AHEAVY-handed attempt to clamp down on the wearing of headscarves by female students has turned Istanbul’s 23 Muslim religious high schools into a battleground between police and schoolgirls.

More than 1,700 pupils have been detained and a dozen 13-year-old girls have been handcuffed and beaten by heavily armed riot police.

Returning to school at the end of February after a public holiday, the schoolgirls found their way blocked by police, who refused to let them enter unless they removed their headscarves. In Turkey, it is forbidden to wear them in normal state schools, universities and public institutions, but they had always been allowed in the religious schools - known as imam hatips.

However, now headscarves appear to have been banned in these, too - but without any party taking responsibility for the decision.

“Everyone gets an order from someone else,” said Gulden Sonmez, a spokeswoman for the human rights organisation Mazlum-Der. “The headmaster says the order not to let the headscarved girls in came from the city governor, but the city governor says the decision came from the city security commission - but there is no such institution.”

Despite the ban, the girls have continued to turn up for class wearing headscarves, leading to confrontations at the school gates. Last week, at Eyup imam hatip, north of the old city and close to Istanbul’s holiest of mosques, riot police handcuffed 40 schoolgirls before loading them on to buses.

“They took them all over the place before dropping them off in pairs many kilometres away down the coast,” said Merve Ozkan, a parent of one of the detained children.

“We are very frightened that something could have happened to them. They are 13 and 14 years old and have done nothing wrong.”

The imam hatips are no strangers to controversy. Five years ago, Turkey’s powerful and staunchly secular military accused the schools of being bases for religious fundamentalism. It proved to be the first step in a political campaign which brought the resignation of the pro-Islamist government in what is now known as the 1997 “soft coup”.

Since then, efforts to enforce a ban on the wearing of religious clothing - principally the headscarf - have led to hundreds of arrests and many sackings from state institutions. This is the first time the issue has arisen in high schools.

“At these schools, religion is being taught,” says Ibrahim Solmaz of the Muslim rights group, Onder. “This religion teaches that girls must wear the headscarf. What is illegal is the police preventing them from going to school.”

A group of parents has opened a court case against the police, the Istanbul governor and the local education board. They allege that the police action breaks the constitutional right to an education, and that it has endangered the lives of the children.

“In 23 schools in Istanbul,” adds Ms Sonmez, “there is no law. What the authorities are doing here is clearly illegal.”