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Turkish Academic, 92, Cleared In Headscarf Trial

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  • Turkish Academic, 92, Cleared In Headscarf Trial

    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.
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