Headscarved women protest Turkish court ruling

Hundreds of headscarved women protested in Turkey on Friday against a court ruling to cancel a reform which would have allowed students to wear the Muslim garment at university.

About 500 women demonstrated in the southeastern city of Diyarbakir after Friday prayers and hundreds more in colourful headscarves chanted slogans in Istanbul.

"I'm crushed and feel hopeless. I really don't feel equal to anybody else in this country anymore," said Esra Altinay Ozbecetek, 29, who ditched university when she was 19 because she was not allowed to wear her headscarf to class.

"For 10 years I've watched people enter and graduate from university and I've just sat by and watched," she said.

Like Altinay Ozbecetek, thousands of women have not gone to university because of the ban, which has been enforced strictly since 1997, or have gone abroad to study.

The AK Party, whose roots are in political Islam, passed the amendment earlier this year to allow students to wear the headscarf at university - angering the secularist establishment which sees the headscarf as a symbol of political Islam.

The Constitutional Court, which like the armed forces is a bastion of secularism, cancelled the reform on Thursday in a ruling which analysts say has increased the chances that the AK Party will be banned for Islamist activities in a separate case.

"Damn those behind the judges' coup," shouted protesters in Istanbul, followed by cries of "Allahu akbar!" or "God is Greatest!"

According to recent surveys, some two thirds of Turkish women wear some form of the headscarf and about the same proportion supported lifting the ban for students.

"It means we are not equal. Headscarved women will continue to suffer discrimination and that will (be enshrined in) the law," said Neslihan Akbulut, head of rights group Akder.

"If there is civilian politics, if there is democracy they can't ignore (women who cover their heads)," she said.

The headscarf debate goes to the heart of the officially secular but predominantly Muslim country's identity.

Turkey, which has seen four governments pushed from office by the arch-secularist military since 1960, is struggling to balance the demands of an increasingly prosperous but pious part of society with those of a traditionally pro-Western sector whose values have long been represented by the secularist elite.

Some women, who fear that if the headscarf is allowed into the public sphere all Turkish women will one day be forced to cover up, were pleased by the court's decision.

"Personally, I'm afraid that the headscarf could become an established symbol of the state and that wearing headscarves in universities is just the first step, so I think the (court) decision is a well grounded one," said Fatma Aslan, a 24 year-old masters student.