BEYOND THE VEIL

 

Two women jump rope in an impromptu session on an Istanbul street.

 

FOR MUSLIM WOMEN, THE CREATION of the secular state was often said to have ushered in liberation from the double yoke of tradition and religion. “The shape of social life changed,” recalled Mîna Urgan, a prominent Turkish writer and academic. “Women were no longer kept at home. They could go out with boys, have fun together, eat and drink together.”

Unlike the fez for men, Islamic head coverings for women were never fully banned, although official discourse discouraged them as retrograde and uncivilized. Headscarves and veils were not allowed inside state institutions—which included everything from schools to government ministries—and within short order, Istanbul’s Muslim elite adopted styles of female dress little different from those in other parts of Europe. Window screens, which had secluded many Muslim women from public view, finally came down in 1930 as part of a national hygiene law to let more light and air into dank interior apartments. That reform alone ended what must once have been a brisk clandestine economy. Travelers’ accounts of surreptitious visits behind the screened-off world of feminine Istanbul are so numerous that the Ottoman city must have enjoyed a roaring trade in harem tourism—in reality, probably visits to disguised brothels—for gullible Europeans.

All these practices had already begun to fade by the beginning of the twentieth century, however. The full seclusion of women under the Ottomans was largely a middle- and upper-class Muslim phenomenon, as was the wearing of elaborate veils or other coverings. The types and sizes of veils were matters of adornment and style, not just a marker of religious piety. Women from rural or working-class backgrounds might wear long scarves that could be pulled over their faces in the presence of male strangers, but the full-length çaraf—a large, circular piece of fabric covering the head, face, and clothing—was generally a fashion of the wives and daughters of the elite. The idea of Muslim women being carted through the streets in servant-borne sedan chairs, or gesturing coyly through their window screens at passersby, were likewise already part of the distant—and largely imagined—past.

But the real innovation under Mustafa Kemal was to formalize women’s rights in a system of legal equality, in theory making Muslim women genuine partners in building the republic. The new Swiss-inspired civil code abolished polygamy, ended the preferential treatment of men in the inheritance of property, and affirmed a woman’s right to divorce her husband. Public harassment was made a criminal offense, and in 1930 women were given the vote in municipal elections. Four years later, the franchise was extended to elections for the Grand National Assembly, and eighteen women were soon elected to the legislature—more than double the number in the US Congress at the time.

Legal rights for women were secured, but the emerging state was traditionalist when it came to their real place in public life. Women were by and large written into the new republic’s history as a group but written out of it as individuals. When they did appear, it was usually as cardboard heroines, women who sacrificed themselves for the nationalist cause or took up patriotic professions in service to the republic. Newspapers were filled with stories of female firsts. The first Muslim female lawyer to appear before a court in Istanbul, Beyhan Hanım, approached the bar in 1928 and was later elevated to a judgeship. The first surgeon, Suad Hanım, was accredited in 1931, and the first pharmacist, Belkıs Hanım, accepted her license the same year. The first wrestler, Emine Hanım, stepped forward in 1932 to take on any male competitor who dared accept her standing challenge. The first female tramway conductors did not appear until 1941, but a satisfied public deemed them more polite than their male counterparts.

Like much of Kemalism, however, the world did not change suddenly with the proclamation of the republic, nor did the gains achieved by women erase old social habits. Even in the last days of the sultans, Istanbul women tended to marry later, have fewer children, and divorce more readily than in other Islamic societies. Women were already very much part of social space. They attended public entertainments. They could be seen transacting business in the arcades off the Petits-Champs or dining in the Pera Palace restaurant. By 1920, more than a third of the employees in Pera’s department stores were women, and even in the more conservative areas south of the Golden Horn, women accounted for nearly twenty percent of sales clerks. Many of these women were Christians and Jews who led lives little different from those of women in other European cities at the same time, but sizable numbers of Muslim women were clearly in the public eye as well. Tramcars accommodated both genders (even though curtains separated the men’s section from the women’s), and during the Allied occupation, Muslim men and women appeared together in theaters, cinemas, and other gathering places.

The first women’s organizations had been formed soon after the Young Turk revolution, part of the general upsurge in liberal and reform-oriented groups that sprang up in the city in the relative freedom afforded by the restoration of the constitution. Like their counterparts elsewhere in Europe, these associations often sought to liberate women by elevating them. Their leaders—chiefly from prominent Ottoman families—regarded increasing literacy and opening a new range of educational opportunities as essential to preparing women to take a more active role in public life.

Educated Muslim women were involved in the Turkish Hearth movement, a set of discussion clubs on culture and current affairs that became the nucleus of anti-occupation sentiment after 1918. Their names appeared as bylines in a range of publications on politics, international affairs, education, and other topics, while specialized journals such as Kadınlar Dünyası (Women’s World) featured work by women essayists and artists. Mass rallies in 1919 and 1920, called to protest the Hellenic occupation of Smyrna and the Allied presence in Istanbul, featured female speakers prominently calling on their Turkish brothers to oppose the dismemberment of their country.

After the First World War, the expansion of women in the workforce probably had as much to do with a fundamental demographic crisis as with the liberal ideas of Turkish nationalists. By the time of the 1927 census, a million women across the country were widows, and in Istanbul a third of all married women had lost their husbands to war, disease, or other causes. More women became the principal breadwinners in their families than at any other time in Turkish history, largely as a result of grueling violence and refugee flight. Women of all classes and religions were taking up public space, confidently and deliberately, long before they were given express permission to do so by the government. Nezihe Muhidin, one of the major organizers of the women’s rights movement in Istanbul and founder of the Turkish Women’s Union, even attempted to form a women’s political party in the summer of 1923. It was technically the first party created in Turkey, founded several months before Mustafa Kemal’s own Republican People’s Party. The administration refused to register it.

Turkish politicians sometimes claimed that women themselves were the main obstacles to female progress. Burdened by their own narrow horizons, they were simply failing to take up the new opportunities afforded them by changes in the civil code. “The duty of Turkish Women’s Societies is primarily to persuade the great majority of Turkish women to accept the rights that have already been granted to them,” said Milliyet in an editorial in 1927. “These societies, prior to occupying themselves with the organization of political life and in struggles against men, should interest themselves in other women and should combat the primitive state of mind shown by them.”

Istanbul women walking near the Galata Bridge, with the Yeni (New) mosque in the background.

It was an argument that reappeared with frequency: The advances women had made were the beneficent gift of the state; the deficiencies were of their own making. The republic even had a semiofficial voice dedicated to making precisely that point. Afet nan, one of Mustafa Kemal’s adopted daughters, became the chief female spokesperson for the one-party government. Like so many other republican elites, she was born in Salonica and studied in Istanbul’s French schools, later working as a teacher in the city of Bursa. Taken under Mustafa Kemal’s wing in the mid-1920s, she studied at the University of Geneva in the 1930s and, as a practicing sociologist, turned her academic training toward crafting the president’s personality cult. She remained one of the principal expounders of Kemalism as a coherent political ideology and a major codifier of the official history of the revolution’s contribution to women’s liberation.

Other women were not so fortunate. Nezihe Muhidin’s women’s organization was closed down in the 1930s as part of the general retrenchment against independent civic associations. But even then it was still possible to wonder whether the republic might take a different path from the one laid out for it in the ever-narrowing vision of Kemalism. There was no better example of that possibility than one of the women who had stood before the cheering crowds near the Sultanahmet mosque in 1919, railing against the Allied occupation and urging Istanbullus to stand firmly on the side of the nationalists. It was both the first and the last time a woman would have such a prominent political voice at a crucial moment in Turkey’s history.

If one were looking for a symbol of late-Ottoman optimism—the hope that Islam, modernity, and imperial revival could be harmoniously combined—Halide Edip would be a good candidate. She represented the best of what the old empire could still produce. She was born into a respected Ottoman family in 1884 and grew up in the green environs of the Bosphorus, first near the forested campus of the sultan’s Yıldız Palace and then on the Asian side in the suburb of Üsküdar. The family mansion, covered in wisteria, had a terraced garden surrounded by tall acacias and a low fruit orchard. Pigeons swooped in on gentle breezes, and small fountains featured carved lions spitting water into a burbling pool.

Her father, Edip Bey, was an Ottoman patriot and close adviser to Abdülhamid II. He kept a household with multiple wives, as was customary in his class and station among Muslims, but in everything from the management of his estate to the education of his children, he was an inveterate Anglophile. Plenty of English travelers fell in love with Turkey, returning to London to eat white cheese with honey and drape their tables with Anatolian carpets. Edip Bey’s was probably the only home in Istanbul to return the favor. He ordered his cook to serve only English food at mealtimes.

Edip Bey was convinced that Britain had discovered the path to enlightenment and modernity, and he sought ways of communicating those values to his children. Woods Pasha—or Admiral Henry Woods, as he was originally known—was a distinguished British seaman who donned a fez and came into the sultan’s naval service as a senior adviser in the late 1860s. He became a close friend of Edip Bey’s family and recalled regularly meeting his young daughter Halide. Flouting Ottoman fashion, she was dressed in English-made dark blue frocks in winter and white linen in summer. She was slight and frail, Woods recalled, but possessed an exceptional intellect. Once she was old enough to begin learning foreign languages, Woods selected stories for her to read in English. It may have been on Woods’s recommendation that Edip Bey decided to take Halide in an unorthodox direction. He enrolled her in school.

Private tutors were not uncommon among upper-class Muslim women, much as they were for contemporary women of the same rank in Victorian Britain or elsewhere. But actually sending a girl to school, even a girls’ school, was unusual. For Halide’s education, Edip Bey chose the American College for Girls, a missionary-run secondary school where instruction was in English. It offered a full complement of subjects from literature to science, and it was one of the mainstays of elite education for religious minorities in the city, including the daughters of English-speaking merchants and diplomats. There she sat amid Jews and Armenians, Bulgarians and Greeks, the only Muslim student in one of the most prestigious institutions in the city. In 1901 she became its first Muslim graduate.

Edip Bey was intent on his daughter’s becoming well educated, but he was enough of a traditionalist to believe that the primary purpose of her schooling was to make her a better woman, not to launch her on a career. Almost as soon as she left the college, she was married to a much older man, Salih Zeki, an Istanbul writer and translator who had also served as her mathematics tutor. He was nearly her father’s age and quickly positioned himself as a paternal figure to his young wife. “No little Circassian slave bought from the slave-market at the lowest price could have entered upon our common life in such an obedient spirit as I did,” Halide later recalled.

She settled into a routine circumscribed by the expectations of her gender, class, and religion: staying secluded at home, serving her husband, and raising their two sons in an apartment overlooking Pera’s Grande Rue. The new family’s outlook—imperial yet progressive—was evident in their sons’ names. The first Halide called Ali Ayetullah, a traditional Muslim name; the second she called Togo, after the Japanese admiral who defeated the tsar in the Russo-Japanese War. With the right mix of tradition and modernization, Muslims like Halide and her husband believed, the Ottoman Empire might repeat Japan’s course and outstrip the industrial West. Still, even though she could follow major world events in the international press, her mind was not yet awakened, she said. She was consumed by frequent depression and occasional nervous breakdowns.

Then came 1908. Like many Istanbullus, Halide was caught up in the general enthusiasm for the restoration of the constitution and the parliament. The Ottoman Empire at last seemed to have its own version of a modern European revolution. Political change had come about not through a palace intrigue or the untimely death of a sultan but because of an uprising by liberal-minded military officers who stepped forward to drag the empire away from self-destruction. As a well-read young woman and fluent in English, Halide presented herself to one of the major pro-Unionist newspapers, Tanin (The Echo), edited by the well-known poet Tevfik Fikret. She was taken on as a literary columnist. She never visited the newspaper’s offices—appearing unaccompanied in public would have been impossible for a high-ranking Muslim woman, even one with an English-language education—but her venture into the world of writing and publishing was a revelation. “I became a writer,” she said of her reaction to the Young Turk revolution. Her fame spread, so much so that she regularly received death threats for her columns. In 1909, she traveled briefly to Egypt and Britain, in part to escape the period of reaction against the Unionist government.

Still in her twenties, Halide was a fairly conventional progressive of her era. She prized self-improvement over politics, patriotism over individualism, and the nation as an antidote to disorderly multiculturalism. She was a liberal only in the sense that all the categories of her overlapping identity—as a woman, as a Muslim, and as a Turk—required liberation from various oppressors: men, religious conservatives, and the non-Muslim minorities whom she and her compatriots saw as potentially disloyal neighbors. She was involved in the establishment of some of the first women’s organizations in the empire and later became a mainstay of the Turkish Hearth associations, but these efforts were focused mainly on the cultivation of women’s minds through edifying lectures in French and English. In 1910, she made her politics personal. When Salih Zeki proposed to take a second wife, Halide requested a divorce, which he granted. She moved out and took the children with her. It was the first time in her life, she said, that she no longer suffered from nerves.

Halide’s publishing career erupted. She continued her essay-writing and drifted into fiction as well, publishing novels that sought to open up the world of Muslim Ottoman women, treating them neither as harem slaves nor as revolutionary feminists. She fell into the orbit of the writer Ziya Gökalp, the main ideologue of Turkish nationalism. Originally from Diyarbakır, in southeastern Anatolia, Gökalp had been in Salonica at the time of Unionist agitation and quickly became one of the leading lights among Turkish nationalists. He was short and round, with an old bullet wound in his forehead that made him instantly recognizable, but his odd appearance gave way when he spoke eloquently about the need for Turks to step forward and rescue their identity as a nation from the flames consuming the old empire. Halide eventually broke with Gökalp, whose nationalism, she believed, stepped over the line into ethnic chauvinism. Being in his circle had given her impeccable credentials as a visionary when it came to questions of identity and the Turkish future. In 1918, the Allied occupation illustrated the weakness of the old empire. In 1919 and 1920, the Hellenic seizure of Smyrna and Armenian claims on eastern Anatolia—both of which were eventually supported by the Allies in the Treaty of Sèvres—were its death knell. “I felt stupefied, tired, and utterly sick of all that had happened since 1914,” Halide said. “I was conscious that the Ottoman Empire had fallen with a crash, and that it was not only the responsible Unionist leaders who were buried beneath the crushing weight of it. . . . [A]t that moment the absolute finality of the death of the empire was an unavoidable fact.”

Halide had no reason to meet Mustafa Kemal, even though both were in Istanbul in 1918 and 1919. In fact, as a public figure, she clearly eclipsed him at this stage. Her ties to the Turkish Hearth movement naturally linked her with the Unionist underground in the city, and her writings had made her one of the most recognizable intellectuals in the empire. During the First World War, she had married for a second time, to Abdülhak Adnan. Small and pale, with prominent round spectacles and a legendary sense of humor, Adnan was a prominent Unionist, medical doctor, and writer. He had served in a senior role with the Red Crescent Society during the First World War and was later put in charge of sanitation in Istanbul—a vital position, given the frequent outbreaks of typhus and other diseases.

Together, Adnan and Halide were a rarity: a husband-and-wife team who were both public personas and both actively engaged in the national movement. They stood at the center of the growing opposition to the Allied occupation. In 1919, Halide later recalled, “I suddenly ceased to exist as an individual: I worked, wrote, and lived as a unit of that magnificent national madness.” That summer, she was invited to address the crowds—perhaps two hundred thousand people—gathered outside the Sultanahmet mosque to protest the Hellenic invasion. She felt herself instantly connected to the masses spread out before her. She had finally stepped into a role for which she had been preparing all her life: a public leader of a great cause at a moment of national crisis. “Brethren and sons, listen to me,” she said.

Governments are our enemies, peoples are our friends, and the just revolt of our hearts our strength. The day is not far off when all nations will get their rights. When that day comes, take your banners and come and visit the graves of your brethren who have fought and have fallen for the glorious end. Now swear and repeat with me: “The sublime emotion which we cherish in our hearts will last till the proclamation of the rights of the peoples!”

“We swear!” the crowd thundered in response. It was a watershed moment not only in the history of Turkish nationalism but also for Turkish women. Never before had a woman appeared in such a visible and expressly political role, least of all a Muslim woman. Halide still hid her blonde hair beneath a chaste headscarf.

The next spring, when Mustafa Kemal’s military movement began to form in central Anatolia, Halide joined the large numbers of Muslim intellectuals, activists, and politicians making their way east to join the nationalists. Had she and Adnan stayed in Istanbul, they almost certainly would have been arrested by the British authorities and deported to Malta as seditious nationalists. Both also soon had the distinction, with Mustafa Kemal, of being given a death sentence by the Ottoman parliament. It was a badge of honor that nationalists wore with pride. The Ottoman government’s reach barely extended beyond the palace and the parliament building in Istanbul, much less eastward into Anatolia. Mustafa Kemal met her and Adnan at the train station when they arrived in Ankara, offering his hand to help Halide down from the carriage.

Ankara was in a state of euphoria, with supporters arriving each day and a sense that a new country was being built from scratch—more egalitarian, more just, more committed to the goal of ridding Turkey of foreign invaders. Given her background as a writer and journalist, Halide became a key figure in the emerging nationalist press. Along with Yunus Nadi, a prominent writer and editor who had also journeyed to Ankara from Istanbul, she set up the Anatolian News Agency, the bureau that quickly became the mouthpiece of the nationalist forces and, later, the official press office of the Turkish government.

When the war against the Hellenes started in earnest, Halide signed on with the nationalist army. She was made a corporal—for all their commitment to women’s liberation, the nationalists could not imagine a female officer—and appeared beside Mustafa Kemal in her specially designed tunic, with a long skirt and dark Islamic headscarf. She witnessed the decisive battle of Sakarya and accompanied the commander in chief on his triumphal entry into Smyrna in September 1922. “I feasted my eyes on the sea,” she wrote, “and constructed a plan for my life in the future: a rustic house not far away from Angora [Ankara], a fireside where immense logs would constantly burn, a gray goatskin in front of it, where I would lie and dream.”

Her fame, however, left little time for dreaming. She wove her experiences into a new series of novels published not long after the Turkish nationalists had taken Smyrna. These and other works became some of the earliest pillars in the emerging literature of the war of independence, the first fruits of a new, republican literary genre, inspired by the anti-occupation movement and informed by firsthand accounts of the glory and gore of war. Later in the 1920s, when Istanbul audiences were packing into cinemas to view some of the first Turkish-made films, one of the sagas they saw unfolding on the screen was an adaptation of her popular novel of the liberation struggle, Shirt of Flame, directed by Muhsin Erturul.

Halide and Adnan believed themselves to be at the center of the effort to build the republic. Adnan was vice president of the Grand National Assembly—politically, second only to Mustafa Kemal, the assembly’s president—and one of the chief foreign policy figures in the nationalist government. In late 1922, he and Halide returned to Istanbul. It had been two years since they had been in the city, but two centuries’ worth of suffering and yearning had been packed into that period, she said. Adnan was given the title of high commissioner, assuming the duties of the initial emissary, Refet Pasha, and serving as a quasi mayor in the transition from Allied to nationalist governance. He was present as representative of the Grand National Assembly at the handover ceremony at Dolmabahçe Palace, when General Harington saluted the Turkish flag and departed the city forever, ending the Allied presence. Halide had a less official role, but as a novelist, publicist, and outspoken feminist, her name was immediately recognizable among the pantheon of figures at the top of the new republican elite. An American diplomatic report was unequivocal in its assessment of the couple: “Dr. Adnan Bey is one of the leaders of the present Nationalist Government, but it is generally felt that his position is due rather to the remarkable personality of his wife than to his own genius.”

As she and Adnan set up their new home in Istanbul, they both could sense a change coming. “I have seen, I have gone through, a land full of aching hearts and torturing remembrances, and I have lived in an age when the politicians played with these human hearts as ordinary gamblers play with their cards,” she wrote. “I who had dreamed of a nationalism which will create a happy land of beauty, understanding, and love, I have seen nothing but mutual massacre and mutual hatred; I have seen nothing but ideals used as instruments for creating human carnage and misery.”

The promise of the republic was that it would put an end to the long period of discord that had defined the entire adult lives of Halide’s generation, from the Young Turk revolution through the First World War and the fight for independence. The promise was quickly broken, she felt. Mustafa Kemal’s willingness to buy off local warlords, his increasing suspicion of any form of disagreement, and the establishment of independence tribunals to mete out punishment to open rebels as well as quiet dissenters—all seemed the opposite of the world Halide had been trying to create. Mustafa Kemal looked more and more like a dictator and his Republican People’s Party like the only approved instrument of governance. The independence war had been a people’s struggle, she believed, and no individual could adequately represent the collective desire for freedom. “There will be only the sum total of a people’s sacrifice to bear witness to the guarding of their liberties,” she wrote in her memoirs.

One after another of their old colleagues was falling away. Some who openly broke with Mustafa Kemal found themselves before a tribunal. Others retired from public life, quietly giving up power to the one-party state. In 1926, Halide and Adnan decided to leave Istanbul, the very year that Turkey’s new civil code established legal equality for women. They began a long period of self-imposed exile in France, Britain, India, and the United States. Like their escape from Istanbul under the British, their departure came just in time. The next year, Mustafa Kemal delivered a thirty-six-hour speech known as the “Nutuk,” a discourse that rewrote the history of the independence struggle by denouncing his enemies and placing himself at the center of the narrative. Political differences were now raised to the level of truth versus treason. Halide in particular was attacked as someone who had advocated Turkey’s becoming a protectorate of a foreign government—perhaps Britain, perhaps the United States—rather than a fully independent country. It was a charge that had little backing, but it was enough to write her out of the republic’s founding mythology.

Halide used her time abroad to work on her memoirs, which offered a kind of alternative history of the early republic. The first volume was published in English in the late 1920s, but it had little impact in Turkey. She and Adnan spent time in Paris and New York, living the lives of émigré academics by lecturing, taking up occasional visiting professor-ships, and recalling old battles that might as well have been ancient history to their students. As Muslim women were taking up new rights in the republic—going about fully unveiled, working as doctors and professors, eventually voting and standing for parliament—one of the principal fighters for their cause was no longer around to witness the changes.

It was not until after Mustafa Kemal’s death, in 1938, that Halide and Adnan were able to return to Istanbul. She served briefly in parliament once multiparty democracy was instituted after the Second World War. But the years of exile had made her a political outsider. She had been present at the birth of the republic, yet she had missed its painful adolescence. She ended her career, in a way, by coming back to her childhood in Edip Bey’s household on the Bosphorus. She became chair of the English Department at Istanbul University—the institution’s first female professor—and translated Shakespeare into Turkish. Her version of Coriolanus, about the journey from war hero to tyrant and from exile to revenge, is still admired.

In her earlier years, Halide believed in a salvageable empire, a place where the sultan’s many subjects, regardless of confession, could find a place. The experience of war and occupation made her into a nationalist. She believed in the need for a Turkish homeland, but her version of nationalism had a cosmopolitan lining. History and culture, she said, had formed the Turks into the Protestants of the Islamic world—reformist, pragmatic, and naturally committed to the separation of mosque and state. Being a good nationalist required self-awareness, and embracing one’s country demanded that one learn how to criticize it. “It is after I have loved my own people and tried to understand their virtues and their faults with open-minded humility that I begin to have a better understanding of other people’s sufferings and joys, and of their personality expressed in their national life,” she wrote. Even then, gender still mattered profoundly when it came to the way people actually behaved. For all the claims to equality in an age of republics, nationalism as a political movement was almost always a man’s game. “Women,” she was fond of saying, “are all one nation.”

Rights, Halide believed, were there for the recognizing. They were not granted or bestowed so much as finally accepted and acknowledged, like removing a veil shielding women from public view and clouding their own vision of possible lives. On the battlefield and in front of a mass rally, it was easy to imagine a future Turkey in which Muslim women could develop a feminism that placed them squarely alongside men, powerful and confident, with few of the strictures that religion and tradition had imposed in the past. As it turned out, women’s achievements would continue to be celebrated as evidence of the republic’s quick progress, but it would be decades before any women would achieve the independent public voice once claimed by Halide Edip.