Muazzez Ilmiye Cig
Indonesians may have the right to say “wer’e not as bad as Turkey”, if the case of Muazzez Ilmiye Cig is anything to go on.
While the blasphemy laws in Indonesia claim their fair share of victims, such as Yusman Roy and Lia Eden, 92 year old academics who make scholarly comments on the origins of the headscarf, or jilbab, are likely to be safe, assuming any such people exist in Indonesia. They are not so in Turkey.
The Australian reports:
An eminent 92-year-old Turkish archaeologist is to go on trial for inciting religious hatred because she angered Islamist circles with a scientific paper saying that the use of headscarves by women dated back to pre-Islamic sexual rites.
Muazzez Ilmiye Cig, a danger to Turkish society.
Muazzez Ilmiye Cig, who has made a lifelong study of ancient Sumerian civilisation, suggests in a book published last year that the headscarf may have been first used by Sumerian temple priestesses whose job it was to initiate young men into the world of sex, directly.
A lawyer in the city of Izmir took offence and filed a complaint against Cig, resulting in a prosecutor charging both her and her publisher with “inciting hatred based on religious differences”. It seems that the thing which offends most is the suggestion that the hijab, and the sexualising of head hair, pre-dates the time of Mohammed, is a pagan practice, and has little to do with Islam.
Muazzez Ilmiye Cig is well-known in Turkey as a strong defender of secularism and has on occasion even criticised Emine Erdogan, the wife of Turkey’s Islamist prime minister, for wearing the head-scarf in public.
Muazzez Ilmiye Cig goes on trial today and faces three years in prison if convicted. In Indonesia it would be five.
