Building Bridges: Muslim Babe on Playboy Cover

The heaving breasts, the bedazzling hair rays. It's just going to be too much for some to handle. I smell a day of rage coming.

Sila Sahin, a 25-year-old Turkish German living in Berlin, had until now been regarded as a glowing example of how a modern Muslim girl should behave in a multicultural society.

A successful actress starring in German television soap opera Good Times, Bad Times, she pleased her many fans and made her Turkish family proud.

But her latest move has shocked some of those fans, and enraged those closest to her.

Posing provocatively on the cover of German Playboy magazine with one breast exposed, Sila Sahin seems to be sending a clear and deliberate message to her conservative Turkish family.

'I did it because I wanted to be free at last,' she said. 'These photographs are a liberation from the restrictions of my childhood.'

Her family have, unsurprisingly, reacted with horror, and her mother has cut off all contact with the actress.

'My mother is still angry. It will be even more difficult with my grandparents, my aunts and my uncles,' she said on the website devoted to her television soap.

She has, however, managed to talk to her actor father, who expressed concern over the pressure she will inevitably face from those not only within the Turkish community in Germany, but from the wider Muslim community as a whole.

Yeah, those conservative Muslim types do have a habit of being intolerant.

Indeed, in the 12-page article that accompanies the revealing photographs, Ms Sahin says she feels 'like Che Guevara', adding that the semi-naked photoshoot was a bid to express her freedom.

'My upbringing was conservative,' she told Playboy. 'I was always told, you must not go out, you must not make yourself look so attractive, you mustn't have male friends.

'I have always abided by what men say. As a result I developed an extreme desire for freedom. I feel like Che Guevara. I have to do everything I want, otherwise I feel like I may as well be dead.'

Funny, but I don't quite consider Che the freedom-loving type.