Word: secularistic
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...upscale shopping mall in Istanbul last week, I overheard a group of teenage girls with big hair and designer jeans proclaim loudly as two head-scarved young women approached: "Why do they have to come here? Can't they go somewhere else?" That's the ugly face of secularist snobbery. Some university professors have even declared they won't teach head-scarved students, while Deniz Baykal, leader of the opposition Republican People's Party, speaks of the head scarf in militaristic terms as a "uniform imposed by outside forces...
...Turkey is facing a reality check. Both the secularist hardliners and the overzealous AKP must face the fact that democracy is messy. Turkey must learn to trust in its institutions and civil society, and be tolerant of difference. My grandparents' generation mustered great courage to make Turkey into a modern country. Now my generation, both secular and veiled, has to gather that same dedication to the pressing task of making it democratic...
...gloves are finally off. After years of sidestepping one of the most sensitive social issues in Turkey, the ruling Islamic-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP) has moved to lift a ban on young women wearing headscarves at universities. The country's secularists, who see the headscarf as a symbol of political Islam, are up in arms over the proposed reform. The debate is the latest installment in the ongoing and increasingly bitter tug of war between the government and a militantly secularist establishment long used to getting...
...University students are currently banned from wearing headscarves under Turkey's strictly secularist laws, which decree that religious clothing cannot be worn in public places, including courts, state office and educational institutions...
...SECULARIST...