Anyone looking at Turkish newspapers or television these days would be forgiven for thinking Turkey was in a deep political crisis over government plans to lift a decades-old ban on female students wearing the Muslim headscarf in universities. The two sides — the secular Turks who long held sway here and the newly empowered pious Turks — are debating the issue in the winner-take-all way Turks like to talk politics. The liberal daily Radikal found the tension rising so much that it ran a front page headline this week reading “Republic of Fear” with a reprint of Edvard Munch’s painting “The Scream” on the cover.

Readers abroad might ask what all the fuss is about. After all, Turkey is a predominantly Muslim country with a vibrant democracy. But the headscarf goes to the very heart of Turkey’s complex identity. For a feature on the headscarf issue, I spoke to devout and secular women and heard two diametrically opposed views. The devout women, some of whom had been expelled from universities because of the headscarf, said covering their hair was all about personal and religious freedoms. “I wear the headscarf, my cousin doesn’t and we go out to family dinners. It is no big deal,” one said. Many secular women feel their rights will be curtailed if the ban is lifted since — they fear — they will eventually be forced to wear the Islamic headscarf.

Male opinion can be just as split. Secular men say that easing the ban on wearing the headscarf in universities would weaken the current separation of state and religion. The pious Muslims — including Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan — say wearing the headscarf is a personal freedom and a right, just like secular women have the right not to wear it.

The two sides are no closer than they were in the 1980s when restrictions were tightened. The army is still against the headscarf. But many Turks do feel the headscarf should be permitted for university students. Thousands of students have decided not to attend university because of the ban or have defied the ban and been expelled. Many others have gone to study abroad.

But Turkey is a constantly evolving country. The once-mighty secularist elite, which includes the armed forces, no longer dominates the media and public life. Headscarves have become more common even in the big cities, where young women sport a wide variety of fashionable colours and patterns and match them with their other clothing. In shopping malls or at Starbucks, women with and without headscarves mix easily — they don’t seem to see any problem. So the more vocal, observant Muslim middle class that helped to clinch a second four-year term for the ruling religiously oriented AK Party last July now wants to see a change in the law.

Who’s right? No one really knows. In the meantime , though, each side is accusing the other of stirring tensions and hatred. It makes for a constant buzz whenever Turks get together. Today, some workers came around to my flat to fix the cable TV connection and our short chat quickly turned to politics. Like everyone else in this debate, they let me know loud and clear where they stood. They were convinced Turkey would soon become an Islamic republic if the ban was lifted.

(Update: Edhi returned to Karachi on Feb. 4.)

When U.S. immigration officers question an arriving Pakistani for eight hours and seize his passport, they presumably suspect some kind of link to Islamist terrorism. Abdul Sattar Edhi, 79, “has links” to some horrifying violence, so to speak, but it’s hard to imagine they’re the kind that immigration officers may have suspected when they detained him at New York’s Kennedy Airport on Jan. 9.

Edhi and his colleagues care for — and, when necessary, bury — the victims of violence in his native city Karachi. His private Edhi Welfare Trust foundation runs an extensive ambulance service, buries unclaimed bodies and maintains centres for orphans, the homeless, the addicted and the mentally ill. In a country where state-run welfare services are basic or non-existant, his charity work is so unusual and prominent that he is often called “Pakistan’s Mother Teresa”.

When a bomb blast in Karachi last October killed 139 supporters of opposition leader Benazir Bhutto (herself later assassinated), Edhi ambulances were among the first helpers to arrive at the scene. One report noted the trust collected 110 of the victims, and washed and wrapped them in shrouds according to Muslim custom at its morgue so relatives could claim them.

When Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl’s body was found in Karachi months after he was murdered, it went first to the Edhi Trust morgue before being shipped home to the United States.

In late 2001, as U.S.-backed Afghan forces fought to overthrow the Taliban, the Edhi Trust sent ambulances from Pakistani border areas into Taliban strongholds in southern Afghanistan to bring out civilian casualties for treatment. The Trust also rushed workers and aid to northern Pakistan when a serious earthquake hit it in 2005. It has offices in several other countries, including the United States, and also rushed aid to the victims of Hurricane Katrina.

Pakistan’s government and media are up in arms over the detention, which means Edhi, 78, is now stuck in New York until at least February 20.

“During the interrogation, they wanted to know why I travelled to the U.S. so frequently,” Edhi told the BBC on Tuesday from New York. “I told them about the nature of my work, but they did not understand. They also wanted to know why I was not living in the U.S. in spite of having a green card. I am a man of emergencies, I need to be on the move, to be where the suffering is, but here I have been sitting idle for 20 days because I cannot travel without my passport.”

When I was a correspondent in Pakistan in the mid-1980s, I once visited Edhi in his sparse Karachi office and asked him how he started making morning rounds in the rough-and-tumble city to pick up unclaimed dead bodies. “I thought they deserved a decent Muslim burial,” he told me simply.

When we wrote about the death sentence for blasphemy against Afghan journalist Sayed Perwiz Kambakhsh two days ago, it seemed the case was set to trudge through the appeals system and land up at the Supreme Court in Kabul. That, at least, is what his brother, Sayed Yaqub Ibrahimi, told us. Now the upper house of the Afghan Parliament has raised the stakes in a way that may turn this into a messy tussle between Afghanistan and the Western countries trying to help prevent it becoming a failed state.

The upper house, known as the Meshrano Jirga (Elders House), has issued a statement backing the death sentence passed by a court in Mazar-i-Sharif and strongly criticising the international community for putting pressure on Kabul over the case. No excerpts from the statement have appeared online yet but some reports say it was signed by the house leader Sibghatullah Mojaddedi. He was the first president of Afghanistan after the fall of communism there in 1992. During his exile in Peshawar in the 1980s, he was the head of the so-called “moderate alliance” of three mujahideen parties that were believed to be less Islamst than the seven-party “fundamentalist alliance”. However, these two labels were relative, as are many terms and titles in Afghanistan.

The upper house has no legal role in this but, by speaking out, it puts pressure on President Hamid Karzai not to pardon Kambakhsh at any point during the appeals process. It also sends a signal to the appeals and supreme court.

The Institute for War and Peace Reporting argues the case is political and meant to punish Kambakhsh’s brother Yaqub, who has written about alleged human rights abuses in Afghanistan for the institute.

Looks like a story our Dublin office filed back in November wasn’t just an Irish joke.

Catholic priests in Ireland complained last year that tougher laws on drinking and driving meant they would easily go over the limit just by saying mass a few times in one day. Priests in rural areas often drive to several villages every Sunday to say mass, during which drinking a small quantity of wine is an essential part of the ritual.

Bloggers naturally had a field day with this one. “Eucharist could mean ‘water into fine‘,” one wrote. “No more ‘one for the road‘ for Irish priests,” said another. A third asked if drinking was part of a priest’s job description. “Only here in Ireland and only with the Roman Catholic Church could such a story arise,” one concluded.

Well, apparently not…

Our Budapest bureau reports that “Hungary’s Catholic Church has asked the country’s justice minister to exempt its priests from a new regulation which severely punishes drink-driving. Under a ‘zero tolerance’ rule which took effect this month, police can confiscate a driver’s license on the spot if the breathalyser shows any trace of alcohol.

The church plans to issue special cards for its priests to show that they consume alcohol in the fulfilment of official duties.”

Here’s our video report from Hungary:

Now here’s a flash from the past — news about the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. The guru, who became internationally known when the Beatles journeyed to India to learn meditation from him during their psychedelic rock phase in the late 1960s, is now 91. He has just stepped down as head of his worldwide organisation promoting Transcendental Meditation.

“His work is done and now he’ll be concentrating on the field of silence and dedicating himself more to pure knowledge rather than administrative matters,” said Benjamin Feldman, a close aide.

Read all about it in this report by Emma Thomasson, our chief correspondent in the Netherlands, where he now lives.

France and India are two countries that proudly proclaim the secular nature of their democracies. The principles of church-state separation and state neutrality towards religion are the same. But somehow the accents were different when French President Nicolas Sarkozy visited India last week. While they both were dealing with the concept called “secularism” in English, it was clear that Sarkozy’s thinking was based on the French word laïcité while Prime Minister Manmohan Singh clearly had the Hindi term dharmanirpekshta in mind.

The visit focused mostly on expanding investment and defence cooperation, with much gossip on the side about whether the freshly divorced president’s new flame Carla Bruni would join him at the Taj Mahal (much to the chagrin of the paparazzi, she didn’t).

Hidden behind the headlines, though, was a fascinating disagreement about Sarkozy’s plan to present Taslima Nasreen, an exiled Bangladeshi writer living in India, with the “Simone de Beauvoir Prize For Women’s Freedom.” This prize sponsored by CulturesFrance (part of the French Foreign Ministry) and a Paris publisher went this year to Nasreen and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, two women of Muslim background who have been threatened with death by Islamists because of their forceful criticism of the religion.

Sarkozy wanted to present the award to Nasreen in New Delhi, presumably at a ceremony to be broadcast back home where he is under fire for allegedly violating French laïcité. He was even thinking of doing it at the safe house where she is hiding from death threats. This caused considerable concern in the Indian government, which worried about a possible Muslim backlash over any honour for the award-winning writer they accuse of blasphemy. The Indian army had to be called in to quell anti-Nasreen riots by Islamist groups in Kolkata last November.

In the end, it didn’t happen. The grand French gesture was reduced to a request to India to “facilitate Ms Nasreen’s journey to France” to pick up her award.

It looks like a case of thinking that secularism was the same the world around. The French version, laïcité, was a reaction to the power of the majority Catholic Church and aimed to keep religion out of public life. Defending this is as natural for a French president as praising apple pie and motherhood is for his American counterpart.

With religion such a part of public life, India’s dharmanirpekshta aims more at making sure no one religious group dominates this country of 1.1 billion people. While Hindus are the majority at around 80 percent, Muslims are more than 13 percent of the population. Christians and Sikhs each account for about 2 percent of the population while Buddhists and other religions account for the rest. Indian law also makes major concessions to religions. For example, Indian laws on family, divorce and adoption differ depending on your religion.

Prime Minister Singh was largely silent on Nasreen’s case last year, sparking criticism from secular intellectuals that the government was failing to defend the country’s principles. In the Hindustan Times, Karan Thapar wrote of India: “Democratic we may be, but liberal we most certainly are not.” His low profile has also drawn fire from Hindu nationalists, who charged he was appeasing Muslims by not vocally supporting Nasreen. There may not have been much he could say. Criticism of the Muslims could have prompted the Hindu nationalist opposition to cry even more loudly that Islamist groups are a threat to the Indian state.

For the moment, it seems as if Singh has won on both counts. He headed off both Sarkozy and a possible uproar from Muslims over his award ceremony plans. In a recent broadside, Jamaat-i-Islami Hind focused on the government’s decision to extend the visa of “a foreign controversial lady.”

Nasreen has since said she will not go to Paris for the award and asked that it be sent to her residence in Kolkata.

The controversy, for now, appears to be fading. And the French have bounced back into the cultural news headlines smartly with another, less controversial award. On Sunday, the French ambassador decorated the Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan with the country’s highest decoration for artists, the “Order of Arts and Letters.”

In India, it was a much safer bet.

The case of Sayed Perwiz Kambakhsh, the young Afghan journalist sentenced to death for blasphemy against Islam, is a classic “clash of civilisations” issue pitting the principle of free speech against that of respect for religion. I’ve been trying to find out more details to understand where this case stands and how it should be reported.

First, it looks like this could drag on for quite some time. His brother Sayed Yaqub Ibrahimi tells us the family has appealed the decision at a court in Mazar-i-Sharif and will take it to the Supreme Court in Kabul if the appeals court upholds the original verdict.

More information has emerged about the case being made against Kambakhsh. We knew some university classmates had accused him of mocking Islam and the Koran and of distributing an article saying the Prophet Mohammad had ignored women’s rights. According to RFE/RL, the article came from a website based in Europe and run by an Iranian exile whose pen name is Arash Bikhoda. “Bikhoda” means “godless” in Persian.

The prosecutors also claim that they found SMS texts mocking Islam on Kambakhsh’s cellphone and a book about religion by the popular U.S. philosopher and historian Will Durant in his apartment. Our reporter was told it was entitled “Religion Through History,” but Durant never wrote any book with that name. Maybe this was a Persian translation of his 1950 book The Age of Faith, part of his massive Story of Civilisation series. Will the prosecutors argue that possession of a book by “philosophy’s best salesman” is somehow criminal?

There have been several protests and expressions of concern from western sources, including the U.S. State Department, Germany’s foreign minister, the French foreign ministry, the United Nations, European Parliament, Reporters without Borders, the Institute for War and Peace Reporting as well as Kambakhsh’s Afghan colleagues. There may be more out there that search engines don’t reach, but this looks representative enough.

Looking for other reactions from the Muslim world, all I found was a report of support for the death sentence from Afghan Islamic leaders and a strongly worded protest against it from the American Islamic Congress.

My unscientific survey shows strong interest in this case in western countries but little or none in the Muslim world. If the case goes all the way to the Afghan Supreme Court and the death sentence is upheld, we can assume there will be waves of calls for clemency and tensions between western and Muslim countries. Are there any other reactions to this case right now in the Muslim world? Should there be?

This is getting to look like a striptease…

The far-right politician Geert Wilders, whose planned anti-Koran film has the Netherlands holding its breath, has revealed that his long-awaited opus will be delayed by two months. There had been speculation he might show it in his party’s broadcasting slot on Dutch television on Friday evening. Viewers instead got shots of Wilders walking along a beach repeating his complaints about Muslims (shown a few minutes into this Dutch TV interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali). For more on his views, he’s here and here spelling them out in English.

The 10-minute movie is now due out in March, Wilders said in an interview in Saturday’s De Telegraaf. This comes after a rising chorus of concern about possible protests against the film and a call from Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende for restraint and reports that Dutch embassies were preparing to evacuate Dutch citizens abroad if things got out of hand.

The Rotterdam daily NRC Handelsblad smelt a rat. “Geert Wilders says he’s making a film. Nobody has seen it yet. But his plan has kept the media and politicians in its grip for two months now,” it commented. “In terms of political PR, Geert Wilders is putting on a great show… Wilders can dominate the news because journalists and politicians are sytematically allowing themselves to be taken hostage by him. Without a loudspeaker, there is no platform. Without political reactions, there is no series to watch.”

Is it that simple? Are the media being taken hostage by politicians like Wilders?

The Order of Preachers, better known as the Dominicans, is warning its Dutch province against sliding into schism by pressing its proposal to allow lay Catholics to say mass if they have no priest available to do so. The Dutch Dominicans have proposed that because the worsening priest shortage means many congregations there don’t have anyone to celebrate the eucharist.

The Dutch Dominicans caused an uproar last autumn when they mailed a booklet called “Church and Ministry” (”Kerk en Ambt“) to parishes across the Netherlands without informing the country’s bishops beforehand. In it, they said a congregation should be allowed to appoint any devout Catholic as a lay minister — “Whether they be men or women, homosexual or heterosexual, married or unmarried is irrelevant” — and did not need the local bishop’s approval. The bishops promptly denounced the booklet and the order’s Rome headquarters distanced itself from it.

Now, the order has produced its own report (here in French under “lire le rapport“). It is — not surprisingly — highly critical of the radical proposals. It says they “risk not only worsening the polarisation within the Dutch Church but also encouraging schism.” The author of the report, French Dominican Father Hervé Legrand, said the Dutch must know “the concrete results of the ordination of a gay bishop in the Episcopal Church in the United States: nationally, the creation of new schismatic and competing dioceses, internationally, the split in the Anglican Communion.” Any congregation acting on these proposals would “dissolve into a sect,” he wrote.

The Dutch Dominicans have pledged to translate Legrand’s report from French into Dutch and distribute it to all the Dutch parishes that received a copy of “Church and Ministry.” They see this as part of a debate they want to continue. They stress the lay-led mass would be an exception, only when no priest is available, and that they do not want to create a schism. But they want to discuss the worsening shortage of priests.

Interestingly, Legrand commends them for discussing the priest shortage and says the Church might one day reconsider celibacy. But this could only be done by the whole Church, he said. Pope Benedict is firmly opposed to any such change.

Legrand’s report mostly refutes theological points brought up in “Church and Ministry” (which he said was so full of holes “that no Catholic theology faculty in the world would support it”). I don’t have the time to translate it and don’t know if an English version is planned, but at least being in French makes it more accessable than Dutch. Several weeks passed before Kerk en Ambt was translated into English last year, which caused some confusion as readers turned to dodgy computer translations to try to figure out Dutch articles on it. One blogger made a rough translation of a press release — not the full booklet itself — and then confidently declared that an accurate report on Kerk en Ambt was flawed! So much for computer translations…

We work with the original documents and try to link to them, regardless of the language, so you can go right to the source.

Bolivians are crowding the steep cobbled streets of La Paz these days to pay homage to Ekeko, the squat mustached Andean god of abundance. They load down colourful Ekeko statues with tiny items representing prosperity, something elusive in South America’s poorest country. It’s the annual festival of Alasita, the time when Bolivians like to buy trinkets representing their wishes for the new year in the hope Ekeko will make them come true.

The festival of Alasita (“buy me” in the indigenous Aymara language) combines local Aymara traditions and Roman Catholic beliefs. In keeping with its traditional roots, a shaman often blesses the trinkets with incense, flower petals and rubbing alcohol. But many participants also climb the stairs to the Roman Catholic cathedral for the blessing of Our Lady of La Paz.

Inside, men in white robes toss holy water onto people’s purchases, creating a muddy slop on the cathedral floor. The faithful throw tiny dollar bills, or bolivianos, at a flower-covered altar to the Virgin Mary. Some of them just ask that their bags of goodies be placed close to the altar for a moment, to receive her blessing.

The stalls lining the streets sell everything from teensy wads of euros to miniature diplomas for industrial engineers and gynecologists. Their tables are dotted with small pots of gold, good-luck frogs and mini-SUVs. Tiny scarecrow-like figures on display are meant to represent maids.

Two giggling young women buy rooster statues to give to one another, in the hope they’ll both find boyfriends in the coming year. “That’s the tradition, that this will come true,” said Lizzette Ramos, 18.

The toy money is also used to symbolically pay off debts. Several people hand me bills, one woman to pay for life insurance, another to repay a bank loan and a third “for her trip to the United States”. After performing the ritual, an old woman in the long braids and layered skirts typical of La Paz’s indigenous population declared: “I don’t owe anything anymore!”

Bolivia’s first Indian leader, President Evo Morales, opened the main Alasita street fair on Thursday calling to the crowd: “May Ekeko give prosperity and justice to all!” An artisan gave him a statue of a hen, so he can find a partner during the coming year, and handed him another for the vice president, who is also a bachelor.

He also received a tiny version of the government’s controversial new constitution, which he hopes to implement despite stiff opposition.

Cristhiam Casazola, a 26-year-old doctor, did some shopping for his whole family, buying a basket of miniature food items and a large pot of gold, representing bounty. “I also bought some bread,” he says, “because we should never be without.”