Hawzah News Agency - (Istanbul - Turkey) - Writer, journalist and activist Şule Yüksel Şenler, a figure credited with introducing the modern headscarf to generations of Muslim women and known for her work for a more active role for Muslim women in society, passed away yesterday at the age of 81. Doctors at the Istanbul hospital where she has been in intensive care for about five months for congestive heart failure announced that she died of a septic shock. For younger generations, Şenler is known for her novel "Huzur Sokağı" ("Peace Street"), which was recently adapted into a popular TV drama.

For popular culture pundits, she was the writer who introduced Emine Erdoğan to her future husband, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Şenler was, of course, more than this and left her mark in the history of Muslim women in modern Turkey with her writings .

She was born in 1938 in central Turkey's Kayseri to a relatively secular family, who later settled in Istanbul. Şenler dropped out of school and had to work when her family went bankrupt and her mother ailed. She worked as an assistant to an Armenian tailor after leaving middle school, an experience that later led her design of a new type of headscarf for conservative women.

Şenler was a new voice for Muslim women in overtly "secular" Turkey where Muslim women were shunned in social life and faced a dire choice of either downplaying their religious views or risk criticism and worse by wearing a headscarf. Her articles and a series of conferences in the 1960s and 1970s helped shape the identity of well-educated Muslim women who increasingly took to wearing the headscarf. The headscarf issue that would haunt Muslim women for decades to come and led to their persecution, was Şenler's most renowned cause. So much so, women choosing to wrap their headscarf like her would be called "Şulebaş" (Şule head).