The Turkish headscarf ban, whose roots date back almost 90 years to the early days of the Turkish Republic, has kept many women from joining the public work force, but secularists see its abolition as evidence of the government pushing an Islamic agenda.

The new rules, which will not apply to the judiciary or the military, were published in the Official Gazette and take immediate effect in the majority Muslim but constitutionally secular country.

“A regulation that has hurt many young people and has caused great suffering to their parents, a dark period, is coming to an end,” Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan told a meeting of his AK Party, which has its roots in Islamist politics.

The debate around the head scarf goes to the heart of tensions between religious and secular elites, a major fault line in Turkish public life.

Erdogan’s critics see his AK Party as seeking to erode the secular foundations of the republic built on the ruins of an Ottoman theocracy by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in 1923.

“There was a witch hunt for civil servants with a headscarf,” said Safiye Ozdemir, a high-school teacher in Ankara who for years had to remove her head scarf at work against her wishes, but had started to defy the ban in recent months.

“Today it became clear that we’ve been right. So we are happy, and we are proud. It’s a decision that came in very late, but at least it came, thank God.”

The lifting of the ban, based on a cabinet decree from 1925 when Ataturk introduced a series of clothing reforms meant to banish overt symbols of religious affiliation for civil servants, is part of a “democratisation package” unveiled by Erdogan last week.   »»» Reuters

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s own wife was usually seen in public wearing a headscarf. Even more important, Kemal himself once said that women’s headscarves did NOT threaten the secular foundation of the modern Turkish State.

Kemal wrote, “The religious covering of women will not cause difficulty…. This simple style [of headcovering] is not in conflict with the morals and manners of our society.” (Quoted in Atatürkism, Volume 1 (Istanbul: Office of the Chief of General Staff, 1982), page 126).

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