ANKARA, Turkey’s Parliament resoundingly approved on Saturday controversial constitutional changes aimed at lifting a ban on female students wearing the Muslim headscarf in universities, the assembly’s speaker said. 
 

Lawmakers backed the amendments by 411 votes for and 103 against after lengthy and often emotional debate on an issue that has deeply split the overwhelmingly Muslim but secular nation, Reuters reported.

Parliament voted 403-107 in favor of a first amendment, which will insert a paragraph into the constitution stating that everyone has the right to equal treatment from state institutions, Parliament Speaker Koksal Toptan said.

MPs then backed by 403-108 votes a second amendment, stating “no one can be deprived of [his or her] right to higher education“.

Opposition parties said in advance of the vote that they would challenge the changes in the constitutional court if they were passed.

 

A strict headscarf ban had been in force in Turkish universities since 1997. The ban came after the staunchly secularist military had exerted pressure to oust a government it saw as too Islamist.  
 

And Turkish women cannot wait to be liberated from the yoke of ‘Western Slavery’ of baring their bodies before, fully clad women. And now they are out to demand their rights to live as ‘Free, honorable and Modest Human beings’.