Islam and female identıty in Turkey

Abstract

There are several hypotheses regarding the construction of females’ Ego and social identity within Islamic Countries. Many of them discuss, in particular, whether the Identity of Islamic women may be under the pressure of male chauvinist society or not. On this account the present paper has been conceived to bring out the ego identity statuses of young Turkish Islamic females. The sample used to this end consisted of 200 young females who have been living in Turkey under Islamic rules between the age of 18 to 30. The results show that the Identity achievements subject’s scores are higher in many Ego identity domains than in other ego identity statutes. This means that, contrary to expectations, these women explore and make their own decisions without any pressure coming neither from their family nor from the male chauvinistic society. It seems therefore that they tend to choose a different way of self-actualization. We might say that the recent shift from tradition to modernity recently witnessed in Turkey has re-evaluated the effect of urbanization and the evaluation of modernity in a different perspective.