LOL for this one!

Turkey's Dy PM Arinc. Doesn't he ever smile?

Raju Korti
Sometimes crying or laughing are the only options left, and laughing feels better right now. The immediate provocation of this rather profound quote coming from my unemployed mind is Turkey's Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc who recently decreed that women should not laugh loudly in public.
That Arinc is a co-founder of the ruling Islamic-rooted Justice and Development Party is less germane to this blog at this juncture. What strikes me in all earnestness is the man himself needs some mirth and laughter given the grimace he sports on his stony face all the time. His statement, a euphemism for an edict, attracted the kind of backlash that was fitting and well earned. Thousands of Turkish women chose to laugh their guts out on a social networking site in protest. I doubt history has heaped ridicule in such measures in a country which swears by its religious identity.
Arinc has since played the predictable tune all political leaders do when caught on the wrong foot, claiming his remarks were twisted out of context and that he was making a general comment on the decline of moral standards in Turkey.While he has been gifting us new theories in Sociology, it doesn't seem to have sunk into the minister that laughter has nothing to do with one's gender and that it is a reflex action of an individual.
Taking a moral high ground comes to all ultra-conservatives by default. So here was our quixotic minister again shooting off with his mouth: "There are women who leave on holiday without their husbands and others who don't have self control and can't stop themselves from climbing up a pole. Anyone can live like this. I can't be angry against you but I can just have pity for you." His new lesson in morality prompted the wife of a prominent Turkish footballer to post a picture of herself pole dancing on Instagram with the slogan "when I see a pole, I just can't resist". The repartee was brilliant for its heavily pregnant innuendo but our granite-faced minister probably only squirmed in his seat.
The heat generated by the minister's indiscrete utterances has a direct relevance to the elections the country is soon slated to go to. The incumbent Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is facing a lot of flak from his detractors who say the country's secular fabric is threatened (Now, isn't that a familiar refrain?). The government's warped ideas about morality and societal structure haven't gone down well in a country where its first president, reformist statesman Kemal Ataturk -- among other things -- gave women equal civil and political rights. General Musharraf who never hid his admiration for the once Turkish military officer, was never really in a position to replicate the latter's efforts in his perennially tumultuous nation.
Abolition of the Caliphate was an important dimension in Ataturk's drive to reform the political system and to promote the national sovereignty but the ruling dispensation has reverse-geared the heels. The Caliphate of the early centuries now seems to be the core concept of Sunni Islam.
Despite his radical secular reforms, Atatürk remained broadly popular in the Muslim world, a balancing act no other Muslim leader looks capable of in the present times.
That's no laughing matter.