TURKEY: A long-standing row over the ideology of education was reignited in Turkey yesterday after it was revealed that the education ministry had ordered the image of a bare-breasted woman to be removed from a school book.
Aimed at 14 year olds, the textbook on citizenship and human rights had contained a reproduction of French painter Eugène Delacroix's famous Liberty Leading the People.
Showing a young, rifle-toting woman leading crowds over piles of dead bodies, the 1830 painting rapidly came to symbolise the victory of Republican France over the powers of counter-revolution.
"This work is a symbol of global democracy," columnist Guneri Civaoglu wrote in Milliyet, the centrist daily that broke the story. "If breasts are a problem, we should remove photos of statues from textbooks too, starting with the Venus de Milo, and we should ban school visits to museums."
For teachers' union head Ozgur Bozdogan, meanwhile, the ministry's decision was "unacceptable". "This reflects the approach of the [ governing] Justice and Development Party [ AKP] to education and art," he said. "The party is in the process of imposing its own worldview in schoolbooks and reference books."
With its roots in political Islam, the AKP has often been accused by secular circles of trying to impose Islamist values on this secular country. None of its senior members have got more flak than the minister of education, Huseyin Celik. He was pilloried in August when newspapers printed extracts from a religious education textbook describing Islam's ritual ablutions as "beneficial to the speeding up of blood flow". Last month, another controversy flared up over education ministry-approved translations of childrens' classics such as Heidi that allegedly Islamised the original texts.
Last February, 700 academics protested at the decreasing space biology textbooks gave to Darwinian theories of evolution alongside creationism that has been taught since the early 1980s.
Not surprisingly, a survey in August by US journal Science showed that only 25 per cent of Turks agreed with the statement that humans "developed from earlier species of animals". The percentage put them at the bottom of 34 countries questioned.
"The Ottoman Empire sank because it turned its back on science," says Ismet Berkan, editor of the liberal daily Radikal. "The Republic must not be allowed to share the same fate."
To be fair to the AKP, Turkey's education system, which was resolutely modern in the early days of the Republic, has been getting more conservative since the 1950s.
In her book, Public Sexuality in School Textbooks, sociologist Firdevs Gumusoglu notes how 1937 textbook illustrations of women lawyers had turned by the 1970s into women doing the washing up. And while a 2003 biology textbook was the first ever to contain the image of a woman's body, she was chastely dressed in T-shirt and shorts.