Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service.

I'm Emily Wither and this is heart and soul, exploring personal approaches to spirituality from around the world.

I met a protest in Turkey.

Tonight, demonstrators are calling for an end to violence

against women. The women chant, we are not quiet, we are not scared, we will not obey.

I'm with Ramesa, a Muslim feminist. She explains she used to stand out from the crowd when she came

to women's protests wearing her headscarf.

I knew all the women with headscarf, actually. I could, you know, see a woman with headscarf,

pointed out and say hi to them. But after five years, now I don't know any of them actually, so it's huge.

Ramesa grew up believing activism was part of her religion.

How I grew up through my father's understanding of Islam was like, you have to be an activist if you are Muslim.

So I learned that if you are a good Muslim, you have to be an activist if you are Muslim. So I learned that if you are a good Muslim, you have to be an activist

because you have to change things through the good one.

So I personally didn't feel any kind of a contradiction there.

But others did see a contradiction,

and she's been working for years to carve a space for Muslim women

inside the civil society and feminist movements in Turkey

that have traditionally identified as secular.

My secular friends and also as the mainstream feminist movements

and even the leftist movement is secular in Turkey,

you can say that they were like so shocked to see this. Because this Islamist understanding of the religion is something unique

as well. Not a huge number of people approach the religion like this. So they didn't understand

...