For nearly half a century you have devoted the content of textbooks, the capacity of education, the capacity of the media, and the advertising space of billboards and walls across the country to what you call the “positive promotion” of compulsory hijab—using images of wrapped sweets, fruit in boxes and refrigerators—and you have achieved no result.

Across three generations you have also spent the capacity of the police, informal forces of repression and the judicial system on the negative struggle against what you call improper veiling, loose veiling and lack of veiling, and again the result has been nothing but overt and hidden aversion and resistance. It never will be otherwise.

Despite all this, in an ignorance difficult to describe, you imagine the problem is the number of billboards, television programmes, textbook pages, morality-police and repressive forces, the number of text messages, sealed businesses and arrested citizens.

If only you could stop for a moment and reflect on this futile madness. Why should the future of these methods be more effective or better than their past?

The root of this painful tragedy lies within you: in your elementary failure to understand human nature and the relationship between human free will, religion and the moral sphere. You will not understand it until the day when, through your insistence on this ignorance, you leave the doors of this country’s history for good and turn yourselves into a historical lesson in everything a government must never do to its citizens.

Aydin Areta