Headscarves will likely get a boost, but the victory may come with a price, warns Gareth Jenkins More than 125,000 secularist Turks rallied in the centre of Ankara on Saturday to protest against plans by the ruling Justice and Development Party (JDP) to amend the Turkish constitution to lift the ban which currently prevents women wearing headscarves from attending university. Opinion polls suggest that around two-thirds of Turkish women cover their heads. However, hardline Turkish secularists have long regarded the headscarf as a symbol of a desire for a state based on Islamic Sharia law, and the presence of covered women in state institutions as a violation of the principle of secularism which is enshrined in the Turkish constitution. In spring 2007, hundreds of thousands of secularists staged demonstrations across the country in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to prevent the JDP from appointing Abdullah Gul, whose wife wears a headscarf, as Turkey's next president. Turkish secularists have long seen themselves as the heart of the Turkish nation. As a result, the landslide victory of the JDP in the July 2007 general election, in which it won nearly half of the popular vote, was a brutal reality check. Over the last six months, the secularist NGOs have been very subdued. When it became clear that the JDP was drafting a new constitution which would lift the headscarf ban, there were cries of protest but no mass demonstrations. Even the staunchly secularist Turkish military, which had publicly opposed Gul's candidacy for the presidency, remained silent, apparently unwilling to risk another humiliating demonstration of its inability to sway the Turkish public. At the end of November 2007, Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan announced that the draft of the new constitution would be made public in mid-December. But it did not appear. Under Turkish law, amending the existing constitution requires the support of two thirds of the members of parliament. The JDP currently has 341 seats in the 550-member assembly, just short of the 367 required. However, in mid- January, the opposition Nationalist Action Party (NAP), which has 70 seats, indicated that it would be prepared to support an attempt by the JDP to amend the existing constitution to lift the headscarf ban. Erdogan leapt at the opportunity. He cancelled a scheduled visit to the World Economic Forum summit meeting in Davos, where he had been due to try to rally international support for Turkey's slowing economy, and suspended virtually all other government business to try to push the constitutional amendment through parliament. JDP officials repeatedly insisted that lifting the headscarf ban was a question of freedom of expression and belief and would put an end to a system of religious discrimination. It is a strong argument. However, there has been a marked contrast between the energy and enthusiasm which the JDP has devoted to lifting the headscarf ban and its attitude towards other restrictions on freedom of expression. The JDP has long been under pressure to abolish the notorious Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code, which makes it an imprisonable offence to denigrate "Turkishness" and which has long been used to stifle freedom of speech. Turkey's large heterodox Alevi community still face restrictions on their ability to open their own places of worship, while their children are not allowed even to opt out of the lessons in Sunni Islam which are compulsory in all Turkish schools. To date, the JDP has made many promises both to the Alevis and on Article 301, but done nothing. Nor has it made a serious attempt to address the concerns of the country's even larger Kurdish minority, who still face numerous restrictions on their ability to express their own identity. If the JDP had tried to ease the headscarf ban gradually, or in a less confrontational manner than trying to embed a clause outlawing the ban in the Turkish constitution, it is doubtful whether it would have triggered such a furious reaction. As it is, the manner in which the JDP has tried to lift the ban has reinvigorated a secularist opposition which had been demoralised and deflated by the JDP's crushing electoral victory in July 2007. For the first time since spring 2007, secularist groups have once begun to mobilise. Last week, even the Turkish military subtly threw its weight behind the opposition to the lifting of the headscarf ban. In a carefully crafted statement to the Turkish media, Turkish Chief of Staff General Yasar Buyukanit declined to comment explicitly on the issue. "There is no segment of the Turkish population which does not know our opinion about this. There is no need to state the obvious," said Buyukanit. Critics now raise the bugaboo, almost certainly false, that the JDP could use its huge parliamentary majority to re-introduce Sharia law. By not compromising on the headscarf issue -- gradually easing the implementation of the ban or initially retaining it only for state-run universities -- the JDP has given secularists an inadvertent boost. Opinion polls suggest that the majority of the Turkish population favours lifting the ban. Yet even though the supporters of the ban are a numerical minority, they are a very powerful minority, comprising not only the Turkish establishment but the business elite and a majority of the urban professional classes. The decision by secularist NGOs to return once again to the streets on Saturday appears to suggest a newfound determination to combat the JDP, and threatens to deepen further divisions in what is already a dangerously polarised society. In the end, the JDP will probably win. But victory may come with a high price in terms of social stability at a time of increasingly political and economic fragility.
