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When two women in Islamic head scarves were spotted in an Italian restaurant in this city's posh new shopping mall this month, Gulbin Simitcioglu did a double take.Covered women, long seen as backward peasants from the countryside, "have started to be everywhere," said Simitcioglu, a sales clerk in an Italian clothing store, and their presence is making women like her more than a little uncomfortable."We are Turkey's image," she said. "They are ruining it."As Turkey lurches toward a repeal of a ban on head scarves at universities, the country's secular upper middle class is feeling increasingly threatened.Religious Turks, once the underclass of society here, have become educated and middle class, and are moving into urban spaces that were once the exclusive domain of the elite. Now the repeal of the scarf ban - pressed by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, passed by Parliament and now just awaiting an official signature - is again setting the two groups against each other, unleashing prejudices that have as much to do with class rivalry as religion.While the public debate here typically revolves around Islam and how much space religion should have in Turkish society - a legitimate concern in a country whose population is overwhelmingly Muslim and deeply conservative - the struggle over power is a glaring, if often unspoken, part of the tension between the two groups.Secular women at parties speak disdainfully of covered women and the neighborhoods they populate. Older people shake their heads and cluck their tongues at them. High school boys yell, "Go back to Iran."Adamantly secular Turks "hate religious people," said Atilla Yayla, a Turkish political philosophy professor teaching in England. "They don't encounter them as human beings. They want them to evaporate, to disappear as fast as possible."That attitude surfaced with the repeal of the ban by Parliament this month."In the past, when a person with a scarf walked by me, I didn't feel anything toward them," said a 24-year-old lawyer in a Starbucks in a fashionable Istanbul neighborhood the day after the repeal. "Now I just want to hit them."One professor declared bluntly that universities should "close the gates until the administrators of the country come back to their senses." Another argued that covered students could cheat by using cellphone headsets under their scarves.The worry, secular Turks said, is that covered women in universities would soon graduate and expect to wear their scarves in civil service jobs, transforming the Turkish state from secular to religious.Turks who support lifting the ban have drawn analogies with school integration in the United States. In a speech to Parliament, Nursuna Memecan, a deputy from Erdogan's party, referred to a 1957 photograph of a white girl shouting at a black student entering Little Rock Central High School, highlighting the girl's apology decades later."There is a reaction that we may regret," Memecan said. She argued that secular fears about growing religiosity were groundless. Observant Turks are not growing in numbers, she said. They have always been there but were not visible in educated society."We weren't sitting with them on planes," she said. "They didn't go to our restaurants. We have to learn to share the cake with them."Hasan Bulent Kahraman, a professor at Sabanci University in Istanbul, put it this way: "Cleaning ladies are all in head scarves and no one says anything. But if a judge wants to cover her head, the problem is triggered."But Turkey is different from the United States, secular Turks argue. The fight here is not about skin color, but a religious belief that seeks to impose an ideology, they say. Islam dictates specific rules for daily life, many of them extremely limiting for women, and secular women argue passionately that Islam's growth in Turkey will inevitably lead to a society that is less free for women."To associate the head scarf with freedom sounds a little cynical," said Ayse Bugra, a political economist at Bogazici University in Istanbul, "since it is clearly about limiting the way in which a woman can appear in public."Women are "clearly inferior" in Islam, whose rules limit inheritance for women and allow men multiple wives, she argued, pointing out that Turkey's president, Abdullah Gul, at the age of 30, met his wife, Hayrunnisa, when she was just 14."If you ask her, did she choose freely to wear the head scarf, she'd say yes," Bugra said. "What does that mean?"To read more go to:
As in the days of Noah....
