ANKARA, 18 January 2008 — A top Turkish court prosecutor condemned as unconstitutional yesterday plans by Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan to end a ban on the Islamic head scarf in universities, rekindling tensions over the role of religion. The head scarf is a highly sensitive issue in Muslim but secular Turkey, pitting Erdogan’s Islamist-rooted government against a secular elite including judges and army generals who see the garment as a threat to separation of state and mosque.
Last year, the issue triggered early parliamentary elections following mass secularist rallies and tough army warnings. “Allowing the wearing of certain garments in institutions of learning will turn them into areas of activities counter to secularism and the unitary structure of the state,” the chief prosecutor of the Court of Appeals, Abdurrahman Yalcinkaya, said in a statement run by the state Anatolian news agency.
Political parties supporting such change would bear legal responsibility for fomenting divisions among the population, he said, in language clearly intended to warn the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) against trying to dilute one of the secular republic’s key taboos.
But Erdogan, who sees the head scarf as an issue of freedom of expression, is under pressure from AK Party grass-roots supporters to act quickly to remove the ban after he swept back to power in last summer’s early election. The AK Party had previously said it would try to relax the ban via a planned new constitution, but it could take at least a year for parliament and the public — via a referendum — to approve the charter.
But returning from a trip to Spain late on Wednesday, Erdogan said: “There is no need to wait for the new constitution. Solving this issue is very simple. We will sit down together and solve it with just one sentence.”
Of the two main opposition parties in parliament, the ultra-nationalist MHP has expressed support for relaxing the ban but the staunchly secularist CHP is opposed to change.
“The MHP has said ‘we’re in’. If the CHP isn’t, so be it. We will continue with those who are (ready for change),” said Erdogan, a pious Muslim whose wife wears the head scarf. CHP lawmaker Mustafa Ozyurek condemned the proposal, saying it violated the constitution and the principle of secularism.
But MHP leader Devlet Bahceli responded positively yesterday with a suggestion to amend the present constitution to say all beneficiaries of public services — including education — must be treated equally. “This would solve the problem without causing political and social tensions,” Bahceli said.
The MHP has long backed relaxing the headscarf ban because, like the AK Party, it counts among its supporters many religiously conservative small businessmen and farmers in rural Turkey where a majority of women cover their heads.
