Epress.am News from Armenia
Islamic internet sites were being monitored by German intelligence agency BND after threats were posted about Turkish-German model Sila Şahin, who recently posed semi-nude for the cover of the German edition of Playboy, “shaming Muslim womanhood” and “prostituting herself for money.”
Other comments, report various media, were more threatening: “Şahin, you should be careful” and “She will pay for this.”
For Şahin, being the first Turkish-German woman on the cover of the German edition of Playboy was downright revolutionary.
“I feel like Che Guevara,” she told Playboy in the interview accompanying the photo spread.
“What I want to say with these photos is, ‘Girls, we don’t have to live according to the rules imposed upon us,'” she said. Growing up, her family was more conservative than she wanted to be, she added.
“For years I subordinated myself to various societal constraints and did what others thought was right for me,” she says in the “making-of” video on playboy.de. “The Playboy photo shoot was a total act of liberation.”
However, some in the Turkish community spoke about the photos being a disgrace and not the kind of thing a Turkish or Muslim woman should do. Şahin told mass-circulation daily Bild that her mother refused to speak to her.
“We’re not allowed to do things like that,” said Furkan, the owner of a small doner kebab restaurant in Bonn. “Muslims are absolutely not allowed to do something like that.
Asked what he would do if Şahin were his sister or daughter, Furkan was unequivocal.
“I would kill her. If I were to see pictures like that, I would kill her. I really mean that. That’s not something for me, not for my culture. I was raised differently. That doesn’t fit with my culture.”
It’s the kind of sentiment that some people believe Şahin is fighting against with her photographs. Many still link the words Turkish, Muslim and headscarf, reports Deutsche-Welle.
“Normally I’d say it’s not really emancipated to pose for Playboy,” said Maria, a psychology student from Bonn. “But if you come from a culture or a minority in Germany where you cannot show skin at all, like only your face, and then you pose naked in this magazine where women are just photographed to show skin, then I can understand that somehow.”
Gökce Yurdakul, an expert on race, gender and Islam and a professor at Berlin’s Humboldt University, however, was disappointed with the way the German media have approached the topic. For too long women have been seen as representations of their nations, she said.
“She’s not a daughter of Turkish immigrants; she shouldn’t be represented this way in the newspapers,” she said. “This is an individual woman who is acting on her own behalf, not as a daughter, not as a part of a community.”
Yurdakul said Şahin is just tapping into what Germans expect to read about Turkish and Muslim women, that German society can liberate them.
“I mean she’s an entrepreneur, she wants to be a film star, she wants to be recognized in Germany, and that’s what Germany buys.”