Islam, Women’s Movement and Feminism: They Are Possible Together

Reçel Blog, which defines itself as an online platform initiated in 2014 for women -particularly Muslim women- to tell their stories about their daily life experiences; to give a voice to their hopes, concerns, struggles, interests and thoughts about social issues, has started a new project.

Within the frame of the project, a workshop called “Is Islam, Women’s Movement and Feminism Possible Together?” was held on 2nd of May in Taksim Avantgarde Otel. The workshop was the first event of Reçel Talks and Workshops and it brought women from different backgrounds together to discuss and be in solidarity.

Rümeysa Çamdereli, the founding editor of Reçel Blog, hosted the first session of the workshop and gave a general view of the writers and posts on the blog. She highlighted the fact that anonymous writing makes women feel free about talking about their experiences and explained that the blog posts are generally defined by country’s agenda, political atmosphere, social mechanisms like family and marriage.

Ayşe Yıldırım from “Muslims against Violence against Women Initiative” talked about the political contribution of the platform consisted of Muslim women to the women’s movement. She indicated that it is only possible for someone who get his/her reference from Islamic sources to move away from equality and justice if s/he gets closer to unearned income and power. Nur Kıpçak, who prepared a thesis called “Place and Ideology: Gender Roles in Mosques”, talked about women’s representation in public arena and informed the audience on the historical process behind political bans and the creation of “Republic’s woman” type. Şefika Özer, the last speaker of the panel, mentioned about different movements of feminism and their common grounds in Turkey.

The second part mostly consisted of Q&A and group discussions. Participants discussed if Islam complies with feminism and mentioned the need to re-talk about concepts like intersectional feminism, secularism and laicism. Islam and headscarf issue, fasting in Ramadan, public and private space differences for consuming alcohol were discussed under the titles of secularism and laicism.

A participant, who defined herself as a secular feminist, said that feminist movement could not establish a common ground for itself. She said that she believes Muslim feminists have a chance to establish this ground, although there are ongoing discussions about big issues like homosexuality.

Another participant shared her thoughts saying that laicism is a new discussion and needs to be re-thought from a libertarian point of view. “Back In 1998 -when I joined the feminist movement in the university- cultural pluralism, nationalism and racism were the most common topics,” she said.

Another participant noted that according to her secularism is very important also for religious people because political Islam tends to exploit religion for political gain.  “In what kind of a country can a Muslim women be happier and feel more comfortable?” was one of the most discussed questions in the session.

“We, as Reçel Blog team, believe that Islam, women’s movement and feminism can be together and that’s why we wanted to start this project. We hope to meet many new women on the way and be in solidarity with ourselves,” said Rümeysa Çamdereli.

Reçel Blog held their first workshop themed “education” on May 19th in Studio-X. This workshop will be followed by workshops on family and business life.