Where are the women in the UK citizenship test?

Thom Brooks asks a very good question.

McGinn Case Doesn’t Turn on Free Inquiry or Speech

An excellent letter from Laurie Shrage.

Amongst many good points:

Colin McGinn is an established and important philosopher who has made numerous contributions to his field. So when we see someone like this forced out of the profession, we rightly question whether he deserved his fate. But the women students who are driven out of the profession, due to retaliation (or the reasonable fear of retaliation) for speaking up about sexual harassment, are invisible to us.

Are the Turkish protests alienating the headscarf wearing population ?

One of the Turkish Prime Minister’s tactics for discrediting the protestors in Gezi Park and elsewhere has been to accuse them of rekindling discrimination towards practicing Muslims which he, Erdoğan, has been combatting since he’s been in power. One claim he made was that protestors entered a Mosque with their shoes one and proceeded to drink beer inside. This has been denied very publically by the Imam of that Mosque, who welcomed protestors inside for their safety, while they were being attacked by the police, and to care for the injured. There is supporting filmed evidence of what he says. The imam was questioned by the police for six hours and subsequently suspended.

Another recurrent piece of rhetoric in the same vein is the Prime Minister’s claim the protestors are ‘insulting his covered sisters’. One story being told is of a young woman carrying a child was urinated on and had her headscarf pulled off by protestors in in Dolmabahçe in Istanbul. Whether this really did happen has not been, to the best of my knowledge, established. On the other hand, some of the denials do sound like the sort of denials one might expect whenever a woman testifies to an assault, so one should be very weary of dismissing the story. (There is one article in Turkish refering to the young woman’s testimony). Be that as it may, the incident quickly became part of the anti-protests rhetoric, together with the manifestedly false accusations relating to the Mosque.

But not all headscarf wearing women chose to take this story as evidence that the protests were not for them. One famously replied to the Prime Minister’s tweet that he should not use the ‘headscarf issue’ to win the protests, and that, like many, she’d had enough of his lies.

Are secular women and muslim women divided by what is happening ? Should we worry that practicing muslim women’s voices will not be heard and that they will, as a result, end up being oppressed ? True, one might worry that as was the case before the AKP came to power, their freedom to wear a head scarf in universities and public buildings might be taken away – and this would be a bad thing.

But so far, this has not figured on the list of the protestors demands, or even complaints. One thing to bear in mind is that the protestors are of a later generation than those who were in favour of the headscarf bans ten years ago. Indeed, one of the famous protesters, the iconic standing man, staged a different protest a few years ago, wearing a headscarf to university in support of women who wanted to but could not.

But more significantly, women seem to be standing together:a group of secular women has just launched a campaign for the support of covered women’s rights to participate in politics wearing their headscarves if they so wish. Nicole Pope of Today’s Zaman writes :

A group of 57 female journalists, academics and intellectuals, among them Amberin Zaman, Nilüfer Göle and Balçiçek Ilter, have just launched a new campaign in favor of women wearing the headscarf, urging political parties to “lift all legal and non-legal obstacles” that prevent them from becoming parliamentary deputies, being elected at national and local level and generally participating fully in public life.

The campaign and its implications are described in the article, here.