ANKARA: A top Turkish court prosecutor condemned as unconstitutional on Thursday plans by Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan to end a ban on the Islamic headscarf in universities, rekindling tensions over the role of religion.

The headscarf is a highly sensitive issue in Turkey, pitting Erdogan’s Islamist-rooted government against a secular elite including judges and army generals who see the garment as a threat to separation of state and mosque.

Last year, the issue triggered early parliamentary elections following mass secularist rallies and tough army warnings.

“Allowing the wearing of certain garments in institutions of learning will turn them into areas of activities counter to secularism and the unitary structure of the state,” the chief prosecutor of the Court of Appeals, Abdurrahman Yalcinkaya, said in a statement run by the state Anatolian news agency.

Political parties supporting such change would bear legal responsibility for fomenting divisions among the population, he said, in language clearly intended to warn the AK Party against trying to dilute one of the secular republic’s key taboos.

But Erdogan, who sees the headscarf as an issue of freedom of expression, is under pressure from AK Party grassroots supporters to act quickly to remove the ban after he swept back to power in last summer’s early election.—Reuters