Secularists look to the court to defy the headscarf amendment, says Gareth Jenkins Over 200,000 secularist Turks took to the streets of Ankara on Saturday to protest against attempts by the ruling Justice and Development Party (JDP) to amend the Turkish constitution to make it easier to lift the ban which currently prevents women wearing headscarves from attending university. Waving Turkish flags and holding aloft portraits of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the fiercely secularist founder of the modern Turkish Republic, the protesters chanted anti-Islamist slogans and swore to prevent the JDP from ever allowing headscarfed women to enter university. The scenes were reminiscent of the mass public protests in spring 2007 when hundreds of thousands of secularist Turks took to the streets to try to prevent the JDP appointing the then Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, whose wife wears a headscarf, to the presidency. But there is no indication that the protesters will be any more successful this time than they were last year. In the general election of July 2007, the JDP was returned to power in a landslide, winning 46.6 per cent of the popular vote. Abdullah Gul was eventually sworn in as president in August 2007, giving Turkey a headscarfed first lady for the first time since the days of Ataturk himself. On Saturday, supported by the ultranationalist Nationalist Action Party, the JDP succeeded in changing articles 10 and 42 of the constitution to include guarantees that no one can be prevented from having access to public services, including education, on account of their beliefs and that no one can be denied an education except for a reason "explicitly stated in law". The amendments secured the support of 403 of the 550 members of Turkey's unicameral parliament. In themselves, the amendments will not lead to a lifting of the headscarf ban, which is based on university regulations rather than the constitution. Ultimately, it is these university regulations which would have to be changed. Nevertheless, as soon as they have been ratified by President Gul and published in the Official Gazette, the main opposition Republican People's Party has sworn to apply to the Constitutional Court for the amendments to be annulled. Whether or not the court will do so is unclear. It is possible that it may decide that the headscarf already falls under the category of reasons "explicitly stated in law" as a Constitutional Court ruling of March 1989 described a proposal to allow university students to cover their heads "for reasons of religious belief" as a violation of the principle of secularism, enshrined in Article 2 of the Turkish constitution as one of the defining characteristics of the Turkish Republic. It may also cite a 2004 ruling by the European Court of Human Rights, which ruled that the headscarf ban in Turkish universities was legal because it was necessary to protect the rights of those who did not cover their heads. Given that opinion polls suggest around two thirds of Turkish women cover their heads, this meant that -- somewhat bizarrely -- the ECHR was arguing that the rights of the majority of Turkish women to cover their heads should be suppressed in order to protect the rights of the minority who do not. The secularists' support for the headscarf ban in universities often seems to follow the same convoluted logic. The teaching of Sunni Islam is compulsory in all Turkish schools, even for students who are not Sunni Muslims. The Directorate for Religious Affairs, which comes under the Prime Ministry, pays the wages of all Sunni Muslim clergy in the country, who are classed as civil servants, and finances the building of mosques and the propagation of Sunni Islam beliefs. No state funding is available for other religious communities in Turkey, not even for Turkey's substantial heterodox Alevi community. Yet such preferential treatment is not regarded as a violation of secularism. Nevertheless, even if it is not entirely logical, there is no question that the headscarf ban in universities has immense symbolic significance for hardline Turkish secularists. For some, it is also likely that the problem is not so much the students wearing headscarves as the fear that lifting the ban would be regarded as a victory for political Islam and would merely be the first step in a process which would eventually lead to the creation of an Islamist state. Many liberals who support allowing covered students into universities have also been alarmed by the contrast between the JDP's insistence that lifting the headscarf ban is a question of freedom of expression and its refusal to lift the many other restrictions in Turkey, such as limits imposed on the expression of Kurdish identity and the notorious Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code, which makes it an imprisonable offence to denigrate Turkishness. Regardless of whether or not the JDP succeeds in lifting the headscarf ban, its attempts to do so appear to have reopened the divisions in Turkish society over the role of religion in public life. Even if the proponents of the headscarf ban constitute a minority of the population as a whole, they are a powerful minority; and still dominate the higher echelons of the education system. "I'm not religious myself but in principle I support the lifting of the headscarf ban," said one university lecturer who asked not to be named. "But I am worried about what will happen. I already have problems in some of my classes. Where religious students are in the majority they attempt to prevent more secular students from expressing their views. And when secular students are in the majority they disparage and denigrate the more pious students. But some of my academic colleagues are even worse. Their interpretation of secularism is like fascism. They are in the majority in my faculty and if the headscarf ban is lifted I know that these secularists will just make life hell for any girl who turns up for class with her head covered."
