Turkey’s mainstream dailies and some TV channels have published in the last two days, photographs of students that took the open high school exams in various schools around the country, under front page headlines such as “Turban Show In High Schools”. The photographs depicted the vast majority of the students wearing turbans [Islamic head cover] and some wearing black chodors, all of which are not permitted by law. In some places there were also male students wearing Islamic pants [shalvar] and caps [takke].
PM Erdogan lashed at the media for publishing these photographs and called it a provocation and an attempt to sabotage the legal process that his government started to lift the turban ban in universities.
The Turkish Teachers Union [Egitim-Sen] demanded an investigation to the matter and accused the Education Ministry of instructing school officials to allow the covered students to take the exams. The anti-Islamist circles in Turkey fear that once the head cover is permitted in universitites, it will spill over to secondary and even elementary education institutions as well.
Source: Hurriyet, Milliyet, NTV, Turkey, January 29, 2008
