Can the Islamization of Turkey and the destruction of its secular system be halted?
An update on this story from AFP, June 6 (thanks to Sam):
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan will hold an emergency meeting with senior aides Friday after Turkey’s top court upheld a ban on the Islamic headscarf in universities, dampening his party’s hopes of surviving a pending closure case.
Erdogan cancelled his programmes in Istanbul and was to return to Ankara to chair the meeting of his Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP) at 3 p.m. (1200 GMT).
He also scrapped a trip to Switzerland on Saturday where he was to have watched Turkey’s first Euro 2008 match against Portugal.
The Constitutional Court Thursday annulled an AKP-sponsored law allowing women to wear Islamic headscarves in universities on grounds it violated Turkey’s secular system, enshrined in an unchangable constitutional article.
The law was a principal argument advanced by Turkey’s chief prosecutor when he asked the Constitutional Court in March to ban the AKP on charges that it is seeking to install an Islamist regime in the mainly Muslim country.
The ruling was largely seen as strengthening the prosecutor’s hand in his bid to outlaw the party and bar 71 party officials, among them Erdogan and President Abdullah Gul, from politics. The verdict is expected later this year.
Since the court “sees the headscarf amendment as a breach of the republic’s basic principles, it will give the gravest punishment to the party which is responsible for this act,” the Vatan newspaper wrote….