Turkey lifted a ban on women wearing the Islamic head scarf in state institutions on Tuesday, ending a decades-old restriction as part of a package of reforms meant to bolster democracy.

The measure hailed by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose wife wears a headscarf, as a “step toward normalisation” came into effect after it was published in the Official Gazette.

“We have now abolished an archaic provision which was against the spirit of the republic. It's a step toward normalisation,” Erdogan said in a parliamentary speech to his ruling party lawmakers.

A dark time eventually comes to an end,” he said. “Headscarf-wearing women are full members of the republic, as well as those who do not wear it.”

Female civil servants are now allowed to wear the veil while their male counterparts can sport beards, both symbols of Muslim piety which were banned by Turkey's first president Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

However, the ban remains in place for judges, prosecutors, police and military personnel.

The ban, whose roots date back almost 90 years to the early days of the Turkish Republic, has kept many women from joining the public work force, but secularists see its abolition as evidence of the government pushing an Islamic agenda.

“A regulation that formally intervened in freedom of clothing and lifestyle — a source of inequality, discrimination and injustice among our people — has become history,” Deputy Prime Minister Bekir Bozdag said on his Twitter account.

The debate around the head scarf goes to the heart of tensions between religious and secular elites, a major fault line in Turkish public life.

Critics of Erdogan see his Islamist-rooted AK Party as seeking to erode the secular foundations of the republic founded on the ruins of an Ottoman theocracy by Ataturk in 1923.

Erdogan's supporters, particularly in the country's conservative Anatolian heartlands, say he is simply redressing the balance and restoring freedom of religious expression to a Muslim majority.

The lifting of the ban, based on a cabinet decree from 1925 when Ataturk introduced a series of clothing reforms meant to banish overt symbols of religious affiliation for civil servants, is part of a “democratisation package” unveiled by Erdogan last week.

The reform programme — in large part aimed at bolstering the rights of Turkey's Kurdish community — included changes to the electoral system, the broadening of language rights and permission for villages to use their original Kurdish names.

An end to state primary school children reciting the oath of national allegiance at the start of each week, a deeply nationalistic vow, also took effect on Tuesday.