Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said Sept. 22 that his government’s decision to allow headscarves after primary school should be considered as a step to strengthen the country’s freedoms and democracy. The government rewrote the dress code regulation for the public schools by lifting the obligation that female students attend school without head coverings. “Those who try to draw restrictions argue this will lead to pressure on some people. That is to say that there is a forced pressure on some people for others not to come under a potential pressure,” Davutoglu said. “There is no such freedom perception. Everyone lives their own life.”

With the advance of radical terrorists such as the Islamic State giving Islam a bad name, and the overall impasse in the Muslim world over fighting radicalism, a goodly portion of the population is concerned that these steps will drag the country into some sort of darkness rather than toward advanced democracy. The Islamist-based Justice and Development Party (AKP) government has been good at arguing tirelessly for the last 12 years that pious people have been oppressed by the previous secular governments.

It has been no secret that the AKP government set religion as the core priority of its domestic and foreign policy decisions. Davutoglu, for example, said Sept. 20, “We made this conservative, pious people, not a part of it, but the main actor of the political system.” Overlapping with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s commitment to “raise religious generations,” Davutoglu’s statement makes it clear that this approach of making the religious segment the main actor of Turkish political life at the cost of isolating the secular population cannot lead to the normalization of the country.

Davutoglu is determined that religion be key in shaping the direction of the country. “I said it in response to the [European Court of Human Rights, or ECHR] decision on religious classes,” he said. “It does not matter whether one is different or not; all are obligated to have this religious education because you can not explain anything in this region without the religious factor.”