Turks set to ease headscarf ban
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Turkey's parliament prepares to change the constitution to ease the ban on Islamic headscarves in universities.
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Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has called for the lifting of a ban on women wearing headscarves at state universities. Erdogan's Islamist-rooted AK Party began drafting a new constitution after its landslide election victory in July.  The separation of religion and state enshrined in the current constitution is one of the key issues in the debate.
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Turkey's parliament on Saturday approved the first of two constitutional amendments that would lift a decades-old ban on Islamic head scarves in universities despite the fierce opposition of the secular establishment.
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Turkey&#39;s parliament last night bowed to European Union demands and passed a liberalising penal code which should open the way to talks with Ankara on EU membership.
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Turkey's military has a tradition of interfering in politics, even staging several coups in past decades. But on Wednesday, the chief of the secular armed forces kept a low profile on one of his country's most explosive issues: the Islamic head scarf.
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Turkey's parliament voted in a first round on Thursday to change the constitution to lift a ban on women students wearing the Muslim headscarf at university, a measure opposed by the secular elite.
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The French government has confirmed that the ban on Muslim headscarves will be applied on Thursday when school resumes, despite the kidnapping of two journalists in Iraq.
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BBC Europe editor Mark Mardell talks to headscarf wearers and headscarf opponents to understand the Turkish debate on Muslim dress.
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Turkey's ruling party and a key opposition party agree to work to  lift a ban on headscarves in universities.
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Eight years after a lawmaker was thrown out of Turkey's parliament for wearing a Muslim-style headscarf, devout Turks are pinning hopes of more religious rights on their next president and his headscarf-wearing wife.
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Pope Benedict XVI is due to begin a four-day visit to Turkey, amid protests against recent comments about Islam.
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More than 100,000 Turks took to the streets on Saturday to protest against government plans to lift an Islamic headscarf ban at universities and to defend the country's strong secular tradition.
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The country's leading secular opposition party has vowed to appeal this weekend's decision to lift a head-scarf ban to Turkey's top court.
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The European Commission looks set to advise that Turkey's EU membership talks be partly suspended.
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ISTANBUL, Feb 4 (IPS) - Turkey's Islamic-rooted governing party is  moving ahead with hotly contested constitutional amendments that  would lift the ban on headscarves at universities. Opponents see  it as a danger-laden step undermining the currently rigid secular  regime by introducing Islamic principles that may extend far  beyond higher learning.
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Turkey's Islamist-rooted ruling AK Party and a key opposition party agreed on Thursday to cooperate to lift a ban on the wearing of the Islamic headscarf in universities, a move sure to anger the secular elite.
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Turkey's devout Muslim prime minister said Wednesday that the constitution should be changed to remove a ban at universities on head scarves, the most potent symbol of the national divide over the role of religion in politics.