A law allowing women to wear the headscarf at university was overturned by Turkey’s constitutional court yesterday, a decision that threatens the ruling party with closure for allegedly promoting Islam.

The powerful 11-member court, the stronghold of secularists, voted 9-2 to reverse changes made this year relaxing restrictions on the wearing of the headscarf.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Prime Minister – whose headscarf-wearing daughters study in the US, where no such restriction exists – had maintained that prohibiting the scarf in higher education was an infringement of women’s rights. But the court said that the changes required to allow the scarf to be worn infringed the secularist principles of the constitution.

In February Turkish MPs voted to amend the constitution to lift curbs on the headscarf in universities by 411 votes to 103. President Abdullah Gül, who helped to found the ruling AK party, approved this two weeks later. Yesterday’s decision has been heralded as a precursor to another case being heard in the same court regarding Mr Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AK). The headscarf vote in parliament is a mainstay of the case against AK, which a top prosecutor wants banned for pursuing an alleged Islamist agenda since it came to office in 2002. He also wants to exclude 71 party members, including Mr Erdogan, from politics for five years. A ruling is expected soon.

Mr Erdogan’s Government – originally founded by breakaway moderates from a now banned Islamist party but expanded to include several social and economic liberals – swept to office in 2002 and soon secured long-awaited European Union candidacy status on the back of a wave of human rights and other legal reforms. By adhering to International Monetary Fund agreements – a rarity for Turkey – it has transformed the economy.

However, despite protestations that it adheres to the secularist principles of Turkey’s revered founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, it has never allayed fears amid the ruling elite and a religion-wary urban public that AK harbours a secret Islamic agenda.

Suspicions of cronyism and attempts by some AK councils to restrict the sale of alcohol and enforce modesty have inflamed these fears, as has the hitherto-unusual parade of headscarf-wearing political wives.

AK has seen off several challenges, including military warnings, an alleged coup plot and public protests which followed another constitutional court ruling that stymied the Government’s first attempt to elect Mr Gül as President last year. Now, AK supporters claim, the judiciary is moving in where others have failed.

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