Fokus Türkei en+ Berichte+ Einschätzungen+ Analysen+ Berichte+ Einschätzungen+ Beri Selin Çağatay 1 Dec. 2009 An overview of the“Headscarf Issue” in Turkey: Kemalism, Islamism and the Women’s Movement Since the foundation of the Turkish Republic, women have been welcome to participate in public life, but there was one informal condition: they would be uncovered. On the post­1980 political map, however, the invisibility of covered women in the public sphere has been questioned and challenged both by the covered women themselves and by the newly rising Islamist intellectual and political circles. Since that time, the“headscarf debate” has been a highly influential factor in Turkish politics each time it has been put on the agenda. This article attempts to sketch an overview of the discussion on the headscarf in Turkey, from an analytical perspective and with a focus on the women’s movement. The aim is to provide the reader with an analysis of the“headscarf issue” with reference to women and their significance in Turkish political culture, and hence to understand why the issue is debated mostly by those who do not wear it and how it has become a problem of representation in recent years. The last decades in Turkey have been marked by a polarization between secularism and Islamism which disrupts social life. Turkish society has been divided into camps, i.e. secularists and Islamists,“us” and“others”. On one end of this polarization is the rapid increase in the public visibility of religious identities, the ascendance of religious cadres within bureaucratic ranks to high level positions under the consecutive AKP(Justice and Development Party) governments since 2002, and the conservative and oppressive tendencies of the central and local state institutions adopting an Islamist discourse. On the other end, there is an excessive distrust towards the executive and legislative organs, a fear of“neighborhood pressure” among groups who identify themselves with the Kemalist tradition, and opposition from these groups to the AKP’s rising hegemony through a discussion of secularism. Needless to say, the women’s movement is a determining factor and has been polarized in this cleavage, which at times has turned into a regime crisis. The substance of the headscarf issue in Turkey consists, above all, of the social and political changes which have also lead to the secularist-Islamist cleavage. In other words, the repercussions of the sociopolitical transformations in the post-1980 period, primarily due to the economic restructuring that changed the constellation of classes and class forces within society and the state, have crystallized in the“headscarf issue”. The actors on the political stage have never refrained from taking sides in the issue, and instead, the actors’ approach Referat: Westliche Industrieländer www.fes.de/international