“We Can Defend Our Rights by Our Own Efforts”: Turkish Women and the Global Muslim Woman Question, 1870-1935

“WE CAN DEFEND OUR RIGHTS BY OUR OWN EFFORTS”: TURKISH WOMEN AND THE GLOBAL MUSLIM WOMAN QUESTION, 1870-1935

Ansev Demirhan

A dissertation submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of History.

Chapel Hill 2020

Approved by:

Cemil Aydin

Sarah Shields

Juliane Hammer

Michelle King

Didem Havlioglu

ABSTRACT

Ansev Demirhan: “We Can Defend Our Rights by Our Own Efforts”: Turkish Women and the Global Muslim Woman Question, 1870-1935 (Under the direction of Cemil Aydin and Sarah Shields)

This dissertation analyzes how Ottoman and Turkish women Muslim intellectuals established a set of arguments to advance women’s rights, through their engagement with the

“global Muslim woman question.” Fighting against Orientalized misconceptions of Muslim women, these intellectuals engaged in both transregional and national debates about the rights, social positions, and “empowerment” of Muslim women. Of course, Western feminists and male

Muslim modernists also debated the conditions of Muslim women, the causes of their problems and the solutions for their “oppression.” But historians have allowed their words to obscure

Muslim women’s own intellectual visions, agency, and activism. As a corrective to this oversight, my project explores three different historical moments of globally engaged Muslim women intellectuals from the 1870s to the 1930s in the context of the late-Ottoman

Empire/Republic of Turkey. And it moves beyond the question of how Muslim modernists reacted to European claims of Muslim women’s oppression, focusing instead on how Muslim intellectuals, especially Muslim women, initiated and developed their own conversations about the place of women in society.

The debate this study examines appeared globally in the 1880s in an imperial context, continued during the Constitutional Era, and reemerged with renewed intensity during the cultural revolution and secularist reforms in Turkey during the interwar period. The dominant political forces and policies during these historical moments overruled the efforts of Muslim

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women intellectuals, and scholars have replicated their omission from historical narratives.

Exploring responses to this question in a global context reveals how ideas permeated imperial, national and regional boundaries, challenging the notion that the advent of the nation-state gave rise to national debates on the woman question that eclipsed transregional identifications and global connections. In other words, national concerns on the proper role for women in society and politics did not replace the global Muslim woman question for Muslim women intellectuals.

This study focuses on three moments in the emergence and evolution of the global

Muslim woman question. Throughout each of these periods, global engagement, facilitated through the intellectual efforts of Muslim women, created a distinct conversation that simultaneously focused on the need for reform within Muslim traditions, while also countering

Eurocentric liberal prejudices. The women in this study had to navigate a fine line between critiquing Orientalism and demanding more rights at home. The latter could easily be used as proof and justification by westerners that all Muslim women were, in fact, subjugated. I argue that the Muslim women who participated in this debate continually provided a double-critique on

Eurocentric racial discourses on Muslim societies and gender inequality within their own societies. I further contend, these women consciously used an Islamic framework to demand their increased social and political rights because it enabled them to undercut the notion that

Islam was at the root of their oppression. And, their reinterpretation of Islamic traditions undermined possible criticisms against their feminist agenda, by bolstering arguments for their rights with claims of religious morality.

For the Kezbans in my life.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This dissertation was a collaborative effort and I could not have written a single page without the unending support and love of the following people.

I want to begin by thanking my advisors Dr. Cemil Aydin and Dr. Sarah Shields. I can never fully express my gratitude to you both for your unfailing commitment in supporting me through this dissertation. I could not have wished for two more wonderful, helpful, and brilliant scholars as advisors. Your brilliance as scholars is only rivaled by your empathy as people.

Thank you for believing in me and this project. I would like to also thank my other committee members, Dr. Juliane Hammer, Dr. Michelle King, and Dr. Didem Havlioglu. Both as feminists and scholars, each of you challenged me to be more thoughtful and intentional with my ideas.

Each of you inspired and helped me develop the necessary tools to produce a feminist history of which I am proud. I would also like to thank my undergraduate mentors Dr. Carolyn Eichner and

Dr. Tamara Zwick. I would never have pursued this dissertation without your belief in me.

My years as a graduate student introduced me to some of the most amazing people and I am lucky to end this chapter of my life with friendships that inspire me to be the best version of myself. Thank you to Sarah Gaby, Jeanne Tilley, Eric Vreeland, Alexandria Faulkenbury, Evan

Faulkenbury, Alyssa Bowen, Heather Hillaker, Lorn Hillaker, Rory McGovern, Jillian

McGovern, Brian Drohan, Larissa Stiglich, Beth Hessler, and Mark Reeves. I especially want to thank Jessica Auer, Erika Huckestein, and Kirsten Cooper not only for your friendship, but for the edits, discussions, and emotional support. This project was made so much stronger because of your brilliant minds and willingness to help.

I want to thank my friends, Amy Lewis, Katie Scott, and Dayna Brayman. You three are my chosen family and I cannot adequately express how much your love and friendship throughout the years gave me the confidence I needed to embark on this adventure.

People say that moms need other moms. I completely agree. However, moms who are finishing a dissertation need a Jenny in their lives. Jenny, you are truly the nicest, most generous person. You gave your time and love to our family so that I could dive into the final stages of this project with total focus. My ability to finish this dissertation with an infant is in large part because of you. I could never repay your kindness.

I want to thank my parents for their sacrifices, love, and belief in me. Both my mom and dad, for as long as I can remember, impressed the vital importance of an education and gave me the support to accomplish my academic goals. I would never have dreamed of pursuing a dissertation without this foundation.

I want to thank my daughter Kezban. You were my greatest motivation and source of joy while I finished this dissertation. You reminded me every day that success is measured in more substantial ways than words on a page and degrees earned. Being a good mother and someone you admire will be my life’s greatest aspiration and success.

Finally, Neil- from start to finish this dissertation, and all the sacrifices that come with it, was made possible because of you. Your selflessness, unlimited support, encouragement, and total understanding gave me the conviction to keep writing on the days it felt impossible. There are not enough words to express my depth of love and gratitude to you for taking this journey with me.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES……………………………………………………………………………….x

INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………………...1

CHAPTER 1: FATMA ALIYE AND THE GLOBAL MUSLIM WOMAN QUESTION…………………………………………………………………………...24

The Ottoman Empire, Global Networks, and the Movement of Ideas…………………..31

Muslim Modernists’ Lives and Intellectual Productions………………………………...39

Qasim Amin……………………………………………………………………...40

Şemseddin Sami………………………………………………………………….41

Muhammad Barakatullah………………………………………………………...42

İsmail Gaspıralı…………………………………………………………………..43

Moulavi Cherágh Ali…………………………………………………………….45

Mehmet Halil Halid……………………………………………………………...46

Fatma Aliye………………………………………………………………………48

The Global Muslim Woman Question…………………………………………………...54

Polygyny…………………………………………………………………………54

Arranged Marriages……………………………………………………………...61

Property Rights…………………………………………………………………..64

Divorce…………………………………………………………………………..66

Veiling…………………………………………………………………………...71

Education………………………………………………………………………...74

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Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………….79

CHAPTER2: “WE EXIST, WE HAVE AWOKEN, WE SHALL RISE”: GLOBAL FEATURES OF THE OTTOMAN WOMEN’S MOVEMENT AND KADINLAR DÜNYASI…………………………………………………………………….81

Ulviye Mevlan Civelek and Kadınlar Dünyası………………………………………….86

Ottoman Women’s Journals……………………………………………………………...90

The 1908 Revolution and Gender Reforms……………………………………………...95

Ottoman Women and the International Women’s Movement…………………………...99

The Global Nature of Kadınlar Dünyası……………………………………………….111

Reconciling Faith and Feminism and Activism Beyond the Pen………………………123

Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………...133

CHAPTER 3: “NOW SHE IS HOLDING THE CROWN OF WORLD FEMINISM”: THE NEW TURKISH WOMAN ON THE GLOBAL STAGE, 1923-1935…………………..135

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’ Answer to the Global Muslim Woman Question……………141

Keriman Halis and the “New Turkish Woman”………………………………………..147

International Women’s Congresses…………………………………………………….160

Halide Edip and the Global Muslim woman Question…………………………………171

Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………...192

CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………………………193

BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………………202

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1.1 – Fatma Aliye’s image on the fifty Turkish Lira…..…………………………………25

Figure 1.2 – Muslim networks in the nineteenth century from Seema Alavi’s Muslim Cosmopolitanism in the Age of Empire………………………………..33

Figure 2.1 – Ulviye Mevlan Civelek (1893-1964)………………………………………………86

Figure 2.2 – Ulviye Mevlan’s Civelek’s Commemorative plaque. Erected in 1971…………………………………………………………………………..88

Figure 2.3 – Bedra Osman, Bedia Şekib, Nezihe Mustafa, Hamiyet Derviş, Mediha, Reﬁ ka Mustafa, Seniha Hikmet-First image of Muslim women in a Periodical (Kadınlar Dünyası) in the Ottoman Empire, 1914…………………………………………………………………...93

Figure 2.4 – Selma Riza (1872-1931)…………………………………………………………..107

Figure 2.5 – The Heading for the French supplement Kadınlar Dünyası……………………...113

Figure 2.6 – Belkıs Şevket……………………………………………………………………...129

Figure 2.7 – Yaşar Nezihe……………………………………………………………………...132

Figure 3.1 – Huda Sha’arawi on the far left with the Egyptian delegation At a press conference in Istanbul……………………………………………………….136

Figure 3.2 – Keriman Halis submission photo for Miss Turkey………………………………..152

Figure 3.3 – Keriman Halis after winning the title Miss Universe……………………………..153

Figure 3.4 – Opening session of the Alliance of International Women’s Congress in Istanbul, 1935……………………………………………………………..164

Figure 3.5 – Ataturk and Halide Edip, 1923……………………………………………………175

Figure 3.6 – Halide Edip delivering speech, 1919……………………………………………...176

Figure 3.7 – Shareefah Hamid Ali……………………………………………………………...187

INTRODUCTION

The Westernist [Kemalist] elites are distressed by educated Muslim women, who are in command of foreign languages as well. You can no longer identify Muslim people with either illiteracy or backwardness. We Muslim people do not fit everyday definitions of reactionary people anymore.1

Islam is open to interpretation. A woman may think that her motherhood tasks come before anything else. For this woman the best thing in life is taking care of her children and staying home. She can interpret Islam in this way. I look at Islam and say that since Islam is such a religion where women, too, can participate in the social and economic life, and it does not outlaw all these explicitly—what I am saying here is that it does not forbid these, this is not a suggestion—then I will study…. That is to say, the condition of where some women consider themselves only as mothers and where the rest find their existence outside the house…. springs from the flexible order of Islam, which fulfills every individual’s needs.2

Let me give an example of my own family. I sometimes talk about the verses and hadiths of our Prophet to my father. “Father, when it was necessary, our prophet undertook his own tasks and helped his wife; he swept the house.” …. “Where,” he asks, “where is it written?” That is, they don’t know such things, and they don’t accept them. Since they have not heard it from their own parents, they don’t believe in such things in Islam. They have been shown just that the women in the West struggle for equality…. For them women are respected so much in Islam, why should they ask for equality?3

—Turkish female university students, 19874 For many Westerners and Turkish secularists alike, no other Islamic symbol has connoted the “otherness” of Muslims more than the veil. Following the establishment of the Republic of

Turkey in 1923, authorities implemented extensive reforms aimed at secularization and modernization. While these initial reforms did not officially ban the veil, donning it became strongly discouraged. Republican elites depicted the veil as a relic of a backwards past. Official regulation of the headscarf began in the 1970s when lawyers and civil servants were asked to no

1 Nilüfer Göle, The Forbidden Modern: Civilization and Veiling (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 98.

2 Göle, 116–17.

3 Göle, 104.

4 These quotes come from field work conducted by Nilüfer Göle in 1987. Göle conducted in-depth interviews with Islamic female students and group discussions. For more on this field work see, Göle, 153–54.

longer veil in government buildings. In 1982, the Council of Higher Education introduced a dress code targeting veiled female students which required “modern” dress at universities.5 Muslim women university students like those quoted above launched an unprecedented mobilization in resistance to this “headscarf ban.”6

As their own words make clear, university women who opposed the veiling ban understood it as a window into larger debates about what it meant to be a Muslim woman in the modern world. They made it clear that their decision to veil was a personal one and criticized the idea that veiling was a reactionary choice. Instead, they suggested that Kemalist efforts to abolish veiling were an unwarranted reaction to Western pressures to fit a certain model of modernity.

These women argued that Islam was open to interpretation and therefore could mean different things to different people. For them, there was no singular way of being a modern Muslim woman. At the same time, some sought to use their own interpretations of religious texts to challenge sexist behaviors and undermine patriarchal practices and policies within their own community.

5 Esra Özcan, Mainstreaming the Headscarf: Islamist Politics and Women in the Turkish Media (London: I.B. Tauris, 2019).

6 For more on this topic see Fatma Nevra Seggie, Religion and the State in Turkish Universities: The Headscarf Ban (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Seggie’s work focuses on the educational and cultural experiences of female students who decided to take off the veil to attend college. For information on the social and economic implications of the headscarf ban see Ayse Guveli, “Social and Economic Impact of the Headscarf Ban on Women in Turkey,” European Societies 13, no. 2 (2011): 171–89. Guveli argues that the ban intended to protect the elite’s privileged positions by slowing down social and regional mobility. Zeynep Akbulut, “Veiling as Self-Disciplining: Muslim Women, Islamic Discourses, and the Headscarf Ban in Turkey,” Contemporary Islam 9, no. 3 (2015): 433– 53. In this article Akbulut analyses how Muslim women’s personalized understandings of self-discipline and Islam were impacted by the headscarf ban. Kerime Akoglu, “Piecemeal Freedom: Why the Headscarf Ban Remains in Place in Turkey,” Boston College International and Comparative Law Review 38, no. 2 (2015): 277. Akoglu argue sin this article that the true purpose for the headscarf ban was not about safeguarding secularism, but had more to do with keeping women out of public spaces. Amélie Barras, “A Rights-Based Discourse to Contest the Boundaries of State Secularism? The Case of the Headscarf Bans in France and Turkey,” Democratization 16, no. 6 (2009): 1237– 60. Barras argues in this article that the use of a human-rights based discourse by Islamists, regarding the veil, bridges the disconnect between the religious and secular in Turkey.

The outlawing of the veil remained a matter of intense public interest and debate in

Turkey throughout the 1980s. Islamists claimed veiling was a personal decision in accordance with their religion, arguing that every woman had the right to veil. On the other hand, progressive public opinion, particularly among Kemalist women, argued that efforts to end the veil ban jeopardized the principle of secularism. The latter group organized into various associations including: Çağdaş Yaşamı Destekleme Derneği (Association of Support for Modern

Life), Türk Hukukçu Kadınlar Derneği (Association of Turkish Female Jurists), and Kadın

Çalışmaları Uygulama ve Araştırma Merkezi (University of Istanbul, the Center of Research and

Application on the Woman Question). These women’s organizations unequivocally supported

Kemalism and systematically opposed the post-1980s Islamist movements. For them, the activism of Muslim women university students symbolized the broader threat posed by Islamist political resurgence.

The global context of the 1980s infused this Islamist movement in Turkey with even more significance. The public discourse on Muslim women and the veil was not just part of a

Turkish nationalist discussion, but was also connected to the transnational politicization of Islam.

Islamist activity in Turkey was filtered through the lens of the 1979 Iranian Revolution and played on Western secularists’ fears of a global reactionary revolution.7 The Iranian Revolution reinforced the identification between veiling and radical Islam. The Islamic Revolution utilized

7 For more on the Iranian revolution see John L. Esposito, ed., The Iranian Revolution: Its Global Impact (Miami: Florida International University Press, 1990); edited by David Menashri, The Iranian Revolution and the Muslim World, Westview Special Studies on the Middle East (Boulder: Westview Press, 1990); M. P. Amineh and S. N. Eisenstadt, “The Iranian Revolution: The Multiple Contexts of the Iranian Revolution,” Perspectives on Global Development and Technology 6, no. 1–3 (2007): 129–57; Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, “Iranian Revolution,” in A Dictionary of Politics in the Middle East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); Mansoor Moaddel, Class, Politics, and Ideology in the Iranian Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).

veiled bodies as symbols to distinguish its difference from the West.8 Thus, the political confrontation between Shari’a and secularism manifested as a conflict between veiled and

Kemalist women and vice versa.9

At times, these reductive dichotomies were replaced by attempts at a more nuanced understanding of the veiling movement in Turkey. For instance, sociologist Nilüfer Göle argues that “veiled students, as new female actors of Islamism, acquire and aspire for ‘symbolic capital’ of two different sources: religious and secular.” But even scholars who sought to understand these women’s choices as modern, and not backwards, positioned them as an innovation of the

1980s. Göle herself suggested that this moment gave way to a new female Muslim intellectualism that was peculiar to the time: “Their recently acquired visibility, both on university campuses and within Islamist movements, indicates…. the emergence of a new figure, the female Islamist intellectual [emphasis added].”10

However, this dissertation reveals a longer history of Muslim women intellectuals that necessitates a reframing of the activism of these university women and other recent conversations about Muslim womanhood. The 1980s Islamist movement in general, and Muslim intellectual women in particular, actually represented a resurgence of what I call the global

Muslim woman question— a broad and nuanced debate surrounding the appropriate social, political, and religious role of Muslim women in society that was often led by Muslim women themselves. Yet, none of the treatments of the historical moment recognized that these women

8 For more on veiling and the Iranian Revolution see Afsaneh Najmabadi, “(Un)Veiling Feminism,” Social Text 18, no. 3 (2000): 29–45; Hamideh Sedghi, Women and Politics in Iran: Veiling, Unveiling, and Reveiling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Masoud Talachian, “The Veil and the State: Debating the Unveiling and Re- Veiling of Women in Twentieth-Century Iran,” (master’s thesis, Florida Atlantic University, 2004).

9 Göle, The Forbidden Modern, 83–84.

10 Göle, 5.

were a part of a long movement to define what it meant to be a modern Muslim woman.

Moreover, the issue around which the 1980s debate circled – the veil – had long symbolized the tensions between Islam and Western concepts of modernity, civilization, and feminism. These tensions infused the veil with significant political meaning, both within Turkey and internationally. Being a veiled woman in the 1980s in Turkey created cognitive dissonance for those who aspired to safeguard Turkey’s secularist and Western modernity. However, if we look to the history of Muslim women intellectuals, we see that many of them had long ago reconciled these supposedly discordant concepts themselves, just as their counterparts did in the 1980s. In fact, the activism against the veiling ban in the 1980s grew out of the Turkish state’s failure to fully wrestle with Muslim women intellectuals’ answers to an earlier incarnation of that question.

Late 20th century Turkish secularists did not recognize how Muslim women played a significant part in the efforts to reconcile Islam and eastern modernism, progress, and women’s rights dating to the 1870s. Scholars have not centered Muslim women’s voices in these conversations, and thus have not seriously considered how these women understood themselves, their choices, and their place in the modern world. More than a century before the Turkish veil ban, women intellectuals in the Ottoman Empire helped launch a global conversation on the

‘Muslim woman question.’ This study addresses this unexplored topic.

“‘We can defend our rights by our own efforts’: Turkish Women and the Global Muslim

Woman Question, 1870-1935,” analyzes how Ottoman and Turkish women Muslim intellectuals established a set of arguments to advance women’s rights, through their engagement with the

Muslim modernists also debated the conditions of Muslim women, the causes of their problems and the solutions for their “oppression.”11 But historians have allowed their words to obscure

This study focuses on three moments in the emergence and evolution of the global

Muslim woman question. Throughout each of these periods, global engagement, facilitated

11 For an example of this literature see Gull-i-Hina, “Modernist Trends and Varied Responses: Reflections on Muslim Women in Urdu Prose by Male Authors of South Asia (1900-1936),” South Asian Studies 27, no. 2 (2012): 459.

through the intellectual efforts of Muslim women, created a distinct conversation that simultaneously focused on the need for reform within Muslim traditions, while also countering

Despite the specific global and domestic circumstances of each temporal moment, the historical actors who participated in the global Muslim woman question built on the intellectual efforts of the Muslim women that came before them. The fact that the debate on the global

Muslim woman question spanned decades reveals the adaptability of and continued necessity for

Muslim Turkish women to reconcile their faith and feminist endeavors. The women in this project all saw the debate on Muslim women as a conversation with global proportions.

Dominant discourses such as Orientalism, civilizational legitimacy, feminist Orientalism, nationalism, modernization, and secularism, all sought to define and impose an idea of Muslim womanhood, imbued with specific political purposes, that excluded actual Muslim women’s ideas and voices from the conversation. The women in this study created an intellectual space for

themselves in the debate on the global Muslim woman question in order to regain control of the narratives on modern Muslim womanhood.

Beginning in the 1870s the status of Muslim women, or more specifically their oppression, became a key criterion in judging the civilizational backwardness of Muslim majority societies. In 1878, British imperialist and Orientalist Stanley Lane Poole claimed that

“the degradation of women in the East is a canker that begins its destructive work early in childhood, and has eaten into the whole system of Islam.”12 In addition to Stanley Lane Poole, colonial officers such as Lord Cromer (1821-1917), and Christian missionaries like Samuel

Zwemer (1867-1952), perpetuated discourses identifying the status of Muslim women as both the cause and symptom of the decline of the Muslim world.13 This discourse compelled a response from late-nineteenth century Ottoman, Egyptian, and South Asian Muslim intellectuals concerned with the political implications of an unmitigated condemnation of their culture and civilization. Propelled in part by these concerns, Muslim women intellectuals developed a comprehensive discourse on the global Muslim woman question.

The Constitutional Era (1908-1919) represented a moment in Ottoman Imperial history where different ideological currents competed for dominance. Yet at the center of Islamic,

Westernist, and Turkist discourses were issues of the equality of women in the Ottoman Empire and citizenship.14 An individual’s view on Muslim womanhood remained a key measure of their

12 Reprinted from Samuel Marinus Zwemer, Amy E. Zwemer, and Peter G. Riddell, Moslem Women (Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2009), cited in Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).

13 Samuel Marinus Zwemer, The Moslem World (New York: Young People’s Missionary Movement of the United States and Canada, 1908).

14 For more on the second constitutional period and the Young Turks see M. Şükrü Hanioğlu, The Young Turks in Opposition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); M. Şükrü Hanioğlu, Preparation for a Revolution: The Young Turks, 1902-1908 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Erik J. Zürcher, The Young Turk Legacy and Nation Building: From the Ottoman Empire to Atatürk’s Turkey (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010); Stefano Taglia,

understanding of modernity and their willingness to adopt a Western cultural model. Ottoman

Westernists viewed Islamic traditions as barriers against civilization and therefore sought to liberate women according to Western understandings. Islamists accused Westernists of imitating

Europe and believed the moral values of Islam needed to be preserved. Turkists looked to past

Turkish life for the ideal society and argued that moral identity existed outside of Islam.15

However, the Muslim women engaged in the global Muslim woman question did not squarely fall into any of these ideological camps, and instead continued to advance a more robust and nuanced understanding of modern womanhood.

After the end of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of the Republic of Turkey as a secular nation, the global Muslim woman question became a key component in the legitimization of Turkey as a nation-state. From 1924-1938, Western writings on the Turkish

Republic overwhelmingly praised the changes in the legal and social status of Turkish-Muslim women. However, Muslim publics in the Middle East and India were divided over the terms and direction of Turkey’s secularizing reforms.16 Middle Eastern and Indian Muslim intellectuals long understood the Ottoman Caliphate as an example of the harmony between Islam and modernity, and together formed a triangle of intellectual transference with Ottoman

Intellectuals and Reform in the Ottoman Empire: The Young Turks on the Challenges of Modernity (London: Routledge, 2015).

15 Göle, The Forbidden Modern, 37

16 Some of these Western sources include Hester Donaldson Jenkins, An Educational Ambassador to the Near East: The Story of Mary Mills Patrick and an American College in the Orient (New York: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1925); Barbara Ward, Turkey (London: Oxford University Press, 1942); Mary Mills Patrick, A Bosporus Adventure: Istanbul (Constantinople) Woman’s College 1871-1924 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1934); Ada Goodrich- Freer, Things Seen in Constantinople: A Description of This Picturesque Outpost of the Orient, Its History, Mosques and the Life and Ways of Its People (London: Seeley, Service & Co., 1926); Anna Fink, Colorful Adventures in the Orient (Austin: von Boeckmann-Jones, 1930).

intellectuals.17 As a result of this trans-imperial link, Egyptian and Indian Muslim intellectuals continued to pay close attention to the radical secularizing reforms in Turkey regarding women’s rights after 1924. The attention from Muslim intellectuals outside of Turkey helped continue an intra-Muslim intellectual network on the global Muslim woman question.

This project engages with and advances three existing historiographies: the historiography on the “woman question,” the literature on Orientalism, and the history of international feminist activism. The first exploration into the “woman question” by historians situated the topic concretely in the Western world and among American and British feminists.

The woman question refers to the debate on the changing social, political, and economic roles of women starting in the late-nineteenth century and continuing through the first few decades of the twentieth century. This debate was ignited by the fight for women’s suffrage. While this literature did an immense service in unearthing women’s activism in Western feminist movements, it failed to reveal the non-Western components of the woman question, as well as its power as a discursive political and social tool.18

This dissertation builds on more recent scholarship on the woman question, which has taken a transnational approach to understanding how it came to be answered. An example of one such work is Allison Sneider’s, Suffragists in an Imperial Age: U.S. Expansion and the Women

17 The following works are primary sources that evidence an engagement by Muslim intellectuals on the topic of the woman question vis-a-vis their claim to civilizational legitimacy, see Moulavi Cherágh Ali, The Proposed Political, Legal and Social Reforms in the Ottoman Empire and Other Mohammadan States (Bombay: Education Society’s Press, 1883); Halil Halid, The Crescent Versus the Cross (London: Luzac & Co., 1907); Şemseddin Sami, Kadinlar [Women] (Istanbul: Gundogan Yayinlari, 1996).

18 For examples of these types of works see Nicola Diane Thompson, Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); June K. Burton, Napoleon and the Woman Question: Discourses of the Other Sex in French Education, Medicine, and Medical Law, 1799-1815 (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2007); Karen Hunt, Equivocal Feminists: The Social Democratic Federation and the Woman Question, 1884-1911 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Mary Evans, The Woman Question (London: Sage, 1994); Christina Crosby, The Ends of History: Victorians and “the Woman Question” (London: Routledge, 2014); Elizabeth K Helsinger, Robin L Sheets, and William R Veeder, The Woman Question: Society and Literature in Britain and America, 1837-1883 (New York: Garland, 1983).

Question, 1870-1929. While in some ways this work echoed both the geographical location

(United States) and subjects (suffragists) of previous literature on the woman question, it has also complicated our understanding of the woman question by revealing how suffragists positioned their arguments for enfranchisement within a larger geopolitical framework. At the turn of the twentieth century, U.S. expansion and empire raised the question of political rights for potential new citizens to the level of congressional debate. The discussion of voting rights for potential new citizens (Dominicans, Indians, Mormons, Hawaiians, Filipinos, Puerto Ricans) created a political context for a national discussion of woman suffrage in an age of states' rights. Sneider argues that had the United States not been such an expansive nation after the Civil War, suffragists would have had a much harder time bringing their claims to Congress.19 U.S. imperialism allowed women’s rights activists to both demand and acquire their rights for fear of jeopardizing the nation’s geopolitical standing as a democratic nation.

The work of historians like Sneider helped raise the possibility for further investigation into the woman question in a global context. By considering how Muslim women raised and developed their own woman question, this dissertation finds a parallel phenomenon in the

Ottoman and Turkish contexts. The global Muslim woman question became crucial for the geopolitical positions of both the late Ottoman Empire and Turkish Republic. In fact, the Turkish

Republic understood the reform of women’s rights as a basic pillar of its legitimacy as a new nation-state during the interwar period.

I also draw from insights gleaned from work by Joan Judge. Judge revealed the existence of a multi-faceted, if national, conversation on the Chinese woman question in her monograph, A

19 Allison L Sneider, Suffragists in an Imperial Age: U.S. Expansion and the Woman Question, 1870-1929 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

Precious Raft of History: The Past, the West, and the Woman Question in China. Her work has changed both our geographic orientation and understanding of the subject. This book pointed to the turn of the twentieth century as a significant moment in the unfolding of Chinese modernity.

Judge argues that both the “woman question” and the question of history were central to understanding national politics during this moment in China’s past. This work elucidated how ideas of woman, history, and nation became imbricated with one another, while exploring how these ideas impacted women’s everyday lives. Her objective was to reveal the complexity of the era by “tracing patterns and seeking meanings in the intricate weave of Chinese modernity.”20

While Judge certainly acknowledged the West as a global force in China’s need to grapple with modernity, she shifted the focus away from the West as an historical actor, and focused primarily on the domestic responses to China’s woman question. I build on Judge’s model in centering the intellectual outputs of Muslim women intellectuals on their own merits.

This dissertation builds off of the literature on the woman question by looking at the transregional/transnational articulations on the topic. Turkey’s response to the global Muslim woman question has yet to be examined as a gendered and geopolitical discourse discussed in a global context. As this study shows, the woman question was not the same in every context and this historical investigation shows how moments of intense debate on the woman question helped facilitate global conversations and were connected to other discourses such as modernization,

Islam, and Orientalism.

By considering Muslim women’s own construction of and engagement with the global

Muslim woman question, this dissertation helps push our understanding of Orientalist thought in new directions. During the second half of the twentieth century, the independence movements in

20 Joan Judge, The Precious Raft of History: The Past, the West, and the Woman Question in China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 2.

the Middle East and North Africa incited a debate within Cold War global academic circuits on

Orientalist knowledge production. One of the primary contributors to the debate, Edward W.

Said, defined Orientalism as European intellectuals’ way of “coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient’s special place in European Western experience… the Orient is… one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other.”21 He contends Orientalism was mainly a

British and French cultural enterprise, used to strengthen their own cultures by setting themselves against the Orient, which was deemed “a sort of surrogate.” Orientalism was an academic discipline. But, more significantly for Said, Orientalism was an ideological discourse that coalesced with European power. Said contends that all knowledge was a product of its historical context, and could never remain unaffected by the auspices it is derived from. This suggests that no knowledge can claim the privilege of truth. Moreover, Said further argued that

Orientalism’s entanglement with imperialism resulted in a willfully racist discourse.

Said’s identification of Orientalist discourse, and its pejorative renderings within and outside of academia, has prompted several scholars to analyze their understandings of

Orientalism and its effect on their own research.22 Edmund Burke is one such scholar, who as a world historian is interested in both European Orientalism and modern Islamic history.

Ultimately, while Burke acknowledges the validity of Said’s claims, he finds Said’s overall understanding of Orientalism simplistic. To complicate Said’s interpretation of Orientalism,

Burke highlights how some Orientalists were against imperialism, or wrote favorably about

Islamic culture and society. Further complicating Said’s stance, Burke points to Middle -Eastern nationalists and the western inspirations they used to claim their autonomy. He also points out

21 Edward Said, “‘Introduction’ to Orientalism,” in Postcolonialisms: An Anthology of Cultural Theory and Criticism, ed. Gaurav Gajanan Desai and Supriya Nair (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 71.

22 Said, 72–78.

that nationalist and Pan-Islamic figures in the Middle East held their own biases and assumptions. In fact, many nationalists internalized and reproduced stigmas attached by

European orientalism to their societies. According to Burke, Orientalism is a species of

Enlightenment discourse that generated “un-falsifiable propositions about the superiority of

Europeans to non-Europeans.”23 However, Burke suggests Orientalism’s connection to nationalism, modernity, and the Enlightenment made it a global process in need of constant critique and reformulation.

This research finds support for Burke’s general framework, while asking new questions about the relationships among nationalism, Orientalism, and gender. Rulers of the Turkish

Republic from 1924 to 1938, for example, argued that Islamic culture was a cause of the

Ottoman Empire’s decline and thus that Turkey needed to westernize in order to achieve progress and civilization. The nationalist Turkish government’s acceptance of stigmas attached to the Turkish populations’ own religion and culture was especially visible in their claims to liberate Turkish women from the shackles of traditions that bound them. Thus, in the Turkish case, we see an alliance between nationalist Westernism and European Orientalism wrought through the prism of women’s status.

Furthermore, I draw from the work Orientalists, Islamists and the Global Public Sphere, by Dietrich Jung, which offers both a critique and reformulation of Orientalism by considering the discourse’s global effects. In an attempt to deconstruct the hegemony of the essentialist conceptualization of Islam found in public discourses, Dietrich Jung employed the use of the

“global public sphere” as an analytical tool. Jung viewed the global public sphere as a social and

23 Edmund Burke, “Orientalism and World History: Representing Middle Eastern Nationalism and Islamism in the Twentieth Century,” Theory and Society 27, no. 4 (1998): 489–507.

political site by which Western and Islamic public spheres established a global platform.

According to Jung, this platform formed, extended, and disseminated knowledge through social power relations.24 Echoing Burke, Jung pointed to the agency of late-nineteenth century Muslim intellectuals in reproducing and contributing to European Orientalism.

Jung’s global sphere consisted mainly of Muslim reformist intellectuals’ exchanges with

European intellectuals, and depicted Muslim intellectuals’ as victims in their need to respond to

European Orientalism. A shift away from European intellectual networks towards intra-Muslim networks reemphasizes Muslim intellectuals’ agency against European Orientalist discourse, and elucidates an organic discussion of the question of Muslim women’s rights within Muslim societies. These conversations looked to develop Muslim women’s roles in society through their own interpretations of Islamic traditions, and not as a result of Western pressure.25 As opposed to

Ataturk’s wholesale westernization project that internalized Orientalist ideas, especially in regards to women.

Both Burke and Jung have added to the complexity of Orientalism as a discourse and topic of historical inquiry. They successfully highlighted the global component of Orientalism, while linking it to other discourses such as positivism and nationalism.26 However, in their efforts to nuance Said’s rendering of Orientalism, both failed to address the gendered facet of

Orientalism.

24 Dietrich Jung, Orientalists, Islamists and the Global Public Sphere (Sheffield: Equinox Publishing Limited, 2011), 11–15.

25 Ansev Demirhan, “Female Muslim Intellectuals: Understanding the History of Turkey’s Woman Question Through the Construction of Islamic Tradition” (master’s thesis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2014).

26 For more works on orientalism see Chandreyee Niyogi, ed., Reorienting Orientalism (New Delhi: SAGE Publications, 2006); Anna Bernard and David Attwell, Debating Orientalism, ed. Ziad Elmarsafy (Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

In considering the relationship between gender and Orientalism, this draws primarily from the work of Reina Lewis, who has sought to critique and reformulate Orientalism through

Ottoman women’s social and cultural agency. Lewis’ focus on Ottoman women’s agency intervened in the discussion of the values and limits of Orientalism as a discourse and a theoretical paradigm in significant ways. She focused on sources with a “female point of origin,” bringing a new element to existing challenges to masculinist histories of Orientalism.27 In addition to the use of sources from a female perspective, Lewis suggested the use of Ottoman sources. These sources provided examples of indigenous cultural agency that demonstrated the other side of the classic Orientalist paradigm. The importance of these sources rests in their ability to speak of “practices of resistance,” charged by differences of ethnicity and gender.

Echoing other post-colonial feminist theorists such as Chandra Mohanty, Lewis argues that using these sources undercut the pejorative and monolithic rendering of Muslim women.28 This study is in part an answer to the call for more dynamic and robust histories on gender and orientalism.

By examining Muslim women’s responses to the orientalist discourse about themselves, and considering those responses as part of a transregional discussion, this dissertation re-centers both the global nature of the Muslim woman question and women’s own agency in answering it.

Finally, this dissertation puts discourses on the global Muslim question and Orientalism in conversation with our understanding of early twentieth century international feminism. One of the landmark works on international feminist activism is Leila Rupp’s work. Rupp’s book

27 Reina Lewis, Rethinking Orientalism: Women, Travel, and the Ottoman Harem (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 3.

28 In “Under Western Eyes” Chandra Mohanty argues that Western feminist scholarship reduces all women of the “third world” into a single, collective category. She argued for more dynamic and nuanced scholarship from Western scholars. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” Feminist Review 30 (1988): 333–58.

Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement, traced the development of three international women’s organizations—the International Council of Women, the

International Alliance of Women, and the Women’s International League of Peace and Freedom.

This work laid a foundation for historians to examine women’s internationalism. Examining the first few decades of the twentieth century, when the United States and Europe saw the expansion of a feminist consciousness, Rupp’s work analyzed how the women in these organizations used the rhetoric of “sisterhood” to help create a purportedly “common” feminist cause. However,

Rupp revealed, this “sisterhood” was forged time and again with assumptions of Western cultural and political superiority.29

Other historians have helpfully broadened Rupp’s scope in recent years. Historian Nicole

Van Os pivoted away from Western feminists’ engagement within the international movement and examined Ottoman Muslim women’s internationalism. In, “They can breathe freely now”:

The International Council of Women and Ottoman Muslim Women (1893–1920s)”, Van Os explored interactions between Ottoman women and the International Council of Women. She argues that the first contact between the international women’s movement and women in the

Middle East occurred prior to the 1920s, which had been the commonly accepted historical narrative previously. This study builds off Van Os’ work by exploring the global connections and networks of Ottoman Muslim women prior to the 1920s, allowing us to see more clearly the long history of global engagement by Muslim women intellectuals.

Charlotte Weber has also shifted the focus away from the western women’s international movement toward “Eastern” women’s feminist activities. Weber’s article, “Between

29 Leila Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).

Nationalism and Feminism: The Eastern Women's Congresses of 1930 and 1932,” examines the

Eastern Women’s Congresses in Damascus (1930) and Tehran (1932) to show how Middle

Eastern women put forward their own claims to modernity. These women used the terms of international feminist and nationalist discourses to demand Eastern women’s advancement.

Weber argues “that in organizing across national boundaries, in seeking recognition from the international women’s movement, and above all in articulating a uniquely ‘Eastern’ framework in which to ground women’s rights, the delegates tried to create an autonomous women’s movement.”30 Weber further showed how these congresses were an attempt to create a feminist model that made sense for these women; one that would be constructed by them and on their own terms.31

Building off these scholars’ works, this dissertation explores how Muslim women engaged with the global Muslim woman question vis-à-vis the feminist Orientalism that framed the international women’s movement. Van Os challenged the standard periodization of Ottoman women’s internationalism and this study contributes to the growing literature on Ottoman and

Turkish women’s global experiences. Like Weber’s research, this study also looks to focus on

Ottoman and Turkish women’s construction of an authentic Muslim womanhood. However, my research also challenges in some important ways Weber’s assessment of the early nationalist period. In her article, Weber declared, “In Turkey…which remained free of direct European rule, the modernizing [regime] of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk…took it upon themselves to transform

30 Charlotte Weber, “Between Nationalism and Feminism: The Eastern Women’s Congresses of 1930 and 1932,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 4, no. 1 (Winter 2008): 83.

31 For more work on women’s internationalism see Marie Sandell, The Rise of Women’s Transnational Activism: Identity and Sisterhood between the World Wars (London: I.B. Tauris, 2015); Mrinalini Sinha, Donna Guy, and Angela Woollacott, eds., Feminisms and Internationalism (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1999); Glenda Sluga and Patricia Clavin, eds., Internationalisms: A Twentieth-Century History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

‘backward women’…their coercive ‘state feminism’ left no room for independent feminist activity.”32 This project aims to show that despite the state-sponsored feminism inacted by the

Turkish Republic, there was in fact “independent feminist activity.” Moreover, that activity derived from a long, dynamic, and nuanced discussion among a globally-focused cohort of

Muslim women feminist intellectuals.

This dissertation is comprised of three chapters. Chapter one reveals the emergence of the global Muslim woman question as it was debated among an intra-Muslim network of intellectuals during the context of nineteenth-century Orientalism. This chapter highlights Fatma

Aliye’s participation in the debate as an inception point of women trying to take back control of the narrative on modern Muslim womanhood. In chapter two, women build on Aliye’s ideas on the pages of the Ottoman women’s journal Kadınlar Dünyası. These women’s responses show the use of an Islamic feminist framework in the context of a greater global discourse on Muslim women’s rights and international feminism. Chapter three presents an inflection point in the global debate wherein the rise of Kemalist reforms seems to some people to achieve Muslim women’s “liberation” but actually is, for women who had been working in the intellectual tradition of women like Aliye and Kadınlar Dünyası’s writers, an imperfect solution.

In order to establish the transregional existence and nature of the global debate on the

Muslim woman question, chapter one probes the assumption that late-nineteenth century Muslim intellectuals’ engagement with issues concerning Muslim women was an apologetic discourse.

This chapter assesses the discourse among Muslim intellectuals both within and outside of the

Ottoman Empire. However, the emphasis of this chapter is on the Muslim modernist Fatma Aliye and her work Nisvân-ı İslâm. This chapter centers Aliye in the global Muslim woman question

32 Weber, “Between Nationalism and Feminism,” 85.

debate. For Aliye, women’s religious and political importance stood at the center of her Islamic understanding. This chapter argues Aliye’s use of an Islamic framework positioned her in a transregional discourse responsible for constructing the modern identity, “Muslim woman.”

Chapter two examines the Ottoman women’s journal Kadınlar Dünyası. The journal’s editors and contributors self-consciously addressed the global Muslim woman question from

1913 to 1921. The editors aligned the journal with the contemporary international women’s movement. The educated Ottoman women who wrote for Kadınlar Dünyası were tired of being blamed for the Empire’s shortcomings and saw the journal as a vehicle to change this narrative, as well as the narrative on Muslim women espoused by feminist Orientalism. I argue in this chapter that Kadınlar Dünyası and its contributors published articles with the twin objectives of presenting a more accurate understanding of Muslim womanhood to Western feminists and simultaneously constructing an Ottoman Muslim womanhood that legitimized their demands for more social and political rights within the Empire. Kadınlar Dünyası carved out a space for women to interpret Islamic traditions and cultural practices in relation to their fight for women’s rights. By doing this, the authors made clear that there would not be an adoption of Western feminist principles at the expense of their religious identities. Through this journal, these women constructed Muslim womanhood in a manner that reconciled their faith with their feminist goals for audiences both within the empire and western audiences.

Chapter three illustrates the significance of a renewed debate among Muslim intellectuals and feminists about the merits and shortcomings of radical Kemalist reforms enacted in the name of civilizing, westernizing, and liberating Muslim women from their religious traditions. This chapter analyzes the Kemalist reforms concerning women in order to link the global Muslim woman question to the Turkish woman question. Instead of focusing on Western responses to

these reforms, this chapter analyzes how other Muslim majority countries (some of which were once a part of the empire) reacted to the Republic’s reforms. This chapter analyzes three important elements in that response: Keriman Halis’ time as Miss Universe, international

Congresses, and Halide Edip’s intellectual works produced abroad. I argue that the response to

Kemalist reforms indicated a divergence in Muslim women’s responses to Ataturk’s top-down answer to the global Muslim woman question. Some women celebrated and looked to Turkey as a model, while others criticized the Kemalist response because Turkey granted women’s rights under the terms that Islam no longer be used as a feminist framework, rupturing modern Turkey from the intellectual legacy of Muslim women intellectual feminists before them.

By using the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey as a lens into this larger transregional global Muslim woman question, this dissertation project advances our understanding of global women’s history in a number of ways. First, I challenge traditional periodization on woman’s issues within Turkish history, illustrating how the Republican-era

Turkish woman question, identified with the successes of authoritarian secularizing reforms, emerged in complex ways from a global Muslim woman question discussed in the late-Ottoman empire. Moreover, my research shows that the debate on Turkey’s woman question continued well after Kemalist reforms were enacted, contesting the idea that Kemalism resolved the debate.

Similarly, this dissertation demonstrates the wide variations in intellectuals’ responses to the challenge of the “woman question,” recognizing the non-monolithic nature of the vibrant intellectual life of the Ottoman Empire/Turkey. Finally, my research emphasizes the crucial transregional/transnational dimension to the global Muslim woman question, revealing how discursive influences on the Muslim woman question transcended national and regional boundaries.

Scholars like Saba Mahmood, Juliane Hammer, and Lila Abu-Lughod, warn us that arguing against established stereotypes can lead to parochialism and discourage theoretical reflection if it becomes the sole purpose of the work. 33 The intention of this project is not to contribute to one of the two dominant narratives on Muslim women: “Muslim women are and have historically been oppressed and here is why,” or “Muslim women are not and have not been oppressed and here is why.” Writing to or against one of these narratives reduces both research and analytical possibilities. My focus on intra-Muslim and Muslim feminist networks of intellectual exchange allows this dissertation to reach beyond unhelpful dichotomies. Accessing and understanding figures like Fatma Aliye, Halide Edip, and other related networks of women, I avoid getting trapped within closed narratives on Muslim women’s “oppression” and/or

“liberation.” Instead, this project offers a critical engagement of what it meant to be a Muslim woman, according to Muslim women in varying temporal and political contexts. This enables me to imbue the category “Muslim woman” with a theoretical and historical nuance that might not otherwise be possible.

This project reveals that, notwithstanding the ideological bifurcation between secular modernists and Islamists in the late twentieth century, both camps have been complicit in their disregard for the nuanced narratives offered by Muslim women intellectuals themselves, especially regarding their ideas on Islam as a discursive tradition. By examining Muslim

33 Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). Mahmood’s work challenges normative liberal notions on Muslim women and reframes how we understand Muslim women’s agency, freedom, and authority. Juliane Hammer, American Muslim Women, Religious Authority, and Activism: More Than a Prayer (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012). In this book Hammer shows how Muslim American women challenged post-911 Islamophobic stereotypes through intellectual productions that expressed what it means to be a Muslim woman in America. These women challenged assumptions of their supposed oppression and carried out intra-Muslim debates about gender roles. Lila Abu-Lughod, Do Muslim Women Need Saving? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). In this work Abu-Lughod challenges the Western notion that Muslim women are in need of saving. In the work she shows the issues of gender inequality are not the result of religion alone, but instead patriarchal, class, and global conditions, not specific to the Islamic world are more decisive factors in women’s subjugation.

women’s intellectual production, which does not fall into either ideological camp, this project presents a means of historicizing and overcoming our understanding of harsh dichotomies like tradition/modernity, modernists/Islamists, and oppression/liberation. These politicized binaries have disempowered and silenced, and continue to silence, Muslim women struggling for their rights on their own terms. In fact, Muslim women in the late 19th and early 20th centuries empowered themselves by challenging these very same dichotomous narratives. Were this history better understood, perhaps scholars and the Turkish public alike might have looked differently upon the activism of the university students protesting the veiling ban in the 1980s.

Chapter 1: Fatma Aliya and the Global Muslim Woman Question

In 2005, Turkey’s Central Bank appointed a committee to select several historical figures to appear on newly issued Turkish currency. Fatma Aliye, noted as Turkey’s first woman novelist, has graced the fifty Turkish Lira minted since 2009. The committee’s decision to put

Aliye on Turkish currency incited national criticism by secularists who thought her selection represented a surrender to religious conservative forces and a snub to the historical activists who fought for women’s rights. Mustafa Özyürek, an MP for the secularist Republican People’s

Party, described Aliye as a “dubious personality” of whom most Turks had never heard. He noted that, “working within the tight criteria of finding types [of women] the AKP [Justice and

Development Party] would approve of is a tough challenge; 90% of people in the street do not know the figures they have chosen.”34 Bedri Baykam, an artist and member of the pro-Atatürk

Kemalist Thought Association, said it was part of an AKP-driven hidden agenda. Baykam declared, “I have no problem using historical figures on bank notes but I don’t trust the motives…They will infiltrate through the currency names or images that at first look harmless…until you get people who negate the values of the republic.”35

The suggestion that most people do not know of Fatma Aliye and her work as a women’s rights activist is accurate. However, the idea that Aliye was not among the first Ottoman feminists to fight for women’s rights, or that as a figure her life and memory negate the values of

34 Robert Tait, “First Woman on Banknote ‘Snub’ to Secular Turkey,” Guardian, October 12, 2008, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/oct/13/turkey-gender.

35 Tait, “First Woman on Banknote.”

the Turkish Republic, both in the past and contemporaneously, is inaccurate. These recent, as well as historical, debates on women’s societal roles present a unique lens through which to see the tension between secularism and Islamic traditions, because often intellectuals and politicians point to Muslim women as a marker of the incompatibility between the two.

Figure 1.1 Fatma Aliye’s image on the fifty Turkish Lira

What most people do not know about is the committee’s internal debate.36 The committee discussed at length whether or not to use an image of Fatma Aliye donning the veil. This debate held some merit considering the backlash from secularists over her selection. It is worth questioning how the national bank chose to construct her popular memory. Ultimately, they decided to put her on the lira sans veil, perhaps because of an understanding that she could pass

36 Dr. İbrahim Turhan, member of the Turkish Central Bank Governing Board (2004-2012), email interview by author, February 22, 2020.

as a modern Turkish figure only if she did not wear the veil, thus reiterating the national discordance between veiling, modernity, and Turkish identity. This debate suggested how little concern there was to depict Aliye’s historical memory accurately. Aliye understood a form of veiling as a directive of Islam and did not see Islam as a challenge to her identity as a modern

Ottoman- Turkish woman. Instead, the construction of her historical memory needed to suit

Turkey’s contemporary cultural identity politics. What is more interesting is that she was debated as a national figure, but her appropriation as a national symbol clouded the fact that she herself was a Muslim intellectual with transregional readership in Arabic, Urdu, and French. An examination of Aliye’s own work would have helped the committee to answer the question of whether or not Aliye should be pictured wearing the veil.

Fatma Aliye’s selection by the Turkish Central Bank highlighted the recent tension between interpretations of secularism and narrow understandings of Muslim womanhood. This tension has a long history; one which some scholars suggest was long since resolved by the formation of the Turkish Republic and with it the institution of legal reforms. Ottoman intellectuals debated the limits of Westernization at the end of the nineteenth century. This historical debate revealed tensions between modernization and cultural identity and, in turn, gender. Ottoman Westernists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries argued that only freeing women from the religious constraints and traditional ties of Islam could emancipate women. Alternatively, Ottoman conservatives conjectured that granting women freedom from religious traditions would break down the moral fabric of society. Consequently, veiling symbolized “backwardness” for proponents of Westernization, because it signified women’s separation from modern civilization, whereas for conservatives, the veil signified virtue.

The scholar Nilufer Göle contends that Westernists eventually triumphed over conservatives with the success of the Turkish Kemalist Revolution of 1923.37 Both scholars and contemporaries of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and his reforms credited Turkey’s first president with posing and answering Turkey’s woman question.38 In his biography of Atatürk, Andrew Mango wrote, “Atatürk who encouraged the process from the start, deserves his fame as the hero of women’s emancipation in Turkey, even though social change was, inevitably, gradual and limited.”39 Şükrü Hanioğlu, while not echoing Mango’s enthusiasm, suggested in his intellectual biography of Atatürk that, “the status and appearance of women was yet another major concern for Mustafa Kemal. As early as 1916…he had expressed support for the emancipation of women and the abolition of the veil.”40 Undeniably, the Turkish Republic ushered in important reforms for women including the unification of national education, which made primary schooling compulsory for all children. The state legally enacted equal pay for equal work, and with the adoption of the 1926 Swiss Civil Code as a model for Turkish legal reform, unilateral divorce and polygyny were abolished. Atatürk, both in historical memory and historiography, is credited for enacting these reforms, their genesis, and the effect they had on the status of (elite) women.

37 Nilufer Göle is the most significant contributor to the literature on gender and male Muslim reformist thought. Göle’s project focuses on the Ottoman/Turkish intellectual network that placed women at the center of the discourse on Westernization, placing Muslim intellectuals Şemseddin Sami and Amhet Midhat Afendi within this grid. Göle, The Forbidden Modern. While more recent works, like Göle’s, use gender as an analytical tool, Muslim intellectual history has failed to highlight Muslim women intellectuals and their discursive contribution to the Muslim woman question.

38 Some of these sources include Hester Donaldson Jenkins, An Educational Ambassador to the Near East: The Story of Mary Mills Patrick and an American College in the Orient (New York: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1925); Barbara Ward, Turkey (London: Oxford University Press, 1942); Mary Mills Patrick, A Bosporus Adventure: Istanbul (Constantinople) Woman’s College 1871-1924 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1934); Ada Goodrich- Freer, Things Seen in Constantinople: A Description of This Picturesque Outpost of the Orient, Its History, Mosques and the Life and Ways of Its People (London: Seeley, Service & Co., 1926); Anna Fink, Colorful Adventures in the Orient (Austin: von Boeckmann-Jones, 1930).

39 Andrew Mango, Ataturk: The Biography of the Founder of Modern Turkey (New York: The Overlook Press, 1999), 435.

40 M. Şükrü Hanioğlu, Atatürk: An Intellectual Biography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 208.

The popular, and scholarly, narratives on Kemalist reforms espoused a state-sponsored feminism. By crediting Atatürk for women’s political and social progress, the history of late-

Ottoman intellectuals and how they discussed the woman question globally, on multiple intellectual fronts, in gendered terms, and in connection with other Muslim intellectuals is muted.

With the exception of a few secondary sources, male Muslim reformists’ comments on the topic of women are only briefly mentioned, if not entirely overlooked in modern scholarship. In fact, male reformists’ works are seldom understood as contributing to the historical discussion of gender in Muslim societies. For example, Charles Kurzman edited a volume of primary sources that represents a collection of the intellectual output of Muslim modernists from the late- nineteenth century until World War II. This work was organized thematically and under the topic of “Women’s Rights,” only two of the six modernists analyzed in this chapter were listed.41

Often times the secondary literature emphasizes male reformists like Qasim Amin, Şemseddin

Sami, Muhammad Barakatullah, İsmail Gaspıralı, Moulavi, Cherágh Ali, and Mehmet Halil

Halid’s contribution to anti-imperial political ideology, or nationalist efforts, instead of their discussions on gendered issues.42

The Muslim reformists and their works examined in this chapter are often positioned in a binary where intellectuals were either pro-Westernization or conservative traditionalists. This binary is in part responsible for an understanding of their works as merely apologetic (i.e. the defense of religious doctrine through discursive debate), particularly in regards to the topic of

Muslim women. As early as the mid-nineteenth century, however, Muslim modernists debated

41 Charles Kurzman, ed., Modernist Islam, 1840-1940: A Sourcebook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

42 S. Tanvir Wasti, “Halil Halid: Anti-Imperialist Muslim Intellectual,” Middle Eastern Studies 29, no. 3 (1993): 559–79; Üner Daglyer, “Ziya Gökalp on Modernity and Islam: The Origins of an Uneasy Union in Contemporary Turkey,” Comparative Civilizations Review 57, no. 57 (October 1, 2007): 53–69.

the Muslim woman question by delving into the following topics: polygyny, arranged marriages, property rights, divorce, veiling, and education. Each of these topics comprised a discourse on

Muslim women and Islamic traditions that extended beyond apologetics and beyond the binary of Westernism versus Islam. A close reading of their works present insights on how Muslim modernists understood and constructed womanhood for themselves.

Beginning in the nineteenth century, the oppression of Muslim women served as a key criterion in judging the civilizational “backwardness” of Muslim majority societies.43 With the

Ottoman Empire a primary target of this civilizing discourse, Ottoman intellectuals presented refutations of these claims and started a transregional conversation on Muslim women’s rights and societal roles. Yet, while the debate over what I term the ‘Muslim woman question’ has raged for over a century, historians have failed to recognize its global character. What has been especially overlooked in academic and political discussions is the historically rich discourse by

Muslim intellectuals, especially Muslim women, who articulated various ideas on modern

Muslim womanhood, while also shaping new Islamic intellectual traditions, and critiquing

European Orientalist discourses.

In order to establish the transregional nature of the debate on the Muslim woman question, this chapter assesses the discourse among Muslim intellectuals both within and outside of the Ottoman Empire. The Muslim modernists highlighted in this chapter in addition to Fatma

Aliye represent a carefully selected group of prominent and influential male figures who come from different geographical regions. While the individual societies they lived in had unique political contours, these men were united by their intellectual fight against a racist European

Orientalism. Each of these thinkers felt compelled to confront derogatory discourses on Muslim

43 There were similar arguments with regard to the Hindu religion’s oppression of Hindu women (Sati) and Chinese civilization’s oppression of their women (foot binding).

women that emanated from Europe. These intellectuals were aware of the implications of their ideas during a geopolitical moment where the Ottoman Empire sought legal equality through international law and Muslim subjects in European empires wanted legal equality in the colonies.

These men addressed women’s issues such as education, veiling, property rights, etc., suggesting that their discourse on Muslim women went beyond apologetics. Each of the male modernists in this chapter believed in reforming Muslim women’s social condition as a way to empower them and strengthen society as a whole.

However, the emphasis of this chapter is on the Muslim modernist Fatma Aliye and her work Nisvân-ı İslâm, a widely translated treatise read extensively by Muslim intellectuals in the late -nineteenth century.44 Aliye is central to the global Muslim woman question debate, and yet her historical legacy is not situated in this intellectual network.45 In order to prove this, this chapter puts Aliye’s work in conversation with the works of renowned Muslim modernists of the nineteenth century. In popular historical memory Aliye has been over-simplified as the first woman novelist. Even though she is rightfully recognized by scholars as an influential novelist, she was also an important figure of Muslim modernism. She is often sidelined as a Muslim modernist and feminist because of the assumption that her use of an Islamic framework could never speak to modern ideas on Muslim women’s rights.

Writing in the last decades of the Ottoman Empire, Fatma Aliye challenged European intellectuals’ contentions that Muslim women were subjugated and oppressed. By using an

44 One of the most important Indian Muslim intellectuals, Shibli Numani, mentions the significance of Fatma Aliye’s writings and their Urdu translations in his travel account of a trip to Istanbul. For a travelogue of his journey to Rome, Egypt, Syria and Turkey along with his scholar companion Thomas Arnold in 1892, see Shibli Numani, Safar Nama e Rome-o-Misr-o-Sham (Delhi: Qoumi Press, 1901)

45 This dissertation builds on other scholars who have recovered Ottoman women’s intellectual legacies. See Didem Havlioğlu, Mihrî Hatun : Performance, Gender-Bending, and Subversion in Ottoman Intellectual History (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 2017).

Islamic framework, she presented positions on the topic of women’s issues through her interpretations of Islamic traditions. For Aliye, women’s religious and political importance stood at the center of her understanding of the Muslim faith and traditions. I argue her use of an

Islamic framework positioned her in a transregional discourse responsible for constructing the modern identity, “Muslim woman.” Fatma Aliye both participated in, and engineered, the transregional debate on Muslim women’s societal roles. By positioning herself in this debate, she created a space for other women to contribute to local and global discourses on women’s rights.

Aliye’s ability to situate her understanding of Islam within larger political and social contexts precluded simplistic or generalizable interpretations of Muslim women. This chapter attempts to rescue the history of modern Muslim thought from exclusively male modernist narratives by positioning Aliye at the center of the global Muslim woman question.

THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE, GLOBAL NETWORKS, AND THE MOVEMENT OF IDEAS

The late -nineteenth century marked an unprecedented movement of people and ideas across the globe.46 With the advent of technological advancements like the steamship, telegraph, and modern journalism, connections between Muslim communities grew. Due to a more technologically advanced infrastructure, Ottoman thinkers established strong ties to European,

Asian, and Southeast Asian Muslim intellectual life.47 Muslim journalism increased along the same rate as book publishing during the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. This period witnessed the proliferation of works written by Muslim

46 Liat Kozma, Cyrus Schayegh, and Avner Wishnitzer, introduction to A Global Middle East: Mobility, Materiality and Culture in the Modern Age, 1880-1940, ed. Liat Kozma, Cyrus Schayegh, and Avner Wishnitzer (London: I.B. Tauris, 2015), 3.

47 Nile Green, Bombay Islam: The Religious Economy of the West Indian Ocean, 1840-1915 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 4; Seema Alavi, Muslim Cosmopolitanism in the Age of Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).

thinkers in almost every field. Their works were translated into the primary languages spoken in

Muslim majority societies, i.e. Ottoman Turkish, Persian, Urdu, and Arabic. These works made their way through Muslim networks because these intellectuals held the “same set of concerns—

Orientalism, social Darwinism, Eurocentric narratives of history, [and] racialization.”48

Increasing numbers of Muslim thinkers from Asia, North Africa, and Southeast Asia asserted their loyalty to the Ottoman Caliphate due to various political motivations. This transregional intellectual network formed, in part, as a result of European empires’ reordering of imperial power along racial, religious, and civilizational identities. As Cemil Aydin argues, the racialized politics of civilizational discourse introduced the geopolitical idea of the “Muslim world.”49 Muslim intellectual networks solidified with the objective of forming a new, potentially global, Muslim political identity. The 1880s marked a new global identification of the

Muslim world, with the Ottoman Empire increasingly seen as the leader of this “new imagined

Muslim geopolitical unity.”50

48 Cemil Aydin, The Idea of the Muslim World: A Global Intellectual History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 70.

49 Cemil Aydin, “The Emergence of Transnational Muslim Thought: 1774-1914,” in Arabic Thought beyond the Liberal Age: Towards an Intellectual History of the Nahda, ed. Jens Hanssen and Max Weiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 121. For a discussion of the contradictions of the British Empire’s claim to be the biggest Muhammedan Empire of the World, leading more Indian Muslims to express interest in the Ottoman empire, see Aydin, The Idea of the Muslim World.

50 Aydin, “The Emergence of Transnational Muslim Thought: 1774-1914,” 123.

Figure 1.2 Muslim networks in the nineteenth century from Seema Alavi’s Muslim Cosmopolitanism in the Age of Empire

Muslim leaders and populations who resisted the rule of Christian monarchs, or who criticized the discriminatory racial policies toward Muslims in European empires, found new homes in the Ottoman capital of Istanbul. The struggles of Muslim populations under the imperial rule of Christian monarchs influenced the geopolitical standing of the Ottoman Empire.

Ottoman imperial elites attempted to maintain cooperation between Muslim and Christian sovereigns. However, in light of European imperial discourses on Muslims and their suggested incompatibility with civilizational legitimacy, this proved impossible.51 During the late- nineteenth century, European empires believed all Muslims held a singular civilizational status and belonged to the same race. Cemil Aydin argues that Muslims, in their own way, also

51 For example, one million Muslims of Caucasus emigrated to the Ottoman territories when their leader, Imam Shamil, was captured in 1864 by the Russian Empire. Aydin, 123.

embraced the idea that there was something about being Muslim that united all Muslim peoples for their own political purposes.52

The Ottoman Empire sat at the center of the newly identified Muslim world, and in some ways was charged with maintaining its geopolitical solidarity. There are multiple reasons for this formation. The Ottoman sultans protected the Muslim holy cities, Mecca and Medina, and presented a model for flexible imperial traditions spanning centuries. However, the Russo-

Ottoman War (1877 to 1878) and the invasions of Tunis and Egypt by the French and British during the late-nineteenth century, marked a turning point for the Ottoman Empire’s

“transnational Muslim credentials.”53 The British Empire’s projection of global power depended on discourses of racial and civilizational hegemony that posited Christianity’s superiority over

Islam. This new facet of European imperialism catalyzed the rapid popularization of the Ottoman sultan as the Caliph of all Muslims. For example, toward the end of the nineteenth century the

Ottoman sultan’s Muslim subjects were only a quarter the size of the British monarch’s Muslim population, but Indian intellectuals expressed loyalty to the Ottoman caliph as a spiritual authority.54 During and after the Russo-Ottoman War of 1877 British policy regarding the

Ottoman Empire changed. Under the influence of Evangelical Christian propaganda, British policy transitioned from “alliance to hostile neutrality.”55 During this transition, Sultan

Abdülhamid II emphasized his empire’s Muslim identity at the very moment when Balkan territories seceded from the empire, significantly reducing the Christian population and increasing the number of Muslim refugees in the empire.

52 Aydin, 134.

53 Aydin, 134.

54 Aydin, 134.

55 Aydin, 134.

Racial and religious ideas propagated among Europeans functioned as another reason

Muslim loyalty toward the Ottoman Empire flourished during this period. Ernest Renan, a

French philosopher, gave a racist lecture on the superiority of Aryan Europeans vis-à-vis Muslim civilization’s inferiority at the Sorbonne in 1883. Renan viewed Muslim civilization, “as rigidly separate and inferior.” He posited the idea that “the fanaticism of Islam, and its Semitic roots, were sure to bring down the Muslim world.”56 It is because of this racial ideology that Muslim intellectuals perceived international relations as “a global encirclement of the Muslim world by a universally hostile Christian West.”57 In other words, this discourse helped cement the perception of a civilizational division between a Muslim East and Christian West in both areas.

Muslims supported the Ottoman Caliphate and its modernist imperial project.58 The

Ottoman Caliphate did not represent a traditional reaction to ideas of progress and civilization.

The Ottoman Caliph’s reputation was linked to his image as a modern monarch who upheld values of civilized rule. The near universal acceptance of the Ottoman Caliphate as the de facto leader of the Muslim world by the early-twentieth century reflected the emergent transnational solidarity in Muslim societies and the greater mobility between and interconnectedness of those societies. According to Cemil Aydin, “Muslim affinities with the Ottoman capital and caliphate were variously religious, cultural, diplomatic and symbolic.”59 While Muslim intellectuals threw their support behind the Ottoman Empire, European intellectuals, bureaucrats, missionaries, and

Orientalists doubled-down on their depiction of Ottoman reform efforts as ineffectual and

56 Aydin, The Idea of the Muslim World, 71.

57 Aydin, “The Emergence of Transnational Muslim Thought: 1774-1914,” 138.

58 Aydin, The Idea of the Muslim World, 137-141.

59 Aydin, “The Emergence of Transnational Muslim Thought: 1774-1914,” 138.

reinforced the idea that Ottoman Muslims could not create a civilized empire.60 According to

Nilüfer Göle these convictions were derived from Western humanist thinking, but more importantly fueled the determination to establish the very definition of modernity through a propulsive force on a global scale.61 A central feature of the European modernizing mission was the claim that the Ottoman Empire was incompatible with modernity because of the position of

Muslim women in the empire.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the “oppression” of Muslim women formed some part of the European narrative on Islam. However, it did not become a touchstone of civilizational illegitimacy until the nineteenth century. The preoccupation with Muslim women really became a central feature of the Western narrative of Islam in the late-nineteenth century—when European empires ruled over Muslim colonies. The centrality of Muslim women to the Western colonial narrative of Islam resulted from the broad belief that all other cultures and societies, in relation to European societies, were inferior.62 The central thesis of the

Orientalist rendering of Islam was that Islam was “innately and immutably oppressive to women,” segregation and the veil exemplified the extreme level of this “oppression,” and these gendered customs were the fundamental reasons for the backwardness of Islamic societies. This imperial Orientalism suggested that only if these intrinsic practices no longer occurred could

Muslim societies move forward along a progressive path. The irony of this assertion was the use of a paternalistic, western feminist language that “prioritized” Muslim women’s social and

60 Aydin, 136.

61 Göle, The Forbidden Modern, 28.

62 While Muslim women were central, women from other Eastern cultures were also used as a touchstone of Orientalism. Michelle King’s work shows how Orientalism emphasized female infanticide in China as a marker of China’s civilizational backwardness. See Michelle King, Between Birth and Death: Female Infanticide in Nineteenth-Century China (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2014).

political rights. 63 In reality the same powerful colonial officials who supported this quasi- feminist agenda abroad were opposed to any feminist activism in the metropole.64

British colonial officials, during the Victorian period, appropriated feminist language in order to serve their colonial goals. The intersection of imperial and feminist ideas and language allowed British colonizers to deride “other” men’s treatment of women. The idea that “other” men, who resided outside the “civilized” borders of the West, oppressed women merged ideas of imperialism and feminism for political gains. The coalescence of feminism and imperialism served colonial powers by creating a “moral” justification of the subjugation of colonial citizens and the eradication of their cultures.65 A prime example of this colonial agenda was the activities of Lord Cromer in Egypt. Cromer was Britain’s consul general in Egypt between 1883-1907.66

Lord Cromer’s views on Islam, women in Islam, and the veil were absolute. Cromer believed Christianity preached respect for women, and as a result of this European men prioritized the elevation of women because of the teaching of their faith. In contrast, Cromer stated that Islam degraded women and that this degradation was evident in the practices of segregation and veiling. He declared that Muslim men’s “subjugation” of Muslim women evidenced their own inferiority. Cromer also thought that the practices of veiling and seclusion exercised “a baneful effect on Eastern society.” He believed an essential part of colonizing Egypt meant forcing Egyptians to become “civilized;” he stated, “[Egyptians should] be persuaded or

63 Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 150–52.

64 In a colonial context British’ theories on race and culture were used to epitomize Victorian womanhood and their mores as the aspirational ideal. In a domestic context these same theories were used to suggest the biological inferiority of women to men.

65 Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam, 52.

66 Egypt was still nominally a part of the Ottoman Empire at this point with an appointed Ottoman governor. Therefore, Cromer’s appointment as a colonial governor resulted from British/Ottoman competition.

forced into imbibing the true spirit of western civilization.” To achieve this, he argued it was essential to change the position of Muslim women, because Islamic practices concerning women were was “the fatal obstacle” to reaching civilization. While Cromer on paper appeared concerned for Muslim women, in actuality he enacted colonial measures that were detrimental to their advancement. For example, he placed restrictions on girls’ education in the form of school fees.67 In addition to colonial officers, missionaries also pushed the Western colonial agenda through their ideas on Muslim women and morality.

Missionaries, like Samuel Zwemer, thought the degradation of Muslim women justified missionaries’ cultural attack on indigenous religious practices. One missionary spoke at a congress in London in 1888 and stated that “Muhammad…set out to preach a religion whose object was to extinguish women all together.” On the topic of the veil he had this to say, “[the veil] has had the most terrible and injurious effect upon the mental, moral, and spiritual history of all Mohammedan races.” Missionary teachers often pressured girls to deny their culture, and in some instances defy their families, and unveil. Samuel Zwemer believed converting Muslim women was the key to turning whole Muslim societies into civilized Christian societies. He advocated targeting women because they were responsible for molding the morality of children.

He openly declared that Islam would be subtly undermined among the youth, and as they grew,

“the evils of Islam could be spelled out more directly;” and a “trail of ‘gunpowder’ would be laid

‘into the heart of Islam.’”68

The European notion of Western superiority rested heavily on the subjugated status of women within the Muslim world, compelling Muslim intellectuals to respond by creating a

67 Earl of Cromer, Modern Egypt, 2 vols (New York: Macmillan, 1908), quoted in Ahmed, 153.

68 Annie van Sommer and Samuel M. Zwemer, eds., Daylight in the Harems, (Edinburgh: Oliphant, Anderson, and Ferrier, 1911) quoted in Ahmed, 153–54.

counter-narrative addressing the status of women in Islam. Muslim intellectuals discussed women’s societal positions and social functions with regard to how much of an influence

Westernization should have on the Muslim world. These intellectuals discussed distinctions between the West and the East and argued that Islam did not hinder progress. Several intellectuals promulgated the myth of the Golden Age of Islam, the impression that ideas of modernization and civilization regarding women existed within early Islam. Ahmet Mithat

Efendi and Namik Kemal referred to the religion of Islam as the zenith of civilization, with its emphasis on moral values and on the training of honorable individuals.69 Therefore, every novelty to be adapted from the West could be detected within the sources of Islam.70 For these intellectuals, ideas of civilization were not independent from religion and tradition; Islam provided a framework to better understand civilization.

MUSLIM MODERNISTS’ LIVES AND INTELLECTUAL PRODUCTIONS

The Muslim thinkers in this chapter formed a transregional intellectual network around the Muslim woman question. They traveled, worked, and lived in South Asia, North Africa, the

Ottoman Empire, Russian Empire, and/or Europe and produced works on the topic of Muslim women for multiple audiences. These intellectuals include Qasim Amin, Halil Halid, Muhammed

Barakatullah, Şemseddin Sami, Moulavi Cherágh Ali, Ismail Gaspıralı, and Fatma Aliye. Aliye was a part of this larger group and also influenced the defining characteristics of the debate. The debate on Muslim women was essential to modern Muslim globalism, both in terms of

69 Göle, The Forbidden Modern, 35.

70 For more works on the Golden Age of Islam see Benson Bobrick, The Caliph’s Splendor: Islam and the West in the Golden Age of Baghdad (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012); Amira K. Bennison, The Great Caliphs: The Golden Age of the ’Abbasid Empire (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009); John Freely and Augusto Romano Burelli, Sinan: Architect of Süleyman the Magnificent and the Ottoman Golden Age (London: Thames and Hudson, 1992); Tarif Khalidi, Classical Arab Islam: The Culture and Heritage of the Golden Age (Princeton: Darwin Press, 1984); Lombard Maurice, The Golden Age of Islam, trans. Joan Spencer (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1975); Eugene A. Myers, Arabic Thought and the Western World in the Golden Age of Islam (New York: Ungar, 1964).

international legitimacy and domestic reform. Before going into the discourse on Muslim women constructed by these individuals, a closer examination of each of their lives reveals how global their intellectual network and ideas actually were. The following brief biographies intend to contextualize the views of each intellectual, their specific experiences, and the political and social currents surrounding their lives that influenced their ideas on Muslim women.

Qasim Amin

Qasim Amin (1863-1908) was an Egyptian Muslim intellectual. He was renowned for his support of women’s liberation in the Muslim world. He was born in Alexandria to an Egyptian mother and a Turkish father. Amin received an education and in 1881 earned a bachelor’s degree in law from the School of Law and Administration in Egypt. Following this he was sent to

France to study law for five years. There he met two other prominent Muslim thinkers, Sayyid

Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Muhammad ‘Abduh, and contributed to their journal publication al-

‘Urwa al-wuthqa (The Strongest Link). Afterwards he returned to Egypt and worked as an attorney general and judge. He also published several books throughout his life. Amin’s major works include Les Egyptiens (The Egyptians, 1894), in which he defended Islam’s treatment of women, and Tahrir al-mar’a (The Liberation of Women, 1899), to which Muhammad ‘Abduh secretly contributed sections.71 The latter book called for an end to the seclusion of women, the improvement of their status, and universal education for girls.72 The book generated controversy

71 A key figure of Islamic Modernism. During his travels to Istanbul, Tunisia, Algeria, and Sudan, he advocated reform, partly by advising scholars, politicians, jurists, and others, concerning education and jurisdiction, and partly by giving lectures. From his travels, he drew the conclusion that Muslims suffer from two kinds of illnesses: ignorance of “the foundation of the Islamic religion” (aṣl al-dīn al-Islāmī), or a distorted view of the religion; and the despotism (istibdād) of unjust Muslim rulers (Riḍā, 1:846). The principal organ for promulgating his views was, beginning in 1898, the monthly al-Manār.

72 Some more recent works have used gender as a category of analysis when examining the intellectual legacy of the male Muslim reformist Qasim Amin. According to Leila Ahmed, Amin’s The Liberation of Women triggered the first major debate over the veil in the Muslim world. Ahmed classifies Amin as a modernizer and not a feminist, with his work “essentially reproducing the colonial narrative of the day, the inferiority of the Muslim Other,” Leila

among conservative Egyptian intellectual circles. In response Amin wrote al-Mar’a al- jadida (The New Woman, 1900) where he adopted further liberal views, such as the need for women’s participation alongside men in public life.73

Şemseddin Sami

Şemseddin Sami Frashëri (Albania-Turkey, 1850–1904) was an Ottoman intellectual, journalist, and linguist. He came from a large Albanian family that prioritized education. He attended a Greek high school where he learned European languages and took special lessons at

Islamic schools where he learned Middle Eastern languages. Post-graduation, he served as governor of Ioannina, followed by a position with the Press Bureau of the Sublime Porte in

Istanbul. During his tenure at the press he also published his own articles and plays which resulted in his banishment. This was achieved through Sami’s appointment as editor of the official gazette of Tripoli, in North Africa. This banishment/appointment lasted one year. He was granted an imperial pardon and returned to Istanbul to work as a journalist.74

Şemseddin Sami was the author of the first modern geographical and historical dictionary of the Ottoman Empire, and other lexicons. He also established a series called the “Pocket

Library” where he published short political essays for the general public. He saved his more

Ahmed, “The Veil Debate-Again,” in On Shifting Ground: Muslim Women in the Global Era, ed. Fereshteh Nouraie-Simone (New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2005), 154. Part of the issue with historicizing Amin is the relationship he had with Lord Cromer. This dynamic highlights the complicated nature male Muslim modernists experienced as their lives and works intersected with British colonial rule. Novel to the debate on Amin’s characterization as a female liberator in Egypt, Hoda Elsadda argues that Amin’s intellectual engagement with the “woman question” was just as much about concepts of masculinity in Egypt as femininity. For Elsadda, Amin is not a liberator, but the person who places the burden of Egyptian backwardness squarely on women’s shoulders, Hoda El Sadda, “Imaging the ‘New Man’: Gender and Nation in Arab Literary Narratives in the Early Twentieth Century,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 3, no. 2 (Spring 2007): 31–55.

73 "Amin, Qasim." In The Oxford Dictionary of Islam, edited by Esposito, John L..: Oxford University Press, 2003. https://www-oxfordreference-com.libproxy.lib.unc.edu/view/10.1093/acref/9780195125580.001.0001/acref- 9780195125580-e-149.

74 Göle, The Forbidden Modern, 32–33

radical ideas for Kadınlar (Women)where he presented his views on the Islamic roots of

European civilization and the veiling of women. Furthermore, his attempt to translate the Qur’an into Turkish was frustrated by the authorities, and he was compelled to destroy the parts he had completed. Meanwhile, his newspaper articles promoted positivism and modernization. Sami took a reformist approach to Islam and argued that the faith did not act as a barrier to civilizational progress. According to him, the contentious debates on Islam resulted from misinterpretations of Islam. In other words, debates on veiling, polygyny, divorce and the exit of women from mahrem, ensued because of a lack of knowledge concerning the “real orders and laws” of Islam. Additionally, Şemseddin Sami argued that, “in the case the West was inferior in the cultural realm, it would not be able to develop its material civilization.”75 Sami prioritized cultural success over material success, which explains his engagement with the Muslim woman question.

Muhammad Barakatullah

Muhammad Barakatullah (1864-1927) was an Indian revolutionary who supported the pan-Islamic movement. He was born in the princely state of Bhopal, in the central state of

Madhya Pradesh in present-day India.76 During his life, the princely state was ruled by a female

Muslim monarchy. Barakatullah travelled and spent time in Britain, Istanbul, and Tokyo. He lived in Britain during the 1880s and produced his most influential writing that reached a wider

British audience in 1899. He published an article in The British Empire Series Volume I. This series explored the history, culture and society of India, and Barakatullah’s contribution focused

75 Göle, The Forbidden Modern, 32–33.

76 Samee Siddiqi, “The Career of Muhammad Barkatullah (1864-1927): From Intellectual to Anti-Colonial Revolutionary” (master’s thesis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2017).

specifically on the position of women in Islam.77 Barakatullah provided a counter-narrative to

Western discourse on Muslim women. The popularity of harem literature from the eighteenth century illustrates the curiosity about, and depiction of, women of the ‘East’ as exotic figures.

Barakatullah used this platform to highlight how the European gaze lacked historical knowledge and cultural context.78 He believed that, “absolute goodness has never been in the possession of any single nation. Still every nation thinks that its social institutions and ethical canons-written or unwritten-are the best. Hence it is no wonder if European writers, who seldom have real insight into Muslim harems, present to the public a terrible picture of the state of woman in

Islam.” He acknowledged how societies judge each other based on their own values with the presumption their society and its values are best. That is why European writers who had no insight into “Muslim harems” present to the public a “terrible picture of the state of woman in

Islam.”79 Based on the understanding that everyone ranks their own cultural values and ethics above other people’s, Barakatullah believed that European writers could have real insights into

Muslim women if they challenged their own cultural superiority.

İsmail Gaspıralı

İsmail Gaspıralı (1851-1914) was an architect of Muslim modernism among Muslim

Turkic subjects of the Russian Empire. Born in a small Crimean village in 1851, Gaspıralı would grow to become a reformer and educator. He was educated in Muslim schools, a Russian military academy, and abroad in France and the Ottoman Empire. After completing his education, he returned to Crimea and founded one of the most influential ethnic periodicals in Russian history,

77 These volumes mostly contain essays that were initially given as lectures; however, it is unclear whether Barkatullah’s paper was a lecture converted to an article, or an original article written for this publication.

78 Muhammad Barkatullah, “Mohamedan Women,” The British Volume Series Volume I, (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co. Ltd, 1899), 375.

79 Barkatullah, “Mohamedan Women,” 375-378.

Tercüman (The Interpreter).80 By 1885 Tercüman reached a circulation of one thousand copies and was distributed over a wide area, including Istanbul, Ottoman Caucasus, the Volga Region

(Kazan, Ufa, and Orenburg), Central Asia, Siberia, Iran, and Egypt. He used this periodical as a platform to express his ideas. Additionally, he viewed this periodical as a way to strengthen the connection between Muslims and Turks the world-over. According to John Esposito,

“[Gaspıralı] posited that the influence of a misdirected religious orthodoxy condemned Muslims to cultural inferiority under modern Western technological, military, political, and intellectual hegemony.” Gaspıralı believed progress required educational reform, teaching a modern curriculum by modern methods, encouraging social and economic cooperation, and cultural borrowing. These views ultimately inspired the movement known as Jadidism.81 His intellectual influence, by the 1920s, was felt throughout Turkic Russia as well as in Turkey, Egypt, and

Muslim India. He made several trips to Turkey, Egypt and India and even tried to convene a

Muslim congress in Cairo in 1907. He maintained close contact with the Turkist groups in

Istanbul and submitted articles to a Turkist publication, Türk Yurdu, published by Yusuf Akçura

(a prominent ideologue of pan-Turkism), a relative of his by marriage. Gaspıralı travelled to

India via Istanbul and Cairo to demonstrate the effectiveness of his new method of teaching. He was well received by the representatives of the Islamic community, and Gaspıralı considered the

80 Esposito, John L. 2003. The Oxford Dictionary of Islam. New York: Oxford University Press. “Gaspıralı, Ismail Bey” https://www-oxfordreference-com.libproxy.lib.unc.edu/view/10.1093/acref/9780195125580.001.0001/acref- 9780195125580

81 Jadidism was a reform movement among Central Asian Muslim intellectuals. This movement began in the later- nineteenth and early-twentieth century as a project intended to transform Turco-Islamic cultures within and influenced by the Russian Empire. During the 1840s-1870s the movement comprised Muslim intellectuals who called for educational reform and a wider dissemination of knowledge through the modern press. For more on Jadidism see Adeeb Khalid, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Edward J. Azzerini, “Jadidism,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE, ed. Kate Fleet et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2018).

trip a success.82

Moulavi Cherágh Ali

One of the first South Asian Muslim intellectuals to address the issue of Muslim women’s supposed subjugation was Moulavi Cherágh Ali (1844-1895). Cherágh Ali participated in the Aligarh Movement – a political movement that pushed for modern education for Muslims in South Asia. As one of its staunchest supporters and a vocal critic of traditional Islamic scholarship and legal stagnation, Ali refuted missionary and Orientalist criticisms of Islam’s hostility to reform. Instead, he suggested the capability of reform within Islam. In 1883 Cherágh

Ali wrote, The Proposed Political, Legal, and Social Reforms in the Ottoman Empire and Other

Mohammadan States. This book served as a response to Reverend Malcom MacColl who published an article in the Contemporary Review in August 1881 titled, “Are Reforms Possible under Mussulman Rule?” In this article the reverend argued the impossibility of reform under

Islamic rule, disregarding the fact that the British Empire constituted the largest Muslim empire.83 In response to this argument Ali countered, “Mohammadanism [Islam]…possesses sufficient elasticity to enable it to adapt itself to the social and political revolutions going on around it.”84 For him the Islamic legal system and schools were institutions run by people and therefore could be modified. However, in regards to the position of Muslim women, Ali did not express the need for reform but suggested that Islam and Muhammad ameliorated the plight of

Arabian women. There are several of reasons why Cherágh Ali looks to the origins of Islam and

82The Oxford Dictionary of Islam, John L. Esposito 2004 Esposito, John L. 2003. The Oxford Dictionary of Islam. New York: Oxford University Press. “Gaspıralı, Ismail Bey”

83 Moulavi Cherágh Ali, The Proposed Political, Legal and Social Reforms in the Ottoman Empire and Other Mohammadan States (Bombay: Education Society’s Press, 1883), i-lx, quoted in Kurzman, Modernist Islam, 1840- 1940, 277.

84 Moulavi Cherágh Ali, The Proposed Political, Legal and Social Reforms in the Ottoman Empire and Other Mohammadan States (Bombay: Education Society’s Press, 1883), 47.

the Qur’an in his discussion of Muslim women’s societal positions. First, in the beginning of the work Cherágh Ali emphasized Europeans general ignorance of the Qur’an in their degradation of

Muslim peoples and their societies. Second, he is directly responding to the claim made by

Reverend MacColl that one of the “incurable vices” of Islam is the degradation of women. By using Suras (chapters or sections of the Qur’an) to show how Islam changed the societal position of women for the better, Cherágh Ali undermines the Orientalist supposition that Islam irrevocably degraded Muslim women. He wrote, “the general tenor of the Koran is to establish perfect equality between the male and female sex, in their legal, social, and spiritual positions.”85

He prioritized the need to dispel European misconceptions over a reformulation of Islamic traditions regarding women. The topics he addressed included: polygyny, divorce, domestic violence, and seclusion (veiling and the harem). For Cherágh Ali, Islam alleviated the oppression and hardships women experienced and therefore could not be, and had never been, a religion that subjugated them. Instead of analyzing how the faith and its traditions were interpreted by people,

Cherágh Ali returned to the source of the faith, the Qur’an, to suggest Islam from its inception only helped women’s societal positions. While Ali was one of the first to address Orientalist charges against Islamic traditions and Muslim women, many Muslim modernists engaged with the topic.

Mehmet Halil Halid

Mehmet Halil Halid (1869-1931) was born in Ankara but lived, traveled, and worked in

London, Istanbul, and Cairo. His work reached a larger geographical span than he did with publications in French, Urdu, and English. In 1907 he published The Crescent Versus the Cross,

85 Ali, The Proposed Political, Legal and Social Reforms, 117.

which Tanvir Wasti identifies as the “mature expression of Halil Halid’s political views.”86 Halid identified his own intentions for this work, stating that “my object in writing these pages is, in the first place, to defend the cause of the Islamic East, and, in the second, to point out some

Muslim views on Western civilization.”87 This work is an anti-imperialist document criticizing

Western European powers for their exploitation and subjugation of large areas of the world in the name of “civilization.” Halid wrote:

It may be assumed that ‘natives’ are inferior people who resign themselves to all the verdicts of the superior people who grant them a civilized rule. This is not the case with most of the Muslim races subject to the rule of a foreign Power [sic]. A Muslim nation might have been living under its own rulers in a state of what is described in the European press as complete anarchy. But it is a bold misrepresentation of the truth to say that they would welcome the authority of any European nation in preference to the administration of their own misrulers [sic]. The civilized rule of foreign invaders is hardly ever wanted; it is always imposed upon them by force only and its much vaunted advantages will sooner or later turn out to be, on the whole, detrimental rather than beneficial to the subjugated ‘natives’.88

With Halid’s emphasis on the problematic nature of imperialism, it is unsurprising that

The Crescent Versus the Cross was translated into Urdu and published in Calcutta shortly after the original publication in 1907.89 Understandably, this work would resonate with educated Muslims in India who experienced colonial oppression firsthand. In addition to his ideas on imperialism, there are several pages in this book dedicated to the Muslim woman question. He believed and expressed the thought that Prophet Muhammed was a

“feminist of the first order.”90 He referenced Qur’-anic passages that suggested hating

86 Wasti, “Halil Halid.”

87 Halil Halid, preface to The Crescent Versus the Cross (London: Luzac & Co., 1907).

88 Halid, The Crescent Versus the Cross, quoted in Wasti, “Halil Halid,” 268.

89 Wasti, 268.

90 Halid, The Crescent Versus the Cross, 98.

women meant hating something “where God placed much good,” and that men should respect their mothers.

Fatma Aliye

In order to fully understand the importance of her work and as a Muslim intellectual it is necessary to contextualize Fatma Aliye’s life. Ahmet Midhat Effendi’s 1893 biography of his protégée, Fatma Aliye, presents a description of her life. To construct Aliye’s biography Midhat

Effendi drew upon letters from Aliye, as well as recollections from family and friends.91 Born in

1862 (d. 1936) to Adviye Rabia Hanim and eminent Ottoman civil servant, historian, and lawyer,

Ahmet Cevdet Paşa (1822-1895), Fatma Aliye would eventually become the first Turkish female novelist and an important Muslim thinker. Aliye spent the majority of her life on the shores of the Bosphorus. As a precocious child she preferred books over toys and displayed her intellectual capabilities from an early age. For example, Aliye studied French in secret at the age of eleven.

Cevdet Paşa eventually learned of his daughter’s desire to learn and permitted her to study

French, declaring “this girl amazes me... If she had been a man and had a regular education, she would have been a great genius.”92 In his biography, Midhat Effendi suggested that Adiviye

Rabia Hanim also supported her daughter’s edification. Fatma Aliye’s access to education resulted from her privileged social status and her supportive family and was not a product of the social standards of the time.

At the age of fifteen, Aliye donned the veil and could no longer meet with her male

Lebanese tutor, İlyas Matar. Luckily, Mademoiselle Alpha, the daughter of a French convert to

91 Ahmet Mithat Effendi, Fatma Aliye: Bir Osmanlı Kadın Yazarın Doğuşu, trans. Bedia Ermat (İstanbul: Sel Yayıncılık, 1994).

92 Findley, “Fatma Aliye: First Ottoman Woman Novelist, Pioneer Feminist”, unpublished lecture. Elizabeth Paulson Marvel, “Ottoman Feminism and Republican Reform: Fatma Aliye’s Nisvân-ı İslâm,” (master’s thesis, University of Ohio, 2010),7.

Islam, began tutoring Aliye. The majority of their intellectual exchanges centered around novels and debates on the morality of novel reading. Mlle. Alpha held the opinion that reading novels provided women the opportunity to grow both intellectually and morally. Presented with this outlook, Aliye voraciously consumed novels in French, Turkish, and Arabic.93

At the age of nineteen, Aliye found herself in an arranged marriage with Faik Bey

(subsequently Paşa), a senior captain in the Ottoman military who would eventually become an aide-de-camp to the Ottoman sultan.94 Conflicting stories exist on the topic of their marriage.

Some people pointed out Faik Bey’s disapproval of Fatma Aliye’s literary endeavors, while others emphasized his eventual support of Aliye’s writing once she proved her aptitude to both him and her father. Based on an interview conducted with a family friend, Faik Paşa ultimately supported his wife’s intellectual pursuits, and “despite their difficulties, they ultimately demonstrated affection for each other; Faik Paşa often brought Fatma Aliye coffee deep into the night as she wrote.”95

Elizabeth Marvel contends that as the twentieth century unfolded, Aliye’s work failed to engage with the priorities of the new society. For example, she attempted to publish an incomplete biography of her father in defense of the criticisms issued against Cevdet Paşa by the

Young Turk regime. However, a lack of interest on the part of the potential readership forced

Aliye to abandon the publication.96 Historian Hulya Yildiz similarly suggest that Aliye’s more

93 Mithat Efendi, Fatma Aliye, 61.

94 Mithat Efendi, Fatma Aliye, 74.

95 Oya Soner, interview by Elizabeth Paulson Marvel, December 14, 2010, Kadıköy, Istanbul, quoted in Elizabeth Paulson Marvel, “Ottoman Feminism and Republican Reform: Fatma Aliye’s Nisvân-ı İslâm,” (master’s thesis, University of Ohio, 2010),38.

96 Marvel, “Ottoman Feminism and Republican Reform,” 34.

traditional Islamic rhetoric fell out of favor in a period of intense nationalist leanings.97 She also faced personal obstacles to her career, which included raising four children and deteriorating health.98

While her literary career tapered off, Fatma Aliye continued to participate in volunteer projects and public speaking engagements during the Greco-Turkish War of 1897 and the Balkan

Wars of 1912-13. She launched an initiative during the Greco-Turkish War to distribute clothing, blankets, and bandages to Ottoman troops. In 1908, Aliye founded the Nisvân-ı Osmaniye İmdad

Cemiyeti (Ottoman Women’s Aid Society). She died in 1936 as a figure who was understood as antiquated because of her intricate links to Islam and Ottomanness. The French author Marcelle

Tinayre commented on Aliye, declaring, “No Muslim woman was more Muslim or more devoted to her father’s faith and her mother’s veil.”99 The sudden transition from an empire to a secular Republic led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the “father” of women’s liberation, made Fatma

Aliye’s life-long intellectual efforts seem outmoded in the new nationalist political context. This led to a lack of understanding in regard to her contributions and influence over modern Muslim thought. Only during the late-twentieth century, when the question of Islam and women resurfaced both nationally and globally did Fatma Aliye’s complex writings on Muslim women receive a wave of scholarly and non-scholarly attention.

Fatma Aliye steadily produced literary works during the 1890s and the first decades of the 1900s. Aliye’s foray into the literary world began with her translation of the French novel

97 Hülya Yıldız, “Literature as Public Sphere: Gender and Sexuality in Ottoman Turkish Novels and Journals,” (PhD. Diss, University of Texas at Austin, 2008), 156.

98 Mübeccel Kızıltan, Fatma Aliye Hanım: Yaşamı-Sanatı-Yapıtları ve Nisvân-ı İslâm (İstanbul: Mutlu Yayıncılık, 1993), 308.

99 Sefika Kurnaz, “Emine Semiye’nin Ablası Fatma Aliye’ye Mektupları,” (Letters of Emine Semiye to her Elder Sister Fatma Aliye) Türkbilig, 14, 2007, 134 quoted in Bahriye Çeri, “A Forgotten Ottoman Woman Writer: Emine Semiye Hanım,” International Journal of Turcologica 3, no. 5 (2007): 12.

Volonté (Meram in Turkish). Subsequently, Aliye published six novels: Muhâzarât (1890),

Hayâl ve Hakîkat (1891), Refet (1897), Udî (1897), Levâyih-i Hayât (1897), and Enin (1912-13).

She also contributed to various Ottoman journals including Hanımlara Mahsûs Gazete, Ümmet,

Mehâsin, İnkılap, Tercüman-ı Hakîkat, and others. She also published essays and treatises, the most famous of which was Nisvân-ı İslâm.

Her father’s, mentor’s, and husband’s political careers and intellectual notoriety offered opportunities for Aliye to cultivate a keen awareness of the political and intellectual currents surrounding her at every stage of her life. These included debates on the Ottoman Empire’s civilizational legitimacy. European Orientalists claimed Muslim societies were uncivilized, despotic, and backwards.100 They presented Muslim women’s supposed subjugation at the hands of Islamic rulers as evidence of their civilizational illegitimacy, compelling careful consideration and responses from Muslim modernists.101 These Muslim intellectuals created a global discussion on Muslim women and Islamic traditions. Fatma Aliye’s book Nisvân-ı İslâm, positioned her within a transregional discussion among Muslim intellectuals who sought to challenge and create an accurate understanding of Muslim women vis-à-vis Islamic traditions.102

100 Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam, 150–52.

101 For other works responding to this claim see Ali, The Proposed Political, Legal and Social Reforms; Şemseddin Sâmî, Kadınlar ( İstanbul: Mihran Matbaası, 1893); Ziya Gökalp, The Principles of Turkism, trans. Robert Devereux (Leiden: Brill, 1968); Qasim Amin, The Liberation of Women and The New Woman: Two Documents in the History of Egyptian Feminism, trans. Samiha Peterson (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2000).

102 Her participation on a global scale on the topic of Muslim Ottoman women included the exhibition of her first three novels in the Woman’s Library at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. Janet Dale, “Turks Up With the Times,” The World, July 13, 1893,7 ; List of Books Sent by Home and Foreign Committees to the Library of the Woman’s Building, World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893, ed. Edith E. Clarke (United States World’s Columbian Commission Board of Lady Managers, 1893), 92, http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/clarke/library/library.html. See also “The Library,” editorial, Art and Handicraft at the Woman’s Building of the World’s Columbian Exhibition, Chicago, 1893, ed. Maud Howe Elliot (Paris: Boussod, Valadon, & Co., 1893), 109–13. These sources do not reveal, however, which books were sent and exhibited, but these must have been the first three novels she published, including Nisvân-ı İslâm.

Fatma Aliye’s Nisvân-ı İslâm marked the first time an intellectual focused both specifically and comprehensively on the charges made by Orientalist intellectuals against

Muslim women.103 Publishers commissioned the translation of Nisvân-ı İslâm into French,

Arabic, and Urdu shortly after the original publication of the Ottoman Turkish text in 1891.104

In 1893 Fatma Aliye received an invitation to display her work at the Woman’s Library of the

Chicago World’s Fair.105

These translations and invitations are significant because they demonstrate that her work had a transregional audience. More importantly, Nisvân-ı İslâm’s translation into Arabic and

Urdu point to the overall significance of Aliye’s work for diverse Muslim publics. Muslim women around the world were the target audience of this book. Nisvân-ı İslâm, both in structure and message, focused on Muslim women’s need to consider and construct their identities for themselves.

Fatma Aliye’s chosen format for Nisvân-ı İslâm and her interpretations of Islamic traditions characterized her contributions to the transregional discussions constructing modern

Muslim women’s identities. The book’s format echoed Aliye’s personal experiences. In addition to her father, Aliye also served the imperial harem. The Palace would send high-status

103 Marvel, “Ottoman Feminism and Republic Reform.” This is the only work that extensively analyzes Aliye’s Nisvân-ı İslâm. Marvel argues that both Aliye and this work had a direct impact on the political reforms affecting women under Kemalism. For other sources on Fatma Aliye see: Fatma K. Barbarosoğlu, “Fatma Aliye Hanım: A Book Without a Table of Contents,” Today's Zaman, October 30, 2008; Elif Ekin Akşit, “Fatma Aliye’s Stories: Ottoman Marriages Beyond the Harem,” Journal of Family History 35, no. 3 (July 1, 2010): 207–18; Serpil Çakır, “Fatma Aliye: 1862-1936,” in Biographical Dictionary of Women’s Movements and Feminisms in Central, Eastern, and South Eastern Europe 19th and 20th Centuries, ed. Francisca de Haan, Krasimira Daskalova, and Anna Loutfi (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2006), 21–24; Cevdet Kırpık, “Fatma Aliye Hanım and Historiography,” Bilig 53 (2010): 139–66.

104 Tahera Aftab, Inscribing South Asian Muslim Women: An Annotated Bibliography & Research Guide (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 124–34. According to Mahmud Zeki in an article for Hanımlara Mahsûs Gazete, Nisvân-ı İslâm was translated into English around the same time as it was translated into French.

105 Nicole A. N. M. van Os, “‘They Can Breathe Freely Now’: The International Council of Women and Ottoman Muslim Women (1893–1920s),” Journal of Women’s History 28, no. 3 (Fall 2016): 17–40.

female visitors with questions concerning the empire and its people to Aliye.106 Nisvân-ı İslâm was written as a series of dialogues between the narrator, a Muslim woman, and different

European women.

The first conversation focused on Madame F’s and a nun’s (rahibe) visit to partake in iftar, the evening meal ending the daily Ramadan fast. The narrator showed the guests the iftar table, an imitation of the table sent down to Jesus, which struck the nun’s interest and several religious topics unfold throughout the course of the evening. They discussed the Qur’anic view of Jesus and his disciples, Prophet Muhamad’s prophecy in the Gospel of John, and the paraclete (Holy Spirit). The evening closed with the namaz (prayer), when the host translated the prayers into French for her visitors. The visiting women expressed gratitude to their host and bid farewell.107 This conversation emphasized the ability for cross-cultural exchange through modern Muslim women’s erudition in both their faith and different languages. Aliye viewed cultural exchange as the solution to dispelling European misconceptions concerning Muslim women. Furthermore, her interpretations of Islamic traditions presented an epistemological framework other Muslim woman could utilize when constructing their own identities. Aliye’s discussions of polygyny, divorce, property rights, and veiling exemplified these points.

While the aforementioned intellectuals in this chapter were prompted to respond to

European assumptions of Muslim women’s degradation, their comments on Muslim women are too often overlooked by historians. These comments were a part of a larger global discussion on women and Islamic tradition, which was precisely Fatma Aliye’s intellectual topic of interest.

With her work Nisvân-ı İslâm, Aliye positioned herself in the global public sphere and the

106 Carter Findley, “Fatma Aliye: First Ottoman Woman Novelist, Pioneer Feminist”, unpublished lecture, 7.

107 Fatma Aliye, Nisvân-ı İslâm: Bazı Adat-ı İslamiye Hakkında üç Muhavereyi Havidir (İstanbul: Tercüman-ı Hakikat Matbaası, 1891), 37-62.

discussion on Muslim women’s rights. Additionally, she posited new Islamic traditions by positioning women as cultural ambassadors and gendering Islamic traditions.

Muslim intellectuals, like Aliye, engaged with the topics of polygyny, arranged marriages, duties within marriage and divorce in their debates on Muslim womanhood. Polygyny and arranged marriage as topics preoccupied the minds of Western thinkers, so it is unsurprising that these intellectuals addressed these topics. However, each intellectual does more than formulate apologetic responses. Instead they created a discourse on Muslim womanhood and debated its various forms in a global context.

THE GLOBAL MUSLIM WOMAN QUESTION

Polygyny

Fatma Aliye argued Islam, in fact, did not oppose the rights of women and it did not serve as a barrier to the “progress of civilization.” 108 To make this point Aliye expressed her distaste for polygyny in various settings, and argued against those who declared the practice a precept of Islam. Several intellectuals who followed Aliye also disavowed the practice of polygyny.109 This section shows how Muslim modernists addressed the practical and historical purposes for engaging in polygyny. These thinkers responded to Orientalist assumptions on the practice, but also responded to the debate by critiquing the practice of polygyny. Their ultimate disapproval of the Islamic tradition rested on understanding the practice from the perspective of

Muslim women. When confronting the topic from a Muslim woman’s perspective these

108 Fatma Kılıç Denman, İkinci Meşrutiyet Döneminde Bir Jön Türk Dergisi: Kadın (İstanbul: Libra Kitapçılık ve Yayıncılık Ticaret Ltd. Şti., 2009), 192.

109 Although polygyny was a provocative topic of discussion in the late Ottoman period, instances of polygyny were in reality quite low. In their pioneering study Istanbul Households, Duben and Behar affirm that between 1885 and 1906 an average of 2.29 per cent of all married men in Istanbul were in polygynous unions, Behar and Duben, Istanbul Households, 114. Furthermore, unlike slavery, which had widespread support, polygyny over time was met with increasing disapproval in Istanbul. Aliye’s attitudes toward polygyny mirror the broader societal sentiments toward the institution.

intellectuals knew Muslim men were incapable of treating all wives equally, and that often a polygynous marriage meant unhappiness for the women involved.

The writings of these intellectuals demonstrated a preoccupation with the issue of polygyny. This issue was central to the European discourse on the uncivil treatment of Muslim women. This topic is one of the central dialogues presented in Aliye’s Nisvân-ı İslâm. The second part of the book introduces Madame R., an educated Englishwoman with a working knowledge of Turkish. The Englishwoman’s moderate fluency in Turkish insinuated a level of cultural receptiveness necessary for meaningful exchange to occur. While traveling with her husband, Mme. R expressed the desire to meet with a Turkish family. What is at first presented as open-minded curiosity deteriorates into an Orientalist understanding of Muslim women.

Upon visiting the narrator’s home, Mme. R surveyed the room and asked, “among the women in this room, which ones are co-wives?”110 This prompted a vigorous conversation on polygyny.111

Aliye argued, “Islam does not order polygyny, and when [polygyny] is permitted, it must be presented in what circumstances this permission is given.”112 The narrator in Nisvân-ı İslâm argued that Turkish women did not support the practice. The narrator stated, “You will find that not only I but the rest of Turkish women agree with you in feeling pity for women who are married along with other women.”113 Mme. R asked the narrator why the institution was not

110 “Bu salon içindeki hanımlardan hangisi, hangisi ile ortaktır? [Which one of these ladies in the room are each other’s co-wives?] Aliye, Nisvân-ı İslâm, 86.

111 Aliye, 63-105

112 “İslamiyet’te taaddüd-i zevcata emir olmayıp mesağ gösterildiği cihetle, bu müsaadenin ne gibi mecburiyetlerde işe yaradığı ibraz olunmalı.” [Since polygyny in Islam is not something required but permitted under certain conditions, we have to clarify under what conditions that this permission can be useful and utilized] Quoted in Marvel, “Ottoman Feminism and Republican Reform,” 47.

113 “...zevceleri kendi üzerine diğer bir kadınla tezevvüç eden kadınlara acımak için yalnız beni değil, bütün Türk kadınlarını sizinle müttefik bulursunuz.”[ It is not just myself, but all Turkish women will agree with you in our shared pity for those women whose husbands married another wife] Quoted in Marvel, “Ottoman Feminism and Republican Reform,” 89.

prohibited and in response the narrator highlighted positive aspects of polygyny. She contended the practice prevented adultery, curtailing the problem of illegitimate children, and suggested the practice allowed barren and ill women a continued role in their families.114 The narrator answered her guest’s questions without derogatorily disavowing polygyny as an Islamic tradition. By highlighting polygyny’s positive aspects Aliye directly addressed and discredited

European assumptions concerning Islam as an inherently oppressive religion for women. 115

Additionally, Aliye’s assessment of polygyny in the remainder of the conversation with Mme. R and the narrator presented to the reader her understanding of modern Muslim womanhood.

The narrator ultimately agreed with her visitor’s disapproval of polygyny. She acknowledged how the practice of polygyny outside the parameters of Islam could lead to certain abuses. She observed, “I also conclude with you that there are women who have been oppressed due to misuse of the permission given to polygyny. But there have been laws established to rescue women from oppressive situations.”116 Aliye depicted polygyny as a last-resort practice that must operate within the strict parameters of Islamic law. Furthermore, she used her work to show Turkish women preferred monogamous partnerships. In other words, while polygyny did not embody an unequivocally oppressive practice, identifying as a modern Muslim woman meant having a non-polygynous marriage.

114 Aliye, Nisvân-ı İslâm, 93.

115 Historians Alan Duben and Cem Behar argue, “the outcry against polygyny during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Istanbul was part of a larger ideological battle for egalitarian gender relations and a modern way of life; it probably had little effect on what were rather low polygyny rates even at the beginning of the period.” Cem Behar and Alan Duben, Istanbul Households: Marriage, Family, and Fertility, 1880-1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 158.

116 “Taaddüd-i zevcata verilen müsaadeyi suiistimalde kadınların mazlum kalacaklarını ben sizinle beraber hükmederim. Ancak kadınlar için o mazlumiyete adem-i tahammül halinden kendilerini kurtarmak hukuku da başkaca tayin olunmuştur.” [I would agree with your judgement that permission given to polygyny, once exploited, would oppress women in the society. Yet, at the same time, women are assigned other rights that will free them from any intolerable conditions of oppression] Aliye, Nisvân-ı İslâm, 95.

A few years after the publication of Nisvân-ı İslâm, Aliye took a stronger stance against polygyny in the journal Malumat.117 She openly criticized the Muslim conservative and member of the ulema, Mahmud Esad (1865-1918). Esad critiqued reformist intellectuals who understood polygynous marriages as symbol of Islam’s backwardness. Esad presented a binary opposition of the spiritual and material components of civilization, “there exist two sides of every civilization, one of them is material and the other one is the spiritual side. The spiritual side refers to the morality of this civilization. The material side, however, consists of sewing machines, railways and dreadnoughts, in short, it is the visible products of industrial inventions.”118 For Esad, the

Ottoman Empire should adopt the material side of Western civilization, as long as this adoption did not compromise the moral civilization of Islam. While Esad’s critique hinted at the problematic nature of a wholesale Westernization project, his argument that polygyny served a central component of maintaining the moral codes of Islamic civilization went too far for

Aliye.119

Different interpretations of Islam in relation to the position of women often incited debate. Polygyny became a central issue, with Aliye among the many Muslim intellectuals who weighed in on an Islamic tradition many Muslim women did not welcome. Aliye sought to reinterpret the Islamic tradition of polygyny and referenced the Qur’an’s legitimization of

117 Her columns in Hanımlara Mahsûs Gazete often dealt with women from other countries. She was able to critique their situation and illuminate the instances where Ottoman women were actually better off than their European or American counterparts. This critique was sounded in the wider women’s press as well. Women’s journals offered a window to international fora, and they published articles illustrating both advancements and setbacks for women. Ottoman men and women, therefore, were not presented only with an idealized image of the West. See Serpil Çakır, “Feminism and Feminist History-Writing in Turkey: The Discovery of Ottoman Feminism,” Aspasia 1, no. 1 (2007): 61–83.

118 Quote found in Göle, The Forbidden Modern, 31.

119 Göle, 32.

monogamous marriages. She explained how the rules set up initially by Islam had degenerated over time.

Aliye raised the practical and potentially viable reasons for polygyny earlier in the history of Islam, and other intellectuals also pointed out practical reasons for the tradition as a way of understanding why some might engage in polygyny. Positing the practical need for polygyny during the advent of Islam, Halil Halid wrote, “the interminable warfare between pagan and

Islamized Arabs brought about a wide inequality between the number of both sexes and many women could find no husbands. The desire to be married is perhaps the prime aim in every woman’s life.”120 Halid cited another justification for the permission of polygyny— illegitimacy.

He declared, “a Mussulman can best save himself from the reproach of the law by marrying the mother of a child whom his indiscretion has brought into the world.”121 To further his point,

Halid referenced the Prophet who told Muslims to “treat your offspring justly.”122 Therefore a man should not disavow or disinherit his child when conceived out of wedlock. Qasim Amin also cited two circumstances where the practice might be understandable, though still problematic.

Qasim Amin stated that no man should be excused for marrying more than one wife, unless his first wife becomes chronically ill or his wife is barren. Amin criticized the first rationale, stating “although I mention this exceptional situation, in reality I do not approve of it, because the woman is not at fault for her condition. Chivalry should compel a man to endure the consequences of whatever diseases may afflict his wife, just as a woman must bear whatever

120 Halid, The Crescent Versus the Cross, 123.

121 Halid, 125.

122 Halid, 126.

afflictions her husband may experience.”123 In general Amin understood the practice as a legal trick used to “satisfy an animal-like desire.”124

Barkatullah argued that the criticism of Islam’s toleration for polygyny ignored the existence of the practice in Arabia before the Prophet Muhammad brought the message of Islam to the region. Both Barakatullah and Cheragh Ali emphasized the fact that polygyny predated

Islam. Barakatullah stated “Islam has often been found fault with for allowing polygyny [sic], as degrading to womankind. But the real students of history who are intimately familiar with the early progress of Islam, will never lay such a charge at its door.”125 He highlights polygyny’s existence in Arabia as extreme and “of the worst kind” prior to Islam and argued the religion put a check on the practice. Barkatullah argued the Prophet, through the teachings of the Qur’an,

“not only put a check” on the practice, but went as far as “morally abolish[ing] it.”126 Similarly,

Cherágh Ali pointed out that polygyny as a practice predated Islam and was “deeply rooted in the soil of Arabian society.”127 The Prophet himself abstained from the practice until toward the end of his life when he lived in Medina. By pointing to this, Ali highlighted the preexistence of the practice prior to the advent of Islam and complicated the connection between polygyny and

Islam. Cherágh Ali highlighted how, despite the demands of religious reform and the political trials Prophet Muhammad faced, he took time to notice the dangers of polygyny. According to

Cherágh Ali, the Prophet worked to mitigate and ultimately abolish the practice.

123 Amin, The Liberation of Women and The New Woman, 85.

124 Amin, 85.

125 Barakatullah, “Mohamedan Women,” 382.

126 Barakatullah, 382.

127 Ali, The Proposed Political, Legal and Social Reforms, 128.

Barakatullah and Ali responded predicting the counter-argument that Prophet

Muhammad practiced polygyny. Barakatullah contended that it is forbidden to follow the

Prophet’s example because what motivated him was “the interest of the public good,” and reminded the reader that with the exception of one of his wives, they were all widows. Cherágh

Ali emphasized this point by preemptively addressing Prophet Muhammad’s own polygynous marital practice:

The restriction of the number of simultaneous marriages was only the first step and a temporary measure. The germ of its virtual abrogation lies in the almost impossible condition of dealing equitably with all wives, at the same time declaring men’s inability to fulfil it. The practice was so deeply-rooted in Arabia and in other Oriental countries that all he could venture to do was by imposing obligatory behests in the Koran against it…He could not do more than this. No reformer or legislator can do more.128

In other words, the Prophet intended to eliminate the practice, but started with regulating the conditions surrounding the practice. These conditions were dictated in the Qur’an and, according to several intellectuals, provide proof that polygyny was not condoned by Islam.

Ali argued the Prophet’s original disapproval of polygyny served as a directive in favor of monogamy, “take in marriage of the women who please you, two, three, or four: but if you fear that ye cannot act equitably, [to so many, take] one: or [take] those whom your right hands have acquired.”129 According to Cherágh Ali not everyone understood the Prophet’s position on polygyny in this light, forcing the Prophet to less ambiguously declare Islam’s position on the matter, “certainly you have not in your power to treat your wives with equal justice even though you fain would do so- Sura iv. 128… If ye fear ye cannot act equitably with your wives then marry one only- Sura iv. 3.”130 Echoing Ali, Barakatullah interpreted the Qur’an as permitting a

128 Ali, 129.

129 Ali, 126.

130 Ali, 129.

man to marry more than one wife, but insisted that the conditional clause that polygyny should occur only when all wives are treated equally, or with impartiality, was “humanly impossible.”

Therefore, he suggested Muslims think of it as an “indirect prohibition” on polygyny.131 Amin echoed this position. For him, these verses indicate that God considered the fear of injustice to be the primary problem in a polygynous relationship, while so declaring that justice in a polygynous relationship is impossible. Amin asked, “Who then can claim that he is just, when justice has been declared an impossibility? Does he not fear attempting the unattainable? Anyone who wishes to pursue an unattainable goal should indeed be afraid, for in pursuing it he may achieve the exact opposite.”132

Arranged Marriages

On the question of arranged marriage, Fatma Aliye, Qasim Amin, and Muhammad

Barakatullah presented different understandings. The topic was not a core part of Orientalist discourse. The fact that Muslim intellectuals engaged the topic of arranged marriages suggests that they were in fact constructing ideas on Muslim womanhood and not simply participating in an apologetic response. Fatma Aliye encouraged monogamous marriage, but did not feel strongly that those marriages needed to derive from love.133 Qasim Amin, on the other hand, found arranged marriages explicitly pointed to Muslim women’s lack of freedom and power.

Barakatullah did not problematize arranged marriages and interestingly highlighted women’s influence over the whole social practice. Each of these responses show that their understanding

131 Siddiqi, “The Career of Muhammad Barkatullah (1864-1927),” 19-20.

132 Amin, The Liberation of Women and The New Woman, 86.

133 Duben and Behar note that translations of French novels began appearing on the Istanbul literary scene in the 1860s. An eager reading public consumed the novels, and soon French notions of love, or amour, were permeating Istanbul culture, Behar and Duben, Istanbul Households, 115.

of Muslim womanhood was informed by specific cultural and social practices relative to their own experiences.

In her work, Aliye made sure to clarify that arranged marriages were not a directive of

Islam, but instead a societal construct. Arranged marriages presented a source of stability and love marriages suggested fantasy and therefore could not lead to a sustainable marriage. Aliye stated, “in our system of marriage, around eighty to ninety out of 100 contracts of marriage result in good compatibility. This contrasts with marriage that results from a courtship in Europe where good marriages do not occur. Because those who marry while in love frequently fall out of love in the middle of the marriages.”134 Here Aliye rejects the European notion of marriage by emphasizing the success of arranged marriages. She further rejected European practices around marriage in the third conversation in Nisvân-ı İslâm. In this conversation, S. Hanim asked the middle-aged European woman why she never married. The woman described how her lack of a dowry made it difficult to find a husband. There was one man who did not mind, and they got engaged. However, when the woman found out that he was born out of wedlock she called off the engagement, refusing to dishonor her family’s name or compromise her future children’s social standing. The woman enquired if unmarried women were common in Ottoman society.

Aliye’s responded with the suggestion that it was incredibly rare to find an unmarried woman— as even the “ugly and poorly found” spouses.135 Aliye’s support of arranged marriages derived

134 “Bizim şu usul-ı izdivaçla yüz münakehenin sekseni doksanı yine hüsn-i imtizaç ile netice- pezir olup, buna mukabil Avrupa’da alelumum be-muaşaka neticesi olan münakehenin kaddesinde hüsn-i imtizaç görüldüğü vaki değildir. Zira birbirleriyle aşk ve sevda ile tezevvüç edenler miyanında kendilerinde o aşktan eser kalmayanlar epeyce çoktur.” [In our custom of arranged marriages, about eighty to ninety percent of the cases end up with a good compatible character. In contrast, European marriages that are based on courtship often do not end up in compatibile. This is because many of those who marry as a result of love relations may end up falling out of love] Aliye, Nisvân-ı İslâm, 123.

135 Aliye, 124.

from an understanding that they provided stability and social security for women and therefore the larger social fabric of the empire.

Unlike Aliye, Qasim Amin challenged the idea that arranged marriages socially benefited women. Qasim Amin wrote on the problematic nature of arranged marriages when considering the social role women held. Arranged marriages centered around the father because he was the one who “communicate[d] with potential suitors [and]…conclude[d] the marriage contract.”

According to Amin, women were never given the opportunity to make their own appraisal of potential suitors. For Amin, this lack of agency was akin to the lack of freedom experienced by slaves, and that by treating women in this manner they are no more valued than an animal. Amin wrote that, “marrying a woman to a man she does not know and depriving her of the right to terminate that relationship (while allowing the man the freedom to keep or dismiss his wife whenever he wishes) is true slavery.”136

Conversely, and of course this is influenced by particular cultural contexts in different

Muslim societies, Barakatullah centers women and their involvement in negotiating arranged marriages. This was based on his own experience in India. According to Barakatullah, Muslim women coordinated arranged marriages. Instead of presenting arranged marriages as something that was forced upon Muslim women, Barakatullah detailed the process of an arranged marriage and showed that the women members in both parties were influential from start to finish. For example, he wrote, “the mother of the girl is generously approached with such expressions:

‘Beebee Sahiba; your daughter, by the grace of God, has grown now; the son of so-and-so is just the sort of person that would suit her as husband.’” This is also the case for the potential groom’s family. He stated, “The mother, sister, or other relative of the young man comes to see the

136 Amin, The Liberation of Women and The New Woman, 17.

would-be bride.” Arranged marriages include the whole family, but the would-be-bride’s consent is also necessary according to Barakatullah. He stated, “After consulting with the near and distant relations, and discussing among the members of the house, one young man out of many is selected with the approval of the girl.”137

Property Rights

Most male Muslim modernists quickly references Muslim women’s property rights without delving into their significance for Muslim women’s economic stability. Fatma Aliye emphasized how these specific property rights helped ensure economic security and power for

Muslim women. More importantly, Aliye’s discussion on property rights revealed that she did not feel compelled to look to other feminist models in order to expand women’s rights. For both

Aliye, and Halil Halid, women’s liberation could be found in Islamic traditions.

In Fatma Aliye’s novel, the issue of property rights comes up in conversation between

Mme. R. and the narrator. Comparing the legal status of Muslim women vis-à-vis European women, the narrator suggested, “when it comes to the subject of demands, women in our society do not have less respect than women in yours. In some respects, it is greater…In Islam, the

Qur’an gives women a degree of respect.”138 Fatma Aliye characterized the narrator as someone who, like Aliye in real life, looked within the empire and Islam to enact change instead of modeling reform after external examples. In the third conversation, Aliye explained how Muslim women experienced more rights than their Christian counterparts and stated, “in your society women cannot sell any of their possessions without the permission of their husbands. As for us, a

137 Barakatullah, “Mohamedan Women,” 380.

138 “Rağbet bahsine gelince bizde kadınlara olan hürmet sizdekinden aşağı değildir. Nev‘ama daha bile büyüktür...İslâm’da nisvâna Kuran mertebesinde ihtiram olunur.” [With regard to esteem for women, respect for women in our societies is not any lower than yours. At certain levels, our respect for women may be higher than yours… Because in Islam, respect for women is shown in the Quran itself.] Aliye, Nisvân-ı İslâm, 100-101.

woman is free to sell her possessions independently.”139 She further declared a husband must furnish his wife’s mahr at the time of marriage and put aside part of the money as a credit.140

Additionally, the narrator highlighted that in the case of divorce the husband provided full financial support for his wife during the post-divorce waiting period. According to Elizabeth

Marvel, “her [Fatma Aliye’s] columns in Hanımlara Mahsûs Gazete often dealt with women from other countries. She was able to critique their situation and illuminate the instances where

Ottoman women were actually better off than their European or American counterparts.”141

Women’s journals often offered this critique, providing a lens into geopolitical debates on the subject of women’s rights. Ottoman citizens who read these journals observed a critical illustration of the West and not an idealized version of Europe. Aliye looked within her own faith and society to understand Muslim womanhood and emancipatory features laid within Islam.

Halil Halid’s writing compared Muslim women’s societal position with that of their

European counterparts because of the European assumption that Islam degraded Muslim women.

Halid pointed out how Islam gave women the right to control their own money and property and that this decision occurred hundreds of years ago. He stated, “the right of ownership was secured to them some thirteen hundred years ago by a just legislator and not by the act of any parliament in recent years.”142 Halid highlighted the fact that while European women may have newly

139 “Sizde kadınlar zevcelerinin müsaadesi olmadıkça hiçbir malını satamaz imiş. Bizde ise bir kadın malını bildiği gibi satmak ve sarf etmek hususunda hür ve müstakildir.” [(According to your customs, women cannot sell any of her property without the permission of her husband. In our customs, however, a woman has the freedom and independence to sell her property as she wishes.] Aliye, 256.

140 Judith Tucker defines mahr as “the dower; the first or collection of gifts given to the bride by the husband, without which the marriage is not valid,” Judith E. Tucker, In the House of the Law: Gender and Islamic Law in Ottoman Syria and Palestine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 207. 141 Marvel, “Ottoman Feminism and Republican Reform,” 51.

142 Halid, The Crescent Versus the Cross, 100.

gained property rights, Muslim women have experienced these rights for much longer and because of Islam.

Divorce

Fatma Aliye, and the other Muslim modernists, emphasized Muslim women’s agency through their ability to incite divorce. Where some modernists looked to the golden age of Islam to address the topic, Fatma Aliye focused on divorce in the contemporary setting. Aliye viewed divorce as an insurance policy that if the marriage impeded on women’s ideas of an equitable partnership, for instance in the case of polygyny, they had the power to end their marital contract.

In the second conversation of Fatma Aliye’s novel, the narrator responded to the idea presented by her guest, Mme. R., that divorced women were disadvantaged. The narrator pointed out how divorce presented women with the opportunity to escape marriages, particularly when their husband decided to take a second wife. The narrator discussed the topic of divorce again with a Turkish friend, S. Hanim, who also held the belief that divorce harmed women. S. Hanim argued that men always initiated and controlled the process of divorce. The narrator respond by detailing a marriage contract in Antakya where the woman could incite divorce by wearing a blue coat (ferace). S. Hanim responded with skepticism and prompted the narrator to further elaborate. The narrator then highlights how individual customs influenced marriage, how marriages in Islam functioned as a contractual agreement, and Muslim women’s right to end their marriages. Aliye also linked the topic of divorce to polygyny. Mme. R saw divorce as damaging to women. The narrator in response to Mme R.’s assertion commented that women could use divorce to their benefit in instances of polygyny. If a husband took another wife, his

first wife held the option to divorce him and find another husband.143

Similar to Fatma Aliye, Cherágh Ali suggested divorce was another area where Islam positively affected women. In his interpretation of pre-Islamic Arab society, people divorced carelessly and frequently, often leaving women in terrible social and economic positions.

However, the Prophet Muhammad’s disapproval of divorce compelled the Prophet to curb the practice with restrictions that made the process harder, particularly for men to divorce their wives. For example, the Prophet placed a moratorium on the infinite period of separation a man could invoke because he did not want to see his wife married to another man. Instead, the

Prophet Muhammad declared a maximum four-month period of separation, at the end of which. the couple needed to either reconcile or divorce. Cherágh Ali identified this as a positive change for women because they could alter their conditions by marrying someone else if they were divorced, but they were unable to remarry if they remained separated indefinitely, which was the case for most separated women prior to Islam.144

Cherágh Ali acknowledged the Prophet’s authorization of corporal punishment by husbands in extreme cases, but argued this was only in the earliest times, when Medina’s government was exceedingly patriarchal. With the establishment of jurisprudence and judicial systems, the head of the family was no longer required to perform the duty of domestic judge.

The formation of tribunals meant both parties needed to appeal to judges, and the power no longer rested solely in the hands of husbands. Cherágh Ali cited Sura 39 as evidence of a husband’s ability to invoke physical abuse against his wife:

And if ye fear a breach between man and wife, then send a judge chosen from his family and a judge chosen from her family; if they are desirous of agreement, God will effect a

143 Aliye, Nisvân-ı İslâm, 213-216.

144 Ali, The Proposed Political, Legal and Social Reforms, 117.

reconciliation between them; verily, God will effect a reconciliation between them; verily, God Is Knowing, apprised of all!145

Cherágh Ali established how the implementation of a legal system changed the dynamics of a marriage. Cherágh Ali overextended the power of the judicial system to curb issues of domestic violence by suggesting the only time a husband inflicted violence resulted from the need to impose justice. With the sole purpose of undermining Orientalist ideas on Muslim women,

Cherágh Ali’s example failed to acknowledge relationships of power and the difficulty women faced in bringing matters to the court compared to men. While Aliye and Ali discussed how divorce empowered women in certain situations and gave them control over their lives,

Barakatullah’s understanding of divorce remained closely linked to the literal interpretation of the Qur’anic guidelines for divorce.

Muhammad Barakatullah believed Muslim societies did not condemn divorce to the same degree as other countries, “if they happen to be of irreconcilable disposition, and the union of hearts proves to be impossible, then they get separated without creating any sensation in society.” The suggestion that divorce occurred without a “sensation in society” meant that a person could get divorced and experience less or no societal shaming and ridicule. However, he did acknowledge that, “divorce, though permitted for necessity, is most odious in the sight of

God.”146 He expressed how the Qur’an is full of advice for couples who are considering divorce.

For example, each party would have a representative to help them work out their issues if the husband and wife could not come to a resolution on their own. If they divorced, religiously, it afforded the couple the opportunity to reconcile multiple times:

“The word Talaq (divorce) is to be pronounced in the presence of witnesses three times at intervals, each interval being about a month, under certain conditions. All this while the

145 Ali, The Proposed Political, Legal and Social Reforms, 132.

146 Barakatullah, “Mohamedan Women,” 381.

woman dwells in the same house with her husband. If they are reconciled after the first or the second pronouncement, the whole performance becomes null and void, and they are still man and wife.”147

Barakatullah’s analysis of divorce is limited to Islamic interpretations of the Qur’an.

Ismail Gaspıralı extended his analysis beyond the Qur’an and interpreted the application of Islamic laws and their effect on both women’s rights and Islam. For Gaspıralı, a woman’s right to initiate divorce was not enough. Instead women needed to be awarded divorces unilaterally when the circumstances warranted the dissolution of a marriage and regardless of their husbands’ agreement. Gaspıralı gave several examples where women found themselves in impossible situations because they were not granted divorces by the mullah. One such example was of a husband in jail who refused to divorce his wife. Another example focused on domestic abuse and a woman’s inability to escape the abuse because her husband refused to divorce her.

Gaspıralı stated, “wives are abused by their husbands, but they receive no sympathy from either the clergy or society.” Similar to Aliye, Gaspıralı connected divorce and polygyny by stating,

“another man marries one woman, then a second, and a third, etc., but does not support or divorce any of them.” In each of these examples, Gaspıralı worked to highlight women’s circumstances that required society to provide them justice through divorce. Preempting people’s criticism that he suggested changing Shari ‘a law, Gaspıralı wrote, “I beg the reader to understand that I am not suggesting that the Seriat be changed; this is impermissible. What can be done, is to improve the lot of women as provided for by Allah, otherwise we will be adhering not to the Quranic point of view, but to some Asiatic concept of women.”148 Gaspıralı made an

147 Barakatullah, 382.

148J. Edward Lazzerini, " Ismail Bey Gaspıralıi and Muslim Modernism in Russia, 1878-1914,” Dissertation, Order No. 7402214, University of Washington, 1973. Phttp://libproxy.lib.unc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest- com.libproxy.lib.unc.edu/docview/302701161?accountid=14244, p.247-48.

important distinction here. He acknowledged that women were not able to receive divorces because of patriarchal practices, and not because that is what the Qur’an stated.

Gaspıralı argued that Shari ‘a allowed change depending on the context and circumstances. He contended that Muslims needed to end the abuse of Shari ‘a when they saw it happening and to take necessary measures to keep the abuse from happening again. Gaspıralı suggested that this course of action, “would not mean changing the Seriat [sic], but would be a strengthening of the principle of justice and mercy.”149 In practice, society reserved the right of divorce for men alone, and that abuse and misconduct prompted Gaspıralı’s profound concern for justice and equity for women. He charged society with drifting away from the “true” teaching of the Qur’an, and this in turn led to widespread abuse. Gaspıralı therefore insisted that evolution in marriage laws was necessary. His emphasis on the question of divorce reflected his understanding that this abuse in Islamic law caused a major amount of suffering for Muslim women. Some might suggest that polygyny proved more injurious to Muslim women, but compared with the infrequency of polygyny, divorce affected more women. Gaspıralı found divorce a legitimate and permissible recourse to irreconcilable difference between husband and wife. However, laws needed regulation so that men would no longer repudiate their wives arbitrarily, and women would be permitted to divorce their husbands with just cause. Gaspıralı was not the only intellectual to acknowledge this abuse, though Halil Halid did not challenge the abuse to the same extent as Gaspıralı.

Halil Halid admitted that, legally, Muslim men held a more advantageous position for securing a divorce than Muslim women. Here he cited Shari ‘a law as the cause of this instead of patriarchal interpretations and applications. In other words, Halid acknowledged this practice as

149 Ibid. 248

a “gross inequality,” but instead of demanding change he pointed to the justification behind a wife’s inability to receive a divorce. He justified this inequality by presenting the logic that informed the legal practice. He suggested women’s “peculiarities in the natural characteristic of the[ir] sex,” compounded with equal rights to men would lead to short marriages.150 Though this is clearly not his intention, Halid draws attention to the fact that women have to take marriage seriously because of their lack of right. Yet, if they experienced full equality with men perhaps their desire to marry or stay married would wane.

Veiling

In addition to the aforementioned topics, the subject of veiling sparked an aggressive dialogue. Tackling this volatile issue in her book, Aliye declared:

According to the Sharia, while it is incumbent upon women to cover their hair, they are not to veil their faces. However, a group of our women reverse these instructions. They veil their faces and leave their hair uncovered. In short, we have no middle. It is as if we do not know which side to take. Nevertheless, excess and deficiency in everything is bad. It is necessary to be moderate in every circumstance.151

Fatma Aliye understood the veil as a directive of Islam.152 She stated, “it is as if we do not know which side to take.” In addition to the sides presented in this quote, this excerpt points to the competing visions Orientalists and Occidentalists presented to Muslim women. However, instead of choosing one side over the other, Aliye posited her own ideas on Muslim women’s veiling practices. Emblematic of her interpretations of Islamic traditions, Aliye stressed the importance

150 Halid,The Crescent Versus the Cross, 141-142.

151 “Şeran kadınların yüzleri namahrem olmayıp ancak saçlarını setretmek vacip iken birtakım hanımlarımız da icab- ı şeriyenin aksine olarak yüzlerini örtüp saçlarını açıyorlar. Elhasıl bizim ortamız yok. Ne tarafa gideceğimizi şaşırmış gibiyiz. Halbuki her şeyde ifrat ve tefrit fenadır. Her hususta itidal gerektir. (Hayrü’l-umûr evsatuha).” [Translated in text] Aliye, Nisvân-ı İslâm, 6.

152 Interestingly however, her image without the veil graced the 2012 reprint of Nisvân-ı İslâm, as well as the Turkish currency she adorns. The national appropriation of Aliye as an intellectual divorced from her interpretations of Islam ignored her actual thoughts on Muslim women in and outside of the empire. Regardless of the photos depicting Aliye without the veil, her treatment of the issue in Nisvân-ı İslâm made her thoughts on veiling explicit.

of moderation in Islam through her position on veiling.

Since Europeans frequently cited veiling as proof of Muslim women’s subjugation

Şemseddin Sami went beyond the question of whether or not Muslim women need to don the veil. Instead, he turned to the women in the Qur’an, and the Prophet’s wife Aisha, to highlight how the practice of veiling did not keep women from taking part in meetings and other activities, voting, and even going to war. In other words, during the inception of Islam, Muslim women’s social interactions and societal participation did not change because they wore the veil. He also highlighted how veiling existed in Christianity and predated Islam.153 Muhammad Barakatullah also addressed this earlier history of Islam and veiling.

Barakatullah explained how the tradition of veiling came about. He believed the Prophet waited until he saw the ethical teachings of Islam take root before he introduced gradual reform to remove “unbridled lawlessness.” Barakatullah identified the first step to ending this immoral behavior was an injunction on faithful women to “cover their faces and hands up to the wrists, and also not to expose their charms and ornaments to the public gaze.” Instead they should,

“cover themselves with extra sheets whenever they might go out, so they might be known as respectable ladies and saved from the insults of street ruffians.”154 Barakatullah does not question why this moral revamping fell solely on women, or why men were not compelled by the Prophet to act in a moral fashion by viewing women as something other than sexual objects. But he does acknowledge that veiling did not mean the utter seclusion of women.

On the point of veiling Cherágh Ali underscored Suras 59 and 31. The former states, “O

Prophet! Speak to thy wives and to thy daughters, and to the wives of the faithful, that they let

153 Şemseddin Sami, Kadinlar (Women) (Istanbul: Gundogan Yayinlari, 1996), 6.

154 Barakatullah, “Mohamedan Women,” 376.

their wrappers fall low. Thus, will they become more easily known, and they will not be affronted. God is Indulgent, Merciful.”155 The latter Sura states, “and speak to the believing women, that they refrain their looks and observe continence; and that they display not their ornaments except those which are external, and that they draw their kerchiefs over their bosoms.”156 He cited these excerpts from the Qur’an to argue Mohammad did not allow or enjoin the seclusion of women. Instead, Cherágh Ali interpreted the Prophet as improving the general dress and behavior of women and this in turn gave women more “honour [sic]and respectability” by safeguarding them from insults hurled from “rude and uncultivated common folk, while going out in the streets.”157 He also stated that the face and hands were not included as parts of the body that should be covered.

Initially Halil Halid identified veiling as an Islamic law, but then revised his assertion stating, “the Mussulman law, or rather a very strictly adhered to Mussulman custom, compels a girl to cover herself with veil and cloak from the time of approaching the age of womanhood.”158

Halid addressed veiling with the purpose of identifying whether or not the intention of the practice was to deny women freedom. Halid believed veiling was an Islamic custom that had more to do with socially monitoring men than women. He argued women were veiled not in order to keep them “in the bounds of chastity,” but instead to keep unrighteous men from seducing women. Therefore, he concluded, veiling as a measure never intended to suppress a woman’s right to liberty. Qasim Amin wrote, “I still defend the use of the veil and consider it

155 Ali, The Proposed Political, Legal and Social Reforms, 122.

156 Ali, 123.

157 Ali, 122.

158 Halid, The Crescent Versus the Cross, 110.

one of the permanent cornerstones of morality.”159 These modernists did not call for the dissolution of Shari ‘a, but an understanding of women’s rights bestowed by Islam. In fact, Amin stated if the Shari ’a included a specific passage that advocated the use of the veil he would not even take up the subject, “because heavenly orders should be obeyed without question, research, or discussion.”160 However, because the Shari ‘a does not stipulate the use of the veil he formulated his own interpretations of the custom. Amin understood this custom as a product of cultural exchange that Muslims were “attracted to…approved it, exaggerated its use, and dressed it up in religious raiment.”161 He contended Muslim societies, Egypt in particular, were too extreme by veiling women and then prohibiting them from appearing unveiled before men. He observed how this turned women into objects or goods owned by the men in their lives, denying them the mental and cultural advantages endowed by their natural rights as a human being.

Education

Education is not a central topic in Nisvân-ı İslâm, but it does feature in the conversationy in a few instances. While there are no explicit pleas for women’s education, the narrator expressed admiration for Mme. R who shared her knowledge of astronomy. Mme. R’s father educated her in various languages, religion, and the hard sciences. When Mme. R expressed her fear that she might be boring her host, the narrator responded with esteem for her guest’s erudition. The women in the third muhavere also entertained the topic of education in their discussion on cultural and material exchanges between the East and West. Aliye commented,

“Science and education and industry are necessary to every civilization.”162 She does not

159 Amin, The Liberation of Women and The New Woman, 35.

160 Amin, 35-36.

161 Amin, 36.

162 Aliye, Nisvân-ı İslâm, 139.

explicate women’s roles within education, but from her own educational experiences and these examples found in her work, it is evident that she is supportive of expanding educational opportunities for women. The preceding Muslim intellectuals echoed this position emphatically and were much more explicit in their demand for women’s full access to equal education.

Similar to Orientalists who focused on the status of Muslim women as a marker of societal achievement, Semsidden Sami also used women as a marker to assess a society’s civilizational status. He stated, “the condition of any society is always symmetrical to the condition of women.”163 He framed women’s access to education within the civilizational discourse and stated, “the whole of humanity will be educated, once women are given the right of education.”164 For Sami, civilizational legitimacy would continue to escape Ottomans as long as women’s lack of education remained unremitting. He contended educating women would help further civilizational progress. For example, if women were educated in science and morality they could transmit this knowledge to their children. This suggested a vital societal role for women as mothers and cultural transmitters. In other words, for the Ottoman Empire to attain true civilizational legitimacy women needed to be educated. This was an internal critique that had more to do with elevating Ottoman society than responding to Orientalist claims.

Sami focused on women’s social conditions and defined their societal positions in terms of their right to an education. Some might argue his reasons for supporting women’s education were reactive and he simply responded to charges made by Western European discourses. Others might interpret his position on women’s education as reductive because he viewed the role of women as mothers who could help educated future citizens of the empire. However, in his work

163 Şemseddin Sami, Kadinlar [Women] (Istanbul: Gundogan Yayinlari, 1996), 25.

164 Şemseddin Sami, Kadinlar, 25.

Kadinlar Sami supported education for women because he believed women and men contained similar intellectual faculties. He went on to acknowledge that societies minimized the possible occupations that women were better suited for than men. He argued, “thanks to their natural inclinations… [women made better] tailors, medical workers, service workers, and accountants in trade.”165 To an extent this is an essentialist position and he failed to acknowledge how or why women were socialized to be good at certain professions. But he also recognized the devaluation of women’s societal and economic contributions. He observed that regardless of women’s abilities to be more successful than men at certain trades, whatever those occupations might be, they will be gendered as women’s work and lose value. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this discussion is Sami’s acknowledgement of women beyond the upper class. He acknowledged working-class women, which sets him apart from several other Muslim modernists who often exclusively speak for upper-class women. This lends more credibility to his understanding that all women should be educated, because he is not simply talking about upper-class women.

Qasim Amin also emphatically supported equal education for women. He declared, “I believe women should be given the same education as is given to men.”166 Instead of ordering the state to mandate equal education for all children, Amin puts this responsibility on fathers.

While other intellectuals noted the role of motherhood and education, Amin looked to fathers to prepare their daughters. As patriarchs of the family they would decide whether or not their daughters would receive an education. He wrote:

Indeed, every father should educate his daughter as completely as he can. He should pay as much attention to her upbringing as he does to his son’s. If his daughter marries, her knowledge can be expected to be of benefit to her and her family, and cannot harm her. If, on the other hand, she does not marry, or if she marries and is then separated from her husband for one reason or another, she will then be able to make use of her knowledge in

165 Şemseddin Sami, Kadinlar, 25.

166 Amin, The Liberation of Women and The New Woman, 67.

an acceptable means of earning her livelihood, which will guarantee her comfort, independence, and dignity.167

Education presented a way for women to gain independence and change their social standing.

Amin placed great value on education, especially where women were concerned. Education in all circumstances presented a desirable goal for Amin, whether the result was economic or abstract gratification gained through the access to knowledge.

In Ismail Gaspıralı’s view, denying women access to education stood in opposition to the teaching of the Prophet. Gaspıralı felt that women could contribute and should contribute to society beyond the family, but without a proper education chances of that were slim. He argued that without women’s full societal participation it would be difficult, if not impossible, for

Islamic society to raise its levels of existence to that of the West. Whenever and wherever he found evidence of Muslim women pursuing or utilizing their education, Gaspıralı was quick to publicize it. The opening of mektebs and handicraft schools for girls, their enrollment in Russian educational institutions, and the achievements of Muslim women in various professions including teaching, nursing, and writing, all received ample coverage in the newspaper

Tercuman.168 He used these examples to challenge the perceptions of those who thought women could not succeed academically. In addition to the women who were succeeding because of their education, Gaspıralı constructed a template for the ideal Muslim woman through the use of historical biography and fiction. These stories included:

the houris [virgins] of the imaginary Muslim community in the mountains of Andalusia, who walked about unveiled in the company of strangers and who enjoyed equal status with the male members of their society, or the Amazon women, who proved they were just as capable as men to govern a society, or the heroic daughter of a Central Asian s(h)eyhk, who sparked the defense of her native city against a Chinese siege, these women emerged from the printed page as paragons of womanhood, perhaps different

167 Amin, 43.

168 Lazzerini, “Ismail Bey Gaspıralıi and Muslim Modernism in Russia, 1878-1914,” 250-251.

from, but certainly not inferior to, men.169

Gaspıralı’s depiction of historical and fictional women in idealized form presented inspiration for

Muslim women fully to utilize her capabilities as a human being, and real-life Muslim societies to permit her the opportunity to do so.

Muhammad Barakatullah supported a religious education for both sexes, stating, “Every

Muslim child—male or female—has to learn, if not all, at least a certain portion of the Quran.”170

Beyond a religious education, he noted how Muslim women’s education started to expand beyond religious texts. He highlighted how women in Turkey, Egypt and India recently started studying languages, sciences, and literatures. He recognized this educational shift as progress and declared it a movement. He wrote, “The movement will gain strength in course of time. The signs of progress in this direction are not wanting. Some young Muslim ladies in Hydrabad,

Deccan, India have even passed university examinations in the English language and in modern science.”171 According to Barakatullah women’s access to education was improving, but for those who continue to be uneducated there was a clear explanation. He contended, “it is a patent fact that Muslim ladies never bear separation from their young children, even for educational purposes.”172 The suggestion here is that women chose not to be educated because they prioritized their roles as mothers. In these situations, Barakutullah suggested following the “little less than heroic” example of Begum of the Nawwab Fakhrul Mulk of Hydrabad, Deccan, India, who sent four of her sons to England to study at Eton. Mothers who are not educated, but send their sons to receive an education, were celebrated by Barakutullah.

169Ibid, 251.

170 Barakatullah, “Mohamedan Women,” 379.

171 Barakatullah, 380.

172 Barakatullah, 380.

These topics as a whole comprised the global Muslim woman question. Aliye, and her fellow intellectuals, addressed topics like veiling, property right, divorce, education, and polygyny through the use of an Islamic framework and interpreted Islamic traditions vis-à-vis women’s societal positions. These topics and the nuanced engagement of these intellectuals, would prove foundational to the proceeding debates on Muslim women in the following decades in the Ottoman Empire. These topics represent the contours of an authentic and intra-Muslim discussion on Muslim womanhood. Fatma Aliye’s contributions to the debate showed that

Muslim women’s intellectualism was present and a needed facet to the conversation on Muslim womanhood.

CONCLUSION

Fatma Aliye’s Nisvân-ı İslâm showed how engaging and interpreting Islamic traditions facilitated the construction of modern Muslim women’s identities. Fatma Aliye argued that many emancipatory features lay within Islam, but also understood Islam as an evolving religion.

Furthermore, Fatma Aliye believed cross-cultural exchanges could affectively combat European misgivings on the status of women in Muslim societies. In this regard, Aliye claimed an intellectual and political space for Muslim women to engage in transregional debates concerning their identities. Fatma Aliye struggled with different historical actors and moments. She interpreted Islamic traditions in a manner that emphasized the importance of women in both religious and sociopolitical milieus. Aliye, and her contemporaries’ works, point to a historical transregional debate on the Muslim woman question beginning in the late-nineteenth century.

For Aliye, and other Muslim modernists, responding to the debate on Muslim women’s societal roles meant formulating a two-part response. At one level Aliye contended with Western misconceptions concerning Muslim women, while at another level she interpreted Islamic

traditions to construct ideas on modern Muslim womanhood. Fatma Aliye exemplified how

Muslim women took on global audiences to control and construct their identities for themselves through interpreting religious traditions.

The following chapter reveals that the ideas and issues addressed among the intellectual and bureaucratic elite made their way to other parts of the social strata. The debate was no longer occurring among and for the elite social and political classes. The topics covered by Fatma Aliye and other Muslim modernists during the last few decades of the nineteenth century continued to be debated during the Constitutional Era. Fatma Aliye’s active engagement in the global Muslim woman question helped create a space for Turkish women to continue to engage in transregional discussions concerning them, particularly the international women’s movement. The following chapter examines the Ottoman women’s journal Kadınlar Dünyası and shows that Europeans continued their preoccupation with Muslim women and that Ottoman women would take an even stronger position in determining their own identities and rights. Aliye’s work was the beginning of a Muslim feminist intellectual legacy that would be utilized by late-Ottoman women to undermine feminist Orientalist claims and bolster the demand for increased women’s rights in the empire.

Chapter 2: “We exist, we have awoken, we shall rise”173: The Global Features of the Ottoman Women’s Movement and Kadınlar Dünyası

In 1913 Ulviye Mevlan Civelek started the Ottoman women’s journal Kadınlar Dünyası.

This journal was the only international journal among the forty Ottoman women’s periodicals published during the Constitutional Era. Kadınlar Dünyası introduced an explicitly feminist agenda that both aligned with and distinguished itself from the contemporary international women’s movement. The inaugural issue declared, “We Ottoman women would like to become part of this movement, which has been started for all women by our sisters, the women of this world; however, as we proceed down the path that this movement has carved out, we shall remain within the boundaries of our own traditions and customs.”174 Kadınlar Dünyası and its contributors published articles with the objective of presenting an accurate understanding of

Muslim womanhood to Western feminists, while simultaneously constructing an Ottoman

Muslim womanhood that legitimized their demands for more social and political rights in the

Ottoman Empire.

The editorial board wrote in regards to the international women’s movement, “we, the

Ottoman women, would like to join these efforts within the traditions, rules, and norms of our own upbringing.”175 In this particular case the editors of Kadınlar Dünyası carved out a space for

Islamic traditions and cultural practices to be considered in moving forward in the fight for

173 Editorial Board, “Eser-i Hayat-ı Azmimiz, [The Product of Our Determination of Life],” Kadınlar Dünyası, April 12, 1913, 2-3.

174 Editorial Board, “Hukuk-u Nisvân [Women’s Rights],” Kadınlar Dünyası, April 4, 1913, 1.

175 Editorial Board, “Hukuk-u Nisvan,” 2

women’s rights, an objective that aligned with the intellectual legacy put in place by Fatma Aliye and other Muslim modernists. The authors made clear that there would not be a wholesale adoption of Western feminist principles and in so doing they constructed Muslim womanhood in a manner that reconciled their faith with their feminist goals. I argue the authors of Kadınlar

Dünyası claimed an authentic Muslim feminist voice that was critical of both feminist

Orientalism, as well as the emerging male Muslim nationalists of the Constitutional Era. I further contend these women highlighted their agency through reinterpreting Islamic texts and utilizing

Islamic traditions to advance women’s rights. In Kadınlar Dünyası contributors analyzed Islamic traditions to challenge patriarchal practices by men who used Islam to justify gender inequality.

Additionally, these authors were compelled to engage with Islamic traditions in order to dispel western visions of “Oriental” women. The editors of Kadınlar Dünyası knew there was little to gain from the adoption of Western feminist principles, which is why even as they aligned themselves with a global feminist movement they made it clear that “as we proceed down the path that this movement has carved out, we shall remain within the boundaries of our own traditions and manners.”176

This chapter builds on the existing historiography on Ottoman women’s journals generally, and more specifically the literature on Kadınlar Dünyası. Serpil Çakır’s scholarship was among the earliest to engage with Ottoman women’s journals in an extensive manner. The objective of Çakır’s work was to compel historians to research Ottoman women’s journals. Çakır argues that late-Ottoman women’s journals provided evidence in support of a feminist

176 Editorial Board, “Hukuk-u Nisvan,” 1.

consciousness that in turn informed the Ottoman feminist movement. 177 Çakır contended that a close reading of the letters and articles found in these periodicals will enable historians to better determine the characteristics of the contemporary Ottoman women’s movement. She pointed out that Ottoman women were extremely determined to change their lives. The editorial board of

Kadınlar Dünyası wrote, “Recently Ottoman womanhood proved that it has a soul and that it exists…It says: ‘We exist, we have awoken, we shall rise, now rise and show us the way’….

From now on, women are not going to live this way, and they cannot live this way. You can be absolutely sure of this.”178 Çakır pointed out how the editors of Kadınlar Dünyası supported the

Ottoman women’s movement, and their journal would play an important part in the movement.

In addition to Ottoman women’s journals providing a lens into the history of the Ottoman women’s movement, historians argue that these periodicals facilitate a better understanding of the Constitutional Era. Echoing Çakır’s work, Serpil Atamaz-Hazar argues that Ottoman women’s journals revealed a “dynamic, flexible, and complex milieu, in which women could and did act as agents of both social and political changes.”179 However, she argues that women’s journals also signified the social transformation ushered in by the Revolution of 1908. Atamaz-

Hazar critiqued the existing literature on the Constitutional Era as male-centered. She showed how the use of Ottoman women’s journals could establish a more complete understanding of the empire following the 1908 Revolution. By addressing some of the characteristics of Ottoman women’s journals she depicted how the revolutionary process influenced women’s activism and

177 Çakır also wrote an Encyclopedia entry on Kadınlar Dünyası and a historical biography on Ulviye Mevlan the founder and editor of Kadınlar Dünyası. See Serpil Çakir, “Kadınlar Dünyası,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE, ed. Kate Fleet et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2018).

178 Editorial Board, “Hukuk-u Nisvan,” 2; Çakır, “Feminism and Feminist History-Writing in Turkey,” 70.

179 Serpil Atamaz-Hazar, “Reconstructing the History of the Constitutional Era in Ottoman Turkey through Women’s Periodicals,” Aspasia 5, no. 1 (2011): 92.

vice versa. Her greatest contribution was the use of Ottoman women’s journals as a lens into the

Constitutional Era.180 Çakır’s article raised interest in sources by and about Ottoman women to discuss a moment in history that is often told from the top down. An often-underemphasized aspect of the journal Kadınlar Dünyası was the fact that it was the only international Ottoman women’s journal of the time.

Özge Özdemir in her article, “‘Kadınlık Yalnız Meyve Değildir’: Kadınlar Dünyası

Dergisi'nin Başyazılarında Kadın Kategorisinin İnşası’ examined the first one hundred issues of the journal. The objective of Özdemir’s work was to examine how Ottoman women’s identities were constructed during the Constitutional Era. She analyzed the concepts and practices the authors of the journal used to describe themselves and their womanhood. In particular, Özdemir focused on the rights these Ottoman feminists demanded for themselves and how they talked about themselves. Interestingly, Özdemir’s work does a comprehensive job analyzing certain characteristics that informed Ottoman Muslim women’s identities but overlooked the role Islam played in the way they understood themselves.181

This chapter reveals how in a significant way this journal was the product of global conversations on Muslim women, ignited decades earlier by the Muslim modernists in the previous chapter. These conversations pointed to Muslim women as the marker of imperial backwardness and decline. Educated Ottoman women were tired of being used as an excuse for the Empire’s problems and saw women’s journals as a vehicle to change this discourse.

Examining Kadınlar Dünyası allows us to access what Elife Devecin calls “entangled history,” the history of transnational connections, interactions, and relationships that extend beyond one

180 Atamaz-Hazar, 92–105.

181 Özge Özdemir, “‘Kadınlık Yalnız Meyve Değildir’: Kadınlar Dünyası Dergisi’nin Başyazılarında Kadın Kategorisinin İnşası,” Fe Dergi 9, no. 1 (2017): 113–120.

locality to analyze “personal contacts and social groups.”182 Devecin argues that the “the development of feminist [Ottoman] ideologies must therefore be seen in the framework of interrelations with the West, and not only in the framework of the nationalizing process.”183

Hulya Yildiz echoed this argument declaring that Ottoman women’s journals “show that there was a close relationship, in some cases even collaboration between Ottoman feminists and their

European sisters.”184 The problem with this approach is the risk of overlooking authentically

Ottoman Muslim feminist ideas and activism. The connections between Ottoman women and

Europeans was a historical reality. However, this framework suggested by Devecin and the connections highlighted by Yildiz oversimplified the efforts of Ottoman Muslim feminists, implying that they had been directed by and in reaction to Western feminism. Ottoman women engaged with Western feminists through Kadınlar Dünyası. The first issue of the journal made an explicit connection to women’s rights developments in Europe and America. But the editors of Kadınlar Dünyası also made it clear that while there was a shared experience in women’s oppression, the solutions to that oppression required acknowledgement of individual cultures and traditions and the role each plays in identity formation.

This chapter focuses on the Ottoman women’s journal Kadınlar Dünyası with the aim of further exploring the major issues and unanswered questions raised by the existing literature. To what extent did the journal Kadınlar Dünyası engage with the global Muslim woman question?

How did the journal’s contributors use the journal to construct their identities as Muslim women?

182 Elife Bic[h]er-Deveciin, “The Movement of Feminist Ideas: The Case of Kadinlar Dunyasi,” in A Global Middle East: Mobility, Materiality and Culture in the Modern Age, 1880-1940, ed. Liat Kozma, Cyrus Schayegh, and Avner Wishnitzer (London: I.B. Tauris, 2015), 347–55.

183 Bic[h]er-Deveciin, 347–48

184 Hülya Yıldız, “Rethinking the Political: Ottoman Women as Feminist Subjects,” Journal of Gender Studies 27, no. 2 (2018): 182.

Did the authors view the journal as a vehicle for demanding and obtaining gender equity? If so, how did they go about fighting for women’s rights on the pages of the journal? How did these women reconcile at times conflicting ideas of Western feminism, modernity, and Islam?

The first part of this chapter examines Ulveye Mevlan Civelek’s life, her motivations for starting the journal Kadınlar Dünyası, and information on the journal itself. In order to better situate Kadınlar Dünyası among other journals, the following section focuses on the culture of

Ottoman women’s journals. After first introducing the foundation of the new journal, this chapter will situate Kadınlar Dünyası in two different contexts- domestic and international. The 1908

Revolution proved revolutionary not only for the empire, but especially for the women in it. The other context explored in this chapter is the evolving international women’s movement and the feminist Orientalism practiced through the movement’s problematic acceptance of Orientalist assumptions. Finally, I will explore the way Kadınlar Dünyası served as a vehicle to address the continued debate on the global Muslim women question, and analyze the ways that the journal itself constructed Muslim womanhood.

ULVIYE MEVLAN CIVELEK AND KADINLAR DÜNYASI

Ulviye Mevlan Civelek created the Ottoman women’s journal Kadınlar Dünyası

(Women’s World) in 1913. Ulviye was born in1893 in

Goreme, a small town in central Anatolia, to Safiye

Hanim and Mahmut Yedic. Her family had been part of

the migration of Muslims from Caucasia, exiled by the

Russians. At the age of six Ulviye was brought to

Topkapi Palace. The Ottoman palace was where she

Figure 2.1 Ulviye Mevlan Civelek (1893-1964)

first received an education.185 At the disturbingly young age of thirteen, the Sultan forced her to become a child-bride by marrying Hulusi Bey. Hulusi Bey was an elderly man, whose mother served as the wet-nurse for Sultan Abdülhamid II. Hulusi Bey died shortly after he married young Ulviye. After her husband’s death, she married Rifat Mevlan, a well-known journalist, but her career in journalism was not due to him—it began before she married her second husband. 186

In 1913, at the age of twenty, Ulviye Mevlan Civelek created and ran Kadınlar

Dünyası— her name appeared on the journal as the owner of the publication. She was a pioneering feminist during a time when social and political structures were undergoing serious changes. She worked to mobilize women and improve their social status through Kadınlar

Dünyası and Osmanlı Müdafaa-ı Hukuk-ı Nisvan Cemiyeti (Ottoman Women’s Association for the Defense of Women’s Rights), the sister organization of the journal she founded in 1913. She focused on both the private and public advancement of women by demanding rights for women in the family, social life, the labor force, and the political realm. For Ulviye Mevlan Civelek, political rights were a necessary complement to the advancement of women’s social rights. She wrote on these topics with vigor throughout the publication’s eight years. According to Serpil

Çakır, “Although the editorial column of the magazine was anonymously signed ‘Kadınlar

Dünyası,’ her [Ulviye Mevlan Civelek] singular style of writing is recognizable. Later, she

185 Her family is an example of the practice of recruiting young women for Ottoman Harem, and thus she was brought to Topkapı Palace at the age of six because of this and received an education. For more on the history of the harem as a focal point of power for women in the Ottoman Empire see Leslie P. Peirce, The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

186 In the first few weeks of publication her name, Nuriye Ulviye, appeared and later she took the name Mevlan. After her second husband was exiled for his opposition to Ataturk, she divorced him. She remarried again in 1931 to Ali Civelek, a medical student from Antakya. They adopted a child named Lutfiye, see Serpil Çakır, “Ulviye Mevlan,” in Biographical Dictionary of Women’s Movements and Feminisms in Central, Eastern, and South Eastern Europe 19th and 20th Centuries, ed. Francisca de Haan, Krasimira Daskalova, and Anna Loutfi (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2006), 336–39.

signed the column with her own name under the heading ‘Düşünüyorum’ (I am thinking).”187

Ulviye thought the only way women’s emancipation could truly be accomplished was through the efforts of women themselves. She relied on her experiences as a woman and ideas of sisterhood and solidarity to facilitate an Ottoman feminist agenda. Her feminist views distinguished her from other public women figures of the time. She defied traditional gender norms in an effort to create a new “world for women.” According to Çakır, “not supported by wealthy and prestigious friends, due to her own modest social background and her distance from dominant political circles, she was relegated to the shadow for a long time.”188 However, her legacy was memorialized by her third husband after she died at the age of seventy one in Istanbul in 1964.

Ulviye Mevlan Civelek’s third husband, Ali

Civelek, held a ceremony of remembrance five years after her death to commemorate her efforts to gain women’s emancipation. At the ceremony he erected a commemorative plaque in her honor which reads:

“Ulviya Nuriye Civelek—a leading figure of the

Ottoman women’s struggle for emancipation.” Figure 2.2 Ulviye Mevlan’s Civelek’s Commemorative plaque. Erected in A similar inscription was written on her gravestone. Her 1971. husband also had a street named after her in Antakya.

He purchased buildings on this street he converted into boarding

187 Çakır, 336.

188 Çakır, 338.

houses and turned an old church into a library which he donated to the municipality in her memory.189 While all of these commemorations created a public history narrative around Ulviye

Mevlan Civelek, it was her publication Kadınlar Dünyası that provided the greatest insight into her life’s meaning.

Kadınlar Dünyası was published from April 17th, 1913 to May 21st, 1921. At the outset the journal was a daily, but after one hundred issues it was published weekly. Kadınlar Dünyası distinguished itself as a radical journal compared to other Ottoman women’s journals of the time.

Kadınlar Dünyası prided itself as the voice of a movement, and that voice was devoted to defending the rights and interests of women and women alone. The journal refused male writers declaring, “Until our rights are recognized in public law, until men and women are equal; in every activity, Kadınlar Dünyası will not welcome men in its pages.” The editors also pointed out that if men supported women’s political and social emancipation their writings would be more effective in journals where women’s issues were not yet addressed, whose primary audiences were men. The editors expressed gratitude to those who supported their feminist efforts, but wanted to make it clear that Ottoman women could protect their rights with their own methods. They reinforced this point by stating, “How can we deign to accept men’s benevolence to end the suffering we endure because of them?”190 The demand for full equality was repeated several times throughout the journal’s pages and by its various authors. These authors included

Aziz Haydar (1881–?), an educator, newspaper columnist, lecturer, fundraiser, and member of

Hilal-i Ahmer Cemiyeti (The Red Crescent Society); Belkıs Şevket (birth and death unknown), the ﬁrst Turkish and Muslim woman to ﬂy on an airplane in 1913, member of the Ottoman

189 Çakır, 339.

190 Editorial Board, “Hukuk-u Nisvan,” 13.

Society for the Defense of Women’s Rights, and a regular columnist at Kadınlar Dünyası; and the poet, Yaşar Nezihe (1882–1971).191

Various women’s journals and their accompanying associations sought to enlighten and mobilize Ottoman women in a number of ways. The name of the journal, Kadınlar Dünyası, reflected its aim — to create a “world for women” through feminist discussion and an agenda intended to better women’s lives. The journal and its contributing writers were dedicated to questioning contemporary sex and gender norms. For these reasons, Kadınlar Dünyası was an important feminist forum. The journal covered a wide range of topics, including education, women’s health, women’s employment, civil and political rights, the family, and literature. These topics prompted heated discussions in its pages about the social roles of women and men. The journal also reported news and helped organize for its sister women’s organization, Osmanlı

Müdafaa-ı Hukuk-ı Nisvan Cemiyeti. The journal worked in conjunction with Osmanlı Müdafaa-

ı Hukuk-ı Nisvan Cemiyeti to set the agenda of the women’s association and served as a mouthpiece for the association’s activities. Kadınlar Dünyası also backed political campaigns that sought to advance women’s rights, like university education and employment. All of these things helped raise a feminist consciousness in Ottoman society.192

OTTOMAN WOMEN’S JOURNALS

It was during the Tanzimat Era (1839-76), with significant changes in social and cultural life, that Ottoman women’s journals surfaced.193 The ﬁrst journal published in Ottoman Turkish

191 Other contributors included: Ulviye Mevlan, Emine Seher Ali, Mükerrem Belkıs, Atiye Şükran, Nimet Cemil, Meliha Cenan, Azize, Feride Servet, Pakize Sadri, Naciye Şerif, Bint-ül Halim Seyhan, Mesudet Bedirhan, Feride İzzet Selim, Meliha Zekeriya, Bedia Kamran, and Fatma Zerrin.

192 Çakır, “Ulviye Mevlan,” 336–39. 193 I use the term journal, instead of newspaper, because these Ottoman women’s journals’ issues were thematic and would focus on specific topics. Whereas a newspaper reports on events without thematic congruency.

was Terakki-i Muhadderat (Progress of Virtuous Women), which came out in 1868 as a supplement of the newspaper Terakki (Progress). Other women’s journals soon followed, such as

Vakit (Time), Mürebbi-i Muhadderat (Educator of Virtuous women, ﬁrst published in 1875),

Ayine (Mirror, 1875), Aile (Family, 1880), İnsaniyet (Humanity, 1883), Hanımlar (Ladies,

1883), Şükufezar (Garden of Flowers, 1886), Mürüvvet (Benevolence, 1888), Parça Bohçası

(Bundle of Pieces, 1889), Hanımlara Mahsus Gazete (Ladies’ Own Gazette, 1895), Hanımlara

Mahsus Malumat (Information Special to Ladies, 1895), and Alem-i Nisvan (World of Women,

1906). Vakit, Mürüvvet, and Hanımlara Mahsus Malumat were supplements of prominent newspapers, whose target audience were men. These periodicals, except for Ayine and Alem-i

Nisvan, were based in Istanbul, the center of publishing in the Ottoman Empire. Hanımlara

Mahsus Gazete ran the longest in the history of the women’s press in the Ottoman Empire, running for more than six hundred issues from 1895 to 1908. The newspaper survived under harsh censorship during the rule of Abdülhamid II, who was known for his control over the press.194 This journal also published its own auxiliary for girls and a separate gazette for children. The aforementioned women’s journals often declared their goals were to turn women into good mothers, good wives, and good Muslims. The journals produced in the post- revolutionary period differed from their antecedents in significant ways.

Ottoman women’s journals in general, and Kadınlar Dünyası specifically, revealed the significant changes the 1908 revolution facilitated in women’s lives. Women’s journals during the Constitutional Era differed from those published prior to the 1908 Revolution in notable

194 Vuslat Devrim Altinoz, “The Ottoman Women’s Movement: Women’s Press, Journals, Magazines and Newspapers from 1875 to 1923,” (PhD diss., Miami University, 2003).

ways.195 For example, as was the case with Kadınlar Dünyası, women started to own and run their own journals. The number of columnists and typographers increased after the revolution.

This is in part how the editors of Kadınlar Dünyası could declare that men were not allowed to contribute to the journal and still successfully go to print. Ulviye Mevlan and other women gained more influence in the press and took matters into their own hands to shape the discourse on women’s social and political rights. Women’s journals opened up intellectual and printing opportunities for women outside of the elite class. Ottoman women understood that the press could provide them a way to redefine gender roles, fight for women’s rights, and have their voices heard.196

Women’s journals increased women’s literary productions by encouraging them to write and insert themselves into public debates. Post-revolutionary journals were filled with more position pieces than literary works. Women’s periodicals allowed women to freely engage and express their opinions on debates concerning womanhood and the nation. For the first time average Muslim women’s voices were reaching wider audiences. Additionally, images of

Muslims were included in an effort to gain visibility. Kadınlar Dünyası initiated this change in

1913 when they published the first image of Muslim women in the press.197

195 Atamaz-Hazar, “Reconstructing the History of the Constitutional Era in Ottoman Turkey through Women’s Periodicals,” 9.

196 Atamaz-Hazar, 99–105.

197 Among these were Belkis Sevket, and Aziz Haydar, members of the Ottoman Society for the Defense of Women’s Rights, and the seven women hired by a French phone company- Bedra Osman, Bedia Şekib, Nezihe Mustafa, Hamiyet Derviş, Mediha, Reﬁ ka Mustafa, Seniha Hikmet—were the ﬁrst Muslim women whose pictures appeared in the press.

Figure 2.3 Bedra Osman, Bedia Şekib, Nezihe Mustafa, Hamiyet Derviş, Mediha, Reﬁ ka Mustafa, Seniha Hikmet-First image of Muslim women in a Periodical (Kadınlar Dünyası) in the Ottoman Empire, 1914.

A possible objective beyond Muslim women’s visibility was the desire to highlight indigenous role models as opposed to European figures for the women of the empire to aspire to. According to Serpil Atamaz-Hazer, “…subscribing to the ideology of Turkish nationalism, which gained momentum during the Balkan Wars, many intellectuals, including the publishers of Kadınlar

Dünyası, began using national rather than Western symbols, images, and references to call for change in the gender system.”198 By including images of Ottoman women, the editorial board acknowledged the national importance of women as citizens of the empire.

198 Atamaz-Hazar, “Reconstructing the History of the Constitutional Era in Ottoman Turkey through Women’s Periodicals,” 99.

It is necessary to address readership of these post-revolutionary women’s journals.

Journals inaugurated after the 1908 Revolution lasted longer than their predecessors, an indication of an increase in the size of the readership. Most cited ﬁgures in the existing literature are speculative, but it is known that the copies sold through individual sales and subscriptions were somewhere in the lower thousands. More importantly, as was the case for Kadınlar

Dünyası, readers were sending letters from cities other than Istanbul. This demonstrated that the demand for and the accessibility of women’s journals in the post-revolutionary period was not limited to the Empire’s capital and most cosmopolitan city. There are no figures for the readership of the French supplement produced by Kadınlar Dünyası. Regardless of the circulation numbers, the ideas in Kadınlar Dünyası provide insights into how Muslim women tried to take control of their own narratives and experiences.199

Muslim women expressed their frustrations with dominant discourses that limited women’s social and political advancements in the empire. These women sought to change the contemporary discourses on gender and women through women’s journals. Women challenged the male monopoly on public discourse by taking control over the topics discussed in these publications. These women were fed up with being scapegoated as the reason anything went wrong in the empire, while simultaneously being told what to do and how to do it. Women’s journals provided the opportunity to pivot the blame to men who played a much more influential role in national and international affairs. Ottoman women began to question the sincerity of the constitutional principles and the revolution’s leaders. They insisted that if male revolutionaries were sincere in their support of women’s advancement, they would pay more attention to what women had to say.

199 Atamaz-Hazar, 105.

This issue was addressed in an article in Kadınlar Dünyası titled “Erkekler Hakikaten

Hürriyetperver Midirler? Kadınlar Ne İstiyor?” (Are Men Really Advocates of Freedom? What do Women Want?). 200 Columnist Naciye Hanım praised men’s struggle for freedom over the centuries but mentioned that although men were able to gain their freedom with great revolutions, there was still a large group of people whose freedom had not been ensured: “That was us; pitiful women.” She wrote, “although men seem to be advocates of freedom, in reality they are nothing but little despots. Even when they were drowning large continents in blood for freedom, they ignored the world of women, which was much greater and more important than theirs.”201 Naciye Hanım pointed out the hypocrisy of these men, who established a constitutional regime, but failed to give women their basic and political rights. A closer examination of the 1908 Revolution showed exactly how the Constitutional Era intersected with the contemporary Ottoman women’s movement.

THE 1908 REVOLUTION AND GENDER REFORMS

The Young Ottomans were erudite Muslim male scholars who attempted to reconcile

Western notions of progress with Islamic culture for the advancement of the empire. These scholars wrote on the benefits of Western technology and scientific thought, but did not feel compelled to abandon their cultural foundations. They generated support for constitutionalism with the use of Islamic language and were proponents of an inclusive Ottoman modernity. For example, the discourse on ‘True Islam’ was used as a modernization/nationalizing strategy.

Young Ottomans used the idea and rhetoric of a ‘True Islam’ to reconfigure Islamic traditions

200 Naciye, “Erkekler Hakikaten Hürriyetperver Midirler? Kadınlar Ne İstiyor? [Are men really advocates of freedom? What do women want?]” Kadınlar Dünyası, April 10, 1913, 3.

201 Naciye, “Erkekler Hakikaten Hürriyetperver Midirler?, 3.

under the pretext of an authentic Islamic interpretation. This allowed them to pursue an

“authentic” Ottoman identity that incorporated Islamic elements and remained free from

European imitations. According to Tuğba Karaman, “what the Young Ottomans did was to use an Islamic filter on ideas coming from the West…progress required a [sic] selective adoption of

Western manners compatible with Ottoman-Islamic cultural codes…modernization was approached as a dualistic matter.”202 The Young Ottomans held no interest in imitating European ideas of being “civilized,” and instead endeavored to create a “modern” national culture in a non- western context for themselves. Modernization included both a material and spiritual dimension, which created space to discuss topics regarding women and the family. Often noted as some of the most strident advocates of women’s rights, the Young Ottomans challenged traditional ideas regarding the gender order.203 These ideas provided the ideological framework used by the

Young Turks and the 1908 revolution.

In July of 1908 the Young Turks put an end to the decades-long autocratic rule of Sultan

Abdülhamid II by declaring constitutional rule and a parliamentary regime.204 Known as both the

Second Constitutional Movement and the 1908 Revolution, this historical moment was the culmination of a series of debates and reform efforts intended to strengthen the Ottoman Empire.

The Committee of Union and Progress (Ittihat ve Terakki Cemiyeti or CUP) served as the

202 Tuğba Karaman, “Rethinking Islam, Remaking Ottoman Women: ‘True Islam’ Discourse in the Late-Ottoman Women’s Press (1895-1914),” (paper presentation at the symposium Rethinking Late Ottoman Civilization, University of Texas at Austin, Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies), 1-41.

203 Karaman, “Rethinking Islam, Remaking Ottoman Women,” 16.

204 The Constitutional Movement of 1908 is one of the most researched topics in Ottoman History. Scholars have analyzed male-centered sources to demonstrate the changes ignited by the 1908 Revolution including, newspapers, biographies, memoirs, government documents, official correspondences, and parliament proceedings. For more works on this topic see Ernest Edmondson Ramsaur, The Young Turks: Prelude to the Revolution of 1908. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957); Feroz Ahmad, The Young Turks and the Ottoman Nationalities Armenians, Greeks, Albanians, Jews, and Arabs, 1908–1918 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2014); Zürcher, The Young Turk Legacy and Nation Building; Hanioğlu, The Young Turks in Opposition; Aykut Kansu, The Revolution of 1908 in Turkey (Leiden: Brill, 1997).

umbrella organization behind the Young Turk movement. Intellectuals, military officers, and bureaucrats alike believed the problems of the empire could be solved with the establishment of a constitutional regime. Political groups shared power for the proceeding five years. However, this ended on January 23, 1913 when the CUP ignited a coup d’état and took full control of the empire. Once the Unionists were in charge, they sought to transform political, social, and economic structures by suppressing the opposition. Military leaders Enver, Cemal, and Talat

Pashas took control of the empire and ultimately brought it to an end when they allied with

Germany during WWI (1914-1918).205

The Unionists championed women’s political rights to a greater extent than previous ruling parties. They accepted female membership and within limits allowed women equal footing within the committee. The Committee of Union and Progress was the first political organization to include women. The organization’s program declared, “Ottomans, both women and men can become members of the organization…female members have the same rights and responsibilities as male members.”206 In 1913 the CUP made primary education mandatory for girls and increased the number of girls’ schools in the country. University doors were opened to women in

1914. The CUP also promoted vocational education and sent several students to study abroad in

Europe starting in 1916. The number of female teachers increased by thousands. The CUP promoted certain career paths for women like nursing and school administration and hired women employees at government offices. In the private sphere, they supported the development of factories that would hire women. The CUP also established a sub-committee called the

205 Erik Jan Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History (London: I.B. Tauris, 1993).

206 Tarık Zafer Tunaya, Türkiye’de Siyasi Partiler, 1859-1952 (İstanbul: Hürriyet Vakfı Yayınları, 1984), 44–45.

Society for the Employment of Muslim Women (İslam Kadınlarını Çalıştırma Cemiyeti) intended to specifically help Muslim women find work.207

In addition to schooling and work, the CUP enacted a number of legal changes during their political tenure. There was a slow, yet real, progression in women’s legal rights that started in 1911. Female property owners were recognized as guarantors of their land. Women could now travel without the permission of their husbands. Equal punishment would supposedly be administered for husbands and wives. Significantly, women gained the right to equal shares from their husband’s, father’s, and mother’s inheritance. The CUP introduced the Ottoman Law of

Family Rights Act in 1917, “which promoted a family model based on monogamy and mutual consent.”208 Women were now able to initiate divorce and transfer the end of the marriage contract to the authority of the state for the first time. The age of consent was increased to seventeen for women and eighteen for men. Women were at the center of social and political projects as objects of modernization. The Unionists were willing to adapt certain social and legal practices, so long as women adhered to the image of womanhood these men created.

During this period, woman as mother became the common image of both reformists and traditionalists alike. Ahmet Riza, a prominent political figure during the Constitutional Era stated, “A woman should seek freedom in order to fulfill her duties as a mother as best she can.”

Abdullah Cevdet, a founding member of the Committee of Union and Progress believed, “The most important duty for women, materially, or spiritually considered, with its most exalted meaning, is to become a mother. Any neglect of this obligation will consequently cause destruction for both women and society.” Women’s rights activists used this reductive

207 Atamaz-Hazar, “Reconstructing the History of the Constitutional Era in Ottoman Turkey through Women’s Periodicals,” 93–95.

208 Atamaz-Hazar, 94

understanding of a woman’s societal role to argue for extensive rights as “the mothers of the nation.”209

The changes ignited by the 1908 Revolution gave women the opportunity to demand their rights and freedom; in some instances, these changes occurred because of the Ottoman women’s movement. They set an agenda and influenced public opinion through women’s journals. Çakır argues in her article Feminism and Feminist History-Writing in Turkey: The Discovery of

Ottoman Feminism that, “It is possible to find out how the women’s movement was defined at the time by looking through the articles and letters of these journals.”210 This is certainly the case for Kadınlar Dünyası. The editorial board addressed the rise of the Ottoman women’s movement in one of the publication’s earliest entries:

“Recently Ottoman womanhood proved that it has a soul and that it exists. We hear its sighs and moans every day. It says: ‘We exist, we have awoken, we shall rise, now rise and show us the way’. We see this motivation in all sections of womanhood. We now believe that our life is not a good one. From now on, women are not going to live this way, and they cannot live this way. You can be absolutely sure of this.”211

Kadınlar Dünyası played a significant role in the Ottoman women’s movement, but they also aligned themselves with the international women’s movement. The next section investigates the motivations, connections, and effects Kadınlar Dünyası had on the international women’s movement and vice versa.

OTTOMAN WOMEN AND THE INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S MOVEMENT

During the first couple decades of the twentieth century, women started to organize an international women’s movement. Historian Leila Rupp stated, “Women from far-flung countries

209 Çakır, “Feminism and Feminist History-Writing in Turkey.”

210 Çakır, p.68

211 Editorial Board, “Eser-i Hayat-ı Azmimiz,” 2-3.

came together in transnational women’s organizations and constructed an international collective identity.” The roots of the international women’s movement came out of the previous century’s social movements. These international networks facilitated the creation and expansion of the women’s movement.212 Movements including abolitionism, peace, socialism, moral reform, and temperance presented their causes transnationally, providing models for feminist efforts to move beyond national boundaries. These social movements also brought together women from different geographical locations and allowed them to participate in mixed-gender meetings. For example, the World Anti-Slavery Convention held in 1840 in London sparked the women’s movement in the United States when the organizers refused to seat women delegates elected to participate in the convention among the men participants. 213

Western women from both sides of the Atlantic were inspired to action by Mary

Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), which was translated from English into French and German in the late-nineteenth century. The demand for and response to this publication suggested the possibility that feminist analysis and the fight for women’s rights could transcend national contexts. Feminist activists across Europe translated each other’s speeches and manifestos. Rupp argues that “the transnational development of a feminist ideology led to formalized contacts among women committed to women’s rights rather than some other cause.”214 The first international women’s congress was Congrès International du Droit des

Femmes held in Paris in 1878 in conjunction with the World Exposition. The feminist activity of the nineteenth century compelled the need to form international women’s organizations. These

212 According to Rupp, women travelers, migrants, missionaries, and writers-of books, newspaper articles, and letters sent off across the lines that divided nations-made contact that prepared the way for more formalized interactions. Rupp, Worlds of Women, 12.

213 Rupp, 13.

214 Rupp, 14.

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organizations “institutionalized and perpetuated the impulse to work on behalf of women on the international stage.”215 There were three major international bodies that held a monopoly over international women’s activism from the first decade of the twentieth century until after WWII.

The first organization was the International Council of Women (ICW) founded in 1888. This organization was the first surviving general body of feminist activity. Second, there was the

International Alliance of Women (IAW), which was an offshoot of the International Woman

Suffrage Alliance officially established in 1904. Third, was the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). This organization evolved out of the International Congress of

Women at The Hague, which organized in 1915 during WWI.

Of the three organizations, the most avowedly “feminist” was the International Alliance of Women, regularly applying the term to describe their actions and the organization itself. The

IAW claimed women’s rights as a primary goal and positioned themselves within a liberal feminist camp that sought political and legal equality. The organization sought to unite women

“worldwide” through the fundamental feminist conviction that all women were disadvantaged in comparison to men and therefore, all women needed to fight for suffrage and equal citizenship.

Charlotte Weber argues that in theory, the international women’s movement “contained the seeming potential for women’s solidarity across boundaries of nationality, religion, and culture.”216 In actuality, drawing influence from European Enlightenment and liberal ideals made it impossible for these organizations to escape Orientalist assumptions. Western feminists often accepted the core element of Western Orientalism—the superiority of Western ways. These

215 Rupp, 19.

216 Charlotte Weber, “Unveiling Scheherazade: Feminist Orientalism in the International Alliance of Women, 1911- 1950,” Feminist Studies 27, no. 1 (2001): 126.

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organizations exhibited their own “feminist Orientalism.”217

In 1911-12 Carrie Chapman Catt, founder of the International Alliance of Women, and

Aletta Jacobs, an instrumental figure in the establishment of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, traveled around the world.218 Based on their travels they held the impression that there was a “women’s awakening in the East,” and they found it “touching to think of these women, who lacked the simplest rights, seeking for help.” 219 They reported their impressions in Jus Suffragii, the official journal of the IAW. Approximately thirty articles concerning the Middle East, i.e. Muslim women, appeared in Jus Suffragii. Catt, Jacobs, and other European feminists believed it was European women’s “burden” to protect the women of the world; this notion actually made it clear that European feminists were in charge of the international fight for women’s rights.

Leila Rupp suggests that women in international organizations could at times recognize and present a more complex understanding of the “East.” For example, in 1912 Carrie Chapman

Catt reported on her time in what was then Burma and acknowledged some of the benefits women held there. The Orientalism that unfolds in Jus Suffragii came out of a fifteen-month trip to Africa and Asia in 1911-1912. Carrie Chapman Catt visited Japan, Korea, China, Philippines,

217 Joyce Zonana, “The Sultan and the Slave: Feminist Orientalism and the Structure of ‘Jane Eyre,’” Signs 18, no. 3 (1993): 592–617. Zonana’s analysis of the novel Jayne Eyre suggested that the orientalist imagery depicted by British feminist writers “blunted” their feminism, because they assumed patriarchy was an “Eastern” element to be purged from Western societies. In other words, when Western men were against European women’s progress Western feminists would employ the orientalist trope that these men appeared “backwards” by adopting “Eastern” behavior.

218 The International Alliance of Women was founded in 1904 at the Berlin Congress of the International Council of Women. This organization emerged out of frustration with the International Council of Women’s inability to take a pro-women’s suffrage stance. While their primary concern was getting the right to vote, they diversified their activism to include several women’s rights issues like: prostitution, slavery, equal pay, and married women’s nationality rights. Weber, “Unveiling Scheherazade,” 130–31.

219 Rupp, Worlds of Women, 76.

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the East Indies, India, Burma, Palestine, Syria, South Africa, and Egypt. The trip was intended to increase membership and support for women’s suffrage outside of America, Europe, and

Australia. Catt also intended to observe and report back the realities of different women around the globe. According to Catt, Burmese women fared better than Western women because they could engage in business, own property, and vote in municipal elections. However, in the same article Catt spoke of the “languor of people in such sunshine.”220 Charlotte Weber also argues that Western feminist attitudes toward Middle Eastern women were also more complex than a simple “feminist Orientalism” might suggest. Western members of the IAW expressed perceptions of Middle Eastern women that both challenged and reinforced Orientalist renderings of them. Webber theorized that in some instances, because of universal claims against patriarchy,

European feminists were able to transcend the “West” and “East” binary. Western feminists did not always attribute women’s conditions to Islam. Ultimately, however, Western members of the

IAW failed to recognize Islam as a possible foundation for feminist activism. The belief in

Western culture’s superiority superseded the belief in a “global sisterhood.” Western feminism’s need to “help” their “oppressed” sisters reinforced the reductive reading that Muslim women equaled total helplessness.221

Catt’s reports from Palestine and Egypt reflected a preoccupation with gender segregation and the veil. Both of these topics were presented as proof of Muslim women’s subordination. Western feminists viewed women’s liberation in relation to their proximity to the public sphere. Therefore, Muslim women were the most oppressed because they were the most removed from the public sphere. Not once did Catt consider how Muslim women understood

220 Rupp, 76.

221 Weber, “Unveiling Scheherazade,” 129.

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their relationship to power, authority, and influence over their own lives. Weber pointed out that despite this, there were moments where Catt tried to dispel misconceptions regarding Islam.

Weber contended, “Ultimately, the construction of ‘Muslim woman’ by the IAW was marked by the tension between orientalist and its [IAW] particular brand of feminism. The result was a hybrid discourse that simultaneously veiled and unveiled its subjects.”222

Ottoman women had direct connection to the international women’s movement from the movement’s beginning. The international “sisterhood” imagined by the International Alliance of

Women did little to influence their acceptance of Muslim women’s agency. A report published in

1915 on women’s progress in Egypt, then a British protectorate, described the country as a place where “religion [Islam] teaches that women have no souls.” This report was followed by another report on Turkish women that sought to dispel these Western criticisms of Muslim societies. The author was Arthur Field, the secretary of the Anglo-Turkish Society. He wrote that he “protested emphatically against the still widely current belief that woman [sic] in Turkey has been a slave, as compared with woman [sic] in Christendom, as a whole.”223 These reports reflect an inconsistency in the discourse surrounding Islam that graced the pages of the IAW’s journal Jus

Suffragii.

Overtly racist statements decreased as a sense of responsibility for their “less advanced” sisters increased. However, there was an undeniable regularity in the way Muslim women were described as “ignorant” or “tradition-bound.” As Western feminists made certain social and political gains, their Muslim “sisters” were depicted as increasingly “backward.” Western feminists did not always overtly blame Islam for Muslim women’s limitations, but it was

222 Weber, 133.

223 Weber, 139.

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consistently implied. The IAW believed Muslim women’s path to liberation meant abandoning their indigenous ways. Weber contended, “Western feminists never considered that feminism in the Middle East might take an alternate route, using Islam as a guide.”224 In other words, they could accept that Islamic traditions were perhaps misinterpreted in order to reinforce patriarchal aims, but they never accepted that reinterpreting Islamic traditions could be a means to create a legitimate feminist framework for Muslim women.

Western feminism viewed the veil as a significant symbol of tradition that held Muslim women back. Carrie Chapman Catt had dismissed the veil as an unimportant symptom. However, as the international women’s movement increased with time and in geographical scope, the preoccupation with the veil also grew. One member of the IAW wrote in the case of Lebanese women that they were “still handicapped by the custom of going veiled.”225 For the women’s movement to truly occur in Muslim majority countries, western feminists believed that women needed to unveil. An article in Jus Suffragii declared, “But first and foremost they must help their sisters out of the veil…it is a wall which materially and spiritually is debarring its bearer from the developing intercourse and opportunity to co-operation with men in a world crying for co-operation.”226

By commenting on Muslim women’s decision to veil they inserted themselves into a charged debate that had been going on for decades within Muslim societies themselves. The veil was a contentious topic and its political meaning changed over time in Islamic societies. For some reformers it represented women’s exclusion from the public sphere and for others the

224 Weber, 141–42.

225 Weber, 143.

226 Weber, 143

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preservation of modesty and protection from the objectification of the male gaze. Veiling has also been used to symbolize resistance to Western imperialism.227

While western feminists viewed Muslim women as a monolith, the issue of veiling made it very clear that different Muslim feminists took different positions on veiling throughout history. Some women decided to veil, or not, for themselves; others were forced to make the decision as the result of a misguided state-feminism. The articles written by Arab women in Jus

Suffragii describing the status of women in their own countries made no mention of the veil.

Instead, they chose to discuss the women’s movement in the dynamic manner that it existed in their respective countries by addressing issues like women’s education, legal and social reforms.

Arab women writers emphasized a history where women contributed to society in substantial ways. Despite their efforts, for Western feminists in charge of the agenda of the international women’s movement, the veil remained an indicator of Muslim women’s inequality and suppression.228 Since the editors of Kadınlar Dünyası aligned themselves with the International

Alliance of Women, it is unsurprising that one of the issues debated in the pages of the journal was the veil. They felt compelled to weigh in and correct their international “sisters’” bigoted ideas on veiling.

227 For more on the historical debates on veiling please see Lucia Sorbera, “The Debate about Veiling and Unveiling. A Transnational History?,” Contemporanea, 681-698, 20, no. 4 (2017); Leila Ahmed, A Quiet Revolution: The Veil’s Resurgence, from the Middle East to America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011); Nadje Sadig Al- Ali, Secularism, Gender and the State in the Middle East: The Egyptian Women’s Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Margot Badran, Feminists, Islam, and Nation: Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).

228 Weber, “Unveiling Scheherazade,” 144.

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Ottoman Muslim women engaged with these international women’s organizations in the first couple decades of the twentieth century, a time when international women’s organizations

were in the early stages of development. There was

a clear interest in the Ottoman Empire on the part of

Western feminist members of these organizations.

Käthe Schirmacher, a founding member of the

International Woman Suffrage Alliance (later

known as the International Alliance of Women),

included Turkey and Egypt in her work on the

“modern women’s rights movement.” In 1900

members of the International Council of Women

attended the world exhibition held in Paris and held

a women’s congress under the auspices of the world

exhibit. Selma Riza, a young Ottoman Muslim

Figure 2.4 Selma Riza (1872-1931) woman, spoke at the congress.229 Selma Riza studied in Europe and in 1900 relocated from Istanbul to Paris, where she joined her brother Ahmet Riza, a key figure of the Young Turk Movement. One member of Ahmet Riza’s social circle was

Maria Pognon—the president of La Ligue Française pour le Droit des Femmes (The French

League for Women’s Rights). Upon Selma Riza’s arrival to France, Ahmet Riza introduced them to each other. Shortly after arriving, Riza gave her first lecture to an audience filled with French feminists, members of the ICW, Maria Pognon, and her brother. Riza lectured on the “Legal

229 Her father was an Ottoman diplomat and her mother was Austrian. She received tutoring at home in multiple subjects. Published her first newspaper articles at the age of thirteen and followed those with a novel Uhuvvet (Brotherhood), at the age of twenty, which was published in 1999.

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Conditions of Turkish Women.” In this lecture she applauded the Tanzimat Reforms (1839-

1876) because they instigated Turkish women’s liberation by opening the first primary and secondary schools for girls. She concluded the lecture by requesting the European feminists in the audience “‘…support the Turkish women in claiming the rights’ that were not only given to them by Islam but also formed the ‘traditions, the mores of the country.’”230

Around the same time as Riza, another Ottoman Muslim joined European feminist circles when she moved to France. Hayriye Ben-Ayad started to give lectures on the status of Muslim women in the Ottoman Empire starting in 1904.231 She published the lecture “The Turkish

Woman: Her Social Life and the Harem” in Vienna. In this work Ben-Ayad blamed the ignorance of Ottoman women on the government rather than Islam. She stressed the importance of education so that women could learn how to demand their rights and asked her “Occidental sisters” to support Ottoman women’s efforts. She also wrote a similar paper delivered by

German feminist Lina Morgenstern at the International Women’s Congress in Berlin in 1904.232

The presence of two Ottoman Muslim women at the congress in Paris grabbed the attention of the International Council of Women and its members, catalyzing a great interest in the women of the empire. There is not much available on Hayriye Ben-Ayad’s activities after 1904. However,

Selma Riza continued to leave an historical trail and impression.

Upon her return to Istanbul with her brother shortly after the 1908 Revolution, Selma

Riza became involved in politics through associational activities. She founded the women’s

230 Van Os, “They Can Breathe Freely Now,” 20.

231 Her father was Mahmud Ben-Ayed and a member of Tunisian aristocracy. She grew up living in both France and Istanbul. Her husband was Swedish and the Ottoman consul to Rotterdam until 1901. See Van Os, “They Can Breathe Freely Now.”

232 Van Os, 21.

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branch of the Young Turk’s Committee of Union and Progress—the Ladies’ Society of Union and Progress. Along with her brother and Emine Semiye (a feminist activist and the sister of

Fatma Aliye), Riza opened a girl’s high school in Istanbul. Public history identifies Selma Riza as the first Turkish woman journalist; she wrote regularly for Kadınlar Dünyası. While in

Istanbul, Riza’s connection to the International Council of Women continued. The secretary of the ICW, Evelyn Gough, argued that the best person to establish a local council in the Ottoman

Empire was Selma Riza. Gough proposed Riza become the honorary vice-president for Turkey.

Selma Riza accepted the invitation and held the position until 1923.233

During her tenure as honorary vice president for Turkey, Riza wrote reports on the

Ottoman Empire for the annual ICW reports between 1909 and 1914. In her first report in 1909 she explained that “her female compatriots…have the desire to work towards progress.” Riza expressed her disappointment with the developments in the empire in a more comprehensive report written in 1910. She wrote, “I have to confess that the time has not yet come for Turkish women to demand freely and publicly the integral application of the laws already existing.” With some optimism she declared later in the report that “all those who have the opportunity to see from nearby obstacles already surmounted and the road already covered in two years in Turkey, carry hope for a better future.” In particular this latter statement referred to the efforts of women’s journals and organizations. Selma Riza was interviewed by an English author and anthropologist Ethel Stefana Stevens who asked about the political climate and in particular its effects on women. Selma Riza assured Stevens that “as soon as the political situation is sufficiently assured to allow us to act, we shall start a branch of the International Council of

233 Van Os, 25.

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Women here.” 234 Riza’s report to the ICW in 1912 suggested that there was little change in the position of women, but that there is a promise for a brighter future with the establishment of the

Women’s Central Committee of the Red Crescent Organization. This committee was an official organ of the Committee for Union and Progress established in March 1912. Riza served as the general secretary of this committee.235 Her most extensive report was written to the women who participated in the 1914 ICW conference in Rome.

The ICW conference in Rome was announced in an article published in Kadınlar

Dünyası on March 1st, 1914. This announcement was written by Odette Feldman, a German journalist who was a member of Osmanlı Müdafaa-i Hukuk-u Nisvan Cemiyeti (Ottoman

Organization for the Defense of Women’s Rights). In this announcement she explained that national [Turkish] councils needed to subscribe to the ICW’s goals in order to gain membership.

In this article Feldman referred to Selma Riza and called upon all Ottoman Muslim members of existing organizations to unite and create a national council.236 The owner of the daily newspaper

İkdamwrote that he felt regret that “Turkish” women did not participate in the Rome congress to report the mistreatment of Muslim women during the Balkan Wars. In response a member of the

Ottoman Society for the Defense of Women declared, “they had no right to be there because they were not yet sufficiently emancipated.”237 This writer suggested that the congresses were for women who had actualized full equality. Perhaps she stated it this way to point out the fact that

Muslim women’s lack of equality meant they were also ill-treated by patriarchal practices in the empire.

234 Van Os, 26.

235 Van Os, 27.

236 Odette Feldmann, “Kadınların beynelmilel .ıçtimai,” Kadınlar Dünyası, March 1, 1914, 3-4.

237 Van Os, “They Can Breathe Freely Now,” 27.

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Although the Ottoman Empire did not send a physical representative to the congress in

Rome, Selma Riza did send an exhaustive report that was read to the attending members. For the first time Riza’s report criticized the ICW for their failure to speak up for Ottoman Muslim women during the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913. She wrote, “The societies which are engaged in these two questions [of arbitration and peace] …have left the innocents, women and children, to die under the blows of bayonets, without shouting out to the aggressors to stop, without showing even any indignation.” As deeply as she presented her disappointment with the

International Council of Women, she expressed her optimism for the Ottoman women’s movement in equal measure. She highlighted the proliferation of Ottoman women’s organizations and their usefulness in the context of war. She wrote that Ottoman women, “have unfolded all the energy …to come to the aid of their compatriots and to take their place in the public and social life.” According to Riza these efforts were even recognized by all facets of society: “ Their [Ottoman women’s] attitude has been so dignified and measured at the start that even the most severe and retrograde spirits cannot find anything to reproach them; they have, on the contrary almost been forced to recognize the importance of the feminine role in society.”238

Here the author pointed out the efforts of Ottoman women to help during wartime and that their contributions left little room for people to argue against their societal importance. Selma Riza’s connection to the International Council of Women is only one facet of the globality of the journal

Kadınlar Dünyası and its writers.

THE GLOBAL NATURE OF KADINLAR DÜNYASI

This section examines the features of Kadınlar Dünyası in order to determine to what extent the journal can be considered global. To what extent did the contributing writers represent

238 Van Os, 28.

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a global perspective? Did an audience beyond the empire exist for the journal? Also, how did the discourse on the global Muslim woman question inform the objectives of the journal? Were the writers of Kadınlar Dünyası only considering Ottoman Muslim women or was there an effort to make connections with Muslim women in other parts of the world?

The journal published translated articles by various foreign women including contributions from Romanian journalist Lia Hurshi; Dr. Frieda Oscar, a German journalist;

Odette Feldmann, The Times journalist; and English travel writers Grace Ellison and Dr. Amelia

Frisch. Some of these women also wrote on Ottoman women for their respective national audiences. For example, Grace Ellison reported her visit to Turkey in her book An

Englishwoman in a Turkish Harem. She was sent to Turkey on behalf of a British suffrage organization in 1915 and stated her intentions were to “reveal the true state of Turkish women’s lives and to challenge Orientalist stereotypes.” In an effort to accomplish this aim, Ellison published a picture of an unveiled Muslim woman she identified as a journalist for Kadınlar

Dünyası.239 In another article, authors made a connection between British Suffragettes and

Ottoman women.240 Editors called on women to protest in front of the Ottoman parliament if women were not allowed to witness the opening of the Grand National Assembly. The feminists of Kadınlar Dünyası were ready to adopt more radical practices in order to gain their rights. The editorial board wrote, “No one gave freedom to our men; they got it with force. Rights are not given; they are taken. Let us, women, demand our natural legal rights; if they don’t give them, let’s take them by force. Long live freedom.”241 The women of Kadınlar Dünyası were ready for

239 Yıldız, “Rethinking the Political.”

240 F. Berktay, “Osmanlı’dan Cumhuriyet’e Feminizm,” in Cumhuriyet’e Devreden Düşünce Mirası: Tanzimat ve Meşrutiyet’in Birikimi, ed. M. Ö. Alkan (İstanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2001), 348–60.

241 Editorial Board, ‘10 Temmuz İyd-i Ekber-i Hürriyettir-1324’, Kadınlar Dünyası, July 23, 1913, 1, cited in Serpil Çakır, Osmanlı kadın hareketi (İstanbul: Metis Yayinlari, 1996), 142.

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another revolution if necessary. Also, the use of a more radical approach and language was one way to ensure Western feminists took Ottoman women and their role in the women’s movement seriously, especially since Kadınlar Dünyası published a French supplement.

Figure 2.5 The Heading for the French supplement of Kadınlar Dünyası

Editors of Kadınlar Dünyası published and distributed a French supplement to the journal. By aligning themselves with the international women’s movement and creating this supplement, the editors found a way to rid misinformed Western feminists, if not Westerners in general, of the idea that Muslim women were oppressed by being cloaked in veils and hidden in harems. The supplement did not last for the full duration of the journal but accompanied issues

121-128 published from 1913-1914. These issues reported on the status of women in the

Ottoman Empire and highlighted the efforts of Osmanli Mudafaa-I Hukuk-I Nisvan Cemiyeti

(The Association for the Defense of Ottoman Women’s Rights) and the gains they made—

for example, sponsoring the first Muslim woman to take flight.242 The French supplement took

242 Letters written by Jules Bois and Vera Stakoff were also included in the supplemental French issue but I was unable to figure out who these two figures were outside of being French and Russian women.

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on the global Muslim woman question and addressed the same issues that Fatma Aliye did a few decades earlier. The French supplement emphasized how Islam accorded women more rights than it inhibited. For example, engaging in polygyny was restricted by Islamic traditions that declared polygyny permissible only if a man could guarantee the equal treatment of all his wives.

The writers also suggested that Islam allowed progressive interpretations and practices. After making sure to address all points that could potentially lead to an Orientalist understanding of

Ottoman women, the editors highlighted how Ottoman women were similar to Western feminists in that they both demanded the improvement of their social and political positions.243 Elife

Devecin argues that “the supplement thus endeavored to create a platform for the communication between Ottoman-Turkish women, Western feminists, and international women’s organizations.”244

In the article, “Avrupa Muybuati Munasebetiyle” (On the Occasion of [the Stories

Published in] the European Press), the editors highlighted the journal’s European audiences.

They wrote, “The European press has heard about our daily publication…and the goal that

Kadınlar Dünyası wishes-and is determined-to pursue; they published numerous articles in order to congratulate, appreciate and encourage us long before some outlets, written by our compatriot men, managed to.”245 The article continued to declare that interest in the journal was so great that

Europeans from Germany and France actually came to the offices of the journal to discuss the women’s movement in the Ottoman Empire. The editors expressed pleasure in this level of exposure, but also stated, “we know well that the European press has long been lecturing us

243 Bic[h]er-Deveciin, “The Movement of Feminist Ideas: The Case of Kadinlar Dunyasi.”

244 Bic[h]er-Deveciin, 349.

245 Editorial Board, “Avrupa Muybuati Munasebetiyle,” Kadınlar Dünyası, April 17, 1913,134-35.

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Ottomans on all issues…That is why in order to not leave any room for misinterpretations, we wanted to briefly present and declare once again the goal we wish to pursue.”246 The editors used the pressure from Europe on the empire to become civilized to their advantage.

The editors advertised the fact that Europe was paying attention to what was going on in regard to women’s rights in the empire. However, the editors also made clear that they recognized the long history of Europe’s misconceptions and arrogance when it came to the

Ottoman Empire and its women. This article is a key example of how Kadınlar Dünyası navigated the fine line between reaffirming Orientalist assumptions and criticizing the lack of political and social rights of Ottoman women. In the second half of the article the true objective in bringing to European recognition of the journal Ottoman men’s attention was clear. The editors used this information to leverage their demands that Ottoman men take the women’s movement seriously, especially when it came to women’s education. The article stated, “We want to collaborate with our men within the confines of our religious manners; in short, we want….to raise children who will dedicate their lives to the well-being of the homeland…We the women…give life and training to humanity. It is necessary to have access to education so that we can pass it on to our children.”247 Here the editorial board used the emerging nationalism of the time to put forth the idea of Republican Motherhood (the idea that women needed to be educated so that they could ensure their children became good citizens), to legitimize the need for women’s education.

The journal emphasized the importance of building solidarity with other feminists in other countries, but especially with other Muslim women in Russia. Perhaps connections with

246 Editorial Board, “Avrupa Muybuati Munasebetiyle,” 135.

247 Editorial Board, “Avrupa Muybuati Munasebetiyle,” 135.

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Muslim women in the Russian Empire were emphasized because of the legacy of Muslim women’s periodicals there. Alemi-I Nisvan was a weekly literary and didactic review devoted to

Muslim women. It was the first Muslim women’s periodical to be published in Russia, and was edited by Ismail Gaspıralı’s eldest daughter, Şefika Gaspıralı. Originally scheduled to appear in

February of 1905, the first issue was not published until March 3rd, possibly because of a worker’s strike at Gaspıralıi’s printing house during the early part of January. According to

Şefika Hanim, the original idea for the review was her own and not her father’s, but it saw the light of day because of Ismail Bey’s insistence that she could fulfill the task of editor. At first

Gaspıralı constributed some articles, but soon left the entire enterprise to his daughter and her husband, Nasib Yusuf Bey Vezirov. According to its stated goals, Alem-I Nisvan sought to provide its readers with the following: 1) legal information from both the Russian civil code and the Muslim Shari‘a 2) advice concerning the education of children, family medicine, and maintenance of the home; 3) information describing types of work that women could do at home, such as hairdressing, embroidery, and painting 4) illustrated descriptions, original or translated from other languages, dealing with the life of women in Russia and other lands and (5) poetry, scientific articles, moral precepts, historical narratives, and travelogues. The review continued with this basic format until 1910.248 This journal prompted a Muslim feminist consciousness in the Russian Empire similar to the one Ottoman women and Kadınlar Dünyası were creating in the Ottoman Empire. Ottoman women like Nimet Cemil actually spent time in the Russian

Empire and were familiar with the journal and position of Muslim women there.

Some of the Ottoman women who wrote for Kadınlar Dünyası also brought their transregional experiences to the pages of the journal. Nimet Cemil was one of the more prolific

248 Edward J. Lazzerini, “Ismail Bey Gaspıralıi and Muslim Modernism in Russia, 1878-1914,” (PhD diss., University of Washington, 1973), 76.

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contributors to the journal.249 Due to her husband’s (Cemil Sais Bey) duties overseas, Nimet

Cemil spent many years living abroad in cities such as St. Petersburg, Tehran, and Paris. She and her husband returned to Istanbul after the Constitutional Revolution of 1908. This gave her the ability to observe both Eastern and Western societies and their cultures. She found on certain issues Ottoman women fared better than other women of the world and in other instances they fared worse. Cemil argued that despite positive developments in the empire, women experienced many deficiencies. She wrote that women did not have the ability to participate in the workforce and therefore did not have the ability to gain financial independence. For Cemil, one area that prohibited Ottoman women’s progress was divorce. While divorce itself was legally permissible, the fact that the rights of divorced parties were not guaranteed by law often left women and children facing serious financial problems. Cemil called on the government to create the legal safeguards needed to ensure child and spousal support. Cemil adopted the Orientalist language of the time to argue that there existed a parallel between the backwardness of society and the backwardness of women. According to Cemil if a society were to truly be civilized, Ottoman women must participate in social and economic life, marry whomever they choose, and have the same political rights and social freedoms as men.250 Comparing the position of Ottoman women by observing other cultures occurred on more than one occasion in the journal.

The editors both wanted to partake in a global feminist movement but also elevated themselves at the expense of other “Eastern” women with some of their articles. Analyzing other

249 Some scholars have speculated that these articles were actually published by Nimet’s husband who was a defender of feminism and supportive of the Ottoman women’s movements. Since Kadınlar Dünyası did not allow contributions from men it was theorized that Cemil used his wife’s name as a pseudonym. But there is stronger evidence indicating that Nimet Cemil herself wrote for Kadınlar Dünyası. Especially since she agreed to have her photograph published in the journal.

250 Osman Karacan, “Kadınlar Dünyası Yazarlarından Nimet Cemil’in Kadına Bakışı,” Birey ve Toplum 9, no. 17 (Fall 2019): 68–72.

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cultures and women allowed the writers of Kadınlar Dünyası to emphasize the modernity of

Ottoman women and elevate Islam vis-à-vis other faiths and cultural practices. Ironically, in trying to dispel Western Orientalist claims about themselves they employed the same means of

“othering” used by European Orientalists to describe the civilizational illegitimacy of the empire and its repressed Muslim women. They used this othering method when discussing women’s status in Greece, India, and Egypt. In this regard, they also created a hierarchy of civilization.

Kadınlar Dünyası examined the development of women’s rights in other parts of the world like Europe, India, and Egypt. Kadınlar Dünyası devoted several pages to an examination of women in other countries in order to prove that not only were Ottoman women equal to

Ottoman men but also equal to women of other nations. The editorial board wrote, “We Ottoman women were not created in a form other than women of other nations. We also have the intelligence and talent that appears in the femininity of other nations."251 Despite having the same aptitudes as women of other nations, they did not always have as many rights and argued the empire still needed to enact certain reforms. The editorial board chose to focus on Greek women when examining the condition of European women. The editorial board justified this choice by contending that Greek women were the “most well-known” of all European women.

The editors presented a harsh assessment of Greek women, arguing that they were inferior because of their lustful manner and lack of humility.252 The choice to focus on Greek women, and to do so in an unflattering manner, would not have been as problematic as if they had focused on French or British feminists, who were at the helm of the international women’s movement. This decision was also politically motivated given that the Empire was in the middle

251 Editorial Board, “Erkekler! Kadınlık Yalnız Meyve Değildir!” Kadınlar Dünyası, May 11, 1913, 38.

252 Editorial Board, “Hukuk-ı Nisvan,” Kadınlar Dünyası, April, 10, 1913, 7.

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of the second Balkan War against Greece.253 Also, by describing Greek women as “lustful,” the writers positioned Ottoman women in a dichotomy where they had honor and Greek women did not.254 Interestingly, there were several thousand Greek people living in Istanbul at the time.

Kadınlar Dünyası, othered Greek women to highlight their own superiority and to critique

European Orientalism that categorized Greek women as Western and the women of Istanbul as

Eastern/Islamic and therefore backwards.

In the article on women of ancient India the editors stated, “The rights and lives of these women were determined and limited by the book Manusmriti.” Since polygyny was one of the key points of Orientalist discourse, the editorial board assessed marriage practices and the permissibility of polygyny in Hinduism. In order to discredit their own supposed inferiority, they gestured to the “ill-marriage practices” of another religion. The editors drew attention to a text from the ninth chapter of Manusmriti. The chapter stated the following principle on marriage:

“Half of humanity has manifested itself in man, and the other half in woman. A man cannot be considered a complete human until he marries. However, the marriage also does not complete his humanness. Humanness comprises of a wife, a husband and a child.” 255 The writers acknowledged the possible wisdom of this rule. However, the authors later argued that with some analysis this principle was illogical because a child is an extra human— an addition to two halves of a whole. Here the editors are pointing to the “illogical” nature of Hinduism to show that there are other religions that are less logical than Islam.

253 Richard C. Hall, The Balkan Wars, 1912-1913: Prelude to the First World War, Warfare and History (London: Routledge, 2000).

254 Using the concept of honor to describe women’s social positions was also used when describing Italian women. The Italian women of the Samnit region of Italy were highlighted as being extremely chaste and early marriage was identified as the source of this chastity.

255 Editorial Board, “Hind-I Kadim Nisvani,” Kadınlar Dünyası, April 6, 1913, 22.

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In the same article on Indian women the editors contended that if reaching full humanness is comprised of “a husband, a wife and a child according to the principle promoted by Manusmriti, it is not necessary for the man to take more than one wife.” Here the editors accomplished two things, they suggested that the practice of polygyny resulted from a misinterpretation of the religious text, a similar argument used in reference to polygamous

Muslims, and that polygyny was a practice found in other faiths. The editors also discussed the practice of Sati, or widow burning. The editors pointed out that according to Manusmriti, a woman must accompany her husband in life and in death and therefore a Hindu widow would have to burn herself alive. They go on to detail the tradition further: “The widowed woman shall not eat anything but fruits, herbs and flowers. She shall let her body wear away. No man shall mention her name. She shall spend the rest of her life to forgive her husband— had she been insulted by him…She shall deprive her own self of indulgence in the pleasures of the world.”

The editors questioned why this level of loyalty was only meant for wives declaring, “It would have been just and fair if men too were obligated to choose the same path when their wives passed away.”256 Instead, according to the editors, they used this opportunity to promote one of their concubines to the rank of wife on the very day of their wife’s passing. The editors pointed out the impossibility of equality between a husband and wife under these circumstances. In other words, if women in India were oppressed it was because of ancient practices that never afford them a chance to live an egalitarian life along-side men.

In the article “Misr-I Kadim Erkekleri Nazarinda Kadınlar,” (Women in the Eyes of the

Men of Ancient Egypt), the editors acknowledged the scarcity of information on ancient Egypt.

However, while difficult to deduce women’s rights in this historical period the article argued,

256 Editorial Board, “Hind-I Kadim Nisvani,” 23.

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“relating the information we have been able to gather is not completely without any benefits.” It is unsurprising that the journal chose to address ancient Egypt given the renewed fascination by

Europeans and the understanding that Egypt was the source of civilization. The article discussed how the Egyptian pharaoh Menel was the first to establish order in Egypt with laws that

“distinguished manhood from animals.” Menel also established a “law of marriage” that referred to women as “wife” and men as “husband.” The editorial board wrote that Menel sanctioned “the marriage of [cousins], the marriage of sisters to a single man. He even considered it permissible for a man to wed his brother’s wife, provided she had been widowed without any children.”257

The authors showed that marriage in the realm Europeans claimed as true civilization included

“backward” practices.

The journal also discussed Arabs and referred to them as a “great people.” The article also differed from the previous articles. The authors focused on men in a way that they did not when addressing the topics of ancient India and ancient Egypt. Some might suggest this shift in focus resulted from viewing Arab women as passive. However, in several of the other articles the journal’s writers tried to shift the focus from blaming Muslim women for societal issues to

Ottoman men, because it was men who held political power. If there was a critique to be made about Arabs it should be made about Arab men, and with the understanding that these shortcomings existed prior to the advent of Islam. According to the article, one of the most misogynistic practices committed by Arab men was the self-imposed shame associated with having daughters instead of sons. The writers posited the shame was so deep, “that there were even some men who opted to kill their daughters by burying them alive…because they would be

257 Editorial Board, “Misr-i Kadim Erkekleri Nazarinda Kadinlar,” Kadınlar Dünyası, April 7, 1913, 33.

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of no practical use.”258 This and other misogynistic practices stopped when Islam “came to the rescue of this holy land and exercised its erudite readjustments in the lives and rights of women, just as it did in all matters of life.” The article declared the Quran, sayings of the prophet, and

Islamic jurisprudence all promoted Arab women’s position within the family. The article stated that, “there is no doubt that the women are their husband’s helpmates, lifelong companions, and overseers of the management of the household within the confines of the Holy Muhammadan

Shari‘a.” 259 The editorial board made clear that if Muslim women did not experience the respect they were owed, it was because Muslim men did not properly observe the rules of Shari‘a.

Another suggestion was that women lacked the knowledge to demand their rights in accordance with Islam.

There is an intellectual trajectory to Kadınlar Dünyası that began with a discussion of and comparison with European, Indian and Egyptian women. These articles may have been written with two goals in mind. Whether intentionally or not, the editors stigmatized other cultures and faiths in an effort to destigmatize Islam as it existed in Ottoman culture. In the context of ancient

Egypt, the writers detailed how Muhammad banned the practice of female infanticide, showing how all the progressive principles women needed for their emancipation could be found within

Islam. If these progressive elements were unclear it was because Muslim men distorted Islamic traditions to maintain patriarchal control over society. In later issues there is a paradigm shift that moves beyond comparison and instead focuses on Muslim women of other nations. A collective identity of sorts came to be assumed when addressing topics relating to Muslim women. The construction of what it means to be a Muslim woman took on a prominent role in the journal.

258 Editorial Board, “Araplar Indinde Hayat ve Hukuk-i Nisvan,” Kadınlar Dünyası, April 15, 1913, 114

259 Editorial Board, “Araplar Indinde Hayat ve Hukuk-i Nisvan,” 115.

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RECONCILING FAITH AND FEMINISM AND ACTIVISM BEYOND THE PEN

Leila Abu-Lughod contends that “translation, hybridization, and even dislocation might be more useful metaphors than imitation, assimilation (forced or attempted), or rejection.”260

Instead of employing universalist claims of feminism, modernity, religious traditions, and womanhood, a context-driven analysis of Kadınlar Dünyası provided the necessary framework to examine the features of the global Muslim woman question during the Constitutional Era. In the hundred and nineteenth issue of Kadınlar Dünyası, the editorial board declared “If what we want and what we will do resemble their [western women’s] demands and actions, this should not lead to the conclusion that we are imitating them. This issue, the woman question, should be the number one priority in the new minds, minds of correct reasoning, bred by this century.”261

The editors suggested that Ottoman Muslim women who sought to challenge the patriarchal practices of the empire were reductively accused of imitating the West, especially because the journal and its corresponding organization aligned itself with the international women’s movement. However, as previously stated, the editorial board made it clear that they were in fact feminists but that their participation in the movement and efforts towards the cause would not be at the expense of their religious customs and Ottoman culture. The authors of Kadınlar Dünyası not only challenged western feminists’ misconceptions concerning Muslim women, they also constructed a version of Muslim womanhood that reconciled their faith with their desire to change their social and political positions in the empire.262

260 Lila Abu-Lughod, “Introduction: Feminist Longings and Postcolonial Conditions,” in Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East, ed. Lila Abu-Lughod (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 18.

261 Editorial Board, “Teceddüdperverler, ve skolastikler [Reformists and Scholastics],” Kadınlar Dünyası, June 1919, 119.

262 Scholars of Ottoman and Turkish Muslim women have shown how women expressed their discontent via religion and used their faith to challenge their unequal statuses. Fatmagül Berktay, Women and Religion (Montreal: Black

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The reforms ushered in with the 1908 Revolution impacting women’s lives have been understood as early secularization attempts simply imitating the West. Often the woman question is viewed as a discourse housed within modernizing efforts outlined by Europe and the United

States. However, this is a distorted reading of these historical processes and discourses, and one that eclipses Ottoman Muslim women’s efforts to change their own lives. Historians Benjamin

Fortna and Selçuk Aksin Somel argue that late -Ottoman reforms were not simply a path to secularization, but instead these reforms reflected an attempt to mix the Islamic and the secular.263 And this is precisely what the Muslim women writers in Kadınlar Dünyası set out to accomplish in their construction of Muslim women’s identities. These women moved away from the notion that the West provided the only model of successful modernization. This epistemological shift challenged binaries of East-West, backwardness-development, and tradition-modernity.

Like Fatma Aliye, Ottoman Muslim women during the Constitutional Era wanted to construct their own identities and positioned themselves as the primary agents to give meaning to

Muslim womanhood:

“Yes, some of the Ottoman men defend us Ottoman women. We see that and we thank them. However, we Ottoman women have our own ways and manners, and male writers can understand neither this, not our psychology. Let them please leave us alone and not make toys for their dreams out of us. We can defend our rights by our own efforts.”264

Rose Books, 1998); Aynur İlyasoğlu, Örtülü kimlik: İslamcı kadın kimliğinin oluşum öğeleri (İstanbul: Metis, 1994); Aynur İlyasoğlu, “Islamist Women in Turkey: Their Identity and Self-Image,” in Deconstructing Images of The Turkish Woman, ed. Zehra Arat (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 241–62.

263 Benjamin C. Fortna, Imperial Classroom: Islam, the State, and Education in the Late Ottoman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Selçuk Aksin Somel, The Modernization of Public Education in the Ottoman Empire, 1839-1908: Islamization, Autocracy and Discipline (Leiden: Brill, 2001).

264 Y. Naciye, “Erkekler Hakikaten Hürriyetperver midirler? Kadınlar Ne ÿstiyorlar? [Are men really freedom lovers? What do women want?]” Kadınlar Dünyası, April 10, 1913, 3.

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Ottoman Muslim women were not passive receivers of the changes that occurred during the

Constitutional Era. They used their agency to determine who they were, who they would become, and how they should be understood globally. The women responsible for Kadınlar

Dünyası interpreted the modernizing efforts post-revolution and determined whether or not these changes were sufficient for their goals—often they were not. The writers of the journal looked for solutions through their own interpretations of Islamic traditions. Their reinterpretation of

Islamic traditions continually pushed for the advancement of women in Ottoman society. In other words, Ottoman Muslim women incorporated Islam into discourses on the Ottoman woman question and modernization because they understood that religion was employed as the primary lens used by both Westerners and Ottoman men to discuss Muslim women. Ottoman women could and needed to use religion to bring about national development where they were concerned, and this required a paradigm shift.

Ottoman women highlighted the ethical egalitarianism found in the Qur’an and used the sacred text to fight for the elevation of women’s rights. They also used the Qur’an and its teachings to support education for girls and women. The Islamic tradition of veiling was examined and debated in the context of women’s ability to participate in the work force and other public activities. Ottoman women used the prism of Islam to take control of the debate on their rights –rendering their own creation of Muslim womanhood.

The editors of Kadınlar Dünyası addressed the issue of religious misinterpretation and ignorance in an article titled “Women’s Rights.” The article assigned blame for the injustices

Muslim women faced to both men and women. The article declared, “The reason for injustice in the lives and rights of women in the Muslim world today arises not only from men, who do not abide by the Islamic (Shar‘ia) laws, but also women who are not aware of their rights within

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legitimate spheres (Shari‘a).”265They went on to declare that if “Allah allows” they will work hard to teach men and women both about “[women’s] legitimate rights and ways of life.” The editorial board made their intended audience(s) known in this article when they stated, “We will prove that [Muslim] women are not slaves or fruits as men assume, but co-partners in all civic duties.” This article spoke to both Western Orientalists/feminists and Ottoman men. The writers wanted to make it very clear to these intended audiences that, “Ultimately, we [Ottoman women] will define our social life.”266 The editorial board was not the only entity to highlight the issue of ignorance.

Süreyya Tevfik, a woman writing from Haydarpaşa to Kadınlar Dünyası, expressed her support for a woman’s right to work. She pointed out how people’s ignorance kept women from pursuing financial independence. Tevfik wrote that society was unconcerned with the rights bestowed upon Muslim women by the Qur’an. She also disclosed that she continually heard ignorant statements about Muslim women from the people around her such as, “ ‘Oh poor women! They lack everything, they are short-witted, they are doomed to enslavement by men, they were…. deprived from human civilization.” Tevfik criticized these statements not only for their ignorance but also in ethical terms. She took these ideas and the people who espoused them to task on a moral level declaring, “(These) kinds of words concern my dignity and honor as a woman… Here this rusty ignorance and superstition restrain our status and ability to possess freedom of expression and personal (liberty) in society.”267 The editors and writers of the journal reinforced their dedication to Islam and their Ottoman identity whenever they felt necessary and

265 Editorial Board, “Hukuk-i Nisvan,” Kadınlar Dünyası, April 28, 1913, 1.

266 Editorial Board, “Hukuk-i Nisvan,” 28.

267 Süreyya Tevfik, “Dinleyiniz, Usanmayınız Azizelerim!” Kadınlar Dünyası, May 11, 1913, 2.

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as a way to reaffirm the fact that their ideas came from an ethical place. The board wrote that they did not want lives that could be classified as unproductive or without basic rights. The article stated, “We want to work alongside men within the limits of our religion’s customs, we want to have the right to live.”268 In other words, Muslim women were not living their lives to their full potential if they did not have equal rights to men and that goal existed within the purview of the faith.

Like the Muslim modernists in the previous chapter, women in Kadınlar Dünyası pushed for the reinterpretation of veiling as an Islamic tradition. Ottoman women debated whether or not a national dress code or clothing reform was needed. How women should dress and how they should go about determining a national dress code was discussed. The veil was at the center of this discussion. Some women admitted that veiling in addition to seclusion made activities in the public sphere more challenging, but did not question the practice itself. For these women the onus for change was societal and not religious. Women pointed to bigotry (from the West) and ignorance (from Ottoman society) as the main reasons for their subordination - not the veil.

Emine Seher Ali’s article published in Kadınlar Dünyası posited that it was a woman’s responsibility to question anyone who felt compelled to speak out against veiling as to whether or not they knew “the purpose of veiling in the first place.” Ali argued that veiling was a religious matter and that only those who identified as practicing Muslims need weigh in. She went as far as to suggest that “faithless people thrusting their nose into this issue is harmful.” She believed that women did not want to sacrifice their religion and the status it gives. She wrote,

268 Editorial Board, “Avrupa Matbuati Münasebetiyle,” Kadınlar Dünyası, April 30, 1913, 1.

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“May they [the Turkish government] give us status, which is what women had in the period of

Muhammed.”269

Joining the discussion on veiling, the editorial board weighed in on the topic in a clear yet diplomatic manner. They wrote that the Qur’an could be classified in two ways - matters regarding prayers and commandments regarding Islamic traditions. They contended that matters regarding prayers should continue until “the end of creation.” However, commandments were interpreted and practiced in accordance with the context they were decreed and therefore they could be reassessed with the “changing of time.” They discussed how to go about enacting changes regarding Islam’s commandments. The board wrote that the Caliph’s approval and affirmation was required: “The Caliph is needed to gather the Ulema to officially enable the reinterpretation of the verses in need of reinterpretation.” The Caliph would then announce any changes and Muslims would then have to practice in a way that adhered to this new interpretation. They then went on to provide an example where this procedure occurred. The use of interest was considered illegal prior to the end of the nineteenth century but it was made legal in 1899. The nature of economics at the time required the commandment change in order to participate in the world economy. The board wrote, “the era obliged Muslims to deal with banks, and even those who did not have interest charges had to pay interest…Even the…Sheyk-al Islam took on debt in this way.” They then go on to declare that veiling was interpreted in such a way that women began to cover their whole bodies. The board pointed out the Qur’an did not specifically establish the form of veiling, but simply that women needed to cover body parts that men found attractive. The editorial board critiqued the overexaggerated version of veiling and pointed to the need for a reinterpretation of the tradition. They wrote, “It might have been

269 Emine Seher Ali, “Tesettür Meselesi,” Kadınlar Dünyası, May 12, 1913, 1-2.

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compatible with the social conditions of the land once, however today, women cannot be humiliated like this…Even pious people are not comfortable with this situation.”270 By giving the example on interest, the board showed that not only was change within Islam possible, but that it should be understood as inevitable given a changing world.

After constructing and legitimizing their efforts through an Islamic framework, the

writers of Kadınlar Dünyası also emphasized the need

to take action as Muslim women in the fight for gender

equality. In a letter addressed to Kadınlar Dünyası,

Bedra Osman, who was a member of the Osmanlı

Müdafaa-i Hukuk-u Nisvan Cemiyeti (Ottoman Society

for the Defense of Women’s Rights), detailed how she

applied with some of her friends to work at a French

phone company whose offices would soon open in

Istanbul. However, their applications were rejected on

the basis that they did not speak French or Greek. After

receiving Osman’s letter, the journal published a series Figure 2.6 Belkıs Şevket of articles demanding an explanation and apology from both the phone company and the government. The editors believed the real reason these women were not hired was because they were Muslim. Within ten days of the first article, Kadınlar

Dünyası received a letter from the government that stated they had “received a memorandum from the phone company in which they denied the allegations and assured that they welcomed all

270 Editorial Board, “L’abolition du voile n’est qu’une question de temps [It is a matter of time to remove the face cover],” Kadınlar Dünyası, December 21, 1913 – January 3, 1914, 1 [from the French appendix of the Newspaper] cited in Karaman, “Rethinking Islam, Remaking Ottoman Women.”

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applicants.” The letter also stated that the phone company intended to hire Osman and her friends.271 This is an example of how the journal challenged ideas regarding Muslim women by fighting for their right to enter the workforce. They also combated racism stemming from

Orientalism on the part of the French phone company.

In 1913 Kadınlar Dünyası initiated a campaign to raise funds to purchase an airplane for the military. As part of the campaign Belkıs Şevket, who was a regular columnist, volunteered to fly in an airplane and drop fliers inviting women to make donations to the Ottoman army. With the permission of the military, Şevket flew for approximately fifteen minutes. This flight marked the first time a Turkish and Muslim woman flew in an airplane. The women of Kadınlar Dünyası presented ideas of patriotism, and an interest in science and progress, as the motivation for this campaign.272 However, this campaign also promoted their feminist agenda by challenging how

Muslim women and the spaces they occupied were understood. This campaign claimed public space for Ottoman women and challenged contemporary gender norms. Şevket, with the support of Kadınlar Dünyası, demonstrated women’s courage, determination and confidence harnessed to serve both the nation and feminist movement.

Kadınlar Dünyası took on women’s education as a cause and the issue was an important aspect of their feminist activism. Mükerrem Belkıs was one of the most strident advocates for women’s education located in the pages of the journal. Belkis compared the status of Ottoman women’s education to that of Russian women’s access to education. She questioned why even

271 Editorial Board, “İctima: Telefon İdaresi [The Phone Administration],” Kadınlar Dünyası, April 26, 1913; “İzahat Bekleriz, Tarziye İsteriz [We Expect An Explanation and Demand An Apology],” Kadınlar Dünyası, April 29, 1913; “İctihad Kaﬁ Değil, İzahat İsteriz, Tarziye Bekleriz [Opinion Is Not Enough, We Expect An Explanation and Demand An Apology],” Kadınlar Dünyası, May 6, 1913, cited in Atamaz-Hazar, “Reconstructing the History of the Constitutional Era in Ottoman Turkey through Women’s Periodicals.”

272 Atamaz-Hazar, 105.

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Muslim women in Russia living under foreign rule had the right to higher education, but

Ottoman women did not. She wrote, “What kind of thoughtlessness would deny this right to

Ottoman women?” This piece and other editorial pieces like it helped make women’s higher education a reality. Just a couple months later the Darülfünûn (Istanbul University), started to accept female students starting on September 12, 1914.273 Columnist and formidable women’s education activist Azize Haydar Hanim took the matter into her own hands and raised the funds to open the first private school for girls in Istanbul. They both viewed education as the way to increase feminist consciousness and not only for students. In one of Mukerrem Belkis’ essays she pushed for women teachers to help in the fight for gender equality. She addressed women teachers directly and stated, “We do not want lazy, timid female teachers. We want active female teachers who are intellectuals and in love with freedom. If educated women do not raise women who will save themselves from slavery…then the larger part of the responsibility will land on the female teachers.” She followed this claim with “Female teachers, know that you are holding the full power of the future in your hands. The lever of humanity is in your hands. Do not neglect this power. You will enable future generations to live the style of life we desire.”274

273 Mükerrem, July 11, 1913, 1; Çakır, 1996, 253; Ulviye Mevlan, ‘Kadınlık Maarif nazırı’, 2, cited in Çakır, 1996, p. 260), cited in Yıldız, “Rethinking the Political.”

274 Yildiz, 187.

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Figure 2.7 Yaşar Nezihe

Kadınlar Dünyası, along with other Ottoman women’s journals, played a key role in the advancement of women’s lives. Working in conjunction with Osmanli Mudafaa-I Hukuk-u

Nisvan Cemiyet (Ottoman Association for the Defense of the Rights of Women), Kadınlar

Dünyası effected real change. Some of the activism included a demonstration where Muslim members entered a post office to fight for Muslim women’s access to public offices. The editorial board/members of the organization opened a business for seamstresses in order to highlight the value of women’s labor and economic independence.275 The association’s

275 Çakır, “Feminism and Feminist History-Writing in Turkey,” 72.

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membership included women from different ethnic minority communities, but the majority of members were Muslim women. Like the association, the journal attracted readership from different sectors of society but its target audience was Muslim women of the Empire. 276 And with this target audience they prioritized representation of Muslim women. Some of the first photographs of Muslim women displayed for public viewership were published in this journal. It is also not a coincidence that certain Constitutional Era reforms affecting women’s lives were enacted around the same time that pressure was applied by Ottoman women’s journals, like

Kadınlar Dünyası. These changes include, for example, the previously mentioned access to universities that women gained in 1914, sending girls to study in Europe, and the introduction of the Family Law Code in 1917.277

CONCLUSION

This chapter examined one dimension of the global conversation on Muslim women during the Constitutional Era. The editors and writers who contributed to Kadınlar Dünyası purposefully positioned their intellectual efforts within a larger, global discourse on Muslim women, like the Muslim modernist Fatma Aliye did before them. The ability to engage in a global discourse on Muslim womanhood was modeled by Fatma Aliye and her work. The global orientation of Kadınlar Dünyası allowed the writers to simultaneously challenge Western feminist Orientalist stereotypes and call for the advancement of Ottoman women’s rights.

Kadınlar Dünyası presented a response to the global Muslim woman question. Their answer helped construct a version of Ottoman Muslim womanhood that reconciled different facets of

276 Çakir, “Kadınlar Dünyası.”

277 This legal reform reestablished family law, in regards to marriage and divorce, custody, and inheritance. See Judith E. Tucker, “Revisiting Reform: Women and the Ottoman Law of Family Rights, 1917,” The Arab Studies Journal 4, no. 2 (1996): 4–17.

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their identities; these women were both feminist and Muslim and one aspect of their identity would not be compromised for another part of who they were. The authors disavowed the adoption of Western feminist principles, and instead looked to construct their own feminist agenda through an Islamic lens. The next chapter shows how this particular feminist agenda continued during the first two decades of the Republic, despite Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s answer to the global Muslim woman question and an international preoccupation with the “new Turkish woman.”

Chapter three will show that the thoughtful and nuanced intellectual legacy built by

Fatma Aliye and furthered by the writers of Kadınlar Dünyası was ruptured by Atatürk and his reforms. However, Muslim Ottoman women’s efforts in the journal, put forth with the aim of gender equality, helped lay the foundation for continued engagement in the global Muslim woman question after the formation of the Turkish Republic. The journal’s alignment with the international women’s movement paved a path for Muslim women to continue to use the global stage to both control their image and fight for their rights. The next chapter shows how Muslim women understood the power of global connections and perceptions in the continued fight to control the narrative on Muslim women moving into the 1920s and 1930s.

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Chapter 3: “Now she is holding the crown of world feminism”278: The New Turkish Woman on the Global Stage, 1923-1935

In 1935, preeminent Egyptian feminist Huda Sha’arawi attended the 21st International

Alliance of Women (IAW) conference held in Istanbul, along with the largest Egyptian delegation to attend an IAW meeting in the organization’s history.279 This was the first

European- based women’s conference to take place in a Muslim majority country. During her time in Istanbul, Huda Sha’arawi spoke with the press and commented on Turkey’s president

Mustafa Kemal “Atatürk.” Mustafa Kemal had adopted the name “Atatürk” because many viewed Turkey’s first president as the “father of the Turks.” However, Huda Sha’arawi called him “Ataşark,” or “Father of the East.” She believed “[Muslim] women,” even beyond Turkey’s borders, “are indebted to Atatürk for our emancipation.”280

In 1934, a few months before the International Alliance of Women met in Istanbul for their annual conference, the Turkish government decided to grant women the right to vote and stand for election to parliament beginning in 1935. Huda Sha’arawi expressed her enthusiastic

278 “Dünya Kadınları Bugün Yıldız Sarayında Toplanıyorlar!” Cumhuriyet, April 18, 1935, 1, 8, translated into Turkish and reprinted in Cumhuriyet, from the Greek newspaper Acropolis, quoted in Kathryn Libal, “Staging Turkish Women’s Emancipation: Istanbul, 1935,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 4, no. 1 (Winter 2008): 32.

279 For more on Huda Sha’arawi see John L. Esposito, “Sharawi, Huda,” in The Oxford Dictionary of Islam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Rosemary Drage Hale, “Sha’rawi, Huda 1879–1947,” in Encyclopedia of Sex and Gender, ed. Fedwa Malti-Douglas, vol. 4 (Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2007); Mohja Kahf, “Huda Sha ’Rawi’s Mudhakkirati: The Memoirs of the First Lady of Arab Modernity,” Arab Studies Quarterly 20, no. 1 (Winter 1998): 53–82; Rula Quawas, “‘A Sea Captain in Her Own Right’: Navigating the Feminist Thought of Huda Shaarawi,” Journal of International Women’s Studies 8, no. 1 (2006): 219–35.

280 “Kadının kurtulu-sunu Atatürke borçluyuz,” Cumhuriyet, April 13, 1935, 1; “Le Congrès de l’Union Internationale des Femmes,” Ankara, April 20, 1935, 1; Huda Sha‘rawi, Mudhakirat Huda Sha’rawi: Ra’idat al- Mar’a al-‘Arabiya al-Haditha (Cario: Dar al-Hilal, 1981), 450.

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approval for the decision in an open letter to the Turkish Ambassador in Cairo. Anadolu News, the Turkish government-run agency, reported on this gesture, which in turn was published in the

Figure 3.1 Huda Sha’arawi on the far left with the Egyptian delegation at a press conference in Istanbul. national press in Ankara and Istanbul. Sha’arawi’s letter also made the news in Turkish local presses in provincial towns where the population consisted of a considerable number of ethnically Arab people—like Adana and Urfa. Turkish newspapers also reported on women’s reforms in the Middle East as the result of the precedent set by the Kemalist regime.281 Echoing

Sha’arawi’s opinion, people across Turkey celebrated their new president and his liberation of

Turkish women.

281 Amit Bein, Kemalist Turkey and the Middle East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 155–57.

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The claim that Atatürk was not only the father of the Turks but also the father of the East, though paternalistic, was not entirely unfounded, especially in regards to the increased education of women in the region. After her time spent in Istanbul in 1935, Huda Sha’arawi gave several interviews and speeches published in the Egyptian press that expressed the need to establish girls’ schools like the ones found in Turkey. Sha’arawi suggested that until Egypt developed the necessary structures for girls’ schooling, they could receive an education in Turkey. In response, the Turkish government gladly sponsored the enrollment of Egyptian girls in Ankara. The

Turkish Ministry of Culture offered two scholarships for Egyptian girls that covered all of their expenses. When Egypt could not provide certain opportunities for women, the Turkish government offered resources and opportunities for them. Not only was this good political diplomacy, but also a good public-relations move. The Turkish Ministry suggested that any

Egyptian woman educated in Turkey would support the Kemalist regime and promote similar ideals at home.282

The transition from empire to nation-state presented two possibilities for how the new nation would deal with the topic of Muslim women’s rights. One potential path would follow the intellectual legacy of the Muslim feminist intellectuals who had preceded this moment and who has already reconciled religion with modernity for themselves. The second path presented a shortcut whereby Turkey’s adoption of Western ideals would be rewarded with civilizational legitimacy in the eyes of western audiences. Atatürk chose the second path.

Both contemporary observers and scholars of modern Turkey have, like Sha’arawi, emphasized the role of the Kemalist regime in the advancement of women’s rights in Turkey.

282 Ibid 164 In 1936, the Kemalist ideologue Tekinalp presented a vision where hundreds of students from neighboring countries would study in Turkey, and then return home where they would help spread the progressive Kemalist agenda, specifically women’s rights.

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Scholars include Atatürk’s gender reforms as a point of celebration and progressive democracy in their understanding of the history of the Kemalist Regime.283 It is understandable that this historical narrative became dominant in scholarship, especially since many contemporary Arab and Western feminists found no issue with the Kemalist state-sponsored feminism and its paternalistic implementation in Turkey. In fact, many celebrated the new Republic of Turkey.

Contemporaries focused on the tangible effects they observed on (upper-class) women’s lives instead of the less than democratic circumstances in which those effects were achieved.

It is not surprising to find positive assessments of the new republic’s authoritarian top- down reforms. The Turkish government did open new opportunities for education and employment for women and more extensively than in other parts of the Middle East. Also, certain social restrictions were lifted and legal rights expanded. Indeed, Turkey granted full suffrage to women before France, Greece, and Switzerland. However, Turkish women’s right to vote would not really hold political significance until the 1950s. Turkey was a one-party dictatorship until the 1950s, making the right to vote in national elections meaningless for both women and men. Not all feminists were as laudatory of these transformations because of the way

Kemalism compromised the nation’s cultural authenticity for Western Orientalist ideas of modernity. However, an examination of the reforms implemented by the new Turkish state revealed a direct connection between the topics addressed by late-Ottoman Muslim intellectuals and Atatürk’s state sponsored feminism.

Scholars have emphasized the unique form of the woman question during the Republican period because of its emphasis on “Turkishness.” The scholarship suggests that instead of a

283 Zürcher, Turkey.

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continued discourse on the global Muslim woman question, the advent of the Republic ushered in the “Turkish” woman question.284 It is undeniable that Atatürk and the Turkish nationalist struggle emphasized the connection between social reforms and Turkishness. However, this muted how the national current regarding Turkish women’s emancipation continued to be debated in a global context and through the continued framework of the Muslim woman question. Even at the height of Turkish nationalism, the global Muslim woman question continued to be debated internationally and it is in this broader context that an alternative understanding of the politics of gender reforms in Turkey can be found.

The 1920s and 1930s presented a divergence in Muslim women’s reactions to the

Kemalist response to the global Muslim woman question. Some Muslim women celebrated and looked to Turkey as a model for their fight for women’s rights, while others criticized the

Kemalist response as catering to Western demands and an internalization of Orientalist ideas. In some ways Atatürk and Kemalist reforms ruptured the intellectual legacy of late-Ottoman

Muslim women. However, a closer examination of this historical moment reveals both Turkish and non-Turkish Muslim women continued to build on the intellectual legacy of the Ottoman

Muslim feminist intellectuals that predated them. As illustrated in the previous chapters, Turkish feminists were embedded in and engaged with a global exploration of the Muslim Woman question. Even with the advent of a top-down, nationalist-oriented set of reforms, some Turkish and non-Turkish Muslim feminist activists continued to set Turkey within a broader Muslim woman question.

Turkey’s woman question was a continuation of the global Muslim woman question as it was closely followed and debated by a transnational Muslim network. Muslim women in Turkey

284 Zehra Arat, Deconstructing Images of “the Turkish Woman” (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998).

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and other societies helped to legitimize Turkey’s position in the geopolitical order by engaging in the discourse on the global Muslim woman question. Women’s rights reforms in Turkey aimed to dispel the image of the “Terrible Turk,” which peaked in Europe and America during WWI and in the aftermath of the war. The Turkish government managed to transform its image in the

West from a dominantly negative one to a surprisingly positive one within 15 years of the declaration of the Republic. This was in large part due to the symbolic measures taken towards women’s emancipation. The continued discussion on the Muslim woman question during this period showed greater connections with other Muslim societies than previous decades.

The construction of the “New Turkish woman” helped legitimize Turkey’s position as a

“modern” state not only in the eyes of the West, but also the East. The international stage was used by Turkish and other Muslim women to leverage their demands for more rights at home from Turkey to Egypt to India. Muslim women questioned how to be both Muslim and modern both before and after Turkey’s gender reforms were enacted. These debates helped push the global Muslim woman question forward during the inter-war period. Similar to Atatürk, successors to the women discussed in chapters one and two understood the importance of these issues in a global context. However, unlike Atatürk, some women continued to argue for a connection between Islam, women’s rights, and modernity. By examining the work and actions of Ataturk’s reforms, Keriman Halis’ election as Miss Universe, Huda Sha’arawi’s connections to Turkey, the International Alliance of Women’s Congress of 1935, the Eastern Women’s

Congresses, and Halide Edip, this chapter explores a larger historical context and debate on

Muslim women’s activism and intellectualism, in order to ascertain how Muslim women tried to figure out their place in this new global moment. These events and women have not been given enough credit for the role they played in advancing Turkish women’s rights without abandoning

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their faith. Even someone like Huda Sha’arawi, who credited Atatürk with the liberation of

Turkish women, ironically failed to take credit for how she and others propelled the debate on the global Muslim woman question.

MUSTAFA KEMAL ATATÜRK’S ANSWER TO THE GLOBAL MUSLIM WOMAN QUESTION

The Muslim woman question remained a topic of political debate during the first few decades of the twentieth century, both in international geopolitics and in domestic reform debates. The newly established Turkish nation-state and Turkish nationalism became inimitable features of this period’s understanding of the woman question. Under the leadership of Mustafa

Kemal, later known as Atatürk, the Turkish nation-state was formed in 1923 by abolishing the

Ottoman dynasty and announcing a Republic. In transitioning from empire to nation-state, and a secular republic at that, Atatürk sought to ensure Turkey’s position as a political member within the Western world. Turkey’s new international reputation as a modern state was further solidified through social and political reforms directly impacting middle and upper-class Turkish women.

These reforms included female enfranchisement, coeducation, and marriage reform, as well as regulations about veiling. In addition to the legal changes directly impacting women’s lives,

Atatürk enacted a series of reforms extricating religion from politics, which helped to further liberalize gender relations in Turkey.

Turkey adopted an extreme secularization process compared to other Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East that set a precedent for other countries in the region. The shift from a multi-ethnic empire to an ethnically Turkish-based nation-state involved a radical distancing between Islam and cultural nationalism. Atatürk took extensive measures to heighten “Turkish” national consciousness at the expense of wider Islamic identification. The effects of this separation prompted the dissolution of central institutions of Ottoman Islam. Atatürk abolished

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the caliphate and emphasized the secularization of every sphere of life. The ramifications of this new secular republic were significant for Turkish women. The secularization of the family code and the enfranchisement of women, coupled with the liquidation of religious institutions of the

Ottoman Empire, legitimized a new state ideology.285

For Atatürk, the crucial element to the success of Kemalism was to foster a Western cultural character for the nation, through maintenance of policies in some areas, and adoption of new ones in others. He understood that the geopolitical location of Turkey made it difficult for some to acknowledge what he saw as Turkey’s rightful place within Western geopolitics. Instead of trying to legitimize Turkey’s position in the West through political alliances, Atatürk sought to express Turkey’s successful Westernization through cultural terms. This cultural revolution ushered in a vigorous intellectual and social transformation in Turkey, that in some ways surpassed the cultural efforts of other Western countries.286 Atatürk felt a wholesale cultural transformation proved necessary if Turkey was ever to be viewed as a legitimate force in the new post-WWI world order. One of Atatürk’s primary goals was to persuade the educated and elite classes in the new Turkish society to reject any ties with the “Orient” and wholeheartedly embrace the “Occident.”287

From Atatürk’s perspective, adopting European models of “civilization” could only occur at the expense of eradicating cultural elements that did not adhere to Western ideas of modernity.

This ideological move rejected the possibility of non-Western conceptions of modernity and civilization, including those which had developed in the late-Ottoman Empire. Until the cultural

285 Zürcher, Turkey, 186–94.

286 Hale Yılmaz, Becoming Turkish Nationalist Reforms and Cultural Negotiations in Early Republican Turkey, 1923-1945 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2013).

287 Hanioğlu, Atatürk, 150.

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Westernization of the Turkish Republic, the late-Ottoman reforms were based on the assumption that progress and civilization were universal processes that could be achieved by people with different religious and cultural backgrounds. Therefore, it was not contradictory to be both

Muslim and modern.288 Conversely, Republican reforms were based on the assumption that a nation could only be truly modern through the process of distancing itself from Islamic traditions and adopting Western cultural practices. Practically, this meant eliminating many of the practices and traditions associated with Islam.289

Şükrü Hanioğlu argues that Atatürk did not intend to ridicule Islam or to eliminate religion entirely. Instead, Atatürk sought to reinterpret Islamic traditions in a way that would bolster the Turkish renaissance he hoped to accomplish.290 Atatürk and his advisors assumed that religion could be replaced with Turkishness and that the former would fade into people’s memories. Mustafa Kemal stated that the ideal human society could only be achieved through,

“the advancement of all mankind in experience, knowledge, and thinking, and the establishment of a world religion through the abandonment of Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism.”291 This opinion goes beyond a reinterpretation of Islamic traditions and emphasizes the creation of an enlightened world, interpreted through Eurocentric cultural models, and made possible through

288 Sinan Kuneralp and Center for Ottoman Diplomatic History, Ottoman diplomatic documents on “the Eastern question” (Istanbul: Isis Press, 2009).

289 Ataturk was not alone in his desire to implement Westernization projects in Muslim majority societies. Both Reza Shah Pahlavi in Iran and Afghan ruler Amanullah Khan attempted cultural transformations along the lines of Western modernity. However, the modernization project implemented by Ataturk rested heavily on the reforms of the late-Ottoman Empire giving him an advantage over the other aforementioned rulers. Ottoman reformers successfully fashioned a brand of modernity accepted by the elite, they devised jurisprudence that amalgamated western legal principles with Islamic law, created a European-style bureaucracy, facilitated private entrepreneurship and a socialist movement. Trade unions, a women’s movement, newspapers developed rapidly during this period as well. Hanioğlu, Atatürk, 152.

290 Hanioğlu, 153.

291 Hanioğlu, 156.

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the abandonment of religion entirely. While Atatürk intended a simple reinterpretation of

Muslim traditions, his reforms and their outcomes suggest a lack of cultural space for Islam within Turkey’s early-republican period. One consequence of this was the failure of early republican leaders to fully appreciate the strength of Islamic notions of legitimacy and reformist

Muslim intellectual networks.

In addition to pushing the populace to reconsider their faith and relationship to religious doctrine, Atatürk emphasized secularism in regards to cultural Westernization and created the first Middle Eastern secular nation modeled after the French-style laïcité.292 The 1924

Constitution still contained articles that declared Islam the official state religion and entrusted that the Turkish Grand National Assembly would implement Shari ‘a. However, these initial constitutional articles were used to placate conservative circles and were soon removed in a

1928 constitutional amendment. As secularizing reforms completely eradicated traces of Shari ‘a and religious customs, a revised constitutional amendment removed reference to Islam and proclaimed Turkey as officially a secular state. In 1924 the Shari‘a courts were abolished and with them legal dualism. The adoption of the Swiss Civil Code of Obligations in 1926 secularized private law and ended Islamic practices such as polygyny.293 Legally banning polygyny was a victory for Turkish women; however, the regime’s motivation for this legal reform had more to do with western public opinion than anything else. Thus, even in the national context, Atatürk ’s policies contributed directly to the continuing conversation on the Muslim

292 Laïcité is the nineteenth-century form of French secularism that discouraged the influence of religious affairs in government. for more on French laïcité see Caroline C. Ford, Divided Houses: Religion and Gender in Modern France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005).

293 Hanioğlu, Atatürk, 158.

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woman question. This is unsurprising given the global spotlight Turkey was under at this time due to its radical cultural Westernization program.

Other secularizing reforms entailed abolishing symbols associated with Islam. For example, Atatürk adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1925, replaced the fez with a European-style hat in 1926, banned the veil in and around government buildings, adopted the Latin alphabet in

1928, and in 1935, Sunday was declared the weekly holiday instead of Friday.294 The objective with these reforms was to strengthen a secular way of life at the expense of sidelining Islam.

With these reforms, Atatürk attempted to transform a society with strong religious ties into a secularist country, with the full power of the bureaucracy backing him. All of the reforms were successfully implemented but the effects of these reforms never fully enveloped the masses. Nor did the top-down secularizing reforms take into consideration how religion informed people’s identities and their relationship to their country.

Atatürk explicitly accepted Orientalist arguments that suggested a country will not be modern or civilized until women are. Of his many reforms, those regarding women were the most significant in revising the view of Turkey internationally. Turkish women’s rights became instrumentalized—having accepted the Orientalist explanation, Ataturk made decisions that aligned with the demands of Westerners. Adhering to westerners’ demands and ideals meant

Atatürk’s total rejection of the earlier more nuanced Muslim feminism addressed in previous chapters. Atatürk theorized that, if Turkish women and villagers looked like the “enlightened,”

“modern,” and “progressive,” role models of the West, then surely the West could not deny

Turkey’s rightful place in that geopolitical and social context. This approach failed to consider what the Turkish masses wanted— this radical secularization process left no room for a

294 Hanioğlu, 159.

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participatory democracy. Atatürk enacted these reforms dictatorially. Although these reforms received the support of elites, the majority of Turkish people found this complete social and cultural overhaul through “civilizing” reforms hostile towards their way of life and their Islamic traditions. Despite the desire of Kemalists, Atatürk’s political regime and supporters, to create a society in the image of European modernity, the average Turkish person continued their way of life and refused the full adoption of a form of European modernity imposed on them by the state.295

Much of Atatürk’s social reform efforts focused on Turkish women. Turkey adopted a modified version of the Swiss Civil Code, which ushered in the first wave of legal initiatives intended to make women equal in various facets of life. By 1930 women were accorded the right to vote and stand election at the municipal level and by 1934 women were granted full suffrage at the national level. In conjunction with these reforms the Kemalist regime promoted an image of the “ideal” and “new Republican woman.” The ideal Turkish woman these images suggested was educated, nationalist, dressed in “civilized” fashion, professional, secular, and had fully internalized the spirit of the republic. Conspicuously, piety was not emphasized in this new ideal.

The regime promoted women role models who served republican efforts, as opposed to women who promoted Muslim feminist agendas.296 Atatürk threw his support behind any woman who practiced and symbolized the tenets of Turkish modernism.

295 Hanioğlu, 206–7.

296 In this regard one could argue that the women’s movement during the republican period was less feminist than the late-Ottoman women’s movement. For example, in 1913, Ottoman Feminist Belkıs Şevket flew aboard a military plane in traditional attire declaring that “Oriental women will not accept a position that falls behind that of their Western sisters.” Hanioğlu, 210.

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KERIMAN HALIS AND THE “NEW TURKISH WOMAN”

Turkey held its first ‘Miss Turkey’ beauty contest in 1929. This competition was not just about beauty, but about a very specific kind of Western beauty that highlighted Atatürk’s success in constructing the new Turkish woman. Miss Turkey would be crowned for her acquiescence to this modern ideal. This competition was more about Turkish nationalism and the success of

Atatürk as a liberator of women than it was about aesthetic standards. Supporters of the regime put forward another response to the Muslim woman question that reaffirmed Atatürk’s international agenda and helped solidify international legitimacy in the post-WWI world order.

P.T. Barnum conducted the first beauty contest to attract audiences to his show in 1854.

However, once he realized that “respectable” women would not participate, the format of the contest changed and participants submitted their photographs instead. This format garnered huge success and quickly spread to national and international newspapers. Starting in the 1920s, beauty contests took on a distinctly nationalistic character. The idea of beauty pageant contestants as national figures and symbols is at the center of Sarah Banet-Weiser's research. In

The Most Beautiful Girl in the World: Beauty Pageants and National Identity, Banet-Weiser focused on the Miss America pageant and argues that the beauty pageant defies a singular definition. She contends that pageants create a national field of shared symbols and practices that define femininity and ethnicity in national terms. According to Banet-Weiser, the pageant tries to reassure tensions about femininity, but because femininity is an unstable and unfixed category, the pageant cannot accommodate all of these tensions. Instead, Miss America does complex cultural work in terms of race, gender, and the nation.297 The same can be said for the Miss

Turkey and Miss Universe contests in the 1920s and 1930s.

297 Sarah Banet-Weiser, The Most Beautiful Girl in the World: Beauty Pageants and National Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

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The newspaper Cumhuriyet sponsored and covered in great detail the first ‘Miss Turkey’ contest in 1929. Cumhuriyet was founded in 1924 by Yunus Nadi, an intellectual, journalist, and politician who had been active in the Young Turk Period. In 1918 he had founded and edited the newspaper Yeni Gun in Istanbul but moved the paper and its press to Ankara after the French and

British occupied Istanbul. He also helped found the Wilsonian Principals Society of Istanbul in

1919. Both he and the paper supported the nationalist cause throughout the war. Then, in 1924, after the abolition of the caliphate—an act that had been greeted with some hostility by the existing Istanbul press—he returned to Istanbul to publish Cumhuriyet. His new paper

Cumhuriyet supported the new republican regime. While at times critical of the government’s corruption or inefficiency, the paper enthusiastically supported the government’s social reforms and initiatives.298

In this context Cumhuriyet covered the beauty contest in conjunction with government initiatives that held direct bearing on women. The press coverage also presented initiatives the government wanted to illustrate through the use of women, like the national language reform.

Throughout the 1930s the newspaper published frequent front page stories and photographs on the beauty contest, women’s suffrage, the introduction of women judges in courts of law, and the

Women’s Union (Kadin Birligi), a political group dedicated to improving the position of women in Turkey.299 Beauty contests were featured with the same level of importance as the social and legal reforms affecting women’s lives.

As previously mentioned, Turkey’s Republican regime focused on policies involving religion. The government aimed to modernize religious life on the one hand, while also

298 A. Holly Shissler, “Beauty Is Nothing to Be Ashamed Of: Beauty Contests As Tools of Women’s Liberation in Early Republican Turkey,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 24, no. 1 (2004): 109.

299 Shissler, 107.

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criticizing those they felt were reactionary in their religious practices. These issues played out on the pages of Cumhuriyet and present another example how the paper used women to illustrate certain objectives of the regime. Stories about “modern” women participating in beauty pageants were placed next to stories regarding “progressive” religion or religious “reactionaries.” This had the potential to shift people’s perceptions on women by suggesting there was nothing morally questionable in women’s participation in these contests. Holly Shissler argues, “the body of women contestants was indeed read as a marker of a particular kind of, not feminine, but female, subject: the kind whose physical presence in a public space did not exclude her from the social contract, and who thus took an important first step towards becoming a citizen and a public actor.”300 The placement of these images also served to highlight the “backwardness” of religious reactionaries.

The announcement of Turkey’s first beauty contest happened just before Ramadan. There was an article entitled, “Who is Turkey’s Most Beautiful Woman?” next to an article that read

“Ramadan is Coming.” In later publications, the prolific coverage of the contest was placed alongside articles covering the trial of religious figures involved in the Menemen protests, where a dervish demanded the return of the caliphate. When policemen showed up to disband the demonstration, the crowd beheaded a policeman and paraded his head around on a pike. The contrasts in images grew more striking, with studio portraits of attractive young women dressed in Western fashion placed next to “harsh and unflattering pictures of traditionally dressed, bearded, and turbaned Sheikhs and Hocas.”301There are two possibilities when analyzing the positioning of these articles. One possibility was that the editors intended to create a dichotomy

300 Shissler, 110.

301 Shissler, 117.

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between devout practitioners of Islam as “backwards” and the new Turkish woman as

“progressive” and “modern.” Another possibility was the editor’s goal of normalizing and safeguarding women’s participation in these pageants as morally sound. If the contest, and therefore the women participants, was construed as immoral the newspaper could subliminally use the positioning of these images of women to undercut this impression. Either way, the newspaper served as an echo chamber for Atatürk’s Westernization efforts.

Adopting the format of the pageants in the United States, Cumhuriyet laid a foundation to ensure readers would be open to the idea of a beauty contest. In the weeks leading up to the contest announcement, the paper pictured foreign female dignitaries touring the country. Each photo highlighted how modern and chic each of the unveiled women looked. These figures, generally appearing on the front page of the newspaper, included queens from Serbia, Romania, and Afghanistan. In addition to these front-page images of women, Cumhuriyet had a regular column titled “What’s going on in the World,” which often depicted women in Europe or the

U.S. at the beach or glamorously attired to enjoy the nightlife in European capitals.302

Turkish beauty contests were exercises in nationalism. By projecting a “modern” national image through the display of its “modern” Westernized women, the contests became a way for Turkey to claim it reached the status of a “civilized” nation. Since civilizational and

Orientalist discourses continued throughout the 1920s and 1930s, these beauty contests presented

Turkey with another opportunity to answer the global Muslim woman question. The woman to be crowned Miss Turkey was sent to compete abroad in international beauty contests. From the

302 Shissler, 109.

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beginning, the editorial staff of the paper presented these young women contestants in terms of national pride, nationalism, and Turkey’s status as a “civilized” country on the world stage.303

With the earliest mention of the contest, Cumhuriyet posited the rhetorical question: “Can it really be the case that Turkish women are less beautiful than those of other nations?”304 It then invited the reader to compare foreign beauty queens to the women of Turkey. There are several comments about what an honor it is for Turkish women to represent their country abroad. Also, during this period, the newspaper published several editorials that lauded the revolutionary changes affecting Turkish womanhood, with one editorial addressing how women had left the harem behind in exchange for a Parisian nightclub. Time and again, the beauty contest was linked to Turkey’s image in the “civilized” world.305 Beauty contests were a rising phenomenon in countries that had recently undergone modernizing revolutions.306 In the domestic context, beauty contests were often intended as tools for effecting a social revolution at home, and in the international context they functioned as a way to project a revolution to audiences abroad. As

Holly Shissler argues, “participation in international beauty contests was an important form of nationalist expression and means of representing the new state on the world stage, as an equal accepted among the ‘great’ and ‘civilized’ nations of the earth.”307

303 Shissler, 110.

304 Shissler, 111.

305 Shissler, 112.

306 Shissler, 113.

307 Shissler, 119.

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Figure 3.2 Keriman Halis submission photo for Miss Turkey The power of beauty contests to project a national image on an international stage is evidenced by Keriman Halis, who won the Miss Universe pageant in 1932. Various winners of the Miss Turkey pageant competed in Miss Europe contests with no success. This caused many to feel disillusioned with Cumhuriyet’s beauty contests, such that in 1932 there were not enough participants to hold the contest. Later that same year, however, Belgian organizers of the Miss

Universe contest extended an invitation to Turkey. A Miss Turkey was hurriedly selected.

Keriman Halis enrolled minutes before the final selection as one of only eight candidates and, the eighteen-year-old Halis was selected as the winner. The young winner traveled to Spa, Belgium for the international contest with alacrity and fanfare—her train was met by several large groups at every train station stop along the Turkish border. The fanfare only multiplied when Keriman

Halis won the Miss Universe crown. This led to an extended tour of Europe for the winner, and to extensive coverage of the victory in the Turkish press at home, with a congratulatory statement sent by Atatürk himself to Cumhuriyet. Atatürk’s message declared that, “because the

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Turkish race is the best race in the world, it is unsurprising that a Turkish woman should win

Miss Universe.”308 Keriman Halis’ victory was also a victory for Atatürk who could point specifically to Halis as proof of the success of Turkey’s entrance into modernity and the

European world order.

Figure 3.3 Keriman Halis after winning the title Miss Universe. Countries throughout the Middle East paid close attention to the policies implemented by the Kemalist government during the 1920s and 1930s. This keen observation occurred because for some, Atatürk’s leadership and accomplishments served as a useful example worth emulating in their own countries. For others, Turkey’s secularization process was a cause for alarm in

Muslim majority countries. In other words, for some countries in the region, Turkey would be a model and for others a cautionary tale. Either way, people in the Middle East understood that there were lessons to learn from the Turkish experience. Middle Eastern countries that debated the pros and cons of Turkish reforms used those celebrations and critiques as a framework for their own cultural, social, economic and political conversations. Prominent Middle Eastern newspapers covered Turkey’s transformation, and Egyptian periodicals in particular reflected an

308 Shissler, 110.

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awareness that the events in Turkey held great potential to influence changes in Egypt and other

Muslim-majority countries.309

The Kemalist regime knew various Middle Eastern countries were watching closely.

Turkish officials and institutions even published and distributed pamphlets in Arabic and French, for foreign audiences. These works routinely celebrated the new nation’s success under Atatürk.

On the fifteenth anniversary of the new republic, a photo album was issued that celebrated

Turkey’s transformation. An Arabic translation of the album was printed in Istanbul and then distributed to Arab readers, exactly ten years after the language reform eliminated the Arabic- based alphabet in Turkey. In the late 1930s Turkey began using radio broadcasts to disseminate propaganda to the Middle East. Early broadcasts were only heard in Syria, but later reached as far as Egypt, Iraq, and Kuwait. Turkey willingly took on the position of “role model” for other countries in the region and this meant cultivating a specific image abroad.310 Therefore, the

Turkish government closely followed the Arab press and used these different propaganda tools to refute or complement whatever messages were articulated abroad. A London Times correspondent reported in 1935, that:

“although ‘Kamalism’[sic] is the natural outcome of Turkey’s struggle for independence and is designed first to meet purely Turkish conditions, a strong feeling exists in the minds of Turkish rulers that it contains valuable lessons for other countries whose political and economic independence is not assured. It is indeed believed that Persia and Afghanistan have already borrowed leaves from the Turkish book, and that other Asiatic or Moslem countries might profitably follow the example set them by Kamalist [sic] Turkey.”311

309 Bein, Kemalist Turkey and the Middle East, 139.

310 Bein, 139–41.

311 Bein, 142.

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One of the factors that determined if Turkey would be a model for the Middle East or a cautionary tale was the emancipation of women under the auspices of Kemalist state feminism.

Women’s rights activists across the Middle East were inspired by the Turkish regime’s encouragement of women to unveil, to enjoy educational and employment expansion, and to adopt the legal rights and protections spelled out in the Swiss Code. However, critics of the change in women’s social and legal positioning viewed these as dangerous precedents.312 Turkey and Atatürk were often at the center of polemical discussions on the best route for political independence, economic prosperity, and social progress in the region.

The Turkish experience as a model worth emulating appeared increasingly relevant in the

1930s. Of course, Turkey faced many critics in the region. However, Atatürk’s admirers and defenders of both him and his reforms were quite significant. Donald Webster, an American expert on Turkey at the time, published The Turkey of Atatürk: Social Process in the Turkish

Reformation (1939). He wrote that countries in the region were aware of the fact that Turkey functioned with full autonomy and that this prompted “not only admiration and envy, in the countries without full autonomy-but also emulation.”313 Decades later, Middle East historian

Albert Hourani concluded that the Kemalist republic of the 1930s, “exercised a great influence over the political minds of the Arabs. Not only because of the success of the Turks [against

European encroachment] …but because there remained profound ties, of religion, shared history and often blood relationship between Arabs and Turks.”314

312 Bein, 143.

313 Donald Everett Webster, The Turkey of Atatürk: Social Process In the Turkish Reformation (Philadelphia: American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1939), 123.

314 Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age 1798-1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962) quoted in Bein, Kemalist Turkey and the Middle East, 143.

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The surprising victory of Miss Turkey in the 1932 Miss Universe competition presented

Turkey with an opportunity to promote internationally the country’s answer to the global Muslim woman question. Keriman Halis’ image graced European and North American newspapers and

Turkey quickly took ownership of her success to further promote their answer to the Muslim woman question, while reinforcing that their response was indeed the best answer.315 The

Kemalist regime hailed Keriman Halis as a marker of Turkey’s success and its ability to nurture a new liberated and educated “modern” woman on par with women found in other “civilized” nations. In 1932 The Times in London published an article called, “Feminism in Turkey” where the correspondent put forward a positive narrative by noting that Turkey:

“acquired one notable victory at the expense of women chosen from Western countries…as a symbol of the new freedom which Turkish women have won, and a proof to the world that Turkey has finally shaken off the shackles which kept her for so long from taking her place among civilized nations.”316

Different newspapers in the Middle East were not far behind with their own reports on the

Turkish Miss Universe. For example, the widely read Egyptian daily al-Ahram published a large photo of Halis Hanim in an evening gown on their front page, celebrating her victory. The

Egyptian pro-feminist literary magazine, al-Ma‘rid also published a photo congratulating Turkey on Halis Hanim’s victory.

After months of traveling around Europe, Keriman Halis arrived in Egypt in early 1933, in what was supposed to be the first leg of a journey that would end with a visit to the Chicago

World’s Fair. Huseyin Remzi organized and publicized the Egyptian part of Halis Hanim’s tour.

Remzi owned and served as editor-in-chief of the bilingual Turkish-Arabic weekly Muhadanet.

In cooperation with the Cairo-based Turkish Benevolent Society, Remzi financed Halis’ time in

315 French newspapers and Yiddish periodical in New York quoted in Bein, 143.

316 Our Correspondent in Turkey, “Feminism in Turkey,” Times, November 12, 1932

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Egypt. He felt Keriman Halis’ visit would foster positive publicity and good will between

Turkey and Egypt.317 People thought her visit could help energize the Egypt-based Turkish community, which consisted of Muslim immigrants from Anatolia and the Balkans and their descendants. However, her visit was also expected to appeal to all Egyptians because she was a

Muslim woman who embodied the modern, progressive, liberated, and beautiful face of Turkey.

What was only meant to be a two-week visit, turned into a four month stay with Halis’ decision to forgo the trip to Chicago for more time spent in Egypt. For a few months in 1933 Halis Hanim experienced celebrity as an international star and informal representative of Turkey in Egypt.

During this time the Middle East in general viewed her victory as a source of pride to share across the region.318

Keriman Halis Hanim arrived in Cairo where both she and her hosts were astounded to find hundreds of Egyptians gathered to witness her arrival. The Egyptian press suggested that the large crowd wanted to convey their pride in the fact that a fellow Muslim and Easterner had won

Miss Universe. After this unplanned encounter with average Egyptian citizens, Halis spent the rest of her first day in meetings with politicians, dignitaries, and journalists. A delegation of the

317 Good will that could help patch up the fallout from the Fez Incident, which was brought to an end only a few weeks earlier. The issue of the fez reform has a dynamic chapter in Turkey’s domestic and international history. In the summer of 1925, Ataturk donned a Panama hat. He addressed the public and declared that the hat was an essential part of “civilized and international dress,” that it was not un-Islamic to wear a hat, and that the fez originated from Greek tradition. Sultan Mahmud II (1808-39) enforced the use of the fez as the official headgear for males in the empire. Through the following years the fez was infused with symbolic meaning that differentiated Muslims from non-Muslim Westerners. The hat reform of 1925 required state employees to wear the European fashion to mark the civilized status of the new Republic. The hat reform sparked a strong reaction from conservatives who were not swayed by religious figures who spoke out in favor of the reform. Courts tried several cases and ordered the execution of leaders who resisted the reform. The fez was banned to a strict degree that when the Egyptian ambassador visited Ataturk, he was asked not wear his tarboosh to the banquet celebrating the anniversary of the proclamation of the republic. For more on this issue see Hanioğlu, Atatürk.

318 Bein, Kemalist Turkey and the Middle East, 144–45.

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Egyptian Feminist Union (EFU) also attended.319 The EFU was founded in 1923, by Huda

Sha’arawi who served as the organization’s president until 1947. The members of the EFU delegation congratulated Halis Hanim for her achievement and for being a positive role model for all Eastern women. This sentiment was echoed again that evening when Halis attended a ball at Huseyin Remzi’s mansion. In attendance was Saiza Babarawi, a feminist leader and editor of

L'Egyptienne, an organ of the EFU. Nabarawi gave a speech in honor of Keriman Halis where she celebrated the latter’s achievement as the first Muslim Miss Universe. Nabarawi suggested that this title served as a point of triumph for not only Turkish women, but all Eastern women.320

Leading Egyptian feminists embraced Keriman Halis as a symbol of the successful modernization of Turkish women. Halis was invited to private meetings with Egyptian feminists

Safiyya Zaghlul and Huda Sha’arawi.321 The latter invited Halis to attend a fundraiser held by the

EFU as the guest of honor. Halis also paid visits to popular entertainment halls. She was the featured guest of the famous belly dancer Badi’ Masabani at the weekly women-only matinee.322

The Egyptian press reported on these engagements positively, publishing reports and even poems that lauded Halis as an admirable Muslim woman worthy of her title.323 The projection of Halis as a symbol of the new opportunities Muslim women could engage in helped support Muslim

319 For more information on the EFU see Margot Badran, “Egyptian Feminist Union,” in Encyclopedia of Sex and Gender, ed. Fedwa Malti-Douglas, vol. 2 (Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2007), 451. 320 Bein, Kemalist Turkey and the Middle East, 147.

321 Zaghloul was born in 1876 and was of Turkish descent. She became a central figure of the Wafd Party, the nationalist liberal political party in Egypt. Her home served as a center for the party, she organized women’s demonstrations, and after her husband, Saad Zaghloul, died, she was central in the appointment of a new party leader. She led the Women’s Wafd party and retired from politics in 1937 when the party split. For more on Safiya Zaghloul see Nabila Ramdani, “Women in the 1919 Egyptian Revolution: From Feminist Awakening to Nationalist Political Activism,” Journal of International Women’s Studies 14, no. 2 (2013): 39–52.

322 Masbani was one of a few successful business women at the time.

323 Bein, Kemalist Turkey and the Middle East, 151.

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feminist agendas in interwar Egypt, and compelled them to support the nationalist modernizing agenda of the Turkish state.

Keriman Halis Hanim’s identity as a Muslim woman was very important to the discussion of her title of Miss Universe. Her title provided another dimension to the discourse on the global Muslim woman question that revealed continued political and intellectual networks between Turkey and Egypt. If it were simply about national identity, Charlotte Wassef’s title of

Miss Egypt and subsequent win as Miss Universe in 1935 would have served as a symbolic win for all Egyptian women.324 However, the fact that Wassef was Christian meant that she could not be presented in the same way Halis Hanim was in 1933. Keriman Halis was used as proof that

Atatürk’s answer to the global Muslim woman question, a response that adhered to Western modes of modernity and secularization, was the best answer and the one that could provide emancipation to all Muslim women. After fifty years of intellectual efforts on the part of Muslim women to deconstruct Orientalist ideas, Atatürk celebrated Keriman Halis for helping Turkey’s global image with her beauty and not her words.

Keriman Halis Hanim appealed to Egyptians because, while foreign with regards to her

Turkish nationality and Westernized appearance, she was relatable as a Middle Eastern and

Muslim woman. Egyptians’ perceptions of Halis mirrored their attitudes towards the Kemalist republic in general. Despite the fact that the regime put into effect nationalist and secularist reforms and adopted European cultural standards, people of the Middle East still considered

Turkey to be an Eastern country and a society in transformation. Turkey reinforced this impression by alluding to a common “Eastern” bond in its political engagements with countries

324 Bein, 153-54.

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in the Middle East.325 The Kemalist regime consciously sought to establish both its international and regional stronghold as the most progressive and civilized Muslim-majority country. This meant acquiring validation not only from Europe and North America, but also the Middle East.

Keriman Halis was not the first or last Turkish woman to help facilitate international networks to advance Turkey and Turkish women’s positions. Even though Turkey did not emphasize the fact that Halis was Muslim, Egyptians certainly did. For Egyptians, Halis’ identity as a modern

Muslim woman was her greatest appeal. Egyptians celebrated Turkey’s reforms and modernization efforts but they were unwilling to sacrifice their religion in the process.

INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S CONGRESSES

Both Turkish women and the Turkish government were keenly interested in fostering international contacts, but for different reasons. Atatürk and his regime wanted to use international contacts to widely spread the image of the new Turkish woman as liberated from the shackles of their Ottoman past. Turkish women themselves fostered international connections because they understood the importance Atatürk and his regime placed on the international perception of Turkey. Turkish women could use international contacts and the global stage as leverage to facilitate change in the Republic and safeguard their new social and political rights, much like the women intellectuals in previous chapters did before them. A direct connection can be drawn between legal rights gained for women in Turkey and the activities of international feminist efforts. Turkish women for years used the international stage and their connections to propel the advancement of Turkish women, meeting at different times both success and derision.

Turkish women understood that real change could be affected on the international stage, not least because of their government’s preoccupation with their geopolitical image. Such women

325 Bein, 155.

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regularly participated in both Eastern and Western feminist congresses to foster international connections and achieve their feminist aims.

Turkish Muslim women’s activism occurred on a global level during the 1920s and

1930s. Turkish women actively visited conferences and congresses organized by the international women’s movement during the first two decades of the newly formed Republic. As early as 1920, a Turkish woman attended the first meeting post World War I held by the

International Woman’s Suffrage Alliance in Geneva.326 Turkish women also traveled to the

United States to attend congresses there.327 In 1924, Efzayis Yusuf attended a meeting in

Washington D.C. hosted by the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom

(WILPF).328 In 1930 Yusuf wrote a letter to WILPF to report on how Turkish women’s efforts had earned them the right to vote and to be candidates in local elections. She also expressed her optimistic expectation that women would have full suffrage by 1931, though it would be another three years before that expectation was met.329 Turkish women were well aware of the importance of international connections in order to push forward local and global feminist agendas.

Atatürk prioritized public opinion towards Turkey, especially those coming from the

West. It would bolster Turkey’s image as “modern” and “progressive” if women held seats in parliament when the IAW convened in Istanbul. Atatürk rushed to give women the vote in 1934

326 Keibrizli claimed to be a member of the “Société des Dames” (Society of Turkish Ladies). There was no organization in Turkey in 1920 that went by this name. It could not have been the Türk Kadın Birliği (Turkish Women’s Union) because that organization only formed in 1923. Nicole A. N. M. Van Os, “Ottoman Muslim and Turkish Women in an International Context,” European Review 13, no. 3 (2005): 467.

327 Van Os, 467.

328 WILPF was founded in 1915, at the anti-war protest at the Hague. Yusuf studied at the American Girls’ College in Constantinople, where she presumably learned English and perhaps made American contacts. Van Os, 467.

329 Van Os, 467.

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in order to positively influence global opinion towards Turkey. Kathryn Libal suggested that the international interest in the 1935 IAW Congress in Istanbul may have influenced Atatürk’s decision to grant full women’s suffrage.330 An official document from the IAW recounted a meeting held in 1934 between President Margery Corbett Ashby and the mayor of Istanbul prior to the congress where Ashby said “What a pity that women will come from all over the world to modern Turkey, and find Turkish women still without the vote.” According to the account,

Ashby’s comment was passed on to Atatürk, who then quickly moved to grant women suffrage and the right to serve in national office.331 It is possible that Ashby took credit where credit was not due. However, it is undeniable that Atatürk was desperate to shed the stigma of Turkey as uncivilized, and it was because of this that the Türk Kadın Birliği (Turkish Women’s Union) endeavored to work on an international platform.332

During the first three years of the Union’s activity, they registered as supporters of the

League of Nations and received several invitations to international congresses. A member of the

Türk Kadın Birliği, Seniha Raif, represented Turkey at an IAW conference held in 1931 on peace and the League of Nations. Raif also attended another international women’s congress held in

Marseille in 1933, with another Turkish women—Lamia Tevfik. The international contacts of the Türk Kadınlar Birliği reached its peak in 1935 with the 12th Congress of the International

Alliance of Women (IAW), held in Istanbul.

Latife Bekir, with the approval of the Turkish government, invited the International

Alliance of Women to meet in Istanbul for its 12th Congress. Upon accepting the invitation, the

330 Libal, “Staging Turkish Women’s Emancipation,” 37.

331 Libal, 38.

332 Halide Edip held a deputyship in the union in 1925.

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IAW issued a press release which announced that, “(w)omen from 40 countries will unite in a jubilant celebration of the recent political advancement of Turkish women, which gave them the vote for the first time, and resulted in the election of 17 women to the new [Turkish]

Assembly.”333 The opening remarks of the Congress occurred at Yildiz Palace, and even with room for five hundred people the space was overcrowded. Loudspeakers were used so that people in the corridors could still listen. Both local and foreign news outlets covered the

Congress.334

In 1935, Turkey’s national newspaper Cumhuriyet reprinted an article from the Greek newspaper Acropolis. The Greek article asked, “who would have guessed? If you had said this to someone fifteen years ago, who wouldn’t have died of laughter? The Turkish woman, who had been imprisoned in harem life, mysterious and unapproachable, now? she is holding the ‘crown of world feminism.’” The author went on to claim, “among those of her sex, the Turkish woman is the first one to escape from guardianship and advance the cause of women’s laws [rights].”335

The editors of Cumhuriyet translated and reprinted this article to promote international acclaim for the “new Turkish woman.” According to historian Kathryn Libal, international recognition of

Turkish women’s advancement often reflected both acknowledgement and incredulity.336 Some members of the International Alliance of Women continued to view the abilities of Turkish women with a level of skepticism. IAW President Margery Corbett Ashby and Secretary

333 Press Department National League of Women Voters, Smith College Library, Sophia Smith Collection, MS 313, International Alliance of Women, quoted in Van Os, “Ottoman Muslim and Turkish Women in an International Context,” 467–68.

334 Van Os, 468.

335 “Dünya Kadınları Bugün Yıldız Sarayında Toplanıyorlar!” Cumhuriyet, 1, 8, quoted in Libal, “Staging Turkish Women’s Emancipation,” 32.

336 Libal, 32.

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Katherine Bompas worried about the ability of the local Turkish committee to properly organize the congress in Istanbul. But they also recognized that they might be “rather sensitive to any attempts to regard them as needing advice on matters affecting their local organization.”337

Regardless of Turkish women’s capabilities to organize and fight for their rights, in a similar manner to their European counterparts, they were perceived as less capable. Even as Turkish women gained their rights with greater success than some Western countries, an Orientalist attitude still informed how they were viewed by Europeans—feminists or otherwise.

Figure 3.4 Opening session of the Alliance of International Women’s Congress in Istanbul, 1935 All previous meetings of the IAW were held in European cities. Accepting Turkey’s invitation meant endorsing Turkey’s reform efforts. Huda Sha’arawi and some of her Egyptian

337 Rupp, Worlds of Women, 78.

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colleagues had previously participated in the IAW’s congresses, but in her memoir she noted her unique level of support for the meeting in Istanbul. Sha’arawi recalled in her memoir, written in the mid-1940s, that after hearing the congress would meet in Istanbul she resolved to take a much larger Egyptian delegation than ever before. She intended to emphasize the strong sociocultural and historical bonds between Egypt and Turkey. She appealed to the Turkish government to help organize the travel plans for her and her twelve-member delegation. Also in attendance at the congress were larger delegations from Syria and Lebanon, led by women’s rights activists Hayat- al-Barazi, Julia Dimashqiya, Amina Khuri, and Huda Sha’arawi, and including female members of some of Syria’s most influential families, such as Su‘ad Mardam Bey, Farlan Mardam Bey, and Ni‘mat al-Azim. The congress and the Middle Eastern women in attendance highlighted the high regard with which Middle Eastern women’s rights activists held Turkey and its state sponsored feminism in the 1930s. The Kemalist government’s desire to create an image of a trailblazing country with a path worthy of emulation for other Muslim majority societies was a success. And yet, Muslim women both celebrated Turkey’s emancipation of women while continuing to reinterpret Islamic traditions to further their feminist agendas, continuing the intellectual legacy of late-Ottoman Muslim women.

In response to some of Turkey’s earliest gender reforms, prominent Arab feminists depicted Turkey as a pathbreaking model that other countries in the region needed to follow. In

1929, for example, Huda Sha’arawi delivered a speech on women’s emancipation in which she argued that Turkey’s emphasis on women’s legal rights set an important precedent for the struggle for gender equality in the region. Similarly, Syrian feminist organizer Nour Hamada enthusiastically endorsed Turkey’s gender reforms at the Eastern Women’s Conferences in

Damascus in 1930 and Tehran in 1932. At the latter conference, Hamada asserted that Turkey,

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along with Japan, had secured the highest level of emancipation for Eastern women. She predicted that this would serve as a catalyst for other societies in the region to prioritize gender reform and equality. Tharwa Ahmad Halat, the Iraqi delegate, presented a similar expectation to the congress in Tehran. She hoped the political happenings in Turkey would inspire a women’s movement in Mesopotamia as well.338 Both feminists and press in the Middle East encouraged the depiction of Turkey as a role model for other Muslim-majority societies. The idea of Turkey being a model for other Muslim societies in the Middle East became a symbol of the success of

Turkey’s adoption of Westernization. Turkophile and pro-Kemalist westerners often emphasized the practical utility of Turkish Westernization in transforming the rest of the Muslim societies.

However, these Eastern Women’s conferences outside of Turkey showed that even as women celebrated Turkey’s reforms and positioned the new republic as a possible path to modernity, they did not abandon the intellectual legacy of Muslim feminism. These women sought their rights by interpreting Islamic traditions for themselves. They offered interpretations that presented the need for equality between men and women, while simultaneously critiquing

Western imperialism and Orientalism.

After the 1929 International Alliance of Women’s (IAW) Congress held in Berlin,

Egyptian Feminist Saiza Nabarawi called on women of the “East” to organize their own congress. She believed there was value in a regional association and its ability to advance the specific interests of Muslim women. Turkish representatives participated at the first Eastern

Women’s Congress in Damascus in 1930, where a representative of the IAW also attended, as well as the Congresses held in Damascus and Tehran in October 1932.339 Turkey would come up

338 Elizabeth Thompson, Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege, and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).

339 Van Os, “Ottoman Muslim and Turkish Women in an International Context,” 470.

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as a model for other Muslim societies to emulate. However, Turkey was used as a political tool to push for more rights. The Muslim women who participated in these congresses followed the intellectual trajectory of other Muslim feminists who understood the possibility of liberation through Islam. Thus, the women in these congresses contributed to the global Muslim woman question and linked themselves to a longer standing Muslim feminist discourse.

The first Eastern Women’s Congress occurred in Damascus in 1930. Nour Hamada, who came from a prominent Druze family and was an active member in the Syrian feminist movement, organized the conference and with great effort.340 In a speech delivered at the 1932

Eastern Woman’s Congress in Tehran Hamada detailed the history of how these congresses came about. She stated, “I had to work very hard to put together the [First] Eastern Women’s

Congress, in particular to obtain the government’s permission.” Initially unable to gain authorization from the Syrian government under French mandate, Hamada turned to international pressure to gain the necessary permit to hold the congress. She declared, “finally, I thought of a way, I wrote to the League of Nations and complained that the government was not allowing us to organize…and requested that an observer be sent by the Society of the Unity of the Women of the World.”341 This representative would oversee the activities of Eastern women’s participation in the congress and then produce a report for the League of Nations. Hamada used international connections and public opinion in order to advance Muslim women’s rights.

By the 1930s Muslim women recognized the limitations of working with and within an international women’s movement dominated by western feminists. In the speech Hamada

340 The Hamada family/clan has provided Druze religious leaders for centuries, and family materials identify Nour as the daughter of “Sheikh Muhammad bin Qasim bin Husayn...the first Sheikh of a united Druze community.” Ellen Carol DuBois and Haleh Emrani, “A Speech by Nour Hamada: Tehran, 1932,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 4, no. 1 (2008): 107–24.

341 Ghulam Riza Salami and Afsaneh Najmabadi eds., Nahzat-i Nisvan-i Sharq ([Documents from] the Eastern Women’s Movement) (Tehran: Shirazih, 2005), quoted in DuBois and Emrani.

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delivered at the 1932 Eastern Women’s Congress in Tehran, she noted her motivations for organizing such a conference. Hamada stated that she wanted to establish an organization outside of the ones she participated in herself. She observed, “all these groups were composed of Muslim and non-Muslim women, but the number of Muslim women was very low.” Hamada believed patriarchal efforts kept Muslim women from joining women’s organizations: “this was not the fault of the ladies. It was the fault of their men.” If this was the main reason women did not participate in these congresses, it would seemingly prove just as challenging for Muslim women to join the Eastern Women’s Congresses. It is possible, however, that Hamada was suggesting that Muslim men were leery of Muslim women joining the ranks of Western feminists, but would be less reluctant towards a Muslim-focused organization. Hamada firmly believed that Muslim women needed to participate in feminist activism because of the unique characteristics they possessed as Muslim women. She stated, “I felt that Muslim women with their pure, strong, exceptional, and eternal beliefs in the religion of Muhammad had to step forward.” Hamada also qualified the unique aspect of the Eastern Woman’s Congress in relation to other organizations like the IAW. She declared “our efforts are focused on promoting and spreading our own honorable religion, defending our excellent religion, and resisting things that may be harmful to it.”342

Both the 1930 and 1932 Eastern Women’s Congresses urged greater equality between men and women in regards to marriage, education, and labor. The conferences adopted resolutions to abolish all forms of polygyny, to achieve equal rights to divorce between the sexes, to increase the minimum age of marriage for girls to 16 and for boys to 18, to ensure equal pay for equal work, and to assure that all avenues of financial advancement available to men be

342 DuBois and Emrani, 116.

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made available to women. The IAW, on the request of Hamada, sent a representative to the 1930 congress. Avra Theodoropoulos wrote in her report to the IAW that the conference organizers were not as radical in their resolutions as they could have been. Theodoropoulos wrote, “the impressions left by the Congress on the more progressive among its members was that the resolutions were too meek and mild. Somewhat timorous indeed. There was no resolution abolishing the veil, and, as for the vote, it is out of the question in a country under a foreign mandate [Syria].”343 These observations showed why exactly an Eastern women’s congress, comprised mostly of Muslim women, was needed. It never occurred to Theodoropoulos that the veil was a non-issue for Muslim women and that they did not feel the need to dictate how women practiced their faith. Instead of observing that the absence of this resolution, among a predominately Muslim congress, meant that unveiling was not linked to Muslim women’s liberation, Theodoropoulos rendered the congress’ goals as “meek and mild.” The IAW representative also failed to aptly critique the mandate system that made it even more difficult for some Muslim women to demand suffrage than women in independent (or Muslim-majority) countries. Both feminist Orientalism and Kemalist reforms suppressed the possibility for anti-

Orientalist arguments. Unlike Kemalism, which prohibited veiling in and around government buildings, Muslim feminists did not see wearing the veil as a hindrance to their social and political progress. Kemalism did not attempt to reconcile Turkish modernity and nationalism with Islam, but instead adhered to Western Orientalism’s markers of civilization. Neither

Kemalism, nor feminist Orientalists were open to the possibility of women’s emancipation through Islamic traditions.

343 Weber, “Between Nationalism and Feminism.”

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This could have been an opportunity for western feminism and in turn the IAW to adjust their perspective on Muslim feminism, but their inability to do so further highlighted the necessity of Hamada’s desire to hold a separate Eastern Woman’s Congress. Topics concerning

Islam and continued Western Orientalism were the primary issues addressed during the second

Eastern Women’s Congress in 1932. The second Congress began in Damascus on October 14th and, after a few days, continued in Tehran on October 24th. Iranian MP Abd al-Husayn Awrang cautioned during an organizing meeting for the Congress that unveiling should not be on the agenda. Hamada thus professed that “the veil and face veil will not slow progress or impede development [for women].” The Congress made clear again that the veil was not an issue for

Muslim women’s liberation. Hamada and the other organizers recognized that there were still much greater issues blocking their path to gender equality. She also expressed that a motivation for addressing certain women’s issues at the second Congress was a direct response to Western feminism. She stated, “we have inserted broader principles in our platform because we wish to say to Western women that Eastern women do not merely have limited goals.” This objective was most likely set in response to the critiques of Theodoropoulos at the 1930 congress. Hamada argued that the agenda for the 1932 Congress was intended to help elevate the status of women.

During the actual conference Hamada used a metaphor in which she described all the countries in Asia as linked together to form a chain, with Turkey and Japan on either end, as the countries where Eastern women had gained the highest degree of progress. She used the example of

Turkish women earning the right to stand for parliamentary elections as proof. She wrote, “just as the women of Turkey have the highest degree of progress among our Eastern sisters…. [their progress] will communicate itself to us.”344

344 Weber, 93.

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Hamada and her colleagues endeavored to use an “Eastern” framework to address their specific feminist demands and pivot away from the construct of “Western civilization.” In order to accomplish this she used Islam as a unifying source. Hamada believed that, “the religious bond is one that most solidly unites the Eastern nations.” Hamada turned to her faith and a close reading of the “Holy Book [Qur’an]” in order to critique patriarchal practices. She found Muslim men ignorantly and purposefully disobeyed Islamic doctrine in order to keep women from gaining the rights they were entitled to by their faith. She addressed issues of polygyny, divorce, and inheritance. She pointed out that men married multiple wives despite the fact that by the

“commandment of our Holy Book, polygyny is impossible.” On the topic of divorce, Hamada declared that “according to our religious law, repudiation of wives is very difficult; yet these men divorce with the same ease as water flows.” Hamada reiterated the resolution put forth in the

1930 congress that advocated for women’s right to legally demand divorce. On the issue of inheritance, she declared that any will which named only sons as beneficiaries needed to be annulled because “our saintly law contains prescriptions for inheritance,” that suggested material possession be left to the whole family in equal measure.345

HALIDE EDIP AND THE GLOBAL MUSLIM WOMAN QUESTION

Halide Edip diverged from those who lauded Atatürk’s gender reforms. She revealed that not all Turkish women found Kemalist reforms satisfactory, and in this regard Edip served as a point of continuity with other Muslim feminist intellectuals predating her. The political framework and ideology expressed in Edip’s collective discourse showed that she created a space for Islam in her understanding of what it meant to be a modern Turkish woman, making her incompatible with the ideal Turkish woman supported by the Kemalist regime and the

345 Weber, 97.

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participants in the congresses. Edip understood that the Turkish woman question was really a continuation of the global Muslim woman question. Because of this understanding she used the global stage to demand more rights for Turkish women at home. Edip’s answer to the global

Muslim woman question presented her own construction of Muslim womanhood vis-à-vis

Turkish nationalism and a changing world order.

In some ways Halide Edip epitomized the ideal Westernized Turkish woman intended by

Atatürk’s reforms. Yet, she often criticized the content, vision, and goals of the Republican period. Edip found Atatürk’s Westernization project unnecessarily ignored the Islamic faith and its traditions. She understood how Islam continued to inform people’s individual and collective identities. Edip suggested embracing female agency and empowerment through Islamic traditions and not a Westernized, state-sponsored, feminist model. The debate on the importance of Islam to national identities continued to inform intellectuals and their understanding of women’s societal roles.

Regarded as the “Mother of the Turks” in popular Turkish history, Halide Edip compiled the events of her life into a two-volume autobiography, Memoirs and The Turkish Ordeal. Born in 1882 to a wealthy family, Edip’s father, Edip Bey, worked in the palace as a secretary for

Sultan Abdulhamid II (1876-1909). After her mother passed away, her father sent her to live with her maternal grandparents until the age of four. She credited her grandmother as the key influence on her religious outlook. When her father remarried, Edip returned home where she experienced the privilege of an education.346 English chaperons and Turkish sheikhs were in charge of her education until she attended the American College for Girls in Istanbul. She studied Arabic and French—the latter from famous poet and philosopher Riza Tevfik

346 Halide Edib, Memoirs of Halide Edib (New York: The Century Co., 1926).

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(Bölükbaşı) (1869-1949).347 During her time at the college, Edip received an education in

Eastern and Western literature, religion, sociology, and philosophy. In 1901 she graduated and married Salih Zeki Bey, one of her high school teachers, and had two children. This marriage ultimately ended in divorce after Salih Zeki decided to take on a second wife. In the aftermath of her divorce, Edip focused intensely on political engagement and writing.348

Halide Edip’s life spanned the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the formation of the

Republic. She was an important intellectual figure and the breadth of her publications, along with their many translations, serve as a testament to her significance. For example, her novel Sinekli

Bakkal, went through twenty-five editions, was translated into Arabic, German, Russian,

Swedish, and Urdu, and twice made into a film. In 1948, another novel, La Fille de Smyrne, known in Turkish as Ateşten Gömlek, appeared in French in Algeria. Edip’s short story, “The

Wolf on the Mountain,” experienced international recognition and was translated into English,

German, and Norwegian.349 According to historian Mushrihul Hasan, Masks and Souls, the only work that Edip wrote in English, is a particularly significant work because it broke down

Orientalist and patriarchal discourses and established a cosmic order for staging dilemmas of modernity.350 The same can be said for the entire discourse she produced through novels, articles, and speeches. Edip’s collective body of work presented audiences with a feminist perspective on Islamic society.351 In Edip’s memoir, written later in her life, her personal life

347 Mushirul Hasan, Between Modernity and Nationalism: Halide Edip’s Encounter with Gandhi’s India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010), 32.

348 Edib, Memoirs of Halide Edib.

349 Hasan, Between Modernity and Nationalism, 24.

350 Hasan, 25.

351 Emel Sönmez, “The Novelist Halı̇ de Edı̇ b Adivar and Turkish Feminism,” Die Welt Des Islams 14, no. 1/4 (1973): 81–115, https://doi.org/10.2307/1570025.

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served as an entry point into the history of the domestic sphere, as well as the political landscape of her time. Edip understood herself as a participant and creator of the master narrative on

Turkish enlightenment and nationalism.

Halide Edip engaged in political activism outside of her writing. In 1909, she founded

The Society for the Elevation of Women. She educated young girls in Damascus and Beirut, and was a nurse in Turkey’s War of Independence starting in 1919.352 Through her experiences and writings, she created a platform where she could highlight her unique understanding of the role of women within a rapidly changing political landscape. Edip saw women as an organic, progressive part of society. Edip believed “she [woman] is Nature’s means of producing life and preventing its stagnation.”353 Edip embraced political reform arguing that changing laws was in accordance with God’s decree to adapt in an ever-changing life. She declared that the essence of

Islamic jurisprudence was “changing times bring changing laws.”354 This interpretation allowed for a reimagining of Islamic traditions and what it meant to be a Muslim woman vis-à-vis the push to modernize during the first half of the twentieth century.

352 Edip, Memoirs of Halide Edib

353 Edip, 60.

354 Edip, 61. Fatma Aliye Hanım’s father, Ahmet Cevdet Paşa, wrote this principle at the introduction of Mecelle, codified Islamic Law (began to be applied from 1877 to 1924) “Ezmanın tagayyürü ile ahkamın tagayyürü inkar olunamaz” (It cannot be denied that laws will change as the time changes. She must be referring to Mecelle to argue for more women’s rights in Islamic legal tradition. For more on Ottoman legal reforms see Gülnihal Bozkurt, “The Reception of Western European Law in Turkey: (From the Tanzimat to the Turkish Republic, 1839-1939),” Der Islam 75, no. 2 (1998): 283–95.

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Halide Edip often wrote and

worked on issues of Muslim women’s

education and political access. She

developed a specific interest in the

Muslim woman question during the

formative years of Turkish nationalism.

As a contemporary and one-time friend

of Atatürk, Halide Edip served as a

Figure 3.5 Ataturk and Halide Edip, 1923 model for the ideal “Turkish woman.”

However, her thoughts pertaining to state formation and sovereignty departed from those expressed by Kemalism and this in turn challenged her position as a national symbol. Where

Edip insisted on ideals of democracy and liberalism, Atatürk prioritized secularist and republican ideals over democratic demands. Her ideological opposition to Kemalism crystallized when she accused Atatürk of establishing a despotic regime. Regardless of her exile from Turkey from

1926 to 1939, and demotion as a cultural symbol, Edip remained an undeniably prominent figure in the Turkish nationalist movement, devoting her life to defending Muslim women’s rights both in and outside of Turkey.

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The Muslim woman question remained central to Edip’s understanding of Turkish nationalism and women’s emancipation. For Edip, the nation-state and Islam were not mutually exclusive entities. This prompted her expressed disagreement with Kemalist reforms that promoted secular nationalism at the expense of religion. Edip’s inclusive understanding of the relationship between Islam and the state also informed her understanding of Islamic tradition.

She therefore approached the issue of women’s rights through a decidedly Islamic framework.

For her, Islam complimented and strengthened Turkish nationalism. Edip similarly understood

women’s societal importance as involving nationalism,

international activism, and Islam. At times these three

factors coalesced into one framework used to address

the Muslim woman question on a global level.

One speech, Edip’s first foray into politics,

cemented Halide Edip’s role as a nationalist visionary

and underscored the ways Islam informed her

understanding of the new Turkish state. Edip

intertwined Islam and nationalism in the hope of

Figure 3.6 Halide Edip delivering speech, 1919 galvanizing people’s support against the occupation of

Izmir by Greek forces after World War I. On June 6,

1919, she found herself traveling down the narrow path of Fuad Pasha Turbesi entering the

Hippodrome, or what is now Sultan Ahmed Square in Istanbul. Right before delivering her speech in front of half a million people, a thought came to her. Reflecting on Islam and her nation she voiced, “Islam, which means peace and the brotherhood of men, is eternal… Turkey, my wronged and martyred nation is also lasting: she not only shares the sins and faults and

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virtues of other peoples, she also has her own spiritual and moral force which no material agency can destroy.”355 Edip understood Turkey’s morality and spirituality as unique— an ethical fabric informed by Islam and therefore “everlasting.”356

This speech is significant for two reasons. First, Edip’s speech and experience illustrated a change in the perception of women’s activism and the space they could occupy. In her memoir, she recalled the Second Constitutional Period (post-1908), as a moment when women as agents of nationalism helped facilitate the creation of the Turkish state. Edip declared, “Women got their real chance in 1908… The very atmosphere became freer for women and it was fully realized that a new Turkey could never be created without them.”357 According to her, a new outlook on women and their role in state formation presented itself during this formative moment that laid the foundation for Turkish nationalism.358 No longer relegated to the private sphere, women brought life to Turkish nationalism.359 Her speech was evidence of this change as Edip

355 Halide Edip, The Turkish Ordeal: Being the Further Memoirs of Halide Edib (New York: The Century Co., 1972), 20.

356 Ansev Demirhan, “Female Muslim Intellectuals: Understanding the History of Turkey’s Woman Question Through the Construction of Islamic Tradition,” (master’s thesis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2014).

357 Edip, The Turkish Ordeal, 215.

358 According to theories on nationalism, women’s roles in national processes included the task of biologically reproducing ethnic collectivities, national groups, participating in the ideological reproduction and signification of nationalism. Additionally, women participated in national economic, political, and military struggles. Halide’s observations on women’s roles in Turkey substantiated these theories. She noted how women broke barriers of seclusion and entered the public realm as a natural right and national obligation. Halide pointed to women’s involvement in the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913 as political organizers, nurses, and educators to support this claim. Edip further contended women’s participation in the war provided society with an alternative outlook on women. Demirhan, “Female Muslim Intellectuals,” 20-22.

359 For more on Halide Edip see Ozgun Basmaz, “‘The Rebellious Daughter of the Republic’ or ‘The Mother of the Turks’: Re-considering the Late Ottoman Empire and the Early Turkish Republic through the Politics of Halide Edip Adivar” (master’s thesis, University of Akron, 2008); Beyhan Uygun Aytemiz, “Halide Edib-Adivar ve Feminist Yazin,” (master’s thesis, Bilkent University, 2001); Hülya Adak, “National Myths and Self-Na(Rra)Tions: Mustafa Kemal’s Nutukand Halide Edib’s Memoirs and The Turkish Ordeal,” South Atlantic Quarterly 102, no. 2–3 (July 1, 2003): 509–27; Ayse Durakbasi, Halide Edib: Turk Modernlesmesi ve Feminizim (Istanbul: Iletisim Yayinlari, 2000); Zeynep Beril Saydun, Construction of Nationalism and Gender in Halide Edib’s Autobiographical Writings: Memoirs of Halide Edib and The Turkish Ordeal (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Veriag Trier, 2008); Hasan, Between

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stood in a square full of people and spoke about contemporary political events to a receptive audience—her gender did not discredit her or her thoughts.

Second, in this speech, Edip did not shy away from using an Islamic framework to promote Turkish independence and nationalism. In contrast to Ziya Gokalp, a Turkish sociologist who greatly influenced Atatürk’s development of Kemalism and Turkish nationalism,

In 1923 Ziya Gokalp published The Principles of Turkism. This book outlined an expansive nationalist identity that he envisioned for Turkey. He detailed a pan-Turkist identity that would ultimately earn him the title “the father of Turkish nationalism.” The new nationalist society

Ziya Gokalp envisioned covered the economic, domestic, aesthetic, philosophical, moral, legal, and political spheres of life. Halide Edip initially looked to Ziya Gökalp as an intellectual mentor. However, Gökalp critiqued Edip’s early novels, suggesting “she lives too much in

Europe,” and Edip broke with Gökalp over the role of Islam in the new Turkish society.360

After 1915 especially, Edip critiqued her mentor’s ideas on society and religion. Gökalp recognized that religion played an important part in national consciousness and could unite people through common sentiments. However, he believed a number of aspects of religion— particularly the Islamic commands on proper social organization of society—were relics from

Arab culture, and therefore had nothing to do with what he identified as “pristine” Islam. He contended that Islam demanded faith of its adherents without confining them to an Islamic understanding of society. Gökalp wanted to develop a religious culture in Turkey that accepted western civilization and made Islam a matter of conscience, private belief. He opined that

Modernity and Nationalism; Aylin Gorgun-Baran, “A Sociological Analysis of Leadership in Turkish Women: Fatma Aliya and Halide Edip Adivar Cases,” American-Eurasian Journal of Scientific Research 3, no. 2 (2008): 132–38; Erdağ Göknar, “Turkish-Islamic Feminism Confronts National Patriarchy: Halide Edib’s Divided Self,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 9, no. 2 (2013): 32–57.

360 Hasan, Between Modernity and Nationalism, 39.

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Turkey, or any Muslim country could not progress or live without a deep reform in Islam, and these reforms meant removing all Islamic institutions from the state and practicing one’s faith privately. The Young Turk government during the late-Ottoman period and the Turkish

Republic, despite their diversity, implemented Ziya Gökalp’s teachings on the role of Islam in

Turkey.

Halide Edip agreed with Gökalp and others on the need to restructure society along nationalistic lines and to promote the secularization of social life. But Edip wanted religion to form the basis for the moral education of youth. She also emphasized Islam in her fight for women’s rights, through an emancipatory interpretation. In her novels, she distinguished the negative and positive ideas of Islamic traditions practiced by Muslims. Often her protagonists held Sufi inclinations and her antagonists adhered strictly to Shari ‘a law. For example, in Vurun

Kahpeye the rigid interpretation of Islamic law prompted the lynching of the good and self- sacrificing heroine, who was also a good Muslim. Here Edip showed that a stringent and patriarchal interpretation of Islam was problematic. Instead, Islamic traditions needed to be reinterpreted and adapted for the contemporary moment. Like Gökalp, Edip wanted social revolution but not at the expense of totally rejecting Islamic traditions and spiritual values.

These are the very values expressed in the works produced during her time abroad and during her exile from Turkey, suggesting a level of continuity between the Turkish woman question and the global Muslim woman question. Halide Edip emphasized international activism as a defining characteristic of the new Turkish woman — a trait informed by Edip’s own experiences abroad. In the years following the formation of the republic, Halide Edip traveled to

America, India, France, and Britain. While in these countries, she lectured and wrote on the social, political, and cultural state of Turkey. In particular she focused on the status of Turkish

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women, but through an Islamic framework. Edip took recourse in the Qur’an to argue for women’s rights. She would often reference Sura IV, Verse 32 which read, “men shall have the benefit of what they earn, and women shall have the benefit of what they earn.”361 For Edip, this

Sura encapsulated the enduring truth that women are autonomous human beings responsible for themselves and capable of contributing to society. In addition to this Sura, Edip presented strong opinions on several Islamic traditions. She understood female seclusion as a gradual deterioration of half of the Islamic world. Polygyny, according to Edip, undermined the unity and strength of Muslim communities because along with the practice of veiling, these traditions shut women off from society and prevented them from contributing to the nation.

While male Ottoman Muslim intellectuals had commonly traveled to various countries as cultural ambassadors, women intellectuals were not afforded the same opportunities. Previously,

Fatma Aliye had hoped Muslim women would fill the role of cultural ambassadors and participate in the deconstruction of Orientalist misconceptions. This hope came to fruition in the

Republican period with the work of Halide Edip. It was in this global context that Edip addressed the Muslim woman question time and again. Halide Edip’s time abroad served as evidence that the Turkish woman question of the interwar period in fact was the continuation of the global

Muslim woman question of the late -nineteenth century. Even more significant was Halide

Edip’s use of the global stage and audience to negotiate political rights for women that were not yet fully actualized in Turkey.

In June 1909, Isabel Fry, an English educationist, hosted Edip’s visit to England. Their meeting led to a deep and enduring friendship that included Edip’s continued visits to England.

Edip’s time in England gave her another platform to present her ideas on the Muslim woman

361 Hasan, 61.

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question. During the interwar period the British Empire continued to be the largest

Muhammadan empire in the world. King George V ruled over half of the world’s Muslims.

Muslim intellectuals in Britain, therefore, closely followed the literature published on Islam and women’s rights.362 It is not difficult to imagine that Edip’s visit and the work she produced while there was read by both the Muslim and non-Muslim public.

In 1928, Edip published a two-part article in the British feminist journal Time and Tide.

Edip opened the first part by critiquing the idea that feminism in the Turkish context was comparable to the Western feminist movement. Halide Edip understood that there were some aspects of women’s liberation in Turkey that overlapped with women’s movements elsewhere, but she wanted to make sure people understood the struggle for women’s rights in Turkey on its own terms. She stated the following:

“In speaking of the emancipation of Turkish women it is not strictly correct to say that it is the outcome of a Feminist movement such as the Western women have experienced… the starting point in the emancipation of Turkish women was wholly different from that of the Western feminists.”363

She identified the Western feminist movement as a separate movement by women to attain political rights, but for Turkey, women’s emancipation was part of a larger struggle for reform and change. She also contended that the reforms affecting women’s lives after 1908 were not an emulation of the West or even a response to the West. Instead, she emphasized that post-1908 reformers made a conscious effort to reestablish an old Turkish tradition that would restore women to their “honoured and equal place in Turkish society.” Edip also emphasized feminist gains prior to the establishment of the Turkish Republic. While the world lauded Atatürk for his

362 Aydin, The Idea of the Muslim World.

363 Halide Edip, Time and Tide, September 21, 1928; Halide Edip, Time and Tide, September 28, 1928.

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reforms and liberation of Turkish women, Edip presented a narrative that suggested efforts to liberate women began well before his presidency.

She highlighted how in ten years (starting in 1908), the Young Turks managed to build an education system for both men and women that was “efficient” and “up-to- date.” Here she detailed women’s education and how the facilities changed from dingy worn out buildings to beautiful structures that housed modern educational equipment and professors who were products of German and French universities. In 1916, Ottoman women gained access to universities and were allowed to pursue fields of study in everything except medicine and law.

Universities’ refusal to allow women to study medicine and law prompted the Minister of

Education to come up with an alternative for women. When professors refused to accept women as medical students, he sent a considerable number of women to German and Swiss universities.

Edip cited two women who benefitted from the minister’s support: Dr. Safiye Ali, who practiced in Constantinople as head of a women’s health institution, and Dr. Bedriye who was the head of the Hygiene Department in Angora. Witnessing the capabilities of women as doctors finally forced the Medical School in Constantinople to accept women. Like women’s advancements,

Edip argued the secularization of the legal system in Turkey predated Atatürk.

Edip addressed how WWI changed things for women by increasing their public recognition. With Turkish men on the front, government offices hired women, trade and commerce drew in women, the army organized women labor battalions for agriculture and the needs of the Army. Edip credited Enver Pasha with these changes. However, while he accepted women’s labor and their desire for an education, he was obstinate in his belief that men and women should not mix in society. Edip suggested that societal changes affecting gender

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socialization were so strong that, despite Enver Pasha’s objections, he could not curb men and women who “had their minds on moving forward towards enfranchisement.”

In this article, Edip called attention to society beyond the Palace. She agreed with the criticism that the women of the harem were not treated ideally, while acknowledging the fact that many of the Sultans’ female relatives were connected to several public works. These projects included —mosques, schools, bridges, roads, soup kitchens and hospitals. Despite these public services, Edip recognized the Seraglio system (i.e. the separation of men and women in public), as problematic, with the most detrimental effect being on the minds of Europeans. She stated,

“up to this day, the average western mind imagines Turkish women in beautiful clothes, herded together to serve the pleasure of their master.” But she calls her audience to look beyond the

“glittering layer” of the palace and to consider the average Turkish woman. These average

Turkish women lived in homes, took charge of their family, and succeeded in their everyday tasks. Their labor produced weaving, sewing, catering, all while raising their children.

In the second part of the article released a week later, Halide Edip addressed issues on law and marriage. First, she addressed polygyny, a key aspect of the Muslim woman question.

Her own father engaged in polygyny, which led to an unhappy household, and Edip’s own first marriage ended because her husband wanted to take a second wife. In her Memoirs published two years before these articles were published in Britain, she declared on the issue of polygyny that,

“When a woman suffers because of her husband’s secret love-affairs, the pain may be keen, but its quality is different. When a second wife enters her home and usurps half her power, she is a public martyr and feels herself an object of curiosity and pity. However humiliating this may be, the position in this case gives a woman…unquestioned…. isolation.”364

364 Edib, Memoirs of Halide Edib, 143.

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In the article itself, she stated that your average Turkish woman “rarely allowed polygyny [sic], and if the husband was stupid enough to take a second wife, the wife saw to it that he regretted it to the end of his days.” She suggested that women controlled and influenced the practice of polygyny. At one level the act could only happen with the consent of a wife, and at another level if their consent was not given, they could influence the level of happiness in the home. While there were little to no political gains in regards to suffrage by 1928 in Turkey, marriage laws seriously occupied the minds of reformers. These reformers insisted that until polygyny was abolished by law, the state could not be called “decent.”365

Halide Edip believed that Islam served as a manual for how one should live their life.

She wrote, “Islam is not merely a religion. It is a state—a monumental code which covers men’s

[mankind’s] actions in every sphere.”366 This understanding influenced how she interpreted the relationship between the marriage law of 1917, which safeguarded women’s right to divorce, and

Islam. She believed the law did not contradict the edicts of Islam, because Islam regarded marriage as a legal contract between two people. As a result, women could refuse to engage in polygynous marriages by declaring in their marriage contracts an equal right to divorce. Edip regarded the marriage law of 1917 as the beginning of a woman’s ability to be an arbiter of her own married life. She pointed out how at the time this law was much more liberal than western laws regarding marriage and that educated Turkish women took advantage of this law by arranging their marriage contracts accordingly. By 1923, Turkey adopted the Swiss Code and article 112 outlawed polygyny. Edip wrote in the article, “This article does away legally with polygyny, and is the most serious and important contribution of the Republic to general reform in

365 Edip, Time and Tide, September 21, 1928; Edip, Time and Tide, September 28, 1928.

366 Edip, Time and Tide, September 21, 1928; Edip, Time and Tide, September 28, 1928.

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Turkey.”367 To close out the article, Edip highlighted that as far as she was concerned, Turkish women’s equal political rights remained unresolved.

During her tenure in America in 1928, as a lecturer for the Institute of Politics, Halide

Edip wrote an op-ed in the New York Times.368 Published on October 7th, “A Turkish Feminist

Views Women Here” compared American and Turkish women’s societal positions retrospectively and in the contemporary moment. In this article, Edip linked the Turkish woman question to the Muslim woman question. She focused on the social unit of marriage and assessed the similarities and differences between American and Turkish women. Edip unsurprisingly used marriage as a comparative tool as western politicians and intellectuals had frequently used polygyny as proof of the Ottoman Empire’s civilizational backwardness during the latter half of the nineteenth-century. Initially, Edip suggested a core similarity between married Turkish and

American women, but she highlighted the privileges Turkish women held over their American counterparts, particularly in the realm of property rights. Her reflection on Western perceptions of Ottoman women and their “oppression” at the hands of Islam compelled Edip to declare

American, not Muslim, women “had a serious handicap in those days” because of their lack of property rights. In celebrating Muslim women’s property rights, Edip reflected a continued interpretation of Islamic traditions concerning the woman question. Instead of highlighting the

Ottoman Empire as the grantor of property rights to women, Edip stated that interpretations of

Shari’a law granted women property rights. In discussing Turkish women, Edip chose to

367 Edip, Time and Tide, September 21, 1928; Edip, Time and Tide, September 28, 1928.

368 Halide Edip, Turkey Faces West: A Turkish View of Recent Changes and their Origin (New Haven: Yale, 1930). This was first published in 1930 and reprinted by Yale University Press a couple of months later. It is based on lectures delivered at the Institute of Politics at Williamstown in Massachusetts. The introduction begins with an Arab proverb “everything goes back to its origin.”

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highlight Ottoman women’s rights vis-à-vis Islamic traditions. This choice linked her intellectual work to that of the work of Ottoman Muslim modernists, like Fatma Aliye. Through this and other works, Edip cemented the relationship between the “new Turkish woman,” and Ottoman women of the past.

This connection is furthered in the second part of the article through Edip’s discussion of worldly concerns and connections. The new outlook on women in the Turkish Republic afforded

Edip the opportunity to voice her thoughts in an international context, imagining a role for women beyond national boundaries. Edip stated, “When I tried to visualize a future when the

Turkish women will also be free and able to work for a larger humanity, the two young faces and minds [Turkish and American] stood side by side.”369 She stressed the importance of women and their ability to contribute on an international scale. Also, Edip understood the international platform as a viable space to discuss the domestic issues Turkish women faced. She declared

“New Turkey began to take shape when Turkish men started to make women matter as much as men.”370 The Republic of Turkey’s existence rested on women’s equal standing in society. Edip stated, “Turkish democracy will be safely launched when Turkish women have the vote.”371

Halide Edip gave lectures in India while it was still colonized by the British and against the backdrop of rising nationalism. Indian Muslims were very disappointed with the abolishment of the caliphate, but they still followed the Turkish Republic’s experience of Islamic reform closely.372 Halide Edip would end up mediating the concerns of Indian Muslim reformers, who

369 Halide Edip, “A Turkish Feminist Views Women Here,” New York Times, October 7, 1928.

370 Edip, “A Turkish Feminist Views Women Here.”

371 Edip, “A Turkish Feminist Views Women Here.”

372 Smita Tewari Jassal and Halil Turan, eds., New Perspectives on India and Turkey: Connections and Debates (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018).

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felt Turkey’s top down radical reforms were at the expense of Islam and Muslim feminists who wanted social and political rights for women through the reinterpretation of Islamic traditions.

Since the late -nineteenth century, Indian Muslim reformists followed the intellectual and political developments in Istanbul closely. These Indian modernists were responsible for the

Urdu translation of Fatma Aliye’s book Nisvan-ı İslam.

Unsurprisingly, there were prominent Indian Muslim women intellectuals speaking in

Istanbul during the 1935 International Alliance of Women congress. In contrast to the Kemalist feminism that internalized the stigmas of

Oriental backwardness and Western superiority in women’s rights, Shareefah

Hamid Ali, an Indian feminist and nationalist, sharply rejected the notions of Western superiority in civilization and women’s rights.

In her speech at the 1935 congress on behalf of the All India Women’s Conference, Figure 3.7 Shareefah Hamid Ali

Shareefah Hamid Ali criticized feminist Orientalism, which may have been a critique of Turkish republican reforms that relied on the same Orientalist ideas. Shareefah Hamid Ali declared on behalf of “we of the East…. [warned] you of the West that any arrogant assumption of superiority or of patronage on the part of Europe or America, any undue pressure of enforcement of religion or government or of trade or economic ‘spheres of influence’; will alienate Asia, and

Africa and with it the womanhood of Asia and Africa.” She emphatically denounced the idea that imperial powers could civilize “backward” people in the colonies, characterizing that belief as

“hypothetical and wrong.” She stated, “Ethiopians might as well someday pretend to go and

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civilize Italy, or China to civilize Japan. The civilization of peoples in Africa and Asia may be different from the European, but it has the same right of existence as that of Europe.” Hers was a particularly powerful voice questioning the very foundation of European imperialism. Ali’s position was indicative of the feminist consciousness and women’s movement in India.373 Halide

Edip could not join the Istanbul conference in 1935 due to her status as an exile, but she gave lectures in British ruled India. Later that same year Halide Edip would travel to India and speak on Muslim women’s rights. The global networks between Muslim intellectuals that existed in the late-nineteenth century continued throughout the interwar period.

Dr. Mukhtar Ahmed Ansari, the Chancellor of Jamia Millia Islamia, invited Halide Edip to New Delhi as a guest lecturer in 1935.374 Dr. Ansari founded the university and served as its president. Dr. Ansari previously led an Indian Muslim medical mission to Turkey during the

Balkan Wars of 1911-1912. He was known as a pro-Turkish Pan-Islamist as well as a prominent member of the Indian National Congress close to both Ghandi and Nehru. He hosted Edip’s visit and wrote to a friend in Madras, “you know what a great world figure she is, and whether you look on her as a Turkish feminist leader, as a world-renowned authority on education or as a great writer, she is one of those rare personalities whose visit is a matter of great moment to us.”375 While in India Edip travelled to Bombay,376 Hyderabad, the villages of Marela and

373 There was also an anti-colonial element to Edip’s work. For more on this see Alparslan Nas, “Inside India, Outside of Kemalism: Analysis of Halide Edib’s Writings on Anti-Colonialism,” International Journal of Humanities and Social Science 3, no. 7 (April 2013): 187–93.

374 In 2006, Jamia named its women’s hostel after Halide Edip.

375 Hasan, Between Modernity and Nationalism, 128.

376 Bombay was Halide’s first port of Halt. January 9th, 1935. This fell on Id-uzzuha (Bakr Id) (Kurban Bayrami in Turkish or Eid of sacrifice), a day of religious celebration for Muslims. She noted how after eight years in exile she was able to celebrate in a Muslim country.

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Bakhnir,377 and Dehli. More important were the people she met with during her time in India.

She networked with Muhammad Iqbal,378 Nehru, Gandhi, writer Atiya Begum Fyzee - an active advocate of education for Indian Muslim girls - and Nazli Begum - elder sister of Atiya Begum and one of the first Indian women to come out of purdah and study in London.379 Halide delivered eight lectures at Jamia that were eventually compiled and published as East Faces

West: Impressions of a Turkish Writer in India.380 In some ways, this work was a record of events and a portrait gallery of personalities. It had stories of people she met and of old acquaintances renewed. It helped, moreover, to define the direction of political movements in

Turkey and India in general, and “Muslim politics” in particular.381 In these lectures Edip delineated the contours of early Turkish history and addressed the Muslim woman question.

However, her discussions of women’s rights and Islamic customs were intended to highlight the importance of these issues in India’s new nationalist context. By addressing Islam Edip tried to create a space for the religion within India’s nationalist movement, by highlighting its importance.

Within the colonial state of India, issues of women’s rights and sovereignty existed in a domestic realm, removed from the political arena. According to British imperial secularism, colonial rulers managed the military and political affairs of the colony, but did not interfere in

377 This is where Gandhi started his village programs to advance their local economy through industry starting in January 1935.

378 He chaired the lecture she gave on January 31st, 1935.

379 Purdah is a custom found in some Muslim and Hindu cultures, where women are kept from being seen by men they are not related to through physical seclusion.

380 Hasan, Between Modernity and Nationalism, 35–60.

381 Hasan, 129.

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the religious lives of the subjects. Thus, British colonial rulers of India regulated Muslim personal and family law according to a codified version of Shari ‘a. Muslim intellectuals addressed cultural and legal equality of the sexes; however, reforms were not pursued with political fervor because of the colonial conditions. Therefore, issues regarding women’s liberation were ignored in negotiations with the colonial state. Even though women voiced their grievances and experiences, their concerns were of diminished importance in the period of nationalism. The modernization agenda in colonial and nationalist discourses did not include women’s wider social transformation. This was the context in which Halide Edip delivered her speeches. A closer look at these speeches reveals how aware Edip was of this context in her desire to create space for Muslim women and legitimize their equal political access and societal participation.

Edip discussed Islam, nationalism, and women as an interdependent triumvirate in the speeches she delivered in India in 1935. Edip’s nationalism established a relationship between religion and culture. Unconfined to the world of worship and belief, religion extended into the practices of daily life. According to Edip, religion heavily embedded the world of customs, and vice versa:

“The supreme aim of Islam being social justice, it could not leave half of society out of consideration… Islam instituted marriage, limited the number of wives and in case of divorce bound the husband to pay alimony. It inculcated a chivalrous attitude towards women in general and meted out equal punishment in cases of immorality. But its greatest significance for the modern world is that it is the first system which accords property and economic rights to women and makes them independent of the guardianship of their men.”382

According to Halide Edip, the institution of marriage, property and economic rights, and issues of morality were customs intrinsically tied to Islam and at the foundation of women’s equality

382 Halide Edip, Conflict of East and West in Turkey (Delhi: Maktaba Jamia Millia Islamia, 1929), 199.

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and rights. As previously mentioned, there were several reforms impacting women directly during the early years of the Turkish Republic. These reforms reflected not an organic desire to better the lives of Turkish women, but rather a nationalist concern to court positive Western impressions of Turkey’s treatment of women. Turkish leaders presumed reform within Islamic legal tradition could not afford women their rights, so they discarded the possibility in favor of the Swiss Civil Code. These gender reforms helped garner international legitimacy for the

Turkish nation-state. Atatürk and most of the Western world understood secular-democratic governance as the only way to ensure women’s equality. However, Edip disagreed with this approach because she believed true egalitarian principles lay within Islam, and therefore reforms could be achieved with reinterpretations of Islamic traditions. As Indians moved forward in their nationalist endeavors, she hoped they would not abandon their faith for a secular model.

Edip’s discussion of women’s rights within Islam created a space for Islam and Turkish nationalism to merge. Her commentary on veiling presented another example of Islam’s importance to society and Turkish nationalism vis-à-vis the woman question. She stated:

“The Koran (Sura 24, verse 31) commands women to pay due regard to their dress, enjoining them to wear veils that will cover the sides of their head, their bosom and their ornaments; there is no order to cover their faces, still less are they expected to shut themselves up and abstain from social activities. The Prophet's own wife was one of the most remarkable women, with a great social reputation. In this commandment we see two things, first, that women should be decently dressed, even if they desire to make themselves beautiful, and secondly, what is more significant, they are asked not to use their beauty and sex to exploit their fellow-creatures. This is just what a modern feminist or any healthy society aims at.”383

383 Edip, Conflict of East and West in Turkey, 201.

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Edip viewed the veil as a symbol of social integration and feminist activity. She further suggested that wearing a veil simultaneously expressed the Islamic faith of the people and nationalist sentiments.384

CONCLUSION

Atatürk and the Turkish government prioritized Western perceptions of the newly formed nation-state above authentic cultural and feminist models of reform. Atatürk sought global recognition that Turkey was a fully modern and civilized nation. Muslim feminists who wanted substantive change were bothered by the superficial policies that suggested an internalization of

Orientalist ideas. These women never gave up critiquing Eurocentrism and Orientalism.

Furthermore, they continued to reform and reinterpret Islamic traditions that aligned with their emancipatory goals. Halide Edip, and others, represent a point of divergence from the complete celebration of Kemalist reforms. Prior to Atatürk’s state-sponsored feminism, the dominant feminist discourse engaged with a careful examination of Islamic traditions in order to reconcile ideas of modernity, civilization and women’s rights. Despite Atatürk’s desire to solidify the international prestige of the Turkish nation through wholesale Westernization, Halide Edip continued to use an Islamic framework when both critiquing the new regime and fighting for women’s rights. This chapter showed how Turkish and other Muslim women’s responses to

Turkish reforms revealed the continuation of the intellectual legacy that informed the global

Muslim woman question.

384 Edip, Conflict of East and West in Turkey, 203.

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CONCLUSION

The female university students whose words opened this dissertation revealed the debate on Muslim women continued well after the interwar period. These women pushed against and challenged the false dichotomies that rendered veiled Turkish women subjugated, these dichotomies were the very same ones that affected the lives of Muslim women over the course of a century. Unfortunately, the efforts of these female university students did not culminate with a legal reform recognizing their right to veil until decades later. The headscarf ban issue resurfaced with vigor in 2008 when the Justice and Development Party (AKP) successfully proposed a constitutional amendment that would make it unconstitutional for universities to ban the headscarf. The Republican People’s Party (CHP) immediately filed suit with the Constitutional

Court to overturn the law, declaring that the law violated the Republic’s secular principles. On

January of 2008, one of Turkey’s highest courts, the Council of State (Danıştay), advised universities to adhere to the headscarf ban. The court argued that allowing headscarves in universities would encourage women to veil in other public spaces, “ultimately hurting peace in society.”385 Later that same year, the Constitutional Court annulled the AKP’s amendment, stating that it “violated the unchangeable laws of the constitution that define the essential characteristics of the Republic.”386 The headscarf ban was fully lifted in 2013.

385 The Headscarf debate intensiﬁes in Turkey, New York Times, January 19, 2008. As quoted in: Mustafa E. Gurbuz “Over the Bodies of the T-Girls: The Headscarf Ban as a Secular Effort to Monopolize Islam in Turkey,” Middle East Critique, 18:3, 231-249, 2009. DOI: 10.1080/19436140903237046

386 Ibid, 232.

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Over the course of Turkey’s three-decade controversy around the headscarf ban, a

Muslim woman’s right to wear a headscarf became a focus of international media attention and political conflict. As they had for decades, Turkey’s Kemalists looked to the West for both inspiration and legitimacy, using France’s own veiling ban to buttress their position. If the

French Republic, a Western democracy - banned the headscarf, then certainly Turkey’s ban was in line with democratic principles.387 Meanwhile, generations of Muslim women intellectuals produced more nuanced arguments and critiques on the issue of gender equality within Islamic tradition, hoping to deepen the terms of this debate and advance Muslim women’s rights.

The headscarf controversies of the late 20th century represented the culmination of tensions embedded in the modern Turkish state from its inception. When the Turkish Republic was established in 1923, its leaders placed a special emphasis on its secular and Westernized nature and represented it as a break from a “backward” Ottoman past. In so doing, the Republic’s leaders posed Islam and modernity as fundamentally incompatible, politically strengthening the conceptual binary that would lead to the headscarf ban. Since then, collective memory efforts that present Ottoman Muslim women as silenced and secluded have reinforced this binary. The modern Turkish state, in this telling, emerges as the savior of these historically oppressed women, granting them freedom through the right to unveil and participate in the public sphere.388

For Kemalist secularists, then, Turkish Muslim women who choose to veil create cognitive dissonance. These political figures, and many everyday citizens alike, cannot understand how

Muslim women could be both educated professionals and choose to practice the “oppressive”

Islamic tradition of veiling. Having used Muslim women’s bodies as markers of the successes

387 Joan Scott, The Politics of the Veil. Princeton, (N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010).

388 Gurbuz, “Over the Bodies of the T-Girls: The Headscarf Ban as a Secular Effort to Monopolize Islam in Turkey,” 234.

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and failures of the Turkish Republic and Kemalism, secularists cannot understand these women as modern. These intellectual weaknesses continue to drive political and social tensions to this day, as mainstream political debate prefers to use Muslim women’s bodies as political symbols, instead of looking to their minds for political possibilities. This dissertation shows that Muslim women intellectuals long worked to create a form of Muslim feminism which fought to dismantle these false dichotomies from the late-nineteenth century onwards.

Chapter one revealed that the nineteenth century witnessed the emergence of a global

Muslim woman question. This debate emerged from a larger racialized discourse on Muslim societies that was used by Western nations to justify the discriminatory treatment of Muslims in global affairs. The status of Muslim women became the linchpin of the Orientalist discourse which argued for the inferiority of Muslim societies. In response to this discriminatory discourse, late-nineteenth century Muslim modernists answered with their own arguments about Muslim women and gender reforms in the Muslim world. These modernists facilitated a global conversation on the Muslim woman question. Most importantly, chapter one showed that the

Muslim woman intellectual Fatma Aliye was not only actively involved in the debate in the

1890s, but played a pivotal role in outlining the terms of the global Muslim woman question itself.

Aliye’s answer to the Muslim woman question went beyond simply responding to

Orientalist claims. Instead, Aliye offered a double-edged critique which responded to Western

Orientalism, but also took to task the unjust treatment of Muslim women. Aliye used her own interpretations of Islamic traditions to simultaneously reject European discourses on Muslim women and demand rights and reform within her own society. Ultimately, this chapter argued that Aliye’s use of an Islamic framework to consider the question of women’s rights positioned

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her at the forefront of a transregional discussion on what it meant to be a modern Muslim woman. She not only joined in, but extended the boundaries of, the transregional debate on

Muslim women’s social roles. Her efforts helped create an intellectual space for other women after her to take control of global and local narratives on Turkish Muslim women.

Chapter two focused on the women who contributed to the pages of the journal Kadınlar

Dünyası (1913-1921), revealing that they inherited Fatma Aliye’s legacy while responding in their own ways to the global Muslim woman question. By the Constitutional Era (1908-1920), the debate on Muslim women, discussed by elite and bureaucratic men and women in earlier decades, had filtered down to the middle classes. During this period of significant geopolitical transition, middle-class women used the pages of the journal Kadınlar Dünyası to debate the global Muslim woman question. Their work in this journal suggests a further internationalization of reformist visions and ideas on Muslim womanhood. Moreover, these Muslim intellectuals were able to impact both domestic and international politics. Late Ottoman-era Muslim women aligned with and actively participated in the international women’s movement. This ongoing exchange compelled them to critique the ideological limits they saw within the women’s movement, namely Christian/European biases towards Muslim women. By engaging with the global Muslim woman question in the context of the international women’s movement, these

Muslim women intellectuals found ways to deconstruct Orientalist ideas on Muslim women and challenge liberal international feminism to think and act beyond stereotypes about Muslim women.

Yet, at the same time as they tried to correct the inaccurate ideas on Muslim women within internationalist Western feminist discourse, the women who wrote in Kadınlar Dünyası simultaneously pressured the Young Turk government to make legal and institutional reforms

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regarding Ottoman women’s rights at home. Even though Muslim women intellectuals celebrated the reforms and freedoms they gained after the 1908 revolution, they understood the revolution as incomplete. While they supported the Young Turks, they pushed for more women’s rights during the Constitutional Era. They contributed to a bourgeoning feminist movement within the empire, advocating for the implementation of progressive reforms. Moreover, their ideas were at times translated into action. These Muslim feminists were at the helm of various projects related to equal education, legal reform on gender equality, and women’s economic independence. The journal also printed the first pictures of Muslim women in the

Ottoman press, challenging ideas of the “exotic” Orient by presenting Muslim women as feminist intellectuals. The internationally engaged Muslim women intellectuals discussed in chapter two were aware of the political and racial implications of the global Muslim women question, and like Aliye, offered a critique of both retrogressive religious and western interpretations that inhibited women’s equality at home and within the international women’s movement.

These Ottoman Muslim women intellectuals engaged in complex ways with discourses about culture, modernity, and women’s rights. On the one hand, their internationalism exposed a fissure between Muslim feminists and the international women’s movement. For example, the

IAW’s official journal Jus Suffragii continued to present orientalist depictions of Muslim women, despite Ottoman Muslim women continually exposing the false nature of these claims.

In order to challenge the European public and Western feminists on this score, Kadınlar Dünyasi published a French supplement in which these intellectuals reiterated their own version of

Muslim feminism, reinterpreted Islamic texts, and presented an emancipatory Muslim universalism. On the other hand, these ideas were sometimes formulated at the expense of other

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cultures and religions. These intellectuals occasionally highlighted Islam’s superiority over other

Eastern religions in civilizational terms in order to elevate Ottoman women’s position in the eyes of Western audiences. Thus, even Muslim feminists who sought to dispel orientalist claims about

Islam at times employed a markedly similar discursive framework when describing other non-

Western cultures. Internalized Eurocentric ideas of progress and civilization led some to destigmatize Islam and Muslims at the expense of stigmatizing other cultures and religious traditions. Still, overall, the writers of Kadınlar Dünyasi advocated a form of progress for

Muslim women that evolved from indigenous roots and authentic interpretations, rather than being rooted in Western judgements and approval. Their vision for reform meant engaging with and reinterpreting Islamic traditions in order to regain control of their identities and partake in an indigenous feminist movement.

Chapter three argues that, during the Republican period, Ataturk ruptured the vibrant intellectual tradition produced by Muslim women intellectuals in an effort to win global legitimacy for the Turkish nation. In fact, because of the decades-long efforts of these women intellectuals, the transition from empire to nation-state presented two possible paths forward for the new Republic of Turkey vis-à-vis the global Muslim woman question. In one potentiality,

Turkey might have built on the intellectual legacy of the Muslim feminist intellectuals who had reconciled religion and modernity and used an Islamic framework to advance women’s rights.

The second possibility, ultimately pursued by Ataturk, presented a shortcut whereby Turkey’s civilization legitimacy would be secured through the whole-sale adoption of western modernization. As the Muslim woman question continued to operate as a global discourse,

Kemalist reforms emerged as a dominant response, including the pursuit of unveiling and the adoption of European civil codes through the abolishment of Muslim legal tradition. And these

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reforms worked according to Kemalist aims: republican reforms clearly changed European public opinion and international feminist perception of the Turkish Republic, which began to be seen as less “Muslim,” and therefore more “civilized.”

Ataturk and Kemalism succeeded in obscuring other historically and politically significant responses to the global Muslim woman question during the Republican era. Western audiences and the international women’s movement largely accepted and lauded Kemalist gender reforms as a solution to the Muslim woman question. Partially as a result, the Kemalist answer overshadowed the continued efforts of international Muslim women intellectuals, like

Halide Edip, who argued that Kemalism was not their ideal solution. Moreover, Ataturk’s reforms reframed the Muslim woman question as the Turkish woman question, ignoring the continued and specific preoccupation with Muslim women by westerners. By reframing the discourse as a national woman question, Kemalist reforms negated and undermined the internationalist arguments posed by Muslim feminist intellectuals during the Republican period.

Ultimately, historians have reproduced the limitations of the nationalist intellectual project that created the “Turkish woman question,” ignoring the true global dimension of this debate. As a result, this historiography has failed to properly consider the intellectuals who participated in a nuanced and significant discourse on what it meant to be a modern Muslim woman during the inter-war period.

In fact, Kemalist reforms did not actually resolve the global Muslim woman question or satisfy its most important participants – women themselves. Muslim feminists in the Republic continued to engage robustly with the question in the 1920s and 1930s and some even suggested that the Kemalist response was insufficient or counterproductive. In fact, the ongoing tensions around the headscarf, decades after the formation of the Republic, suggests the intellectual

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failures of the Kemalist response to the global Muslim woman question. Kemalists put the rejection of Islam at the heart of the “liberation” of Turkish women and used that pairing as the foundation for claims to civilizational and geopolitical legitimacy. In so doing, the leaders of the

Turkish republic reproduced and solidified Eurocentric stereotypes rather than transcending them. In contrast, intellectuals like Halide Edip continued to engage with the global Muslim woman question in a different, and altogether more nuanced, way. She publicly disagreed with the Kemalist response because it was detached from Islamic traditions and offered only what she considered to be superficial changes to satisfy the Western orientalist gaze and its obsession with

Muslim women. International Muslim women intellectuals, and those who participated in the

Eastern Women’s Congresses, wanted reform to be grounded in Muslim religious traditions.

Though it might satisfy the West, the simple and superficial act of abandoning the veil would not promise true liberation. For most of these Muslim feminists, the veil was not even a central issue in their struggle for Muslim women’s emancipation and equal rights.

Chapter three showed how intertwined the formation of the new Turkish Republic was with the discourse on the global Muslim woman question. The nation’s legitimacy rested on the

Kemalist embrace of a particular answer to that question. This intellectual entanglement left a long-lasting effect on the nation, most crucially in the solidification of strict political dichotomies that dictated how Muslim Turkish women would be understood for decades to come. The political narratives created by and around Turkey’s secularization/westernizaiton process eventually erased the historical memory of generations of Muslim women intellectuals and their achievements. These women’s intellectualism produced a double critique of Eurocentric racial discourses on Muslim societies and gender inequality at home. Recovering some of this overlooked history will hopefully do justice to the intellectual achievements of Muslim women

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of the past, and perhaps contribute to contemporary Muslim feminists’ efforts to transcend reductive and dichotomous narratives that continue to ask us to believe that Muslim women are, simply by virtue of their religion, oppressed.

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