Turkey's Constitutional Court ruled nine to two yesterday to overturn constitutional amendments adopted by the Turkish parliament in February allowing women to wear headscarves in class at the country's universities.

The headscarf issue has been a bone of contention in Turkey for years. In the 1990s, universities were allowed to set their own rules regarding the wearing of headscarves (meaning only a scarf tied under the chin—full-length chadors have never been allowed). After the government of Necmettin Erbakan was overthrown in 1997, however, headscarves for students at universities were banned altogether under the new and more aggressive secularism embraced by the state as part of the so-called "February 28 administration."

This year, the ruling AK Party of Turkey tabled a bill—which passed with the votes of 411 deputies or 80 percent of the Turkish parliament—allowing women to wear headscarves at universities.

The ruling overturning this law is hardly surprising given Turkey's current political climate. In March of this year the Constitutional Court accepted a case filed by the country's top prosecutor asking that the AK party be closed and that seventy-one party members—including President Abdullah Gül and Prime Minister Tayyıp Erdoğan—be banned from politics for a period of five years. A decision on the closure of the AK Party and the exclusion from politics of the seventy-one members is expected later this year, probably in the early Fall.

Abdullah Gül and Tayyıp Erdoğan will have to think carefully if they want to avoid Necmettin Erbakan's fate—and even that may not help them.

My prediction is that the party will be closed and that Gül and Erdoğan will be banned from politics—although many among the seventy-one will not be banned. Indeed, it's hard to imagine the Constitutional Court agreeing to hear this case unless the judges were favorable to closing the party altogether. Moreover, the "deep state" types who support this move—aggressively "secular" figures within the country's military and bureaucracy—obviously feel that their strategy of using legalistic means to guide democracy in Turkey is working and that such a course is preferable to the embarrassment that a more overt military intervention would bring.

Indeed, over the last decade every time a party branded as "Islamist" was closed in Turkey a new, more "moderate" party was allowed to open in its place. After Erbakan's Welfare (or Refah) Party was closed in 1998, a new party—called Fazilet (or Virtue)—was allowed to open (without Erbakan) the following year. When Fazilet was itself banned in 2001, the AK party (the initials stand for "Adalet" and "Kalkınma," or Justice and Development) was allowed to open shortly thereafter, with Gül and Erdoğan (who had been considered to be among the more "moderate" spokesmen for Refah and Fazilet) as party leaders. Once again, the country's "secularists" are banking on the patience of the supporters of Refah, Fazilet, and AK, whose parties have consistently won large blocs of votes in elections (including two straight majorities for the AK Party in parliament). This, however, is in my opinion a dangerous assumption to be banking upon. One wonders how long people in Turkey will support the concept of democratic change after seeing one government after another removed from power by such means.

One final word: when discussing these issues, it's important to be careful about the terminology we use. Gül, Erdoğan, and other AK Party leaders are often referred to in the media (such as here) as current or former "Islamists," whatever that means. Meanwhile, their opponents are branded as "secularists" (without the quotation marks). This dichotomy can be rather misleading, however. Indeed, whereas in the United States we understand the concept of "secularism" to mean a separation between religion and the state, in Turkey the concept is based upon the French concept of laicism and state control over religious institutions. For Turkish "secularists," the state must be involved to engage and counteract religion whenever Islam (and Islam is the only religion which frightens Turkish secularists) is thought to have become too influential. Turks who oppose such measures are, in Turkish political discourse and in western media reporting on Turkey, referred to as "Islamists."

This concept of secularism is thus very different from the concept of secularism held in the United States. By the same token, individuals considered to be "Islamists" in Turkey are often (though not always) targeted because of their efforts to lessen state control over the public observance of practices considered to be "Islamic." These are distinctions worth keeping in mind as political maneuvering in Turkey continues towards the Constitutional Court's ruling on the future of the AK Party (and, by extension, the current government) later this year.