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Sibel Kekilli: "I still don't understand why women's hair should be covered"
Photo: HANNIBAL HANSCHKE / REUTERS
Actress Sibel Kekilli has criticized the fact that headscarves are compulsory in Iran.
"I still don't understand why women's hair should be covered," the 42-year-old wrote in a guest article for the weekly newspaper Die Zeit, referring to the protests in Iran.
What is happening there shakes her deeply.
Kekilli wrote to fundamentalist men: »But if our hair excites you, that fundamentalist male world, so much, is it really a problem for us women?
Isn't it time for men to control their excitement?'
Headscarf fight in the family
Sibel comes from a working-class family who came to Germany from Turkey in the late 1970s.
In Die Zeit she writes that there was also "a headscarf fight" within her family: "On the one hand there are the allegedly educated supporters of Atatürk, who advocated a modern, secular Turkey, and on the other hand the supporters of the Gray Wolves, i.e. the Turkish nationalists.«
Her father forbade her mother to wear a headscarf.
In doing so, he differentiated himself from those families that "were still firmly rooted in traditional religious structures."
Since her breakthrough with Fatih Akin's feature film »Gegen die Wand«, the internationally successful Kekilli has criticized the fact that girls of primary school age or after their first menstrual period have to cover themselves »so that they don't tempt the male world«.
In this way, women are made »the object of desire«.
The symbol for this is »the sexualized woman's hair«.
She has nothing against women choosing to wear a headscarf.
However, she is annoyed by the arguments of some feminists: "When middle-class German women try to explain to me that wearing a headscarf is the same as wearing a necklace with a cross around your neck, it makes me angry."
Kekilli's plea: »We women have our own mind.« And: »How we present ourselves is something we decide for ourselves.«
wit/AFP
