Kemalism and the Islam: Legitimizing Discrimination Against Veiled Students in Turkish Daily Newspapers

In this book, I explored the discursive strategies used to represent veiled women in Kemalist discourse, with a particular focus on the manipulative use of language aimed at legitimizing the discrimination against veiled female students in the Republic of Turkey during the second half of the 20th century and the early 21st century. The theoretical and analytical framework for this research is rooted in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), which gives the study its interdisciplinary character. In the first and second chapters, I presented the theoretical foundation and key principles of CDA. Methodologically, the research adopts Norman Fairclough's triadic structure of discourse, comprising text, discursive practice, and sociocultural practice. In the third chapter, I analyzed sociocultural practice through the example of textbooks used in the Republic of Turkey for the subject Atatürk İlkeleri ve İnkılâp Tarihi "Ataturk’s Principles and History of the Revolution". I identified the core discursive strategies of Kemalist discourse, which are rooted in the narratives found in these textbooks, and then deconstructed them using contemporary literature.
In the final chapter, I analyzed how the newspapers Cumhuriyet, Hürriyet, Radikal, and Sabah reported on the discrimination faced by veiled female students, who were banned from attending universities in the Republic of Turkey. I found that these newspapers employed the following strategies to relativize and legitimize this discrimination: a) Dehumanization b) Delegitimization c) Mystification of agency and responsibility of Kemalist elites and d) Shifting the responsibility for discrimination onto veiled female students. The realization of these strategies involved the use of linguistic tools such as nominalization, passive voice, subordination through participles, metonymy, metaphor, and pronouns. These findings confirmed the justification and importance of including linguistics in interdisciplinary social research.