Çarçamba is a working-class, religious, very conservative neighbourhood in Istanbul's Fatih district, its high street dotted with small family restaurants and shops selling conservative clothing and religious books.
At the beginning of July, Çarçamba made the news with a peculiar case of vandalism: somebody had spray-painted black the Photoshopped figure of Brazilian model Adriana Lima advertising a global hair removal brand. 'Don't be immoral!' demanded the clumsy graffiti next it.
Opposition and leftist media picked up on the incident and, this being Çarçamba, immediately defined the attack as an Islamist one: 'They dressed Adriana Lima in a carshaf', they said, referring to the black full body cover worn by religiously conservative women. Commentators argued that it was a worrying sign of creeping Islamisation, an organised attack on liberal, modern Turkey.
However, Aytekin Aydogan, 38, owner of a textile shop just around the corner from the now-replaced advertisement in question, said: 'It was wrong to spray paint that picture. Our religious teachers tell us not to interfere with anyone else's lifestyle. It's a question of tolerance, open-mindedness, of education.'
His assistant for the summer, a 16-year-old who wears both the headscarf and an ankle-long overcoat over her skinny jeans, shrugged. 'We all know that it was the old man sitting by the bus station all day. He always yells at women to cover up, and he taps my legs with his walking stick when I walk by wearing trousers.
'But nobody really takes him seriously. Why should he have the right to tell me what to do?'
Does she think that the rift between women who cover and those who do not has widened? 'No, I don't feel that way. I can go anywhere in Istanbul, and I do. I am comfortable in Fatih and in [the bar district] Beyoglu.'
Aydogan agreed. 'In my opinion the mood has even softened. People are more tolerant now when it comes to clothing. There used to be more tension between conservative and secular Turks because of the headscarf. Of course there are still those who insult women who don't cover their heads, and those who call covered women 'stick-in-the muds'.'
Deniz Nasiroglu, 40, manager of a clothes shop for conservative women, often comes to Çarçamba for business reasons. She was more critical of the advertisement. 'Why do you need the body of a scantily clad woman to sell leg wax anyway?' she laughed. 'We all know what the wax is for and how to use it. Displaying a woman's figure is unnecessary. Surely a leg or an arm would have sufficed.' And she added, smiling: 'Wouldn't feminists think so, too?'
These are interesting times to be a woman in Istanbul. When deputy prime minister Bülent Arinç lectured women to refrain from laughing in public in an Eid al-Fitr address last week, women and men took to social media in protest.
Much of the remainder of Arinç's speech, however, in which he criticised 'moral degeneration' in Turkey, reminding women to be 'chaste', was no laughing matter.
The headscarf has been politicised ever since it was banned by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish Republic, and it still is now. Under the government of the religiously conservative Justice and Development party (AKP) the ban on wearing the headscarf in universities and public offices in recent years has been lifted. Prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan often patronisingly refers to women covering their hair as 'my little headscarved sisters', while more Kemalist-minded Turks voice their fear about the new proliferation of conservative dress in areas they used to consider their domain: universities, parliament, fashion.
Social psychologist Yasemin Acar said: 'There has always been a divide between people that consider themselves secular and those who consider themselves religiously conservative. The polarisation between the two is not new, and it is not helpful when it comes to the question of women's rights.'
Women's rights activist Selime Büyükgöze of the Socialist Feminist Collective agreed: 'The AKP government bases its politics on the division of all social opposition. They pretend to care for women wearing headscarves, but we know that they don't treat them any better. While the headscarf underlines differences between women, they also share many issues: All women suffer male violence - the headscarf, faith, education or social class do not provide an escape from that. Every woman risks to be killed. Every woman needs the right to abortion. Every woman may experience sexual abuse and rape - at home, in the street or at work.'
Reported violence against women in Turkey has risen 14-fold since 2002. Last Thursday a Turkish court ruled that a woman who was attacked and wounded with a knife by her ex-husband had 'provoked' him by wearing leggings, therefore providing 'mitigating circumstances'.
The government of Erdogan, who said in 2010 that he did not believe in equality between men and women, has done very little to tackle these issues. Instead, AKP politicians have repeatedly used misogyny to polarise and rally a conservative base around topics as various as abortion, gender-segregated schools and university dorms, kissing in public, rape, women working or the number of children women should have.
'Misogyny and patriarchy are nothing new in Turkey,' said Acar. 'It's not something that has come about with the AKP - but the AKP brings it up in a much more open manner than before. It's much more politicised.'
Büyükgöze warned: 'For Bülent Arinç, women mean family, women mean mothers, women mean housewives. Because politicians like him don't accept any other option, they don't refrain from such attacks. His words feed into the conservative vein in Turkey. It normalises the control over women and prepares the ground for violence against women and the murder of women.'
Shafak Pavey, an Istanbul MP for the main opposition Republican People's party, who has been called 'immoral' for questioning the prime minister's demand for gender-segregated dorms in parliament and who was previously criticised by an AKP MP for 'smiling too much', agreed: 'As a cultural and political leader, the things Bülent Arinç says have enormous effect on the street. The messages he sends enable further crimes against women.'
While women and girls wearing headscarves also protested, posting pictures on social media of themselves laughing, others used pictures of laughing women in headscarves to attack the government, accusing them of hypocrisy. For Özgür Kazim Kivanç of the Anti-Capitalist Muslims, this is a trap. 'We should all stand together against a male-dominated view of women, and men in power assigning certain roles to certain women, but instead we use their language to attack each other,' he said.
Acar agreed: 'The big question is: where do we go from here? The problem with Kemalist nostalgia is that it wants to go back to an old Turkey assuming that it was good - when it really wasn't. The question has to be how to move forward and make things better for all women, and everyone.'
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