The fees look like associated to a video circulating on social media from a Gulsen live performance in April, when she joked about one of many musicians.
He “graduated from Imam Hatip (religious schools). That’s where his pervert side comes from,” she mentioned.
A number of Twitter customers could possibly be seen sharing the video on Thursday with a hashtag calling for her arrest and saying it’s offensive to affiliate the colleges with perverts.
Gulsen denies that she has dedicated any crime and is interesting the arrest, in keeping with her lawyer Emek Emre.
After her detention, Gulsen shared a message on her official Twitter and Instagram accounts, apologizing to “anyone who was offended” by the joke and saying it had been twisted by “malicious people who aim to polarize our country.”
“I made a joke with my colleagues, with whom I have worked for many years in the business. It has been published by people who aim to polarize society,” she mentioned.
“In defending the freedom I believe in, I see myself thrown towards the radical end that I criticize. I apologize to anyone who was offended by my speech in the video,” she mentioned.
She later mentioned in an affidavit that it was an “unfortunate joke” and requested to be launched, saying she had a toddler relying on her and that she would come to courtroom or a police station when wanted, in keeping with Anadolu.
Gulsen has beforehand been focused by Turkish conservative teams for her revealing stage outfits and help for the LGBTQ group.
The Muslim majority nation is formally secular however extremely polarized over points surrounding secularism, faith, ladies’s rights and LGBTQ rights.
Imam Hatip faculties, which educate non secular research alongside the Turkish curriculum, have grown within the twenty years that the conservative Justice and Growth Social gathering (AKP) has been in energy. The faculties are recognized for coaching younger individuals to change into imams or preachers. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan attended the college, as did many AKP social gathering members.
Controversy in Turkey
Reactions to the arrest have come from atypical Turks, celebrities, and even political events.
After her arrest, social media posts confirmed Gulsen followers in a packed soccer stadium singing her songs in solidarity.
The award-winning British-Turkish novelist Elif Shafak referred to as for Gulsen’s launch, as did different cultural figures.
Iconic Turkish pop star Tarkan additionally took to Twitter on Friday, writing that “this injustice to Gulsen must end and Gulsen must be released immediately.”
“Those who prosecute the ones without arrest and sometimes even release them without trial who sexually abuse children, murder women, rape women, but when it comes to Gulsen, they take action quickly. Our legal system, which ignores those who are corrupt, steal, violate the law, slaughter nature, kill animals, use religion as a tool for their own bigotry ideas and polarize society, arrests Gulsen at one whack,” he additionally wrote.
Turkish Minister of Treasury and Finance Dr. Nurettin Nebati tweeted, “Our Imam Hatip High Schools are our distinguished institutions that raise generations equipped with our national and moral values and have moral maturity. I strongly condemn this distorted language and the distorted mentality behind it, which targets our youth studying at our Imam Hatip Schools, and I find it unacceptable.”
In the meantime, the chief of Turkey’s principal opposition social gathering described the backlash towards Gulsen as a manufactured controversy supposed to “set our young people against each other.”
“The winds of peace have been blowing for a long time among young people with different lifestyles. The goal (of the arrest) is to take a joke that has exceeded its purpose and set our young people against each other. It is to stay more in power, and more to steal and snap,” Kemal Kilicdaroglu wrote on Twitter.
The presidential and parliamentary elections in Turkey are each scheduled to occur early subsequent summer time.
