TURKEY: It's graduation week in Turkey, a time of pride for students and parents. In theory, at least.
Celebrations this year have been tarnished by the decision of a tiny minority of universities to refuse entrance to female relatives who were wearing headscarves.
"I was turned away like a common criminal," wept Sabire Karsi, sitting outside Erzerum's Ataturk University, where the younger of her sons was receiving his degree. The other died fighting Kurdish separatists in 1995.
"This was an isolated and provocative event," said university rector Yasar Sutbeyaz. "Carrying out the state's instructions makes the state strong." He was referring to the touchstone of Turkish republicanism, its staunch secularism.
Similar arguments failed to convince families attending a graduation ceremony at Istanbul's Marmara University. When officials denied entrance to an 85-year-old grandmother who refused to uncover her head, they and the students walked out in protest.
The ceremony was postponed.
Since 1997, when the military nudged Turkey's first Islamist-led government out of power, few issues have divided public opinion as much as the headscarf, worn in various forms by around 70 per cent of Turkish women.
For some, it is a dangerous political symbol. Others see restrictions on its use as a rights violation. For years, university students have had to remove their headscarves before attending classes. This week's bans on parents are a novelty.
For most commentators, they have more to do with state attempts to destabilise Turkey's present government, rooted in political Islam, than with any real concern for secularism.
Take the annual drinks party in the presidential residence, says political commentator Hasan Cemal.
For years, headscarved women could attend. "As soon as this government came to power, they were forbidden."
Judging by a bizarre debate that has raged for the past fortnight, the sceptics may be right.
Devoid of any discernible political programme of its own, the pro-state parliamentary opposition suddenly began insisting on early elections. Without them, it argued, the present government would be in a position to elect Turkey's new president in 2007.
If the next president's wife wears a headscarf, argued opposition leader Deniz Baykal, "it will become impossible to walk Turkey's streets bare-headed." Editor of liberal daily Radikal, Ismet Berkan thinks Mr Baykal and his colleagues have misread the Turkish public.
"If you put secularism to a referendum, 90 per cent of the public would approve," he notes. "If the headscarf is put to the vote, over 80 per cent would vote for an end to the headscarf ban."
"The state and the opposition are playing with fire," agrees Hasan Cemal.