Sule Yuksel Senler fought for the equal rights of Turkey's conservative women. Here is what makes her journey remarkable.
In late August, Turkey’s First Lady Emine Erdogan released an emotional statement on the death of Sule Yuksel Senler, the conservative Turkish author and activist, who played a crucial role in empowering the country’s conservative women and normalising their personal choice of wearing headscarves.
“Ms Sule used to say to her ‘My daughter, Emine, let’s marry you’ and she would evade Senler’s inquiry saying just ‘OK’,” Mine Izgi, a conservative female author who had worked with Senler since 1984, toldDuring her stay, Izgi said, Emine Erdogan woke up from a dream one day and talked about it to her mentor Senler.
For most of her lifetime, Senler championed the causes of social equality across Turkey, a country that followed radical interpretations of secularism following its establishment under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in 1923.Born in 1938 in Kayseri, a central Anatolian Turkish city, Senler had Cypriot-Turkish ancestry. She moved to Istanbul in the 1940s following her father who had decided to be a businessman.
On hearing of his prayers, Senler's parents were in rage, forbidding Ozer from leaving his room for days. But Ozer did not give up and kept praying and attending the meetings of the Nur movement.“One day my aunt [Sule Yuksel Senler] told my uncle that ‘I also want to come to your meetings’.
“You can see [a woman's hair] from the front with that way of tying up your scarf; the way that the scarf is tied around the back doesn't exist anywhere then. It doesn't exist in other nations, nor in our country. During windy weather, the scarf can flutter. It can reveal your neck, your hair. This was to tidy up the whole thing and give a modern appearance, to set an example to Muslim girls and women of the time who were made to feel inferior [by Western society],” Senler added.
Instead of fearing the president, who was a former top general, Senler wrote a fierce letter to him, saying: “He needs to apologise to both Allah and nation [for his words],” according to her family.“We swore not to give up from our headscarves” says Senler in a headline of Turkey’s Aksam newspaper on Oct. 29, 1969.
She gave hundreds of speeches across the country, encouraging conservative women to participate in politics and social life, contributing to the development of a female conservative movement.a conservative newspaper and the official publication of the religiously-mindedTurkan Kumru, a conservative activist and a friend of Senler, had known her from mid-1970s.
The association still exists today. Izgi and others among Senler’s friends are part of it and publish the magazineThe cover of Idealist Women magazine, which is a publication of Idealist Women Association, a pioneer of Turkey’s female conservative movement led by Senler.
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