When boredom struck Esra Erdogan, daughter of the prime minister of Turkey and a soon to be IU graduate, she escaped the doldrums of daily life at her Islamic high school in Istanbul by coordinating protests with her friends. \n"Whenever there was a protest, the teachers would blame her," Erdogan's younger sister Sumeyye, a freshman, said smiling. "She's just like my father (Tayyip) … the way she acts, appears, the way she uses her hands, even her personal characteristics."\nDespite Erdogan's expertise in instigating protests, she didn't organize the national rallies held throughout Turkey in 1998.\nA potential politician, Erdogan hopes to offer a more concrete sense of Turkey's role in the constantly shifting international kaleidoscope, she said. As the war on terror rages through the world, Turkey's responsibilities in the affairs of democratizing the Middle East have become more critical, as witnessed when Tayyip's visit with President Bush last fall made front-page news in The New York Times. \nDespite personal, regional and global struggles, Erdogan, a sociology and history major, has remained focused, allowing her optimism to overshadow political setbacks. Graduating from IU in three years, 19-year-old Erdogan has decided to further her education by attending one of the nation's top sociology programs at the University of California Berkeley.\nWhile in school in Turkey, Erdogan wore a hijab (the Islamic head scarf) to school for five years. \nRumors of a head scarf ban floated throughout the school, but students scoffed at the possibility. \n"What people wear doesn't mean much for that person's political background," Erdogan said, shifting her weight.
The day hearsay transformed into reality, Erdogan remembers her tenth-grade teacher asking one of her friends to read the official statement to the class. \nDespite the pressure, Erdogan and the 39 other young women in the class refused to remove their hijabs.\n"I don't see myself having a political agenda," Erdogan said. "I see myself just wearing a scarf, it's not about anything political. I see myself as a religious person trying to live my life as a Muslim."\nFor weeks, she skipped her mandatory national security class (the only one, in which the teacher required students to take off their hijabs). An honor student who began school in the second grade when she was five years old, Erdogan endangered her educational future. \nWhen the first report cards were distributed, Erdogan didn't receive a grade for national security, a grave problem, because she needed the course to graduate. \n"We were begging the professor to give us a zero, give us something," Erdogan said, her eyes still pleading with the memory.\nSumeyye said she remembers how much pain the ban brought to her older sister. Erdogan would cry within the comforts of her home because of the incomprehensible sense of apathy shown by Turks in a moment of political havoc, she said. At the same time, her father was imprisoned for allegedly inciting violence through a poem he recited at a political rally.\nThe hijab ban led Erdogan's eager mind to question the ways in which humans think and interact.\n"I realized people in Turkey didn't react to politics," Erdogan said. "They saw the government in Turkey as a father figure and didn't question it."\nPeople stopped searching for their natural rights, she said. Instead, parents began asking their children to conform to policies with which they themselves did not agree.\nShe wanted to discover why Turks reacted differently than the rest of the world. She hoped to find answers with a major in sociology. \nShe came to IU because people graduating from Islamic high schools were placed at a disadvantage when applying for Turkish colleges. The university entrance exams were slanted to hurt students graduating from occupation and technical high schools, which included Islamic schools. She didn't apply to Bosphorus University, the school she wanted to attend, because she knew her chances of admission were slim. Erdogan's older brother Bilal, now at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, was an undergraduate student at IU. Rather than live thousands of miles from home without any familiar faces, Erdogan decided to attend IU and stay close to the comforts of her brother. \nBorn and raised in Istanbul, politics have always surrounded Erdogan. Her father served as the mayor of Istanbul in 1994 and is chair of Turkey's ruling political party, the Justice and Development Party.\nOn March 9, her father was elected to parliament from Siirt, the same city in which he was banned from politics. \n"There were a series of bans in Turkish politics," Erdogan said with a giggle, her dark, deep brown eyes dancing with excitement. \nShe leaned over to the coffee table to sneak a piece of Turkish delight into her mouth. She smiled, allowing two faint dimples to crease her fair, rosy complexion.\nAs the daughter of a politician, Erdogan said she's become accustomed to Turkey's twin national papers, the Istanbul Milliyet and Istanbul Hurriyet documenting every detail of her family's life. \n"(The media) try to damage us from all sides," Erdogan said. "The news is biased and not from first-person accounts. It's really subjective decisions based on the biased news."\nIronically, despite accusations of corruption toward Erdogan's father, his recent election proves the news has had little success in shaping public opinion. \nMost people who meet Erdogan, such as sociology professor Christine Von Der Haar, are struck by her humbleness.\nHer parents continue to live in the family's rented house rather than in a presidential palace.\n"Today, you're at the top of the world, tomorrow you may be at the bottom," Erdogan said. \nLast fall, Erdogan served as a teaching assistant for Von Der Haar's introductory sociology class. \nEven with her father's powerful political role, Erdogan hasn't lost her human side, Von Der Haar said. \n"She's selfless," Von Der Haar said. "She's able to put herself in the position of someone else and understand how they feel." \nWhen Erdogan's father proclaimed victory in the Turkish elections, Erdogan postponed her happiness out of consideration for Von Der Haar, whose father had passed away the same week. \nEven though she's assimilated herself into the Bloomington community, Erdogan said she misses Turkey immensely. The educational quality of her high school dramatically decreased because of the head scarf ban. \n"It's going to take a lot of time to rebuild," Erdogan said. \nHowever, her optimism surpassed all initial concerns. Although Turkey is not an ideal democracy, Erdogan said its long history of democracy dating back to 1923 when the republic was established can prove a solid example to Middle Eastern neighbors. \n"It's still not perfect, but with the (European Union) laws and harmonization laws, it's becoming a better democracy," Erdogan said.\nThough religious freedom is not Turkey's top priority, Erdogan said once people understand freedom in general, religious freedom will automatically follow.
