By SABRINA TAVERNISE

ISTANBUL - For Fatma Benli, a Turkish lawyer and women’s rights advocate, the controversy over Islamic head scarves has an irritating feel to it.
Ms. Benli, who is 34, wears one herself. But she would rather talk about other things.
“I could tell you about domestic violence, about honor killings, about the parts of the criminal code that discriminate against women, she said, listing her areas of expertise in rapidfire sentences. “But we can’t move on to those issues.
“The head scarf is where we are stuck.
The story of how Turkey got there is also, in large part, the story of Ms. Benli, who has been a central, if reluctant, participant in the fight in Turkey over whether covered women should be allowed to go to college. In February, President Abdullah Gul approved a change in the Constitution that lifts a ban against women’s head scarves at universities. The measure has polarized Turkey.
Ms. Benli’s family came to Istanbul from rural Turkey before she was born. They were part of a huge wave of migration to cities that began in the second part of the last century, as uneducated religious Turks sought work in newly developing industries. In the process, Turkey changed into an urban society from an agrarian one .
Still, the state remained divided by class, and the secular elite who controlled the state watched warily as growing numbers of covered women, whose mothers had not been educated, entered campuses.
Ms. Benli was the first person in her family to get a college education. She earned her law degree before the state began to enforce the ban in the late 1990s. But her two years of additional graduate work was stopped by the restriction . A 300-page master’s thesis at Istanbul University law school had to be orally defended on campus. Her mother, also covered, pressed her to remove her scarf, to no avail.
“I just couldn’t do it, Ms. Benli said . “I left the room crying. They marked me absent.
She says the reasons are a combination of her relationship to God and her aversion to accepting what she sees as misplaced authority. “This is related to my private life, she said. “It’s my personality. My wholeness.
Ms. Benli contends that the ban moved Turkish society backward by keeping women like herself out of skilled professions. The women in her generation of the family include a doctor, a dentist and a teacher, but their daughters have fewer opportunities.
“There’s a sense of defeat, she said. “Now, the objective is to have a family, to make a nice marriage. They do not have the ideals we once had.
For the past decade she has been defending cases of covered women who argue that the state has violated their legal rights. Because of her scarf, which is also banned in public buildings, Ms. Benli cannot defend the cases in the courts, and so has to send uncovered partners to do so for her. A few months ago, one of her law partners took up the veil, and now they are both looking for new partners.
“They say you are not a person, she said . “We can limit you because you don’t deserve it. They don’t cite laws. They say you are a threat.