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Turkey's PM Wants To Lift Headscarf Ban
Only weeks after the election of moderate Islamist Abdullah Gul as President, his party colleague Recep Tayyip Erdogan has called for the removal of a controversiala piece of secular legislation: The ban on female students wearing headscarves in universities.
Turkey's secularists worried that Gul's election would remove the country's last democratic obstacle to Islam-inspired legislative change: Gul responded that he would rule for all Turks. However minor the proposed change appears to westerners, the PM and President are sure to be condemned for pushing forward an agenda of "creeping Islamification" in public life.
Mr Erdogan's call comes as the AK Party (variously described as "mildly" or "formerly" Islamist) draws up a new constitution following its landslide election victory in July.
The BBC reports that Turkey's long-standing separation of church and state is an important issue for the new treaty. The current constitution strictly separates the two to the extent that Islamic women who choose to manifest their faith through traditional headscarves are all but barred from public life (though the headscarf-wearing wives of AK Party leaders would be an exception to this).
The ban on headscarves in universities would seem oddly discriminatory, not least given the fact that British universities have no shortage of students who wear the voile. However, Turkey's secularists would perhaps argue that they are better positioned that westerners to judge the dangers of "opening the floodgates" to Islamist sentiment, even via minor concessions. Fundamentalists and revolutionaries are rarely satisfied with minor victories and once one obstacle is overcome, demand for more can be rapacious.
Mr Erdgogan and Mr Gul, however, are determined to depict their planned changes as sweetly reasonable: "The right to higher education cannot be restricted because of what a girl wears," he said, ""There is no such problem in Western societies, but there is a problem in Turkey and I believe it is the first duty of those in politics to solve this problem."
The BBC notes that the European Court of Human Rights upheld the ban on headscarves in universities in 2005, judging it might be needed to uphold secularism in the country.
More on this issue, including the Turkish Army's role in upholding the secular constitution (and the AK's stated determination to uphold the constitution) here.
