Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s proposal for a referendum to guarantee women’s right to wear the Islamic headscarf in public institutions has sparked a controversy over an issue many considered long resolved. Islamic-conservative Erdoğan lifted a decades-old headscarf ban in 2013, allowing women to wear the covering in places like schools and universities. There hasn’t been any serious debate over it since. Before that time, a staunchly secular bureaucracy had denied headscarf-wearing women from joining the public work force. The issue, however, recently came to the centre stage of do…