Turkey's new prime minister wants the ban on women wearing headscarves removed.
Secularists in Turkey are alarmed. They see any relaxing of the ban on headscarves as a move toward theocracy.
The Turkish ban on headscarves reveals the difference between the secularist form of government that has been imposed on Muslims in Turkey and the separation of church and state that prevails in the United States.
In the United States, the First Amendment prohibits Congress from establishing any law that would establish a religion to undergird and bolster the legitimacy of the government. Our government is secular because it is founded by social contract on the mutual consent of the governed. It is not founded on religion.
The First Amendment of our Constitution also assures that Congress can pass no law that would prohibit the free exercise of religion. Our secular form government of government is not secularist. Our government is not opposed to religious expression. It protects every individual's right to express his or her own faith as long as it does not impose upon the freedom of others.
In the United States, the right of Muslim women to wear headscarves is protected by the free exercise clause of the First Amendment because, for some Muslim women, wearing headscarves is a requirement of their faith.
What would not be permitted in the U.S. would be an insistence by Congress or by any elected official that all women wear headscarves. That would be an establishment of religion and deny the freedom of non-Muslim women to follow the dictates of their own consciences.
The Christian Fundamentalists who complain that God has been kicked out of public schools because children are no longer forced to recite state sponsored prayers have the same mindset as Muslims who would force every woman to wear a headscarf.
My experience with the Turkish Institute for Interfaith Dialog and the followers of Fetulah Gulen convinces me that Turkey has little to fear from Prime Minister Erdogan and his wife.
The specter of theocracy casts a far longer shadow over the Christian Right in America, than it does over moderate Muslims in Turkey. Outside their mosques, I never heard one of them suggest that non-Muslim women should wear head scarves.
1 comment:
Yeah, I agree. This is also the difference between our system and France's. France banned religious clothing (Muslim headscarves, Sikh turbans, etc.) from their public schools. That was a monumentally bad idea.
There are several Muslim students at my daughter's public Middle School. Most, not all, of the girls wear the headscarves. No one seems to care one way or the other. That's as it should be.
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