TURKEY:Turkey's ruling AK Party and opposition nationalists unveiled plans yesterday to ease a ban on wearing Muslim headscarves in universities that try to address the worries of the country's secular elite.
The new proposal would only lift the ban for women who tie the headscarf under their chin in the traditional Turkish way. The increasingly popular wraparound version, seen as a symbol of political Islam, will continue to be banned on campuses.
Burkas, which cover the whole body, and other forms of Islamic dress will remain banned. University teachers and civil servants will continue to be barred from covering their heads.
"Under our plan, the [ woman's] face must remain open and so a person will not be permitted to conceal her identity," Devlet Bahceli, leader of the Nationalist Movement Party, told his MPs.
Turkish secularists have long opposed any easing of the ban, saying it could harm the separation of state and religion. The issue sparked an early election last year after mass secular rallies and army warnings.
"Our sole goal is to end the injustice against our women students, we have no other aim. These changes are limited to higher education," prime minister Tayyip Erdogan told lawmakers from his religiously oriented AK Party.
Mr Erdogan, who once served a short jail sentence for reading a poem deemed too Islamist and whose wife and daughters all wear the headscarf, has to tread warily for fear of provoking a harsh reaction from army generals. The staunchly secular army, with public backing, ousted a government it saw as too Islamist as recently as 1997.
Underlining the sensitivity of the issue, the AK Party launched an investigation on Monday into one of its deputies who said the eventual goal was to lift the ban. The MP could face party disciplinary proceedings.
"We know there are people who are trying to provoke this process, but I believe we will all act with a view to strengthening social harmony," said Mr Erdogan, who is under pressure at his party's grassroots level to reform the law.
"Turkish politics has suffered a great deal because of rigid [ secularist] prejudices," he added. Members of Turkey's judiciary and university rectors have criticised the proposal as unconstitutional and damaging to "social peace". But the army, which sees itself as the ultimate guarantor of the secular order, has stayed quiet.
Despite the relatively modest scope of the planned reform, secularists are worried that in practice the changes will, over time, increase pressure on women, especially in conservative rural areas, to cover their heads.
"When the ban is lifted, there will be such pressure that it will be nearly impossible for women not to cover their heads," Ergun Ozbudun, a professor at Ankara's Bilkent University, said.
"We should not try to expand one woman's freedom at the expense of another's . . . Tomorrow this freedom will be extended to primary and high school education and then to the civil service, and finally Turkey will have an Islamic way of life."