Turkey’s Fez Ban Resurfaces: Student Arrested in Clash Over Century-Old Dress Code
In Turkey, a Muslim student was arrested for wearing the famous red Moroccan fez, a headcover banned in the country by a law from 1925. This serves as a reminder of a century-old battle between conservative religious and Islamist factions, and anti-religious and Kemalist nationalists [named after the founder of the Republic of Turkey and gravedigger of the Ottoman caliphate, Mustafa Kemal, or "Atatürk", "Father of the Turks"].
"The reforms concerning clothing undertaken in the time of Mustafa Kemal, adopted to Westernize the Muslim Turkish people, continue to claim victims, a century later," writes Yeni Akit. The daily refers to the law on the fez [fes, in Turkish], "this borderless red hat, made of velvet or felt, of Greek origin which probably takes its name from the city of Fez, in Morocco, where it was manufactured during the Ottoman era."
The newspaper recounts that Fatih Aktas, a student in a Quranic course, suffered the wrath of a secularist Kemalist because of wearing the Fez. On Saturday, July 5th, as he boarded the bus wearing his fez to sit behind a "furious secularist Kemalist dressed in a miniskirt," he was confronted by her. She allegedly told him: "The country you dream of will never come to be, this is the secular Republic of Turkey." She shows him the text of the Turkish Constitution on her phone and asks him to remove his fez. The Kemalist is met with the student’s refusal.
The bus arrives on the outskirts of the Kurdish city of Diyarbakir. The Kemalist complains about the student to the gendarmes on duty. They order the man to get off the bus. "I was totally unaware that it was forbidden to wear the fez," explains the traveler. He will be apprehended, then taken to the gendarmerie. After being presented to the prosecutor, he was released, but the offending object was seized.
