Posted on 04/24/2003 7:01:11 PM PDT by blam
Turkish row over scarves spoils party
By Amberin Zaman in Ankara
(Filed: 25/04/2003)
Tensions have surfaced between Turkey's secular elite and its Islamic-rooted government over the vexed issue of the wearing of the religious headscarf in state institutions.
The dispute led to a boycott of an official function to mark the founding of the Turkish parliament.
President Ahmet Necdet Sezer, who is firmly anti-Islamist, like-minded generals and the leader of the main opposition stayed away because the headscarf-swathed wife of Bulent Arinc, the parliamentary speaker who was the event's host, was expected to show up.
"Should the poor man [Mr Arinc] have divorced his wife? Should he lock her up in the house?" asked Ismet Berkan, managing editor of the liberal daily newspaper Radikal, echoing mounting opposition to the secularists' intransigence over the headscarf issue.
In an attempt to ease tensions, neither Mrs Arinc, nor the wife of Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister, who also covers her head, attended the party.
The headscarf, worn by more than half of Turkey's women, is seen as a symbol of Islamic fundamentalism by the secularists and is banned in government institutions and schools.
An Islamic-leaning party, Virtue, was banned two years ago for lobbying to lift the ban on the headscarf.
Mr Erdogan has said that resolving the headscarf issue is not among his government's priorities.
But the country's influential generals remain unswayed, and suspicions that the government may have a hidden Islamist agenda have grown following the appointments of alleged Islamists to senior civil service posts.
And that it did is the prof that the problem is with a broader culture.
After the fisrt full millennium of Christianity, Islam outshone the oecumenical workd on all dimensions. What happened, however, is that the West evelved and the Arab world devolved. Since the sacred books remained the same, it is safe to assume that they have nothing to do with it: it's the understanding and application of the basic ideas that has changed.
The list is much longer than this. Also, your casuality is too strongly stated.
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