The make-over of a first lady

So, as I read on BBC recently, our new first lady will be given a make-over. Now that Abdullah Gul is appointed to the Turkish presidency, all eyes are on his wife more than ever before as she wears the headscarf, which has caused huge rifts in Turkish society between the devout Muslims and the strict seculars. (Side note: I HATE it when the foreign press refers to the Turkish secularists as the elite stratosphere of Turkish society. First of all, there's nothing elite about my family. Some of my family members can't even afford to buy a car, which is a must-have in Turkey. Also, I think everyone's mistaking secularism for atheism. Many muslims are still secular. If someone is a devout muslim, that doesn't mean they can't be secular...It also pisses me off royally when the foreign press use images of women in bikinis to represent secularism and a poor, hungry kid to represent the Muslim population in Turkey. Reminder to all: 98% of Turks are Muslims, including the ones wearing the freakin' bikinis...)

To get back to the point, apparently a Turkish designer (who lives in Vienna..ahem..I wonder why...?) is now designing new looks for Hayrunisa Gul, so she can be as stylish as Audrey Hepburn in the '20s. The designer, Atil Kutoglu, says that he wants to bring back the glamour of the 20s and 30s to modernize Gul's look. Now, I do like the idea of modernizing the headscarf and making it more like a fashion accessory to ease it for the Western stares, but doesn't this prove that even the Guls themselves don't feel comfortable with the traditional headscarf... what does that tell you?

Maybe Erdogan and Gul have really changed and become modern muslim seculars, and now they're slowly trying to shake off the image that they created so boldly when they were together with Necmettin Erbakan. They're trying to shake off their islamist image from those days, but therein lies the problem: no one believes them, because no one trusts them. They shouldn't really be surprised at this though. These are men who said that democracy was a tool to get what they really want, but that it wasn't essential. Now how am I supposed to trust them? Maybe they think that if they modernize the headscarf, I'll be fooled by the Louise Vuitton or Vera Wang headscarf my new first lady wears. And I'll say to them "It's not the cloth that matters, but what ideology lies beneath it." Now, can they change that?

Some headscarf alternatives from Vera Wang follow.