A controversial family. One of the main reasons? The headscarf Mrs. Gül wears.

Go to Turkish Daily News to find out more about Abdullah Gül’s wife, Hayrünisa Gül. She’s an independent thinking Lady, who dislikes many things, one of them being dependent on her husband.

Well, not entirely:

Although her family is well-off, she argued that she will be the one to lose if they went to a notary just after the change in the civil law for the property sharing between the man and woman.

“If I was in need of property, I could not ask my husband to give me any because of my pride. But if I would ask, I am sure that he would give me all his property. For example, I bought him a car but I know that if I didn’t have one, he would buy one for me. In Kayseri culture, many things are given to women. But today, I may be the one who loses if such an agreement is made.”

She is determined to wear her headscarf no matter what.

Hayrünisa Gül proposed a condition to her soon-to-be-husband in order to get married. “I didn’t want to give up education and he also did not demand that I did,” she said. After getting married, she completed her high school education but could not get a diploma in 1980, because of her headscarf…

After returning from Jeddah, she completed her education, entered the university exam in 1997 and was found eligible to study in the department of Arabic Language and Literature of Ankara University.

But because of her headscarf, she could not register at the university and applied to the Council of State (Danıştay). After a refusal, she applied to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) but after Gül became the foreign minister, she withdrew her application a month before the court’s March, 2004 decision, which was supportive of the university.

She also called the headscarf debate, which is raging in Turkey for quite a while already, “artificial.”

The issue is, of course, bigger than the headscarf. The real issue is secularism. Turkish secularists are proud that Turkey is a secular country and want to keep it that way. There are, however, many Turks who, to a degree, want to go back to the days of the Ottoman Empire, the rule of the Koran in public life. Not all Turks are secularists, to say the least, so secularists know that they have to guard their accomplishments closely.

In related news, it seems that Erdogan did want to run for President, but that he changed his mind after the mass anti-Erdogan / pro-Secularism demonstration (attended by 600,000 people) and the press conference of Chief of General Staff Gen. Yaşar Büyükanıt in which he said: “We hope to see a president who is bound with the principle of the state and secularism in essence and not in words.”

Erdogan then came up with a list with four names. He reduced it to two. The two remaining (possible) candidates were state minister Beşir Atalay and defense minister Vecdi Gönül. Then:

The latest obstacle was the AKP’s third powerful figure, the Parliament Speaker Bülent Arınç. At first Gül went to visit Arınç on April 21. Gül proposed the names but Arınç was extremely committed to nominating someone from the AKP whose wife wore a headscarf. Otherwise he would put himself forward for the presidency. Arınç put pressure on Gül and Erdoğan who visited him on Monday that “the president should be himself, Erdoğan or Gül.”

As Arınç could not be convinced, Erdoğan suggested Gül as the AKP candidate and Arınç approved this alternative. In AKP corridors, this result is seen as a victory for Arınç who is the representative of the conservative group in the party.

So now we know that the AKP made a very consciously decision to nominate someone whose wife wears a headscarf. This was not an accident, it was a requirement.

Secular Turkey, where art thou, while the Islamists are taking over?