Headscarf politics
I often have occasion to complain about the nasty politics of the religious right in the United States. Still, to keep things in perspective, I should also be grateful it’s not an Islamic religious right, and that our political culture, as corrupt as it is, is at least not a Middle Eastern political culture.
Here’s an example from a Turkish Islamist newspaper, Vakit. It’s old news, from last month, and Türkan Saylan, the woman pictured, just died a week or two ago. But the level of nastiness is still impressive.
![](https://secularfrontier.infidels.org/wp-content/uploads/edis/saylan.jpg)
The commentary next to the picture of the dying Saylan, undergoing chemotherapy and its associated hair loss in the last stages of her struggle with cancer, is supposed to be a comment by a reader. It says “She dedicated her life to enmity toward the [Islamic] headscarf. At the end of her life she was forced to wear a headscarf. My God you are capable of everything!”
Saylan was a leading medical doctor, and a staunch secularist, much reviled by the Islamist press.