TURKISH ACADEMIC, 92, CLEARED IN HEADSCARF TRIAL
by Nicolas Cheviron

Agence France Presse — English
November 1, 2006 Wednesday 12:19 PM GMT

An Istanbul court on Wednesday cleared an eminent Turkish academic
of charges of insulting people over their religious beliefs in a
paper linking the first use of headscarves by women to pre-Islamic
sexual rites.

The judge acquitted 92-year-old Muazzez Ilmiye Cig at the first
hearing of her trial that lasted only about half an hour.

She was the latest in a string of intellectuals to stand trial in
Turkey amid mounting European Union criticism that failure to ensure
freedom of expression is casting a pall on the country’s membership
bid.

Some 30 supporters inside the courtroom and another 200 outside
applauded the diminutive Cig as she emerged smiling from the courtroom.

Cig is an expert on the Sumerians, a Mesopotamian urban civilization
dating back to 5,000 BC and credited with inventing writing.

She drew the anger of Islamists when she wrote in a book published
last year that the headscarf was first worn by Sumerian priestesses
initiating young men to sex, but without prostituting themselves.

She also criticized, in quite a provocative style, a widespread
practice among conservative Turks to marry in a religious ceremony
performed by an imam, or Muslim preacher, which the law does not
recognize.

An Izmir lawyer took offense and filed a complaint, resulting in a
prosecutor charging her and her publisher with "insulting a certain
group of people on the basis of religion" under penal code provisions
carrying up to 18 months in jail.

The judge ruled Wednesday that the offense mentioned in the indictment
had not taken place and stressed that Cig’s remarks had posed no
danger to public order.

Publisher Ismet Ogutucu was also acquitted.

"I never meant to discriminate between people," Cig said at the
hearing.

"I am a child of the Kemalist revolution," she added, referring to
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who founded modern Turkey on the ashes of the
Ottoman Empire in 1923 and enforced a wave of sweeping reforms to
westernize the mainly Muslim nation.

Cig, a staunch defender of Turkey’s strictly secular system, wrote
recently to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s wife, Emine,
calling on her to avoid wearing her Islamic headcsarf in public to
set an example to young people.

"She can wear whatever she wants at home," Cig said in a newspaper
interview last month. "But as the wife of the prime minister, she
cannot wear a headscarf — or a cross for that matter."

The Muslim headscarf is viewed by secular Turks as a symbol of
political Islam and is banned by law in government offices and
universities.

The issue has polarized Turkish society, particularly since Erdogan’s
Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party came to power in 2002
with an end to the headscarf ban high on its list of electoral promises
— one it has so far been unable to keep.

Despite EU warnings, dozens of Turkish intellectuals, among them 2006
Nobel literature laureate Orhan Pamuk, have been put on trial over
the past year, mostly over remarks contesting the official line on
the controversial massacres of Armenians under the Ottoman Empire.