Space

Domestic Policy

Owning Modernity in the Turkish Public Space

By Ibrahim Kalin

The debate over the headscarf issue is increasingly becoming a debate about who defines modernity in Turkey. The traditional vanguards of modernity are claiming to own modernity in a way that leaves practically no space for those they define as the "other," which in the language of militant Turkish secularism turns into "enemies of the republic," "backward-looking dogma obsessed people," "religious fanatics," "ethnic nationalists," etc.