Turkey celebrated the 81st anniversary of its foundation on October 29, but the festivities were marred by an embargo that President Ahmet Necdet Sezer slapped on women with Islamic headscarves at a reception in his palace.
Most MPs from the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) boycotted the reception, the top event on Ankara's social calendar, after the staunchly secularist Sezer refused to invite wives who cover their heads.
Out of the 368 AKP parliament members, only about 20 - including four ministers - turned up at the presidential palace, NTV news channel reported.
Some had said earlier in the week they had sent back their invitations to the president in protest at the snub of their spouses.
The wives of most members of the AKP, a conservative party with Islamist roots, wear the Islamic headscarf, seen by many here as a symbolic declaration against the Muslim nation's strictly secular order.
Sezer introduced the stringent dress code for the reception last year, after the AKP was voted into power.
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a practicing Muslim whose wife, Emine, also covers her head, was spared the embarrassment of turning up alone again to this year's party thanks to a trip to Rome for the signing ceremony of the new European Union constitution.
Sezer has come under fire both from the AKP and liberal critics, who accuse the president of discriminating between the elected representatives of the nation.
Women legislators from both the AKP and the opposition Republican People's Party (CHP), none of whom wear the headscarf, and wives of AKP members who do not cover their heads, were invited.
The controversy highlighted once again the deep divisions in Turkey over how secularism should be interpreted.
Women wearing the headscarf are banned from attending universities and working in public offices in Turkey.
Though Erdogan has disowned his Islamist past, he remains closely watched by skeptics who suspect him of harboring a secret agenda to undermine the secular foundations of the Turkish republic, established on the ashes of the Ottoman Empire by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk on October 29, 1923.
Headscarf row mars Turkey's 81st birthday
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