It's quiet in IU's med school library. Only a few typing sounds emerging from below the fingers of the medicine students who are wearing white frocks.
It's a busy faculty, with over 9000 students. I'm working in the library, which looks out onto the Marmara sea, while my friend Rabia attends her psychiatry class.
We have a 40-cent (delicious) lunch in the uni's cafeteria. I don't see any student wearing a headscarf.
I'm fascinated by the headscarf. I guess it's a powerful social and religious symbol- that's why I'm fascinated.
Imagine: one line in the Q'ran advising women to cover their heads... and what ensues are decades of social debate, sometimes conflict, talk of freedom of expression, of religion.
Rabia's friends are über-friendly and talkative. We sit in the sun on campus and talk about traveling, the scarf (surprise, surprise), politics, parties. Everyone is smiling.
Of course, there are med students who wear the scarf, but I haven't seen any yet. I would like to talk to girls who wear the scarf. It somehow seems so much easier to address the issue here, because it is at the heart of national debate.
...Especially since the headscarf ban in universities was lifted in Turkey on Feb. 9, 2008.
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