Turkey:The Woman in Red

” In her red cotton summer dress, necklace and white bag slung over her shoulder she might have been floating across the lawn at a garden party; but before her crouches a masked policeman firing teargas spray that sends her long hair billowing upwards.

Endlessly shared on social media and replicated as a cartoon on posters and stickers, the image of the woman in red has become the leitmotif for female protesters during days of violent anti-government demonstrations in Istanbul.

“That photo encapsulates the essence of this protest,” says maths student Esra at Besiktas, near the Bosphorus strait and one of the centres of this week’s protests. “The violence of the police against peaceful protesters, people just trying to protect themselves and what they value.” Times of India

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In the NY Times, Seyla Benhabib, who was a child in Istanbul and is now a professor of philosophy at Yale, neatly summarizes the issues and their intersections.

The real problem … is Mr. Erdogan’s “culture war” against the country’s secular classes and the illiberal form of democracy that he is advancing. I’ve heard many Turks, both devout and non-observant, say: “If consuming alcohol is a sin, let me reckon with my own maker. The government cannot force us not to sin.”

Mr. Erdogan’s attempt to forge a Muslim moral majority is evident also in his government’s stance on abortion, which, until recently, had prompted no theological or political controversies. Islam, like Judaism, gives priority to the mother’s life and health over that of the fetus, but Mr. Erdogan, borrowing a page from America’s Christian right, has introduced legislation to curb the availability of abortion through Turkey’s national health insurance system. And he has compounded such measures, which would hurt poor women more than the wealthy, with nationalistic calls to increase the population of the great Turkish nation by recommending that all women have at least three children.

This moral micromanagement of people’s private lives comes amid an increasingly strident government assault on political and civil liberties. Turkey’s record on journalistic and artistic freedoms is abysmal; rights of assembly and protest are also increasingly restricted.