ANKARA, 2 February 2008 — The Turkish government’s plans to allow women students to wear the head scarf at university will provoke campus chaos and street violence and end up destroying the secular state, university deans and teachers said yesterday.

Dozens of university deans yesterday warned the Islamic-rooted government and a conservative opposition party against lifting a decades-old ban on Islamic head scarves in universities, saying it would pose a serious threat to the country’s secular traditions.

Deans of several state and private universities gathered in Ankara as a parliamentary commission began debating the proposed measure days after Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AK Party) struck a deal with the Nationalist Action Party to allow women wearing head scarves on campuses.

Lawmakers from the secular Republican People’s Party opposed the measure in the commission meeting, but they lack seats to prevent the measure from being approved on the floor. A vote could come as early as next week. “Turkey is secular and will remain secular,” shouted some deans at the end of their meeting.

Thousands of secularists are expected to march in Ankara against the measure today. “We are warning those who support this measure and those who remain silent that it would erode the gains of the republic and the secular order will come to an end,” said Mustafa Akaydin, head of a council that serves as a bridge between universities. “It would inevitably transform the Turkish republic into a religious state.”

The deans are part of a Turkish secular elite, which also embraces army generals and the judiciary that sees the head scarf as a symbol of political Islam and thus a threat to the separation of state and religion.

“After such changes in the constitution and the law, the Republic of Turkey would inevitably turn into a religious state,” Akaydin said to loud applause from dozens of academics. “We are worried that the universities will be plunged into chaos... Universities are the venue for knowledge, not for (religious) faith,” he said, reading out a statement unanimously approved by the rectors after an emergency meeting in Ankara.

Some professors chanted “Turkey is secular and will remain secular” and held up a banner that read: “Enough already, wake up! Let’s protect the principles and revolution of Ataturk and the secular republic!” Kemal Ataturk is the revered soldier-statesman who founded the secular Turkish republic in 1923. Secularists plan a rally against the head scarf today at his Ankara mausoleum.

Under the government plan, the ban on the head scarf would remain for teachers and civil servants, but Akaydin said the change would “inevitably” spread in time to the civil service. The rector of Ankara’s Middle East Technical University warned of a return to the kind of political street violence that shook Turkey during previous decades if the reform passes. “University tensions spilled into the streets in the 1960s and 1970s. Now there is a danger once more of them spilling onto the streets,” Ural Akbulut said.

Members of Turkey’s judiciary and top businessmen have already slammed the head scarf plan and the main opposition party, the secularist CHP, has said it will try to block the reform through the Constitutional Court.