Villagers Say No to Turkish Imam’s Hard-Line Edicts

KOTANDUZU, Turkey —  Every day, Leyla Karsli, shrouded in an Islamic-style turban and a bulky ankle-length skirt, lines up at the only well in this wind-swept village in the mountains of eastern Turkey.

Such modest attire is customary for females in what is one of the nation’s most religiously conservative and poorest regions. But it is not enough for the new imam, Mustafa Platin, who has been bullying the women to don the full head-to-toe chador.

“How are we supposed to carry water, herd our sheep, wearing sheets? We’d trip over them and break our heads,” said Karsli, 35, a mother of six.

Platin’s efforts to impose a stricter version of Islam go beyond attire.

“He forbade us to watch TV because he said it was sinful and said we should not ride the minibus [running to the nearby town of Pasinler] because our shoulders could rub against male passengers,” piped up another woman, who refused to be identified by name. Men in the village said Platin accused them of moral laxity for playing cards and backgammon.

The cleric’s fiery edicts have sparked a rare revolt among the villagers, who have vowed to boycott worship in Kotanduzu’s only mosque until Platin is replaced. It is also the latest front in the ongoing battle over how Islamic Turkey will be.

Local authorities recently suspended Platin from his duties and launched an investigation.

The cleric might not only be fired but could also face prosecution for breaching the rigidly secular laws introduced eight decades ago by Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey.

Ataturk exhorted Turkish women to shed their veils and to get an education, while granting them the right to vote long before their peers could do so in Switzerland and France. The Religious Affairs Directorate, the Turkish government institution that micromanages religious life, tells clerics -- all of them state appointed -- what to preach to their congregations.

Laws that penalize any attempt to tamper with secularism continue to be strictly implemented under the government formed 17 months ago by a group of former Islamists.

Seeking to distance themselves from their militant past, Turkey’s new leaders said their chief objective was membership in the European Union.

To that end, parliament, dominated by the ruling Justice and Development Party, has approved sweeping reforms that include granting women further rights.

And Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has quietly shelved pre-electoral pledges to end bans on the Islamic head scarf in government-run institutions and schools.

Ali Bardakoglu, a liberal cleric brought in recently by the government to head the Religious Affairs Directorate, wowed women’s groups in March when he sought their help in penning a sermon condemning “honor killings,” the widespread slayings of females deemed to have stained their families’ reputation by associating with men who are neither husband nor kin.

News that parliament is debating new laws that would scrap reduced sentences for honor killings may not have reached Kotanduzu’s imam.

During a brief interview in Erzurum, Platin, a short, stocky man with a scraggly beard, said the inquiry barred his discussing events in Kotanduzu.

Yet, when asked about honor crimes, he responded without hesitation.

“They should be dealt with as prescribed by Sharia [Islamic law],” Platin said, as his wife, standing several feet away swathed in a black chador and matching satin gloves, peered through a tiny slit in her veil.

Did that mean that the Koran approved of such killings? The imam shrugged. “There is nothing in the Koran that either refers to or justifies honor killings,” said Nicole Pope, a Swiss researcher on honor crimes who is based in Turkey.

In what some locals speculate may be an attempt to get Platin off the hook, officials in Erzurum, the provincial capital, have ordered the cleric to undergo medical tests.

“He is an epileptic and is mentally unsound, the poor soul,” said Mustafa Ucar, the Religious Affairs representative.

“He was not taking his medication at the time he said those irresponsible things,” Ucar said. “The hospital told us that if he resumes his treatment, he can go back to his job, but we have to wait for the results of the investigation.”

Villagers in Kotanduzu agreed that Platin would frequently fall to the ground in epileptic fits, ramble incoherently at length, and offer wildly contradictory views on the same subject from one day to the next.

“We hope he recovers his health and finds new employment; at heart, I am sure he is a good man,” Karsli said. “But we don’t ever want him back here again.”