them a form of religious and undemocratic oppression, and wish to ban them in order to create a secular Turkey based on Western ideals, while the Islamists see them as a symbol of piousness and religious freedom. Where do the women wearing (or not wearing) these head-scarves fit into the conversation? The suicide epidemic seems to imply that many women feel they do not fit anywhere into Turkish society. In this essay, I will be analysing Pamuk’s treatment of the nation’s conflict with particular focus on the topics of the head-scarf girls and the suicide girls, and discussing how this fits in with the reality of the political situation in Turkey in general and through a feminist lense.

The main character of the novel is the poet Ka, who returns from exile in Germany to Turkey and decides to visit Kars, a city along Turkey’s eastern border with Armenia. This trip is the main plot of the story. His official reason for the trip is to investigate a series of suicides committed by young girls in Kars for a newspaper. His personal reason for visiting the city is to reconnect with a woman he knew from his student days and proceeds to fall in love with. In the few days he spends in Kars, he meets with the families of the girls who had committed suicide as well as various city officials and locals to discover the reason behind these suicides. One of the first to commit suicide was a 15-year-old girl, Teslime, who was a well-known head-scarf girl in Kars. She was eventually expelled from her school for not complying with the ban, and soon after hanged herself with her head-scarf. This led to Ka (as well as nearly everyone else in the city) investigating the head-scarf ban as one of the reasons for the suicide epidemic, although Teslime’s was the only case directly related to the ban. The other suicide victims were mostly young women who lived in abusive households with little control over their lives. One example was another schoolgirl, about whom a rumour was spread that she was not a virgin. This resulted in her being shunned from society and losing hope of finding a husband. She then killed herself by overdosing on sleeping pills. An autopsy found that her virginity was, in fact, intact. Most of the locals thought the women committed suicide because they were unhappy. The city started a campaign against the suicides, plastering the city with posters calling suicide blasphemy, and prepared for the state’s anti-suicide propaganda committee to come to Kars from Batman, also asking them to include at least one woman in the committee as the girls might be offended by men constantly telling them what to do. During the three days that Ka is in Kars, the roads are snowed in and no one can get in or out of the city. A revolutionary actor takes advantage of this situation and stages a secular coup through a play that portrays a woman abandoning and burning her head-scarf and ends with soldiers shooting real bullets at the audience, killing and injuring a few Islamists as well as innocent bystanders. Towards the end Ka is involved with another secularist revolution play in which one of the prominent head-scarf girls is forced to remove her head-scarf on stage. After this, the roads are opened and he has to leave the city. The book ends without a clear conclusion to the issue of the suicide epidemic or any of the conflicts outlined.

The novel, although fictional, tells a true story about Turkey. The suicide epidemic described in the book actually happened in Batman and another areas in Eastern and South-Eastern Turkey. Most of these suicides seem to have been committed due to family pressure after a girl has hurt the family’s honour - much like the story of the girl whose life was ended by a rumour about her lost virginity. As honour killings are becoming harder to do without legal punishment, families have begun to pressure women into killing themselves in what is called honour suicide. Many suicides are also results of general abuse and issues like forced marriages. (UN News 2006) These suicides can be considered a symptom of women’s lack of agency over their own lives and bodies in Turkish society, which the head-scarf conflict is also an example of. The head-scarf has become highly politicised in Turkey, considered a symbol of oppression and Islamism in the opinion of secularists and honour and piousness as well as religious freedom in the opinion of Islamists. Since the 1980s, women wearing head-scarves have been subject to bans from educational and state institutions. (Smith 2013) This has stripped women’s bodies of agency and made them pawns of the Turkish conflict between secularism and religion, as is well portrayed in Snow. These women can not simply choose what to do with their lives and bodies; they are told what to do by their families and the state, and when those orders are in conflict with each other as the state bans something their families have told them to do their whole lives, they suffer even more.  For many, suicide may seem like the only way to regain some control over their lives. These issues are analysed from many different perspectives in the novel.

As Ka discussed the problems in Turkey with the citizens of Kars (as well as visiting revolutionaries), they gave him various reasons for the suicides and viewpoints on the head-scarf ban. Although only one suicide case was related to the head-scarf ban, almost every conversation about the suicide girls was also about head-scarf girls and vice-versa. This indicates a certain unwillingness to treat women and their problems as heterogeneous - it’s easier to think of women as having the same problem (being suicidal because of the head-scarf ban) rather than dealing with different problems separately and recognising that there are many different reasons why women may be committing suicide as well as different reactions women may have to the ban. Ka talked to both secularists and Islamists, but most of them were men. Many men considered the suicide epidemic to be contagious, as it reached Kars through a girl from Batman who had come to visit family and killed herself in their home. They assumed girls felt inspired to do the same when they saw someone else commit suicide. This view suggests that girls are very impressionable and have no real reasons of their own to commit suicide, and that the suicides are avoidable by simply hiding women from the fact that other women have killed themselves, which is easier than really working on the issues that cause depression and suicide among the women.  Another common view was that girls were simply doing it because they were unhappy - however, as the deputy governor told Ka, if unhappiness was a “genuine” reason for suicide, half of the women in Turkey would be doing it (Snow 26). This is a depressing view of the situation of women in Turkey, who were supposed to be liberated in secular Turkey and yet are often still living in abusive patriarchal households and communities with few opportunities and little personal agency. The men in Kars are reluctant to take the suicide epidemic seriously by really analysing the kinds of problems women face and coming up with solutions, and instead prefer to believe the problems come from an unhappiness that is inevitable for women in Turkey and can only be solved by ignoring them.

As many people considered the head-scarf issue and the suicide girls to be connected, the banning of head-scarves was often brought up as a reason for the suicides, by both secularists and Islamists. One very interesting conversation about the head-scarf ban takes place between an anonymous Islamist and the director of the Institute of Education who carried out the ban in the local schools. The Islamist makes a case against the head-scarf ban, as it denies Muslim girls their right to education by forcing them to choose between it and their faith. This leads to them becoming depressed and suicidal; he mentions how the ban resulted in one girl having a nervous breakdown, four being kicked out of school and one committing suicide. He also defends the right to wear head-scarves as they protect women from harassment and degradation and allow them to not live like sex objects and worry about their appearance all the time. The director argues that Turkey is a secular country and that by turning head-scarves into symbols and using women as pawns in a political game, they are causing suffering to women. Politicising head-scarves turns Turkey into a weak and divided nation, where everyone is fighting either for or against the head-scarf ban. He also believes that having their heads uncovered allows women to occupy a better place in society and gain more respect in secular Turkey. He also brings up the point that many uncovered girls would feel uncomfortable if they were the only one not wearing a head-scarf in a classroom, and would then feel pressured to wear one. At the end of this conversation, the Islamist kills the director. (Snow Chapter 5)

They both make points I would agree with and disagree with from a feminist point of view, which further emphasises the difficulty of the conflict in Turkey as it is not always clear which side of the conflict is the “right” one. I agree with the Islamist that the head-scarf ban makes it harder for many girls to get an education, as the head-scarf can be very important for girls to feel comfortable. As over 95% of the population in Turkey is Muslim and wearing a head-scarf is an important part of being a Muslim for many women, banning it in schools is very exclusionary and would cause mental distress to girls who have so far always worn a head-scarf, as is shown in the novel. However, his statement that head-scarves protect women from sexual harassment, which is a common opinion among many Turks today (Arik 2012), is completely false. There is no evidence that women who wear head-scarves are less likely to be sexually harassed - in fact, sexual harassment is very common in Muslim countries, where most women wear head-scarves. (Shahryar 2012) At the same time, the director is right about turning head-scarves into political symbols causing suffering to women - although he contributes to that suffering through his own work as well. This statement does not work in favour of either side of the conflict, as both are turning head-scarves into political symbols. Believing that women have to uncover their heads to gain respect in society is misogynistic, as it implies women still have to change themselves according to men’s current ideological whims in order to be respected. A woman’s worthiness should not be determined by her clothing. As for his last point about girls feeling pressured into wearing head-scarves against their will if everyone else in their community is, this may be true but rather than dictating clothing by law this problem should be dealt with by promoting the idea that women are all free to choose what they would like to wear. By enacting a head-scarf ban, they are promoting the exact opposite idea. With this conversation, Pamuk makes the reader think about different aspects of the secular-Islamist conflict in Turkey and realise that nothing about it is black and white. Both sides have views and concerns that are understandable, but that makes it harder to decide which side is “right”.

In this scene, Pamuk appears to be perpetuating the trope of the violent Islamic terrorist by having an Islamist assassinate a secularist in the first chapters of the book, perhaps swaying the reader to side with the secularists. However, this is soon contrasted by the violent theatre coup organised by secularists. They detain, torture and kill many of the Islamists in Kars, as well as plenty of innocent bystanders, in the name of the secularist democratic state. They also claim to be against the militant Kurds - this is an issue that is never analysed in the novel but is mentioned often. With this, Pamuk further highlights the fact that neither side of the conflict can easily be considered better than the other. In Turkey, both secularists and Islamists have used violence and caused suffering in order to meet their ideological aims in the past decades.

Most of the characters Ka talks to are men, but there are three important (living) female characters in the novel: his would-be lover İpek, her sister Kadife and another head-scarf girl, Hande. All three of them display aspects of the conflict in Turkey, as well as the general situation of women. İpek, the only secularist of the women, is the main reason Ka went to Kars. They were classmates in Istanbul and when Ka heard that she had moved to Kars with her family, he could not stop thinking about how beautiful she was. Upon meeting her, he decides he has fallen in love with her and must bring her back to Germany with him. He is convinced that being with her is the only way he can ever find happiness. As İpek herself notes multiple times, Ka’s sudden and complete infatuation with her indicates a desire to own her rather than to love her. Ka also realises that both him and her ex-husband Muhtar long for İpek as a “symbol of escape from this defeatist state of mind” (Snow 66). This relationship underlines a general attitude of men in the patriarchal Turkish society that women are simply objects to be controlled, and a means to an end. This makes it natural for them to use women in order to further their political agendas, rather than thinking of women as humans who may have their own political needs and desires. Although İpek is a secularist, raised by her ex-communist secularist rebel father, she supports the head-scarf girls, especially after her sister joins them, and is sympathetic of the suicide girls. She states that while “the men in Kars turn to religion, the women in Kars kill themselves” (Snow 49) - this indicates a feeling that men are capable of changing something in their lives as a reaction to the suffering they endure, while women feel they have no hope or agency in life and can only change their lives by ending them. Even belief in God can’t help them - especially if one of the most important ways for women to express their belief in Islam has been outlawed. The other important female character, İpek’s sister Kadife, began wearing a head-scarf to make a political statement, an action also inspired and supported by their rebellious father. However, after the outrage she caused she felt that she couldn’t simply go back on what she had done and stop wearing the head-scarf. She continued wearing it and soon became religious, believing God had made her join the head-scarf girls in order for her to discover His love. Kadife believes women commit suicide to show their pride and to escape all the forms of punishment they endure in life. Women hope to gain something through suicide, while men kill themselves because they’ve lost hope of gaining anything. (Snow 441) This, again, shows how suicide often feels like the only way for a woman to achieve anything in a world where they have no agency.

The third girl, Hande, was also a head-scarf girl and a close friend of Teslime. She tells Ka the story of Teslime, who had been convinced by the head-scarf girls to continue wearing her head-scarf and was even told that it would be better to commit suicide that uncover her head. As suicide is a sin in Islam, none of her friends expected her to take those claims seriously. Her suicide came as a shock, but Hande realised if she had been in the same situation, she would have done the same (Snow 139). Hande decided to take off her head-scarf and return to school to spare her parents distress. She describes how difficult it is for her to uncover her head, as everytime she imagines herself without a head-scarf she sees herself turning into an “agent of persuasion” and someone who only thinks about sex. She feels that by bearing her head, she would be becoming a different person, and believes this desire to remain true to oneself as well as a wish for innocence and purity is what makes girls commit suicide. (Snow 143) This indicates that the desire to wear head-scarves can often come from prejudiced beliefs about women who do not wear head-scarves. They are considered overly sexual, and the idea of them being “agents of persuasion” suggests that these women want to change girls, perhaps by taking away their innocence and purity. As these beliefs are generally taught to them by a patriarchal society that wants them to believe things like sexual freedom are evils to be avoided by being pious and covering themselves, it brings to question whether the wearing of head-scarves is then truly done out of the women’s free will rather than the influence of others. This has been a question Western feminists and secularists have grappled with, especially since the larger influx of Muslim immigrants to Europe - do Muslim women wear head-scarves out of their own free will, and if not, should head-scarves be banned? The fact cannot be denied that many Muslim women are forced to wear head-scarves by their families and, in some cases, the law (Sharma 2014). However, it is questionable whether the head-scarf bans now enacted in parts of Europe (BBC News 2018) are the right way to deal with this. By banning certain clothing, women are still being forced to change their appearance against their will to satisfy an ideology. These laws have the same effect on women in Europe as they do in Turkey - they use women as symbols of ideological conflict and try to control them.

The three women Ka speaks to give different first-hand experiences and perspectives related to the head-scarf ban and the suicides. İpek, the secular one of them, sees the suicides as a problem related to women’s helplessness against their suffering. Kadife, the recently converted Muslim, believes women commit suicide as a way of gaining some pride and relief from the suffering they endure in life. Hande, the life-long Muslim, describes her reaction to the head-scarf ban and the difficulties of uncovering her head after a lifetime of considering her head-scarf to be an essential part of who she is. Although three women could never represent all the different experiences of the women of Turkey or even Kars, they do give us a varied insight into how the conflict affects women.

The Turkish Republic has been a divided nation since its conception. On the one hand, the secularists want to develop and modernise the country in a Western style to give its citizens a better quality of life. On the other hand, the Islamists want the religious traditions and morals of most of the Turkish population to be honoured and to have some kind of influence on how the state is run. As a European atheist, I strongly believe that religion and the state should be kept separate and that, in most cases, neither should dictate the other. There may be extreme cases, such as honour killings that are often related to religious beliefs, where the state should step in, but clothing should not be considered one of those. A democratic secular state should not control personal decisions such as clothing unless they have been proven to cause harm to others. Wearing a head-scarf does not, in itself, cause any harm, but the existence of this tradition can create undue pressure for women who do not wish to wear a head-scarf. This should be dealt with in a way that does not negatively affect those who do wish to wear head-scarves and maintains women’s bodily autonomy. This is a difficult conflict to deal with and Turkey does not seem to be nearing a conclusion that satisfies both parties any time soon. Orhan Pamuk’s Snow introduces many of the different arguments and viewpoints of the two sides to the reader, making it clear how difficult the situation is, by focusing largely on the suffering it has caused women. This is a refreshing take on the topic, as analyses of political issues so often focus on men who are more easily able to be politically active, and forget the women who are often caught in the middle of the ideological conflicts in patriarchal society as the main losers, no matter which side appears to be winning at the moment.