ANKARA, 20 September 2007 — Turkey’s prime minister and president have urged the abolition of a ban on the Islamic head scarf in universities amid a simmering controversy on whether a planned new constitution should lift the restrictions. Both leaders, former Islamists whose wives and daughters wear the head scarf, argued that the ban violated individual freedoms and the right to education of women who cover up.

“The right to higher education cannot be restricted because of what a girl wears,” Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in an interview with the Financial Times published yesterday. “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,” he said.

Secularist forces, which include the army, senior judges and the academic elite, see the head scarf as a symbol of defiance of Turkey’s fiercely guarded secular system. Many fear that easing the restrictions will erode the country’s secular fabric and raise the profile of religion in public life.

President Abdullah Gul, who belonged to the AKP until he became head of state in a crisis-ridden election last month, also backed the abolition of the ban. “It is much better for (women who cover up) to go to university than to stay home and be isolated from social life,” Gul told the Milliyet newspaper.

“We have to see the issue from the point of individual freedoms and as a result of modernity,” he said. Gul played down concerns that lifting the ban might result in women who do not wear the headscarf coming under social pressure from conservatives to cover up.

“We are people who have lived side by side in peace... There can be both girls who cover up and who do not in the same family. This is our social structure and we have lived like that for years,” he said.

Erdogan pledged that a comprehensive debate would be held on the new constitution draft before it is brought to parliament for a vote. “We want a constitution that is going to provide and protect a state that is a democratic, secular, social state of law,” he told the Financial Times.

Turkey’s top academics yesterday strongly objected to any moves to allow the much-disputed headwear on to campuses as unlawful. “The head scarf ban is a legal situation based on rulings passed by Turkish courts as well as the European Court of Human Rights,” Erdogan Tezic, the head of the Higher Education Board, said here after an extraordinary meeting of the rectors’ committee.

“It is not possible to make changes in the constitution that would allow freedom of dress,” he added. In 2005, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the head scarf ban in Turkish universities was not a violation of fundamental freedoms and could be necessary to protect Turkey’s secular order against extremist movements. Public servants are also barred from wearing the head scarf in Turkey.

Erdogan’s Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP) has started drafting a new constitution, boosted by its landslide election victory in July that gave it a second five-year mandate. The current constitution is a legacy of the 1980 military coup. It has been amended several times but its many critics say a fundamental overhaul is needed to stamp out its authoritarian spirit and make it fully democratic.

But there are widespread concerns that the new code will be the fruit of the AKP rather than one of national consensus. “The fact that the constitutional amendments are being drawn up by one political party casts a shadow on democracy,” Tezic said. “The way the draft is being prepared has led to social unease and insecurity.”

According to media reports, AKP leaders, wary of a secularist backlash, are hesitating on whether to press ahead with lifting the head scarf ban in the new constitution and have left the decision to Erdogan.

Erdogan’s government has pledged to replace Turkey’s military-era constitution with a new charter that puts the focus on individual rights and freedoms and is more in line with the requirements of the European Union, which Ankara aims to join.

“We want a constitution that is going to provide and protect a state that is a democratic, secular, social state of law,” Erdogan told the FT. “This constitution is going to point Turkey in a certain direction and it is our duty to debate it and consult with people in the widest possible sense,” he said.

The AK Party is currently debating a draft text drawn up by a team of legal experts but Turkish media say it is still divided over how to broach the headscarf issue in the charter. Turkey’s military, which views itself as the ultimate guarantor of the secular order, is closely watching the debates, as are nervous financial markets. Ten years ago the army, with strong public support, ousted a government seen as too Islamist.