Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arinc has sparked an outcry as he declared that women should not laugh loudly in public, reported the guardian.
Bülent, one of the most senior members of the Turkish government and also one of the co-founders of the ruling Islamic-rooted Justice and Development party (AKP), made the comment while lamenting the moral decline of modern society on Monday.
He said: "A man should be moral but women should be moral as well, they should know what is decent and what is not decent.
She should not laugh loudly in front of all the world and should preserve her decency at all times,"Arinc said in a speech in the western Bursa region for the Bayram holiday that marks the end of Ramadan.
Imitating a Turkish woman on her mobile, he said: "'Is there nothing else going on? What happened to Ayse's daughter? When's the wedding?' People should say these things face to face."
The deputy prime minister went on to denounce a moral degradation that left society awash with drugs and prostitution, and lashed out at popular Turkish soap operas for encouraging lax lifestyles, in comments quoted throughout the Turkish media and online.
He denounced the excessive use of cars, saying that if even the "river Nile was filled with petrol", there wouldn't be enough to go around. Arinc also slammed the excessive use of mobile phones in Turkish society, with women "spending hours on the phone to swap recipes".
His comments provoked a storm on social media, with political tensions riding high as the Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan prepares to stand in presidential elections on August 10.
Erdoğan's main rival in the polls, the mild-mannered former head of the Organisation of Islamic Co-operation, Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu, took to Twitter to poke fun at Arinc. "We need to hear the happy laughter of women," he wrote.
The ruling AKP is accused by critics of seeking to erode Turkey's strict separation of religion and state – the basis of the secular republic founded by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.
