It started as a women’s protest for the right to wear Muslim headscarves at university, in this case at Marmara University in Istanbul. Then the men showed up with their banners and megaphones, lined up in front of the cameras and began speaking in place of the women. That left the ladies standing demurely on the sidelines or in the crowd, all decked out with their bright silk scarves with nothing to do but clap at what the men said.

It was just another case of what women here often complain about — that the headscarf has been hijacked by politics for decades, leaving ordinary women to suffer the consequences. Some have sacrificed an education for their faith, preferring not to go to university if it means uncovering, and they feel like little more than a political football in this very masculine power struggle.

Check out our video from Marmara University, especially the protester who says “We want freedom to wear headscarves!” Hmmm … do you think he’ll ever wear one?

Turkish politics is deeply divided over whether women should be allowed to wear the headscarf at university and elsewhere in public life. Secularists, who fear that pious Turks are bent on curbing their right to live as they please, are trying to protect Turkey’s official secularism so fiercely that they are accused of restricting religious freedom. Pious Muslims are clamouring for a change in the strict ban on headscarves as a human right. And, as in the video, it’s the men who do most of the talking.

“Some are trying to win votes by banning the headscarf, others by allowing it, and we’re stuck in the middle. For years they have been making politics over me and my headscarf,” one angry young woman told me at Marmara this week.

Turkey’s parliament in Ankara, dominated by the religious-leaning AK Party, has lifted a ban on the use of the headscarf at university. But the secularist establishment is rebelling. The reform has been challenged in court while some rectors refuse to let covered women into class until another law is passed. Secularist students have also protested against the reform, as in the photo to the right. The placard reads “The headscarf cannot liberate women.”

While the secularists accuse covered women of trying to undermine the secular republic, the women themselves deny any political agenda and appear to suffer deeply from what they consider restrictions on their personal freedom.

At the protest this week in Istanbul, one young woman whipped out a copy of the Koran to explain to me what it was all about. This was an order from God, she said, as she guided me patiently through the text. Others I spoke to kept using the word “humiliation” when they described how it felt to go to class “undressed.”

These women are now setting their sights on getting the ban lifted in other areas of public life — much to the horror of secularists — so they can put their degrees to use in the public sector. And that guarantees their wardrobe, whether they like it or not, will remain a political issue for years to come.

P.S. Whenever the headscarf issue comes back into the headlines, a wave of articles shows just how many aspects this story has. Here are a few of the most interesting recent ones:

• Al-Ahram Weekly reports on a beauty salon for covered women in a Cairo suburb.
• Turkish journalist Mustafa Akyol comments on which other reforms the government should introduce now that it has allowed the headscarf at universities.
• The New York Times describes how secularised urban Turks react to headscarves.
• The Washington Institute for Near East Policy discuss the foreign policy implications of the headscarf issue for Turkey and the U.S.
• An American anthropoligist argues in Sightings that the controversy veils what the headscarf really means.
• British writer Madeleine Bunting says secularists have nothing to fear from women wearing headscarves.

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.

When Jane Stranz of the World Council of Churches emailed me a link to her blog about me, I thought I should mention something here that is already out there on the web. The Conference of European Churches in Geneva has awarded its John Templeton Award for the European Religion Writer of the Year 2006 to yours truly.

The award was for articles on the Atlas of Creation, a Muslim creationist book by Harun Yahya (left) that was mysteriously distributed for free in Turkey (and later more widely in Europe), Vienna imam Sheikh Adnan Ibrahim who says yes to Europe but no to Euro-Islam and a French comic book by René Pétillon called The Headscarf Affair (right) that spoofs the debate about Muslim headscarves.

At the award ceremony in Paris this week, I gave a short speech about the problems international religion writers face when struggling to express untranslatable foreign words and concepts in English. Since much of our reporting and research is done in foreign languages, this is a constant challenge. Ecumenical News International has a short item on the speech and the text.

With Muslim women’s headgear becoming a political issue in some European countries, do you think journalists in these countries are right to adopt words like hijab or niqab as better terms to use than headscarf or veil?

One of the most persistent canards about Islam in France is that Muslim groups played a key role in stoking the three weeks of rioting in the suburbs of Paris and other French cities in late 2005. Stories still regularly pop up on the Internet talking about “Muslim riots” or mentioning that cries of Allah-o-akbar were heard amid all the burning and trashing that went on. These cries, reported in the French press at the time, were taken as a sign the Islamists were behind the unrest. Bloggers coined the term “Paris intifada.” Some talked about “Baghdad-on-the-Seine.” Others were frustrated because the media did not make clear what role religion played in the unrest.

The French television channel France 2 has just broadcast an excellent documentary called Quand la France s’embrase… (When France Flares Up) about the 2005 riots in the suburbs and the 2006 student protests in the centre of many French cities. They interviewed dozens of police, politicians, community leaders and residents. They showed a lot of previously unbroadcast on-the-spot video footage taken on cellphones (sometimes by the rioters themselves). Their conclusion is actually not new. Most journalists covering the riots at the time (myself included) came to same conclusion after some initial confusion caused in part by false statements from politicians who should have known better. But the documentary is an excellent analysis of those confusing days, with new information filling out the story better than anything done before.

The unrest was spontaneous and hardly organised at all, the documentary concluded. The rioters protested against widespread discrimination, unemployment and the government’s failed integration policies. Many were from North African immigrant families, and therefore from a Muslim background. But religion was not the driving force and Islamists did not organise or stoke the unrest. Some politicians accused Islamists early on in the saga, but this was more a case of clueless suits seeking a scapegoat than solid facts the police observed on the ground, the documentary concluded.

Bruno Laffargue, head of police intelligence for the Paris region, said: “We received no solid information that would permit us to accuse the Islamists of this or that riot. They stayed very much in the background in this affair.” Footage broadcast just before his interview showed an imam trying to calm down some hotheads. The clip (in French) can be seen at the end of the second video — entitled “Le tournant, quand tout bascule” (The turning point, when everything tips over) — on the documentary’s video clips page.

If anyone suspects Laffargue of whitewashing the Islamists, it should be noted that his conclusion — first written in a confidential note in late November 2005 for his boss, the interior minister at that time — contradicted what his boss had publicly said. The boss was none other than the current president of France, Nicolas Sarkozy. Early on in the riots, it was Sarkozy who said the unrest was “perfectly organised” by “mafiosi” (his term for drug dealers) and “fundamentalists.” His tough talk was controversial at the time and he was embarrassed when the note contradicting him was leaked to the press in early December 2005.

This is not to say there are no Islamists in the Paris banlieues or that they don’t stir things up when they want. They did stoke the headscarf controversy of 2003/2004 quite effectively. But even as the rioting was going on, we journalists covering it on the ground noticed the classic Islamist demand in France — to repeal the law banning Muslim headscarves in state schools — was never expressed by the rioters. Interviews with residents in riot-hit areas (Muslims and non-Muslims) showed they didn’t buy the Islamist explanation.

There may well have been some Allah-o-akbars shouted in the din of the rioting but, like one swallow not making a spring, they didn’t make an Islamist plot that the MSM just didn’t see. We have known this for quite a while, and now have even more evidence for it. Is it finally time to retire the misleading term “Paris intifada?”