Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan has accused opponents of the Islamic-style headscarf for women of trying to sow division in secular but predominantly Muslim Turkey.
Turkey's Islamist-rooted government has come under intense pressure from secular opponents, including army generals, over its plan to lift a decades-old ban on women students wearing the headscarf at university.
"I have a few words for those who claim that secularism will be destroyed, Turkey will become a state of religion, the basic values of the Republic will be demolished, and people who do not wear headscarves will be under pressure," Mr Erdogan was quoted as saying in a speech in Istanbul late yesterday.
"Aren't you the ones dividing the society by blaming everybody who does not think or dress like you for being the enemy of secularism or the regime," Mr Erdogan said, according to the state news agency Anatolian.
More than 120,000 secular Turks held rallies in the capital Ankara and other cities on Saturday against the headscarf reform, which they say would usher in a stricter form of Islam in Turkey.
The powerful secular establishment, which includes generals, judges and university rectors, sees the headscarf as a symbol of radical Islam and believes lifting the ban would undermine the separation of state and religion, one of the founding principles of the modern Turkish republic.
The republic was founded as a secular state by Kemal Ataturk in 1923 from the wreckage of the Islam-based Ottoman Empire.
As recently as 1997 a group of army generals, acting with public support, ousted a government they deemed too Islamist.
"Ataturk gave us democracy. We do not want to turn back the clock and become like our Arab neighbours who are still developing nations," said Can Atessal, an international relations student at Ankara's Bilkent University.
Financial markets are watching the debate nervously.