( AFP ) - Turkey's prime minister and president have urged the abolition of a ban on the Islamic headscarf in universities, amid a controversy on whether a planned new constitution should lift the restrictions.
Both leaders, former Islamists whose wives and daughters wear the headscarf, argued that the ban violated individual freedoms and the right to education of women who cover up.
"The right to higher education cannot be restricted because of what a girl wears," Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in an interview with the Financial Times published Wednesday.
"There is no such problem in Western societies, but there is a problem in Turkey, and I believe it is the first duty of those in politics to solve this problem," he said.
Erdogan pledged that a comprehensive debate would be held on the new constitution draft before it is brought to parliament for a vote.
"We want a constitution that is going to provide and protect a state that is a democratic, secular, social state of law," he told the Financial Times.
"This constitution is going to point Turkey in a certain direction, and it is our duty to debate it and consult with people in the widest possible sense," he added.
Turkish President Abdullah Gul has spoken out in favor of abolishing a ban on the Islamic headscarf in universities, amid disagreements on whether a planned new constitution should lift the restrictions, newspapers reported Wednesday.
Gul, a former Islamist, whose wife and daughter wear the headscarf, defended calls for ending the ban, on the grounds that it was a violation of individual freedoms and the right to education of women who cover up.
"It is much better for them to go to university than to stay home and be isolated from social life," Gul told the Milliyet newspaper, while on a visit to the breakaway Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus.
"We have to see the issue from the point of individual freedoms, and as a result of modernity," he said.
Gul played down concerns that abolishing the ban might result in women who do not wear the headscarf coming under social pressure from conservatives to cover up.
"We are people who have lived side by side in peace ... There can be both girls who cover up and who do not in the same family. This is our social structure, and we have lived like that for years," he said.
In remarks quoted in the Sabah daily, Gul stressed that "everybody in Turkey should ... respect each other's differences."
Hard-line secularists see the Islamic headscraf as a symbol of defiance of the country's fiercely-guarded secular system.
The Islamist-rooted ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), to which Gul belonged until he became president in a crisis-ridden election, last month, is currently drafting a new constitution.
The current constitution is a legacy of the 1980 military coup. It has been amended several times, but its many critics say a fundamental overhaul is needed to stamp out its authoritarian spirit, and to bring it in line with contemporary democracy standards.
According to media reports, AKP leaders are hestitating on whether to include into the draft a provision that would lift the headscarf ban in universities, and has left the decision to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Secularist forces, which include the army, the judiciary, and the academic elite, are widely mistrustful of the AKP, because of its roots in a now-banned Islamist party.
In 2005, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the headscarf ban in Turkish universities was not a violation of fundamental freedoms, and could be necessary to protect Turkey's secular order against extremist movements.
Public servants are also barred from wearing the headscarf in Turkey.