Women and the City, Women in the City: A Gendered Perspective on Ottoman Urban History 9781782384120

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Figures
Preface. Kaffee und Kuchen
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I. Women and the Reorganization of Urban Life
1. Times of Tamaddun: Gender, Urbanity, and Temporality in Colonial Egypt
2. Women in the Post-Ottoman Public Sphere: Anti-Veiling Campaigns and the Gendered Reshaping of Urban Space in Early Republican Turkey
Part II. Male Spaces, Female Spaces? Limits of and Breaches in the Gendered Order of the City
3. Playing with Gender: The Carnival of al-Qays in Jeddah
4. Mixed Marriage, Prostitution, Survival: Reintegrating Armenian Women into Post-Ottoman Cities
5. “This time women as well got involved in politics!”: Nineteenth Century Ottoman Women’s Organizations and Political Agency
Part III. Discourses and Narratives of Gender in the Urban Context
6. Early Republican Turkish Orientalism? The Erotic Picture of an Algerian Woman and the Notion of Beauty between the “West” and the “Orient”
7. The Urban Experience in Women’s Memoirs: Mediha Kayra’s World War I Notebook
Notes on Contributors
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Women and the City, Women in the City

Women and the City, Women in the City A Gendered Perspective on Ottoman Urban History

KL

Edited by Nazan Maksudyan

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

Published in 2014 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com ©2014 Nazan Maksudyan All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data    Women and the city, women in the city : a gendered perspective on Ottoman urban history / edited by Nazan Maksudyan. — First Edition.      pages cm    Includes bibliographical references and index.    ISBN 978-1-78238-411-3 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-78238-412-0 (ebook)    1. Women—Turkey—Social conditions. 2. Women—Turkey—Economic conditions. 3. Sex role—Religious aspects. 4. Turkey—Social life and customs. 5. Turkey— History—Ottoman Empire, 1288–1918. 6. Turkey—History—20th century. 7. Turkey—History—21st century. I. Maksudyan, Nazan, 1977– editor of compilation. HQ1726.7.W6296 2014 305.409561—dc23 2014000993

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Printed on acid-free paper ISBN: 978-1-78238-411-3 hardback ISBN: 978-1-78238-412-0 ebook

To my grandmother, Maryam Maksudyan, and to my city, Istanbul, two inalienable parts of my life and work.

Contents

‫ﱬﱫ‬

List of Figures

ix

Preface. Kaffee und Kuchen

x

Acknowledgments

xiii

Introduction Nazan Maksudyan

1

Part I. Women and the Reorganization of Urban Life 1. Times of Tamaddun: Gender, Urbanity, and Temporality in Colonial Egypt On Barak 2. Women in the Post-Ottoman Public Sphere: Anti-Veiling Campaigns and the Gendered Reshaping of Urban Space in Early Republican Turkey Sevgi Adak

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Part II. Male Spaces, Female Spaces? Limits of and Breaches in the Gendered Order of the City 3. Playing with Gender: The Carnival of al-Qays in Jeddah Ulrike Freitag 4. Mixed Marriage, Prostitution, Survival: Reintegrating Armenian Women into Post-Ottoman Cities Vahé Tachjian 5. “This time women as well got involved in politics!”: Nineteenth Century Ottoman Women’s Organizations and Political Agency Nazan Maksudyan vii

71

86

107

viii

Contents

Part III. Discourses and Narratives of Gender in the Urban Context 6. Early Republican Turkish Orientalism? The Erotic Picture of an Algerian Woman and the Notion of Beauty between the “West” and the “Orient” Nora Lafi 7. The Urban Experience in Women’s Memoirs: Mediha Kayra’s World War I Notebook Christoph Herzog

139

149

Notes on Contributors

169

Bibliography

171

Index

189

Figures

‫ﱬﱫ‬

Figure 1.1. “Speed is from the Devil”

20

Figure 1.2. Clock Discipline

21

Figure 1.3. Asking for the time

31

Figure 5.1. The official seal of the “Sisterhood of Saint Eleftherios”

116

Figure 6.1. The front page of Resimli Gazete, 2 February 1924

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ix

Preface Kaffee und Kuchen Nazan Maksudyan

‫ﱬﱫ‬ 1 December 2006, Krakow Saturday afternoon. A very elegant old little café on Starowiślna Street. Small square tables, dark colored curtains on the windows, and the smell of burned sugar and cotton candy. Two very well dressed women in their seventies enter through the door proudly taking off their graceful little hats and leather gloves. They slowly approach one of the few empty tables, make a sign to the waiter without looking at the menu, and order immediately. Two coffees and two slices of cake arrive shortly afterward. The way they sit facing one another, the apparent harmony of their conversation, their togetherness—in other words every little detail of this presumably weekly or monthly ritual—is in some way warm, sincere, and flowing naturally.

15 January 2007, Madrid Monday morning. A bakery/coffee shop close to the metro station La Latina. The mother and daughter calmly come toward the comptoir, sit on the high bar stools and order croissants. A tender-eyed waitress behind the comptoir serves warm milk to the mother, who really has a resemblance to Carmen Maura, the famous actress in many Almodovar movies, and café con leche to the daughter in her forties. There is a happy silence between them, while they eat their butter-smelling breakfast with good appetite. Then a third woman joins the troupe—maybe she is also family. As they finish eating, all of them light a cigarette and start a conversation that is frequently interrupted by high-pitched and cheerful laughter. x

Preface

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20 January 2007, Prague Tuesday morning. A classy pastry shop on Karmelitska Street. Chairs covered in blue velvet, antique mirrors on the walls, jewel-like cakes in a glass case. Three old ladies step in while still in the middle of an excited conversation. In a short while the waiter brings three glasses of red wine. In fact, it is not even ten in the morning! Their body language and gestures imply that they all enjoy the heated debate, who knows on what.

26 February 2007, Paris Monday afternoon. A sunny day in Place de la Bastille, one of the fanciest cafés: Café Français. A pretty, old woman at one of the miniscule tables, wearing a pale blue deux-pièces, maybe a designer’s cut. She wears heavy makeup of rosy colors and her hair is pinkish blond. She has probably just been to the coiffeure. Neither reading a book nor writing in a diary, like most of the unaccompanied crowd, in her silence and loneliness she is just looking at the place and the monument of liberty in our sight. Yet, her attention is mostly focused on her chocolat chaud, the cup of which is warming her hands.

WOMEN AND THE CITY While working on putting together this volume, my intent was to have a range of essays that covered a wide array of subjects, and the final product proudly bears witness to this initial hope. Yet, when trying to prepare the introductory section and reflecting on the two keywords in the title of the book, “women” and “city,” I could not help but remember Edward Hopper’s famous painting, Chop Suey from 1929. In most of his paintings, he observes people and places, especially the interiors of New York restaurants in the 1920s. But this painting is probably one of the best representatives of his focus on the ever growing affinity of the urban scene and modern women. It goes without saying that urban women do much more than enjoy kaffee und kuchen. Especially when the background scenery is the Ottoman context, one has to broaden the scope to a variety of subjects and issues. Yet, the above described separate but linked images of women in cafés in different cities still played a role in the conception of an urban history book mainly from a gender perspective. Without doubt and with the utmost strength, I thought of my grandmother. Through all her life, she was for me the best guide in discovering my city, Istanbul, and a perfect example of a city woman. A city woman, a perfect example? What do I mean by

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these phrases? If I were to define it in a rigorous way, I guess I might refer to such things as education, work experience, mobility, and travel, having a presence in public, a taste of fashion, and a notion of living well. But again I am haunted by Chop Suey and cannot detach myself from the theme of kaffee und kuchen. My grandmother was my heroine not only because she was a well-educated, intelligent, and incredibly elegant woman who spoke five languages, who had a career and who had seen many parts of the world, but also she was my first and regular companion at the famous and exceptional European styled café of Istanbul: Baylan. Until it was closed in 1992, Karaköy Baylan was the usual stop of our adventures in the European side of the city, as we were among the people of the “other side” (karşı). But we were also frequenters of the branch in Kadıköy, in our side of the city. There, we always had the specialty of Baylan, kup griye (cup grillé ). To give an idea of the sin that we shared, it was made with ice cream, caramel sauce, toasted almonds, vanilla, pistachios, and crème Chantilly and was served with langue de chat biscuits. Even though I was a teenager at the time, I like to think that we were both women of sweets enjoying the dolce vita. So I want to dedicate this book to my grandmother, Maryam Maksudyan, and to my city, Istanbul, two inalienable parts of my life and work.

Acknowledgments

‫ﱬﱫ‬

I would like to thank the Europe in the Middle East—the Middle East in Europe (EUME) program of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. As a postdoctoral fellow of the EUME program (2009–2010), directed by Georges Khalil, I became affiliated with my host institute in Berlin, Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO). Thanks to the productive research environment I was granted, I managed to put together both the necessary motivation and time to bring together the fields gender and urban studies in the Ottoman context. During that period, the ZMO was hosting an exquisite group of colleagues working on different aspects of urban history, and our regular discussions brought to my attention the rarity of publications on the Ottoman Empire. This collection is the product of those two intellectually vibrant years that I spent in Berlin, at the ZMO, during which I thought, wrote, and spoke frequently about women in Ottoman and post-Ottoman cities. I am grateful for the combined efforts of Ulrike Freitag and Nora Lafi, who shared their invaluable ideas for editing this volume. I would like to thank all the contributors of this volume who kindly agreed to work on their chapters and diligently made the necessary changes so as to create a very solid contribution to the available literature.

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Introduction Nazan Maksudyan

‫ﱬﱫ‬ It is well established that men and women have considerably varied experiences of the city in relation to housing, use of transport, relative mobility, and spheres of employment. Now a customary trope among urban theorists, the flâneur,1 someone who finds delight and pleasure in ambling contentedly and unhurriedly through the city, is necessarily a male figure.2 As Wilson succinctly puts it, “Men—white middle-class men at least, and in particular— own the street without thinking about it. Women must always make a conscious claim, must each time assert anew their right to be ‘streetwalkers’.”3 Still, it took a while for urban and gender studies, as coconstitutive subjects, to stop being shy toward each other. In fact, parallel to patriarchal gendered participation and representation in the public sphere, urban history, like many other subfields of history, had traditionally tended to focus more on his story rather than hers. This was largely due to the spatial separation of home and work, which necessarily meant a highly gendered division of labor between masculine paid work and feminine unpaid work.4 Men were associated with public, productive spheres, including paid work outside the home, while women were associated with private, reproductive spheres that confined them within the home. However, growing and expanding scholarship on the history of women from the last few decades demonstrated the necessity of incorporating women’s roles into the larger picture. Especially given the waves of structuralism and poststructuralism, there is more and more emphasis on both women’s agency in history and the contextual fluidity and ongoing production of meaning (of gender and forms of power relations).5 It was largely thanks to postmodern theory and method— which originally sought to recover excluded and marginalized urban subjects (space, culture, women, ethnic minorities)—that traditional urban

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studies approached and developed within itself a markedly feminist scholarship. Therefore historical record has proved that despite the prevalence of dominant (patriarchal, traditional) gender relations encouraging women to “stay home,” women have resisted confinement to the private sphere. Women’s participation especially in voluntary organizations reshaped the city and its social relations, often by creating liminal spaces in the community where women had more power and authority than they did in either the home or the workplace.6 In that respect, a systematic treatment of urban and gender studies combined offers a feminist critique of mainstream urban policy and planning and a gendered reorientation of key urban social, environmental, and city-regional debates.7 These studies that take into account previously neglected dimensions of gendered critical urban analysis shed light on transformations of gender roles and state and personal politics, across intersecting spheres of home, work, the family, urban settlements, and civil society. They acknowledge women as manipulating, if not shaping, urban space. Numerous research works attest that women did more than react to alterations in urban space. They actively participated in changing the map of the city and in redefining its essence. Before going deeper into what is meant by “a gendered approach to urban history” and in what ways historians learn from the contributions of feminist geographers—and what this volume offers in general—there is need to assess the state of affairs in the field of Ottoman urban studies. It goes without saying that for a considerable time now there has been a growing body of literature in the form of city monographs. The cities around the Mediterranean, and especially port cities with multiple connections to the global system, were among the first to capture the attention of Ottoman historians—as they continue to do today.8 Moreover, there have traditionally been more numerous and much deeper analyses of the provincial capitals and other important cities in the Balkan and Arab provinces—especially Salonika, Beirut, Aleppo, and Damascus.9 One would actually be surprised to see that much less has been written even on the capital, Istanbul, leaving aside other core cities such as Bursa or Edirne.10 Recognizing more and more the multiple faces and realities of the Ottoman presence throughout its large geography, urban historians recently built up working groups and conglomerates in order to produce comparative studies, providing more nuanced accounts of the cities involved and the urban administration of the empire. One such significant working group has been established within the framework of the EUME (Europe in the Middle-East—the Middle-East in Europe) program at Wissenschaftskol-

Introduction

3

leg zu Berlin (Institute of Advanced Study) in 2004 in collaboration with the Zentrum Moderner Orient. First formulated as “New Approaches to the History of Merchant Cities in the Ottoman Empire and Its Successor States,” this group was later named “Cities Compared: Urban Change in the Mediterranean and Adjacent Regions.” Zentrum Moderner Orient has also become the host of the now well-known Ottoman Urban Studies Seminar, organized by Ulrike Freitag and Nora Lafi since 2006. The intent of the Seminar has been to provide a floor to discuss several dimensions (urban government, cosmopolitanism, everyday life) of Ottoman urban history with the participation of both the fellows of the EUME program and international guests. Numerous projects were completed under this rubric and most of them deserve to be considered milestones in the growth of Ottoman urban studies.11 One of the latest accomplishments of the group, The City in the Ottoman Empire, also needs to be mentioned as a significant contribution to the field with its comparative perspective, since, as previously underlined, Ottoman urban history has often been written in a fragmented manner by the prevalence of area studies.12 Despite the developmental trend in both urban and gender studies, their combined approach to Ottoman history remains scantier. On the one hand, new scholarly works that embrace a broader understanding of Ottoman women’s participation in different facets of social life are usually economic and social histories of a particular urban area, yet fail to provide a truly urban historical perspective. On the other, serious urban histories of the empire still suffer from the abovementioned male bias and usually remain silent about the female members of urban communities. Still, there is reason to believe that this gap will soon become narrower as new contributions to the field, including the present volume, increasingly include gender in their analysis.13

GENDERED SPACE AND TIME: WOMEN AND URBAN SOCIAL CHANGE Elizabeth Wilson characterizes the urban as a space of opportunity and abandon for women. Notwithstanding its difficulties, Wilson argues, the city emancipates women far more than rural life or suburban domesticity.14 It goes without saying that the urban space is highly segregated by income, class, and race, yet it is rarely demarcated according to explicit sex separation. However, normalization of a patriarchal gender regime and hegemonic masculinity have profound impacts on urban experience, life chances, and

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well-being. The resulting inequalities are wide ranging—from legal barriers to owning property, to real or perceived threats of violence or insidious labeling.15 Having said this, the approach of this volume still follows Wilson in maintaining that women successfully make use of the urban space for mobility, transgression, and social change. Hence they negotiate with the urban milieu with their own strategies and flourish in the interstices of the city.16 Sevgi Adak’s essay on women’s dress provides an ideal setting for studying the gender regime in the urban public realm. Literature has highlighted women’s historical contributions to urban norms and other such reconfigurations, despite all the dominant ideologies about women’s place and women’s space.17 Adak’s account clearly brings forth this dichotomy. The state ban on veiling is on the one hand a case of direct state intervention in deeply rooted gender codes and women’s public presence in an attempt for reshaping the urban space. The chapter also presents a very strong case of assumed agency on the part of women against the actions of an authoritarian state. Women of the new Turkish republic contested the reform agenda of the Kemalist regime, as they become involved in the anti-veiling campaigns, both as facilitators and as actors who tried to adapt, shape, modify, and/or resist the change. These campaigns were primarily formulated and implemented at the local level. This way, women could benefit from a wide range of possibilities to manipulate the new dress codes in the public sphere, leaving room for agency. While women took part in the remaking of the city, they also reconstituted gender relations and gender identities.18 Women’s negotiation capability was not only limited to the spatial axes, but also reached out to the temporal one. In a recent article, Gila Hadar noted that women were the timekeepers within the patriarchal family and society of Salonika. The life of the family, namely, women and children, was conducted not in accordance with official space and time—either “government time” or “Jewish time”— but in terms of more internal, restricted dimensions.19 Also from within a parallel understanding, On Barak’s chapter highlights the active participation of middle-class women in new timekeeping arrangements in colonial Egypt. In his analysis, Egyptian women appear not only as the rhetorical “other” of modern abstract masculine clock-time. Alongside this important capacity, women paradoxically reinforced masculine temporality in several important, if concealed ways. Notably, they were the ones who made it possible for their husbands and sons to lead a scheduled life while at the same time taking much of the blame for disruptions in these new modern routines. Undoubtedly, synchronization and the transmission of time between and inside each of the interconnected “private” and “public” spheres involved much social tension. Still, it is still relevant to talk

Introduction

5

about the agency of women over the passage of time inside the house, which eventually influenced outside-the-house temporality. Moreover, Barak’s essay hints at how different female actors (i.e., effendi women vs. servants) based on their own history of spatial and social knowledge approach the city in varied ways. Postmodern (poststructural) feminist writing on the city brought about the recognition that gender identity functions through multiplicity and differences between (categories of) women.20 Diverse groups of women, possessing multiple and fluid identities (and identifications) approached the city from different angles, with distinct intents, and with unequal pace. Heterogeneous everyday experiences and domestic spaces of women determined their relation to and presence in public arenas. What feminist geographers call intersectionality underlines that gender identity operates in complex relationships to other social identities such as race, ethnicity, class, nationality, First World–Third World, religion, sexuality, age, and health.21 Nazan Maksudyan’s chapter on the political agency of women in the nineteenth century Ottoman society eloquently depicts the large role that intersectionality plays in how women associate themselves with the city. Philanthropy was a fairly different form of female engagement, granting women an exceptional freedom of mobility in the city and at unconventional times. They could easily bypass spatial urban boundaries, which were mostly drawn with reference to class, gender, and respectability. Philanthropic women’s organizations breached various social hierarchies on a daily basis, as non-Muslims in Muslim households or as wealthy women in poor neighborhoods. Their direct involvement in current political, social, and religious issues was a significant source of empowerment. They assumed a significant amount of authority at the societal level and especially within larger female networks. In that respect, the analysis of women’s organization and philanthropy as a new urban profession for women brings to light how women from different class, religious, ethnic, or immigrant backgrounds had manifold linkages within themselves and with the urban space. Fluidity is not only meaningful on the identity level, but current research recognizes that the urban context is also a changing set of situated social relationships that are influenced by economic, social, political, and cultural changes operating at various spatial scales and interacting with each other. Change in urban places in return alters women’s lives and the gender inequalities associated with them. The fluidity of urban environment may also create opportunities for women to make progressive changes through individual and collective action. The city represents a site of personal autonomy and political possibilities for women. It would not be an exaggeration to

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claim that cities are the only place where women are able to negotiate social change. At least, in the urban environment this potential for empowerment becomes particularly visible and thus accessible to the historian through a range of material sources. Maksudyan’s chapter recounts various moments of opportunity in times of utmost change. Women’s claims to rights as citizens is a relevant perspective with which to map out gender relations and gender identities in urban places. Ottoman women tried to find common ground for their experiences as urbanites of important cities, as members of non-Muslim communities, as educated and elite minority of women in their polities. Their interactions have been very similar to those previously observed by Sarah Deutsch. Women from diverse backgrounds came together for common purposes and through both rivalries and alliances, they formed new urban relations and spaces, which in the end challenged and negotiated the over-imbued sexual division of urban space.22 Their philanthropic engagement with urban social life created chances for them to have a say in changing the urban structure and to take agency.23 In this picture, the city becomes the site of modern citizen making. Women tested their chances of becoming full citizens by forcing free access to the streets, by demonstrating in front of public buildings, by establishing shelters for women and the needy. Different groups of Ottoman women living in distinct temporalities/spatialities have negotiated ethnic, religious, nationalist, and sexual urban tensions and so they were all engaged in the political questions of their time as significant actors of social change.

A FEMALE FLÂNEUSE?: BEING “OUT OF PLACE” AND FORMATIONS OF BELONGING The city is more than its economic and ethnic geography. Urban sexual geography crosscuts them in both ideological and physical terms. Wolff suggests that there cannot be a female flâneuse, only the prostitute. I would add to them the lower classes, underscoring the idea that the freedom to roam is very much a male freedom.24 Since power relationships intertwine with the field of vision, the cultural codes and politics of seeing and being seen are deeply gendered. In urban space women are more likely than men to be the ones who are looked at, the objects of the gaze.25 Therefore, women alone in public space have been inevitably women “out of place,” subject to sanctions and negative connotations. As proof of the internalization of the sexual geography and gendered spatiality, it has been demonstrated that “warnings

Introduction

7

about the potential for sexual victimization are a central feature of women’s socialization.”26 Moreover, the presence of elite women in working-class neighborhoods would be a breach of proper sexual geography, since only working women and sex-workers were allowed there.27 The controversy over a philanthropic maternity clinic mostly for single mothers and prostitutes is a typical example of such blurring of boundaries, where elite women disturbingly occupied the same space as “other women.” In discussing the gap between the sexual freedoms afforded to men and women on the streets, one needs to be careful not to reproduce the idea that the public realm is a solely male realm, nor the private realm exclusively female. Instead, as has been demonstrated by feminist geographers, it is to assert that men and women create their presences in the urban space on a profoundly gendered basis.28 Ulrike Freitag’s essay on the carnival of al-Qays in Jeddah is a perfect representation of how women both reproduced and played with the urban sexual geography. When men left Jeddah for Mecca and onward to Mount ‘Arafāt, the women would dress up as men and for four consecutive nights, they would take to the streets with drums and perform dances. So during this carnival, women not only take over the streets, but also they do it at nighttime, overturning both spatial and temporal axes of urban belonging. To stress and sanction now the reversed “out of place” roles in the public sphere, they could even take an aggressive posture by attempting to beat up those men who did not let them celebrate unhindered. The urban environment is the context within which gender identities and gender relations are negotiated and this context is in turn altered by changing gender identities and relations. Freitag’s chapter gives an actual and fairly exceptional account of this interactional relationship between gender and urban, between city and women. The politics of seeing and being seen or from the reverse dimension, the “politics of looking” could also be discussed with reference to another typical urban public realm, that of the print culture. It was asserted that circulation of images was part of the construction of a new public sphere for producing and reproducing identities. As Nora Lafi elaborates in her essay on the visions of North African women in early Turkish Republican press, power relationships intertwine with the field of vision, including acts of seeing and being seen, as well as the cultural meanings of the visual and its representations. Lafi argues that the dichotomous visualities of a semi-naked “exotic” Algerian young woman in contrast with Turkish women dressed and made up as modern Parisians is indicative of a new stance of the state in imagining the new Turkish woman as a way to position the country in the mirror of Europe. Accordingly, the new Turkish

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nationalist elite assumed the colonial gaze of European men and women toward Arab Muslim females.29 Hegemonic masculinity of city streets might make women unwelcome outsiders, even targets of sexual assaults. Spatial relations, including restricted access to public space and limited mobility because of fear of violence, can be seen as a test of equality—a parameter of empowerment.30 Women negotiate space for themselves by conscious practices of boldness and through their very presence in the public sphere. The women who feel confident reclaim space for themselves and make it more available for other women through everyday practices and routinized uses. In that respect, they are both victimized and empowered by the same gendered urban environment. Vahé Tachjian’s chapter brings forth a range of mechanisms, from nation-state formation to ethnic nationalism, from repressive patriarchal structures to local exclusionary mechanisms that put Armenian women in a highly precarious situation. Still, when their lives were at stake, they could have come up with survival strategies of conversion, mixed marriage, and prostitution—even if none of them seemed neither voluntary nor preferable. Moreover, in the discussions about reintegrating them into the Armenian society, Armenian elite women took initiatives to create women’s groups that would work in the shelters in order to provide a female network of moral support and inspire them with courage. What these activists tried to do was to re-adapt these women, who had been through entirely different experiences, to their communities. More importantly, the attempt was to re-create a sense of belonging that was lost along the way, as many of these women dreaded the idea of going back home after all that happened. Belonging does not simply denote being a member or a resident of a place, but it also has affective dimensions of longing or yearning.31 Furthermore, belonging has an across-time quality: it brings together past memories, present experiences, and future ties connected to a place.32 What Armenian women lacked was related to this rupture between past and present, and eventually between present and future. Belonging as a sentiment is noted to build up and grow out of everyday life activities. For de Certeau, corporal everyday activities in the city are part of a process of appropriation and territorialization.33 Once those activities are lacking or changing at an unprecedented pace, then people might develop a sentiment of dis-belonging. Christoph Herzog’s essay on a young woman’s memoirs during World War I touches upon her multilayered dimensions of dis-belonging on her migratory journey from Trabzon to Istanbul. Mediha recounts her suffering from being forced to be sheltered in non-Muslims’ quarters in the cities they passed. In these Armenian or Greek quarters, the family not only had “headaches due to church bells,” but they were also de-

Introduction

9

prived of the sound of ezan. Judging from her account, intercommunal relations between Muslims and Christians in Trabzon were both distant and culturally demarcated. In addition to the loss of customary religious boundaries, Mediha also longs for the beauty of nature that she associates with her hometown. As her case clearly demonstrates, when everyday practices are interrupted, memory as well creates and consists of a sense of belonging.34 Although Herzog’s chapter is the only one referring directly to the dimension of mobility in urban history, several other contributors touch upon the urban-rural dichotomy and criticism against and exclusion of rural practices and behavior in the urban environment. Adak discusses how women of Eskişehir were ordered to remove their peştemal, or at least choose simpler and more “dignified” colors, since too colorful ones were presenting “a rural image,” instead of “a more civilized style.” The negotiation of urban spaces through dress was a significant challenge for Muslim women across class. They would either “fit in” or face exclusion. In an entirely different context, Barak refers to the perceived difficulties ahead of the middle-class temporal reform—especially targeting night hours and sleeping patterns of children—in the face of jinn and afarit stories, which effendi men and women believed to be contracted from domestic servants, many of whom were of rural origins. The city offers more numerous and probable promises for the emancipation of women in comparison to rural life. However, the city also demanded a sense of urban belonging. Rural and migrant women were expected, if not forced, to “fit in” the urban norms.

CONCLUSION The present volume aims to contribute to a growing scholarly sensibility by highlighting the role of women in the making of urban space. Embracing the significance of intersectionality in gender studies, the contributors of the volume also work with other relevant analytical categories such as class, culture, ethnicity, nationhood, and religion. In that respect, the collection is an attempt to reveal, recover, and reconsider the roles, positions, and actions of women in the midst of altered or redefined economic, social, political, and cultural contexts of the Ottoman and post-Ottoman cities. Separate chapters as a whole highlight how women could reimagine and reconceive the city, actually neither designed for nor controlled by them, and how in time they could create female-controlled public and semi-public spaces. The contributors reconsider the negotiations, alliances, and agency of women in asserting themselves in the public domain, a spatial challenge in which even today they face obstacles and resistance as legitimate actors.

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NOTES 1. The flâneur first appears in Charles Baudelaire’s Paris poems of the 1850s, resurfacing in the work of Walter Benjamin in the early twentieth century. Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991). 2. Keith Tester, ed., The Flâneur (London; New York: Routledge, 1994, 2006). 3. Elizabeth Wilson, The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 139. 4. Suzanne Mackenzie, “Restructuring the Relations of Work and Life: Women as Environmental Actors, Feminism as Geographic Analysis,” Gender, Place and Culture 6, no. 4 (1999): 417–430. 5. Chris Beasley, What is Feminism? An Introduction to Feminist Theory (London: Sage, 1999), 91. 6. Beth Moore-Milroy and Susan Wisner, “Communities, Work and Public/private Sphere Models,” Gender, Place and Culture 1, no. 1 (1994): 71–90. 7. Helen Jarvis, Paula Kantor, and Jonathan Cloke, eds., Cities and Gender (London; New York: Routledge, 2009). 8. Among the first such examples are Edhem Eldem, Daniel Goffman, and Bruce Alan Masters, eds., The Ottoman City between East and West: Aleppo, Izmir, and Istanbul (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Çagˇlar Keyder, Y. Eyüp Özveren, and Donald Quataert, eds., Port-Cities of the Eastern Mediterranean, 18001914 (Binghamton: Fernand Braudel Center, 1993). So far the latest contribution is the study of Kolluoğlu and Toksöz. Biray Kolluoğlu and Meltem Toksöz, eds., Cities of the Mediterranean: From the Ottomans to the Present Day (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010). 9. Some examples might be: Meropi Anastassiadou, Salonique, 1830-1912: une ville ottomane à l’âge des Réformes (Leiden: Brill, 1997); Abraham Marcus, The Middle East on the Eve of Modernity: Aleppo in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989); Margaret L. Meriwether, The Kin Who Count: Family and Society in Ottoman Aleppo, 1770-1840 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999); Leila Tarazi Fawaz, Merchants and Migrants in Nineteenth-Century Beirut (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983); Richard van Leeuwen, Waqfs and Urban Structures: The Case of Ottoman Damascus (Leiden: Brill, 1999); Jens Hanssen, Thomas Philipp, and Stefan Weber, eds., The Empire in the City: Arab Provincial Capitals in the Late Ottoman Empire (Beirut: Orient Institut der Deutschen Morgenlandischen Gesellschaft, 2002); Mark Mazower, Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims, and Jews, 1430-1950 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005); Jens Hanssen, Fin de siècle Beirut: The Making of an Ottoman Provincial Capital (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Stefan Weber, Damascus: Ottoman Modernity and Urban Transformation 1808-1918 (Århus: Aarhus University Press, 2009). 10. It requires an analysis of its own, but one main reason behind this discrepancy is the better preservation of court records and other local archives in these areas, thanks to ironic clerical or colonial interest in history. Having said that, some



11.

12.

13.

14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

Introduction

11

major works on Ottoman Anatolia should definitely be underlined: Suraiya Faroqhi, Towns and Townsmen of Ottoman Anatolia: Trade, Crafts, and Food Production in an Urban Setting, 1520-1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Leslie Peirce, Morality Tales: Law and Gender in the Ottoman Court of Aintab (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Hülya Canbakal, Society and Politics in an Ottoman Town: ‘Ayntāb in the 17th Century (Leiden: Brill, 2007). A few examples from many: Nora Lafi, ed., Municipalités méditerranéennes. Les réformes urbaines ottomanes au miroir d’une histoire comparée (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 2005); Malte Fuhrmann, Der Traum vom deutschen Orient. Zwei deutsche Kolonien im Osmanischen Reich 1851-1918 (Frankfurt: Campus 2006); Marc David Baer, The Dönme: Jewish Converts, Muslim Revolutionaries, and Secular Turks (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2010); Florian Riedler, “Public People: Seasonal Work Migrants in Nineteenth Century Istanbul,” in Public Istanbul: Spaces and Spheres of the Urban, eds. Frank Eckardt and Kathrin Wildner (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2008), 233–253; Nazan Maksudyan “State ‘Parenthood’ and Industrial Orphanages (Islâhhanes): Transformation of Urbanity and Family Life,” The History of the Family 16, no. 2 (2011): 172–181. Ulrike Freitag, Malte Fuhrmann, Nora Lafi, Florian Riedler, eds., The City in the Ottoman Empire: Migration and the Making of Urban Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2011). There are two other volumes written from a comparative perspective. The first mainly concentrates on “the Arab Middle East” and the second on the contemporary phenomena. Peter Sluglett, ed., The Urban Social History of the Middle East, 1750-1950 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2008); Martina Rieker and Kamran Asdar Ali, eds., Gendering Urban Space in the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Some exceptional works, so far mostly in the form of articles, need to be mentioned here. Amila Buturovic and Irvin Cemil Schick, eds., Women in the Ottoman Balkans: Gender, Culture and History (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007); Haris Exertzoglou, “The Cultural Uses of Consumption: Negotiating Class, Gender, and Nation in the Ottoman Urban Centers during the 19th Century,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 35, no. 1 (2003): 77–101; Eyal Ginio, “Living on the Margins of Charity,” in Poverty and Charity in the Middle Eastern Contexts, ed. Mine Ener, Amy Singer, and Michael Bonner (New York: SUNY Press, 2003), 165–184; Eyal Ginio, “18. Yüzyıl Selanikinde Yoksul Kadınlar,” Toplum ve Bilim 89 (2001): 190–204. Wilson, The Sphinx in the City, 10. Jarvis, Kantor, and Cloke, 16. Wilson, The Sphinx in the City, 8. Dolores Hayden, Redesigning the American Dream, The Future of Housing, Work and Family Life (New York: WW Norton and Company, 2002); David Sibley, “Gender, Science, Politics and Geographies of the City,” Gender, Place and Culture 2, no. 1 (1995): 37–49. Valerie Preston and Ebru Üstündağ, “Feminist Geographies of the ‘City’: Multiple Voices, Multiple Meanings,” in A Companion to Feminist Geography, ed. Lise Nelson and Joni Seager (Malden: Blackwell, 2005), 211–227.

12

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19. Gila Hadar, “Jewish Tobacco Workers in Salonika: Gender and Family in the Context of Social and Ethnic Strife,” in Women in the Ottoman Balkans: Gender, Culture and History, ed. Amila Buturovic and Irvin Cemil Schick (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007), 127–152. 20. Linda McDowell, Gender, Identity, and Place: Understanding Feminist Geographies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 22. 21. Gillian Rose, Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Patricia Martin, “Contextualizing Feminist Political Theory,” in Mapping Women, Making Politics: Feminist Perspectives on Political Geography, ed. Lynn A. Staeheli, Eleonore Kofman, and Linda J. Peake (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 15–30. 22. Sarah Deutsch, Women and the City: Gender, Space, and Power in Boston, 1870-1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). 23. So, in principle, it would be very interesting to examine rural women as actors in social change, but this inquiry would definitely require different and also rare kinds of source material. 24. Janet Wolff, “The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity,” Theory, Culture and Society 2, no. 3 (1985): 37–47. 25. Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994). 26. Ross Macmillan, Annette Nierobisz, and Sandy Welsh, “Experiencing the Streets: Harassment and Perceptions of Safety among Women,” Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 37, no. 3 (2000): 306–322. 27. Phil Hubbard, “Women Outdoors: Destabilizing the Public/Private Dichotomy,” in A Companion, Nelson and Seager, 322–333. 28. Kim Namaste, “Genderbashing: Perceived Transgressions of Normative SexGender Relations in Public Spaces,” Environment and Planning D—Society and Space 14, no. 2 (1996): 221–240. 29. Julia Clancy-Smith, “The Colonial Gaze: Sex and Gender in the Discourses of French North Africa,” in Franco-Arab Encounters, ed. Carl L. Brown and Gordon S. Matthew (Beirut: American University of Beirut, 1996), 201–228. 30. Hille Koskela, “Bold Walk and Breakings: Women’s Spatial Confidence versus Fear of Violence,” Gender, Place and Culture 4, no. 3 (1997): 301–319. 31. Nira Yuval Davis, “Belongings: In Between the Indegene and the Diasporic,” in Nationalism in the 21st Century, ed. Umut Özkırımlı (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2003), 127–144. 32. Mike Crang, Cultural Geography (London: Routledge, 1998). 33. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 34. Tovi Fenster, “Gender and the City: The Different Formations of Belonging,” in A Companion, Nelson and Seager, 242–256.

Part I

‫ﱬﱫ‬ Women and the Reorganization of Urban Life

Chapter 1

Times of Tamaddun Gender, Urbanity, and Temporality in Colonial Egypt On Barak

‫ﱬﱫ‬ Tamaddun, a key concept standing in turn-of-the-century Egypt for “civilization” or “urbanity,” is usually associated with space, and particularly with the space of the city (madina), which was undergoing dramatic transformations, involving significant social change. For example, with the introduction of the tramway into Cairo in 1896, the city tripled its size within roughly two decades, witnessing new rural-to-urban migration, suburbanization, and various other transformations that drew much criticism as well as ample praise. Technologies such as the tramway, as well as the telephone (introduced into Egyptian cities in 1881) or the automobile (appearing in 1903) allowed urban centers simultaneously to expand and contract. Yet the city’s “annihilation of space with time,” as Marx had famously put it, manifested also in temporal terms, which were also seen as part of tamaddun. For example, responding to a previous article titled “The Crimes of Tamaddun,” suggesting that modern over-stimulation of the senses induced madness,1 an 1898 article in Anis al-Jalis, the first women’s magazine published in Egypt, attempted to balance this grim view of urban modernity with an account of the positive impact of tamaddun on the duration and quality of life. Even though in ancient periods people may have lived for hundreds of years, as their lives were not shortened by modern corruption, the article suggested that “twenty years lived nowadays are much better than a thousand years in ancient times.” This is because steam power, telegraphy,

15

16

On Barak

telephony, and print shortened distances and travel times so dramatically, that one can now see and experience much more than in past times.2 Yet the modern mechanical temporality of tamaddun—by which I mean the set of new ways with which time was measured, arranged, and conceived by urbanites—was fraught with much tension and discontent, revealing the colonial condition characterizing Egypt under informal British rule, and helping frame this quandary in temporal terms. For example, frequent discussions of “the value of time” (qimat al-waqt) tended to exaggerate both the Egyptian tendency to squander time, and Western impersonal time-thrift, and to bemoan “how costly time is for them and how cheap it is for us. . .” implicitly accepting the monetized language whereby time can be wasted, squandered, or economized.3 These self-flagellations featured Western Europe and North America in various ways as standards against which Egyptian deficiency could be revealed.4 For example, one of the many articles titled “The Value of Time” opened by approvingly quoting a British observation according to which “the Egyptians are the most observant people when it comes to setting their clocks . . . but the most time-wasteful people when it comes to their professional lives. . .” The writer then went on to provide concrete examples of Egyptian time-wastefulness.5 Such articles suggest that Egyptian middle-class self-criticisms were actually redeployments of British admonitory discourses targeting the indolence of the colonized. Interestingly, Americans, even more than the English, emblematized model time-thrift in the Egyptian press. In 1908, for instance, the weekly Diyaʾ al-Sharq published a series of articles on this matter, mentioning in one of them a case in which a clever American businessman hired a dockworker to wave his red handkerchief to the businessman’s nearsighted wife who was standing onboard a ship leaving for Europe, until the ship sailed out of sight. The husband, of course, used the saved time to do some work.6 Such anecdotes, which pushed the logic of time-is-money ad absurdum, arguably came to be seen as the rule rather than the exception in the Egyptian press. Furthermore, beyond these supposed East-West divides, such articles reveal a gendered difference regarding attitudes toward timekeeping: “time-ismoney” emerges here and elsewhere as a masculine equation, a conversion that takes place despite female interference and disruption. The role of middle-class women in new timekeeping arrangements in colonial Egypt is the subject of this article. But as I argue in what follows, Egyptian women were never simply the rhetorical “other” of modern abstract masculine clock-time. Alongside this important capacity, women paradoxically reinforced masculine temporality in several important, if concealed ways. Notably, they were the ones who made it possible for their husbands and sons—members of the effendiyya, a designation referring in

Times of Tamaddun

17

early twentieth-century Egypt to an educated, urban, and nationalist male professional7—to lead a scheduled life, while at the same time taking much of the blame for disruptions in these new modern routines.

WORK TIME IN AND OUT OF THE HOUSE Upon graduating from law school and embarking on adult professional life, future Egyptian nationalist leader Mustafa Kamil (1874–1908), a role model for generations of effendis, announced that he was adopting a strict daily routine: 6:00 AM – 7:00 AM: wake, pray, breakfast, walk to the Qasr al-Nil bridge for exercise 7:00 AM – 12:00 AM: reading, writing, legal business 12:00 PM – 3:00 PM: lunch, nap 3:00 PM – 5:00 PM: reading 5:00 PM – 7:00 PM: visits to friends and relatives 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM: reading 9:00 PM – 12:00 AM: dinner, socializing8 This schedule—one of several other well-publicized new devices promoting self-regulation9—is a fine example of the reliability, vigorousness, and punctuality expected of an effendi.10 Kamil’s well-planned routine, however, had a “political unconscious,” a universe of “task-oriented time” which mutely enveloped and sustained the homogenized clock-time day, excreting it as a false symptom from the moment it started, perhaps with a 6:00 AM ring of an alarm clock. Indeed, here the binary opposition between what EP Thompson famously called “clock-oriented time” and “task-oriented time”—the premodern temporality of agriculture and artisanship revolving around natural oscillation11—should better be seen as a heurism repeatedly destabilized and reasserted. Thus, the young lawyer seems capable of ignoring a morning call for prayer governed by the celestial composition and level of daylight, as well as by auditory temporal markers that imposed themselves on urban dwellers.12 However, prayer itself, with the preceding prescribed ablutions and then its “units” of recitation and changes in bodily posture, imposes its own “task-oriented” rhythms and pulse.13 Or imagine the contents of Kamil’s breakfast. Most likely, this meal included a cup of coffee, a stimulant that was incorporated as a key component of effendi nutrition (and status) and facilitated bodily compliance with

18

On Barak

the dictates of the clock. But if Kamil’s coffee was taken with milk in the European fashion that effendis came to adopt,14 the plot thickens: the mere suggestion of fresh milk traveling daily from a water buffalo in the countryside to Kamil’s cup evokes various other nonhomogenized mornings that start much earlier than 6:00 AM and are unfamiliar with the clock.15 It is clear, then, that the “clock-time” schedule is constantly shot through and polluted with multiple messy “task-oriented times.” But only complicating and destabilizing such abstract schedules would be merely pointing out the obvious, that reality is inherently messier than the modes of its simplification into workable and livable categories. Therefore, the next and more significant analytical step must be retracing the logic animating these evidently fragile instances of purification, examining how time was gendered, classed, and politicized in ways that reduced it, simplified it, and made it possible to keep. In other words, it is important yet insufficient to collapse binary oppositions between task-oriented feminine time and masculine clock-time, or between natural and social time. In addition, one has to also do exactly the opposite: to trace how these fragile contrasts were created, stabilized, and maintained. Practically, Kamil’s eventful morning seems to have necessitated the presence of domestic subordinates to prepare and serve the breakfast that had to be promptly consumed between prayer and exercise or attend to the different sets of clothing for indoor and outdoor activity. In what follows, I flesh out the mechanisms that assigned different temporalities to different actors, pushing men, women, and their servants to occupy different temporalities, while simultaneously binding them together to the same time system. A “typical” woman’s schedule took its cue from the masculine one. If Kamil and his ilk would ideally wake up at 6:00 AM, take breakfast and dress to leave the house, an ideal middle-class housewife (as she was promoted in the women’s press) would also wake up at 6:00 AM, but dress in her house clothes, prepare breakfast, and start cleaning the house.16 Before noon she would go into the kitchen and cook or supervise the preparation of lunch, then eat, and rest until 3:00 PM. The rest of her day also matches the patriarchal program outlined by men such as Kamil.17 As for servants, they too were synchronized with the masters of the house. Proposals to the effect that a servant’s schedule would start at six in the morning and last until ten at night with one hour for rest in the late afternoon18 suggest harsher actual working conditions but also reveal attempts to tune servants’ labor with a synchronizing domestic sphere. The fact that a noteworthy degree of synchronicity can be detected among the schedules of masters, servants, and wives suggests that domestic temporalities cannot be confined to the realm of “task-oriented time.” Obvi-

Times of Tamaddun

19

ously, however, we are not dealing with pure “clock-times,” either. To maintain intensive and demanding schedules such as Kamil’s, and moreover, to instill them in male children, women had to be brought into “clock-time,” without fully departing from the “task-time” of domestic chores. This can be seen as an indication of the extensive yet always incomplete penetration of the logic of time-is-money into more and more domains of practice and everyday life in Egypt, and indeed the new discourse of household scheduling was linked to efforts to economize the domestic budget. The new effendi women’s press that promoted placing clocks and calendars throughout the house also called for a monthly allowance for middle-class housewives who managed and economized the family budget.19 Such hierarchical schedules—in which what we call “gender” or “class” can be seen as demarcations of distance from the ideal standard of abstract clock-time—empowered effendis and sustained their masculine public performances, holding together a middle-class masculine “public sphere.” Effendis—who, as I show elsewhere, were themselves brought to a mechanical time on board European trains and telegraphs that were at once punctual and belated, abstract and physically violent20—were in turn applying such differential temporalities at home. A good example of the uneven deployment of clock-time in the domestic sphere can be found in the frequent effendi descriptions of women hindering their ability to keep to schedules (as is often the case, dependency is revealed when it emerges as encumbrance). A recurring joke, for example, described a typical wife making her husband miss the train or delay his arrival at important social engagements. Indeed, there is probably no better locus for examining the interface of the domestic and public spheres than instances of leaving the house. And as both cartoons pasted below suggest, wives were exercising temporal discipline themselves, giving husbands a taste of their own medicine. An article published in 1932 in the Egyptian State Railways Magazine, a company publication meant to promote solidarity and team spirit among the workforce, clearly reveals the violence animating this tension, and links such differential temporal arrangements to large-scale, communal forms of conviviality and togetherness. “Our Jobs and their Effect on our Private Lives,” written by an anonymous effendi railway employee, begins by asserting that “Time is everything in the life of the railway man and it holds his yoke in its hand and does whatever it pleases with him, disregarding the orders of nature.” The clock-time of the railway is contrasted with the time of nature, daylight, and house chores. But a man cannot survive on his own in this brave new world of abstract clock time and, as the article goes on to explain, it is the wife’s job to make this possible by silencing the children, by performing the housework in a manner that allows the husband to

20

On Barak

Figure 1.1. “Speed is from the Devil.” Source: Kull Shayʾ wa-al-ʿAlam, 2 January 1928. The husband (in the railway station): It is your fault—you delayed me in the toilette an entire hour, painting your face white and red, pudra and mudra, and we missed the train. The wife: It is your fault—you rushed me and made me leave the toilette before the time of the next train.

Times of Tamaddun

21

Figure 1.2. Clock Discipline. Source: Kull Shayʾ wa-al-ʿAlam, 20 February 1928. After she took three hours to prepare, the wife responds to the husband’s request that she wait till he puts on his coat, “Why are you delaying us?”

sleep, and by providing his meals in a prompt and timely fashion. “And pity the wife who does not respect speed.”21 The article reveals how the home became a synchronized extension of the workplace (and vice versa) and exposes the percolation of workplace disciplinary mechanisms to the domestic sphere, too. In turn, as we shall see below, familial categories were borrowed from the domestic sphere to inform affinities at work. The violence of the clock, barely hidden in the husband’s threats quoted above, cannot be seen simply as a means for the oppression of women, as wives themselves used the clock to coerce husbands to perform certain tasks, and to return home from work promptly at fixed times. Thus, a married woman responding to a newspaper column comparing marriage to a prison admitted that there is some truth in the comparison as she strictly enforces the time of her husband’s return home, never permitting him to be late.22 With the increasing installation of domestic telephones, more and more wives could ring their husbands’ office and remind them that the working day was over.23 The home therefore curbed the work sphere, constituting an “outside” vigorously enforcing the “inside’s” temporalities. One of

22

On Barak

the forces that kept these “public” and “private” realms categorically apart, despite their many interfaces and intersections, was the feminine flirtation with clock-time, and the ambivalent nature of women’s timekeeping, seen as a source of power, a generator of masculine desire. This will be discussed in the next section. The “public” and “private” spheres were synchronized (yet again, in a way that made them seem neatly separate and hierarchically aligned) in another sense, a more technical one. It is impossible to determine precisely the pace of the proliferation of timepieces in Egypt during the first decades of the twentieth century, but the growing number of clock menders and watchmakers counted in official censuses,24 as well as the growing number of press mentions and advertisements for watches, support the commonsensical hypothesis that during this time clocks were quickly becoming widespread, certainly among members of the effendiyya. At the beginning of the century these clocks still needed frequent winding. Before radio sets transmitted time signals hourly and directly to homes beginning in the early 1930s, the exact time was regularly obtained from public clocks, especially those located in central train stations.25 The Egyptian State Railways (ESR), in turn, took its cue, starting in 1900, from the Greenwich “master clock” which informed all “slave clocks” in the Empire of the time by means of telegraphic time signals.26 The abstract clock-time of the railway brought into effendi homes, usually by male users of public transportation, was thus framed by colonial and gendered master-slave relations. Such differential ensembles of temporal synchronicity and diachronicity, of physical violence and governmentality, and of the imperial and national, held communities together and structured their agency. For example, the author of the aforementioned “Our Jobs and their Effect on our Private Lives” claims that a “readiness for action under these circumstances” characterizes and binds together the entire Egyptian State Railways workforce, [f]rom our distinguished director to the smallest in our midst. Our director is woken by the naqus27 for every unusual event. He gets out of bed without paying heed to the orders of nature. The inspector and the engineer, the doctor and the station supervisor, the locomotive driver and the technician, do exactly the same. Is this not one of the noble contents hidden in the moral link which binds together the members of the railways family? Indeed, there is nothing more noble or beautiful than knowing that all of us—our different positions notwithstanding—constitute one family, for we cooperate in one work and strive towards one goal—the service of the public.28

During the first decades of the twentieth century, the family became the central metaphor for togetherness in the Egyptian nation.29 Such idioms

Times of Tamaddun

23

were reproduced by defining the domestic sphere and its temporalities as the foundation of the public sphere of class and national politics and, at the same time, as its internal other. Moreover, texts such as “Our Jobs and their Effect on our Private Lives” make clear that the transfer of metaphors among the spheres of class, nation, and family—what made these realms analogous and thus metaphorically exchangeable—were actual familial realities. As such, these texts also help raise questions about the supposedly “imagined” nature of the national community.30

WED(C)LOCK Companionate marriage and the mutual temporal disciplining married men and women exercised upon each other was regularly contrasted with the free life of the effendi bachelor. Whereas marriage was governed by regular schedules and by the productive tensions triggered by keeping and ignoring them, bachelorhood was often defined by its time-wastefulness (for which marriage was considered the best cure). Throwing one’s youth away was most powerfully demonstrated on a quotidian level by a critique of the urban café culture that many effendis enthusiastically embraced, while at the same time criticizing it in various literary avenues, describing it as one of the ills of Egyptian society.31 For example, in 1898 jurist and public intellectual Ahmad Fathi Zaghlul blamed coffeehouses for spreading indolence and for stifling the ability to think and act creatively.32 During the last decade of the nineteenth century the number of cafés, bars, and gaming rooms in Cairo more than tripled—from 2,316 to 7,475—providing the context for Zaghlul’s alarm.33 According to Egypt’s official census, a similar increase is detectable in the number of workers in such institutions. In 1907 there were 11,772 males and 301 females employed in hotels, coffeehouses, restaurants, and bars. By 1917 these numbers had increased to 25,433 and 1,777, respectively.34 The purported inclination of effendi bachelors to waste their time and money in coffeehouses instead of entering the bonds of wedlock was seen as one of the key explanations for the alleged “marriage crisis” (azmat al-zawag) that was thought to threaten the very foundations of the Egyptian nation in the first decades of the twentieth century.35 It was claimed that only young women and their enticing time-wastefulness had the power to wrench bachelors from their café culture of time-wastefulness. Indeed, whereas love had the effect of slowing down an enamored woman, for example by extending her beautification rituals,36 a loving man felt a stunning quickening.37 Thus, in Tawfiq al-Hakim’s 1933 novel ʿAwdat al-Ruh (Return of the Spirit) most of the

24

On Barak

bachelor protagonists wasted their time and money in al-Hajj Shahata’s café, where they waited to be awakened by love. One of them, Mustafa, a good man “whose goodness was buried under a heavy layer of indolence . . . ,”38 likewise wasted long hours in this coffeehouse but this changed when love infused him with a new energy that made relaxing in the café impossible. Love also instills in Mustafa a new orientation toward a future as a productive industrialist, and erases his past. The time of bachelors and that of lovers were incommensurable, and any movement between them was seen as a rupture. Appropriately, perhaps, if the effendi bachelor threatened the disciplinary institution of wed(c)lock with his time-wastefulness, the anisa, the unmarried educated maiden, was seen as a generator of titillating delay who made men keenly aware of time lost. Paradoxically, the shorter the wait, the longer the delay seemed. A 1928 joke titled “time wastefulness” (idaʾ al-waqt) symptomatized this: Young lady: I was introduced to you one hour ago and already you wish to kiss me? Young man: That’s right. . . and I’m sorry I wasted all that time.39

Female telephone operators, usually young and unmarried members of the middle class, were the most visible group of women to typify the maiden’s proclivity for delay. As I show elsewhere, keeping male callers on hold had a contradictory effect. On the one hand, it stirred their frustration and violence, while on the other hand, it aroused their desire. Being on hold on the telephone line was often equated in the Egyptian press and literature to awaiting political independence from colonial rule. This was part of a literary trope whose origins can be traced back to the beginning of the twentieth century, in which Egypt was seen as a woman waiting to be liberated by middle-class men.40

MOTHERS’ DAY The emergence of companionate marriage and the nuclear family as the central stages of effendi domestic life involved several important dislocations of preexisting household ties and significant rearrangements of domestic labor. One of the fundamental shifts was the reallocation of childrearing from servants to mothers, and the emergence of maternal time disciplining. The hybrid role of women as facilitators of masculine abstract clock-time and the task-oriented time of the home was first hammered out in discussions regarding the education of women during the turn of the twentieth

Times of Tamaddun

25

century. This happened alongside the appearance of education as a general social remedy, as in the aforementioned work of Ahmad Fathi Zaghlul and that of Muhammad ʿUmar,41 both of whom acknowledged and relied on works addressing women’s education. In reformist texts initially authored by males, women were connected to the clock-time of effendi men not only as their wives, but also as mothers instilling it in their male offspring.42 In a chapter on the education of women, pioneering Egyptian feminist and lawyer Qasim Amin linked women’s education to the role of the woman as mother, raising future members of the society. Being assigned the role of educators previously left to servants or foreign nannies, mothers came to be perceived as playing a crucial role in instilling timekeeping values in children, for better and initially mostly for worse: “Is it not [a mother’s] ignorance that allows [her child] to be lazy, running away from work and wasting his precious time, which is his capital, lying down or sleeping or dallying, even though childhood years are the years of energy, work, and action?” And, as was frequently the case also in subsequent pointed critiques,43 the effect of uneducated women on children’s time-mindlessness was linked to their proclivity to superstitions. In the following paragraph Amin continues, “Is it not a mother’s ignorance that compels her to bring up her child through fear of jinn and evil spirits? Is it not her ignorance that impels her to hang charms on her child for his protection, and to lead him around graves and shrines of Muslim saints?”44 Education for boys clearly required educated mothers capable of instilling proper temporal discipline that in turn would replace the superstition and folk religiosity of the lower classes. Temporal discipline, in other words, was a project entailing excising the servant or the peasant within. Indeed, feminism of the kind developed by men such as Amin arguably had the effect of articulating and widening a class divide between effendi women and mostly female domestic servants. It was an ideology that transformed gender inferiority into a device of class politics. Consequently, this discourse also harbored a contradiction between the two central positions women could occupy in effendi discourses: wifehood and motherhood. As wives, effendi women constituted the sub-standard that they upheld as mothers. The main arena of the struggle between wives and servants (as well as the internal conflict of wifehood and motherhood) was the realm of pedagogy, self-making, and character building. As the deepest roots of Egyptian time-mindlessness and superstition were now found in the home, the temporal education of the schools could not stop when the last bell rang for the day. It had to be extended to the domestic sphere. This new paradigm was promoted in the daily and women’s press,45 and primarily in scientific journals such as al-Muqtataf. “Tadbir al-manzil” advice

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On Barak

columns devoted to “rationalized homemaking” targeted effendi women (sometimes through their husbands or fathers, but often directly, in the second person feminine voice), advocating a rearrangement of domestic time. Different activities, from cooking and eating to sleeping, were allocated proper times and durations. Evening hours, for example, “from sunset to darkness, when the light weakens and children are unable to study, but it is not dark enough to light the lanterns” were considered times which mothers should spend with their children, instead of leaving them in the custody of lower-class servants who fill their heads with nonsense about jinn and ʿafarit.46 In these twilight hours children grow fearful and require motherly guidance. The mother therefore has to tell her children that the dark has nothing in it to fear from, “not monsters, not demons and nothing of that sort. And she has to firmly establish this in their minds and refute anything that servants had told them on these things. She has to repeat this point until it is firmly established in their minds.” The problem with jinn and ʿafarit stories, the article explained, was that they were implanted in the young mind and when the person grows they weaken his tenacity and make him delusional.47 Al-Muqtataf reveals that from the turn of the twentieth century onward, after-sundown hours—once the hours in which the jinn had roamed the night (as servants allegedly still believed)48—became times in which jinn and ʿafarit started posing a new danger to effendi children who were thought vulnerable to a new kind of possession, the superstitious fear of the jinn they might contract from the servants.49 The regularized day that was deemed an antidote to such “superstitions” came to be associated with various scientific discourses stressing hygiene and physical activity that it was meant to frame and ensure: “a child must be exposed to light and air, and must be assigned specific times for feeding, sleeping, and bathing every day.”50 Other realms of public health and hygiene were similarly regulated by fixed schedules. The times of street sweeping, for example, repeatedly generated controversy in Egyptian newspapers.51 Setting fixed times for practices such as sweeping and sprinkling (mostly carried out at night or during the early morning) allowed neighborhood residents themselves to supervise the performance of these tasks and keep their children away from the streets at these times, when dust threatened their health.52 (Sprinklers occasionally ran over children, which was reason enough to avoid them.)53 Knowing the times of street sweeping was even connected to longevity, as avoiding street and domestic dust was one out of “22 Advices how to Reach the Age of One Hundred.”54 Even sleeping hours and the appropriate time to go to bed gradually became an important domain of measurement and scientific observation. Popular psychology journals such as al-Nafs al-Bariʾa (The Healthy Spirit) were

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mapping sleeping and dreaming patterns, discussing, for example, the specific moments in which dreaming occurred during a night’s sleep.55 Often, discussions of sleeping and rest were imbedded in more general concerns regarding the proper distribution of work and leisure, deemed necessary for mental, physical, and even national health.56 Whereas the emergence of leisure time was reminiscent of, and surely inspired by, similar processes taking place in Western Europe and North America,57 Egyptian magazines linked these discussions to specific concerns. For example, al-Nafs al-Bariʾa promoted a distribution of rest time according to social class and the type of work performed, recommending bodily rest to manual workers and physical exercise to clerks and doctors. The problem in Egypt, the periodical further diagnosed, was that the coffeehouse is the only place where both rest and exercise occurred, a site occupied by both the worker and the doctor.58 We have already seen how the coffeehouse represented a locus of timewastefulness undermining various projects of national and marital reform. Seen as a promoter of indolence, aversion to wedding, or improper modes of respite, the café and its time-wastefulness were pathologized as the antithesis of industriousness, national manhood, and as we now realize, eventually also sound mental health. Indeed, the coffeehouse and the time-wastefulness it stood for became a nexus of practices of various kinds. To the ones already mentioned we can add a spatial aspect. As Egyptian urban centers were rapidly becoming busy with the traffic of vehicles and pedestrians, coffeehouses came to be seen as impediments to regular and swift movement along the street. Different sets of municipal regulations attempted to curb the spatial spread of the cafés (stipulating, for example, the parameters to which chairs and tables can extend on the pavement) as well as closing and opening times of coffeehouses.59 The regulations for closing times of cafés, especially, facilitated the (always selective) enforcement of vagrancy laws by depriving night prowlers any excuse to be up and about in the dark. For example, in a 1909 article in al-Nizam (Order), the time four Italians had been arrested in the street—between 2:00 AM and 5:00 AM—together with their known indolence and sloth is reason enough for their deportation.60 The different discourses and attitudes targeting coffeehouses and the timekeeping practices they promoted were clearly intersecting. Whereas we have seen above that socially legitimate timekeeping habits represented intersections between seemingly insulated realms of interaction—the educational, domestic, labor, and national spheres—the opposite also seems to have been true. Time-wastefulness was critiqued as pathology in the marital, national, spatial, and psychological realms. In other words, in tandem with regarding these different planes of interaction “metaphorical,” what we see here is how marriage, the psyche, or urban planning become key realms

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whereby national politics, imperial inequalities, and labor tensions play out and get shaped, and the opposite, of course, is also the case. Alongside popular scientific magazines such as al-Nafs al-Bariʾa, advice columns in various periodicals predominantly targeted evening and night hours as a key realm of temporal reform, linking sleeping patterns, fear of jinn and ʿafarit, proper childrearing, servants’ superstition, and effendi wives in all sorts of ways. For example, if according to the aforementioned al-Muqtataf column, fear of ʿafarit contracted from servants hampered children’s sleep, another periodical suggested that children’s irregular sleeping hours instilled the fear of ʿafarit in them.61 Another indication of the nature of the dislocation from the fear of ʿafarit to the fear of fear itself may be found in The Fellahin of Upper Egypt (1927), one of the first anthropological monographs venturing beyond urban Egypt. In the belief system of the peasants of Upper Egypt, the ʿafarit themselves were deemed responsible for children’s nightmares and if a child suffered from them or sleepwalked, this was an indication that an ʿafrit had entered his body.62 Furthermore, one of the sure ways for conjuring up ʿafarit was fearing them.63 Domestic servants, many of whom were of rural origin, seemed to have constituted a new threat simply by endorsing and promoting such theories of action. At the same time, these theories themselves thereby helped fashion new notions of the psyche and thus the foundations of scientific rationality. Moreover, however different, the aforementioned newspaper columns similarly strove to transform the night into a quantifiable period. Inside the discourse of time-is-money and its ideas about success and rest, various “others” were discerned and domesticated. The supernatural, the dream, and the imagination were rationalized, and framed as “supernatural.” They could exceed the rational only after being framed by it. If dreams and the imagination have a history, these processes mark a significant shift in it, as well as a shift in the history of the masculine and middle-class rationality, which fashioned itself as their “other.” Significantly, while popular scientific texts were obviously importing their subject matter from the West, many of them were making direct references to preexisting systems of knowledge and expertise or at least making such readings very likely. The aforementioned al-Nafs al-Bariʾa article tracing dreaming bursts throughout the night, for instance, was titled “The Meaning of Dreams” (maʿna al-ahlam) simultaneously referencing Freud’s famous text as well as a rich literature of Arabic dream interpretation. In this literature the dream and wakeful activities were connected in ways that accommodated prospective-ness and not only retrospective-ness. It is important to stress, again, the connection of the scientific concern with nighttime and new concerns about labor productivity, including the ability of the male professional to concentrate and perform

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his job and pay attention.64 Thus, enumerations and calculations of sleeping hours were connected to questions of proper modes of wakefulness, success, and mindfulness at work.65 Clearly, then, “mental health” was emerging as a field of expertise, shaped by and in turn shaping the understandings and the organizations of free time, sleeping, and dreaming. This process is connected in several ways to the aforementioned redistribution of domestic labor, which was carried out through contrasting the effects of wives and servants on children and that of scheduled rationality with superstition. Firstly, both processes provided yardsticks, rules of thumb, and guidelines for rationality and normativity. Secondly, in both processes, equipping effendi women with seemingly abstract clock-time meant that this temporality attached itself to bodily tasks, and became inscribed as a biological clock regulating sleeping, eating, and moving. Clocks, in tandem with artificial illumination (allowing, for example, the reading of evening newspapers, and reading oneself to sleep—a habit adopted by “most people engaged in intellectual labor”),66 stimulants and suppressors (such as coffee and hashish), medical practices addressing fatigue and productivity,67 all pushed clock-time into the body, making the communities that were thereby assembled not merely imagined, but as corpo-real as possible. Similar claims were made by the author of the aforementioned “Our Jobs and their Effects on our Daily Lives” whose eating and sleeping, as well as level of energy and activity, were allegedly regulated by the unnatural time of the clock. Seeming abstractions such as clock-time manifested in the tangibility of light, food, or bodily disposition, which transformed them into task-time again.

CONCLUSION: SERVANTS’ TIME Side by side with the wedding crisis (azmat al-zawag) allegedly threatening the bonds of effendi wed(c)lock, another crisis, “the servants’ crisis” (azmat al-khadam), seen as the blurring of some of the relatively new boundary lines between servants and masters,68 was posing its own threats to the servant-free nuclear family and by extension to the Egyptian nation (thereby helping to cement these categories). “The servants’ crisis,” recently and insightfully explored in Egyptian literature,69 still awaits its historian. Nevertheless, it is clear that servants played a role in the temporal (re)arrangements of the effendi home. Servants, like women, sustained effendi routines by facilitating them practically while discursively constituting their theoretical “other.” For example, a 1930s cartoon shows an effendi master of the house rebuking his

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bawwab (doorman) for handing him a letter three days after it was delivered.70 The cartoon reveals the importance of doormen for maintaining communication among the members of the effendiyya, and simultaneously also the importance of lower-class time-mindlessness, against which the master’s efficiency and promptness could be articulated. We have already seen how superstitious female domestic servants stood for “the servant within” and constituted the background against which women’s education and the reallocation of childrearing to educated wives was deemed necessary. Doormen similarly allowed maintaining a boundary line between the inside and outside by being constantly included and excluded, closing and opening the doors between the public and the private spheres. The galaxy of “others” with and against whom effendi-ness could be articulated and performed as a complex and multidimensional identity became ever more dense. Interactions between the different “others” constituting it—for instance, between women and servants, or among different types of servants themselves—thus shed light on increasingly elaborate social hierarchies. We have already seen how synchronization and the transmission of time between and inside each of the interconnected “private” and “public” spheres became a process involving much social tension and also implying a hierarchical transmission of desire. Instances of asking and giving the time archive some of this desire as well as the (verbal) violence it entailed. A scene from the 1937 film Salama fi Khayr (Everything is Fine), offers a case in point. Standing in the street, Salama, a farrash (an office servant) played by famous comedian Nagib al-Rihani, hears a beautiful upper-class lady ask for the time. As he starts answering her she immediately hushes him, barking, “Nobody asked you!” Then he hears another female voice inquire about the time, and starts answering again: “the time (al-saʿa, also “the watch”) is. . .” But when he turns around, Salama realizes that the inquirer is an ugly old lady. Without loosing his wits, he immediately continues, “. . . the clock stands (al-saʿa waqfa).” The following cartoon, from Guha magazine,71 similarly reveals something of the hierarchy among the effendis’ various “others,” and some of the tensions and contestations inside this hierarchy. Guha, the ambassador of lower-class practical wisdom and mentality in the effendi sphere, asks a beautiful woman for the time. Her reply is “one sharp” (wahda madhbuta, also “a sharp one,” or “a foxy lady” in colloquial Egyptian Arabic). The sexual connotation of the word play, a secondary meaning that comes to override the primary one for those in the know (as is also the case in the previous instance from Salama fi Khayr) is another example of the transmission of desire through instances of asking and telling the time. The potency of this simple exchange hinges on a complex set of hierar-

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chies and tensions between class and gender. As a member of the lower classes, Guha does not posses a watch and is thus excluded from effendi clock-time. As a man, however, his venture into clocktime allows him to rhetorically objectify his female interlocutor. If in Salama fi Khayr women ask for the time and the lower-class man attempts to answer (in the first instance his reply and the desire it connotes are rejected by a respectable woman, and in the second instance he himself refrains from telling the time, so that he would not be mistaken for per- Figure 1.3. Asking for the time. forming desire), here the opposite is the case. However, both cases suggest that much was socially at stake for all parties when asking and telling the time. The timekeeping conventions explored in this article helped orchestrate domestic conviviality, synchronizing the movements and labor of husbands, wives, and servants, facilitating the coordination of the home with the demands and routines of public spheres of action. These domestic arrangements of time therefore indicate not only power hierarchies at home but also reveal the political and economic conditions that connected the home to the wider world while, at the same time, presenting it as an insulated and separate domain. By moving between task- and clock-oriented times, effendi women, represented in the abovementioned cartoons, plays, films, and magazines, played a key role in forging this connection and simultaneously in making it invisible.

NOTES 1. Anis al-Jalis, 30 September 1898, five years before Georg Simmel composed “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” 2. Anis al-Jalis, 31 October 1898. 3. Diyaʾ al-Sharq, 4 May 1908. 4. In other words, rather than “othering” the West, effendi intellectuals started regarding themselves as the West’s “other.”

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5. Majallat al-Musawwar al-Haditha al-Musawwara, 11 December 1929. 6. Diyaʾ al-Sharq, 20 May 1908. 7. See Lucie Razova, “Egyptianizing Modernity through the ‘New Effendiya’: Social and Cultural Constructions of the Middle Class in Egypt under the Monarchy,” in Re-envisioning Egypt 1919-1952, ed. Barak A. Salmoni and Amy J. Johnson (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2005), 124–164. 8. ʿAlī Fahmī Kāmil, Must≥afa Kāmil Bāshā fī Thalāthah wa-Arbaʿīn Rabī ʿ: Sīratuhu wa-Aʿmāluhu min Khuta≥b wa-A˘hādīth wa-Rasāʾil Siyāsīyah wa-ʿUmrānīyah (Cairo: Mat≥baʿat al-Liwāʾ, 1908), 128–129, as quoted in Wilson Chacko Jacob, Working out Egypt: Effendi Masculinity and Subject Formation in Colonial Modernity, 1870– 1940 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 120. 9. Such as the personal diary or yawmiyyat. Regularly describing one’s day was a practice that prominent effendis came to adopt in the early decades of the twentieth century. See Kull Shayʾ wa-al-ʿAlam, 2 January 1928, on prominent figures adopting this habit. Women also wrote yawmiyyat devoted to “things feminine.” See al-Majalla al-Misriyya, 15 July 1901. In one of the most famous literary renditions of this genre, Tawfiq al-Hakim suggests that the writing of a diary can safeguard an effendi from the degrading effects of living in the countryside. See idem, Diary of a Country Prosecutor (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989), 53. 10. See Jacob’s discussion of the model effendi character in Working out Egypt, 120. 11. EP Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism,” Past and Present, no. 38 (1967): 56–97. 12. An article titled “Morning Time” published in Wadi al-Nil, 5 January 1916, maps the different noises marking daybreak in Cairo, from the calls of the muezzin and the bangs of the Christian naqus to roosters which woke Cairenes in the morning. 13. It is noteworthy that Kamil prays only once per day, according to the clock rather than the muezzin’s call. 14. See Muhammad Taymur’s 1918 short story, “Milk with Coffee and Milk with Dirt,” in Mu’allafāt Muh≥ammad Taymūr. (Cairo: Mat≥ba‘at al-I‘timād, 1340 [1922]), 1: 355–356. 15. In late eighteenth-century Europe, for example, the desire of Hamburg’s women to take fresh milk with their afternoon tea was said to cause dairy farmers around the city to set their clocks half an hour earlier than city folk so that the milkmaids would be able to wake up before sunrise to milk the cows in time. See Michael J. Sauter, “Clockwatchers and Stargazers: Time Discipline in Early Modern Berlin,” The American Historical Review 112.3 (2007): 38, http://www .historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/112.3/sauter.html, accessed 30 December 2008. The opening scene of the 1963 Egyptian film Umm al-ʿArusa (Mother of the Bride) reminds us that the arrival of the milkman was once a wake-up call of sorts: the camera pans from the wall-clock indicating the early hours of a silent morning to the front door, where the milkman’s ring sets off a hectic day. 16. Al-Sufur, 28 January 1921, quoted in Beth Baron, The Women’s Awakening in Egypt: Culture, Society, and the Press (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 157.

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17. Ibid. 18. Malaka Saʾad, Rabbat al-Dar (Cairo: Mat≥baʿat al-Tawfiq, 1915), 97–99, quoted in Baron, Women’s Awakening, 154. 19. Baron, Women’s Awakening, 157. 20. See On Barak, On Time: Technology and Temporality in Modern Egypt (Berkeley: California University Press, 2013). 21. “Our Jobs and their Effect on our Private Lives,” Egyptian State Railways Magazine, February 1932. 22. Al-Musawwar, 2 January 1925, 2. For a critique of the feminist procedure of reducing male-female relations to ones of subjugation and resistance, see Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2004). 23. See, for example, Al-Fukaha, 20 June 1928, and Kull Shayʾ, 7 December 1925, 13. 24. In 1907 there were 926 clock- and watchmakers in Egypt. In 1917 there were already 1,317. See 1917 Census, 386. 25. M.A. Hassunah, Misr wa-al-turuq al-hadidiyya (Cairo, n.p. 1938), 146–147. 26. M. Perkins, The Reform of Time: Magic and Modernity (Sterlin, VA: Pluto Press, 2001), 19. 27. A wooden or metal board on which Eastern Christians pound to call for prayer. This may be a technical term for a device used in train stations at the time. 28. “Our Jobs and their Effect on our Private Lives,” Egyptian State Railway Magazine, February 1932. 29. See Lisa Pollard, Nurturing the Nation: The Family Politics of Modernizing, Colonizing, and Liberating Egypt, 1805-1923 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 30. As famously claimed by Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1999 [1983]). 31. In this vein coffeehouse culture was seen as a moral problem threatening not only marriage, but society in general. See for example al-Saʿa, 15 April 1923. 32. Ahmad Fathi Zaghlul, Sirr taqaddum al-inkliz al-saksuniyyin (Cairo: Matbaʿat alTaraqqi, 1898), 20. 33. Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 116. 34. 1917 Census, 386. 35. Hanan Kholoussy, “The Making and Marrying of Modern Egyptians: Gender, Law, and Nationalism, 1898—1936” (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 2008), 84–85. 36. Tawfiq al-Hakim, Return of the Spirit: Tawfiq al-Hakim’s Classic Novel of the 1919 Revolution, trans. by William M. Hutchins (Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1990, 231. 37. One day after he falls in love, Muhsin, the protagonist of Return of the Spirit, arrives at school in the morning to discover, in front of the clock in the guard’s room, that he is there an entire hour early (ibid., 76). 38. Al-Hakim, Return of the Spirit, 217. 39. Kull Shayʾ wa-al-ʿAlam, 2 January 1928.

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40. Barak, On Time. 41. Muhammad ʿUmar, Kitab H≥ ad≥ir al-Misriyyin, aw, Sirr Taʾakhkhurihim (Cairo: Mat≥baʿat al-Muqtat≥af, 1902). 42. For example, in Hadir al-Misriyyin, Muhammad ʿUmar supported Qasim Amin’s call for the liberation of women and their establishment as a home-schooling authority. 43. Especially those directed against peasants; see Barak, On Time, chapter 4. 44. Qasim Amin, The Liberation of Women (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2000), 26–27. My emphasis. 45. See, for example, “al-Nizam fi al-Bayt,” in al-Marʾa al-Misriyya, 6 March 1923. 46. Al-Muqtataf, February 1903, 170. See also al-Musawwar, 23 January 1925, 2, for a comparison of childrearing in Egypt and abroad. The article complains about the Egyptian habit of giving children to uneducated servants who fill their minds with talk of jinn and ʿafarit and the “stories of Sit Hassan.” 47. Ibid. 48. See W. Blackman, The Fellahin of Upper Egypt (Cairo: American University in Cairo, 2000), 235. 49. In the concluding chapter of Barak, On Time, I argue that the internal hierarchy of the subject—a rational maternal/paternal overt voice juxtaposed with a “sub-conscious” or superstition—retains traces of gender and social difference between effendis, mothers, and servants. 50. “Bab Tadbir al-Manzil: Tarbiyat al-Atfal,” in al-Muqtataf 42, no. 3 (March 1913), 295, quoted in Omnia Shakry, “Schooled Mothers and Structured Play: Child Rearing in Turn-of-the-Century Egypt,” in Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East, ed. Lila Abu-Lughod (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1998), 126–171. 51. See, for example, al-Barid, 29 June 1895; al-Kawkab, 7 October 1905; Tashriʿat wa-Manshurat 1891, 911–913 on street cleaning in Alexandria, and Tashriʿat waManshurat, 1895, 393. 52. Ibid. 53. See for example in al-Qahira, 10 October 1887, a story about a girl run over by a sprinkler. 54. Kull Shayʾ wa-al-ʿAlam, 30 January 1928. 55. Al-Nafs al-Bariʾa, 5 June 1930. 56. For example, an al-Muqtataf article links insufficient sleep to decreased work productivity on the following day: al-Muqtataf, January 1909, 65. Articles in alSaʿa linked sleeping eight hours per night to the ability to make a fortune, see, for example, 12 August 1923. 57. See A. Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (New York: Basic Books, 1990). 58. “Al-Sirr fi al-Siha,” al-Nafs al-Bariʾa, 29 May 1930. 59. Tashriʿat wa-Manshurat, 1884, 304–305, 310; Tashriʾat wa-Manshurat, 1891, 865– 872: Qamus al-Idara (Cairo, 1884), 2: 828, “Qahwa.” 60. Al-Nizam, 3 June 1909.



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61. See al-Musawwar, 27 March 1925, 3; see also al-Sufur, 3 July 1918, on servants and their role in raising the children of landlords. 62. Blackman, The Fellahin of Upper Egypt, 237. 63. See, for example, Muhammad Husayn Haykal, Zaynab (Cairo: Matba’at al-Jarida, 1913). 64. See Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Boston: MIT Press, 2001). 65. See, for example, “How Many Hours do You Sleep?” al-Musawwar, 26 December 1924. 66. Al-Muqtataf, January 1909, 65. 67. During the turn of the century, newspapers such as al-Ahram advertised various invigorating medications—from nerve strengthening to blood strengthening— to reduce fatigue. See, for example, al-Ahram, 7 January 1903, and 14 January 1903. 68. See for example an article titled “The Servant’s Crisis” in al-Marʾa al-Misriyya, 5 March 1923. 69. Wael ʿAshri, “Servants in the House of the Nation” (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 2009). 70. Al-Radio, 4 December 1937. 71. Guha, 5 November 1931.

Chapter 2

Women in the Post-Ottoman Public Sphere Anti-Veiling Campaigns and the Gendered Reshaping of Urban Space in Early Republican Turkey Sevgi Adak

‫ﱬﱫ‬ The gender aspect of social change in early republican Turkey has been studied mainly with reference to well-known Kemalist reforms, such as the secularization of the civil code. In fact, as a more ambiguous reform agenda in terms of content and application, the question of women’s dress is one of the richest cases through which the transformation of the gender regime under the Kemalist regime and the interaction between state and societal actors can be studied. Since veiling encompassed the whole system of seclusion of women,1 anti-veiling campaigns entailed direct state intervention in deeply rooted gender codes, and reshaping of the urban space according to new ones.2 Therefore, it is particularly illuminating terrain for analyzing the Kemalist reconstruction of the public sphere based on a new gender regime, and women’s agency in shaping it. This chapter aims to explore the Kemalist policies regarding women’s dress by concentrating on the anti-veiling campaigns during the mid 1930s. By using local newspapers, supported by archival documents, it looks at the various ways in which these campaigns were formulated and propagated, and how women handled this dramatic change.3 It seeks to analyze the ac-

36

The Post-Ottoman Public Sphere

37

tors, content, mechanisms, and discourse of these campaigns, and women’s involvement in the process, as both facilitators and actors that tried to adapt, shape, modify, and/or resist the change the Kemalist elite wanted to impose. The argument of the chapter is that the implementation of these campaigns was primarily based on the discussions and negotiations at the local level. This allowed a wide range of possibilities for the new dress codes to be manipulated in the public sphere, leaving room for women’s agency. It will be shown that the gendered remaking of the urban space and reconstruction of the cities under the new regime were equally influenced by this process. In other words, anti-veiling campaigns had a direct impact on the shaping of a Kemalist public space. Before proceeding, two points are worth mentioning. Veiling in the context of anti-veiling campaigns of early republican Turkey referred to the use of the peçe (face veil) and the çarşaf (a full-body cloak).4 In other words, anti-veiling campaigns in the early Republican era targeted the peçe and the çarşaf, and in some cities, certain local equivalents of the çarşaf only. Hence, contrary to what is usually thought, Kemalist policy in women’s dress, although it ideally favored total unveiling, did not directly try to eliminate headscarves or turbans women used to cover their hair. Second, the use of the peçe and the çarşaf was never outlawed in Turkey. Rather, anti-veiling campaigns were mainly local initiatives. There are indications that they were shaped with the endorsement of the Ministry of Interior and the Republican People’s Party (RPP). In other words, Ankara tried to control and to intervene in the process; the anti-veiling campaigns, nevertheless, remained local as far as their actors, content, and application were concerned. That is why it is rather difficult to talk about a consistent policy of anti-veiling. One can point to an overarching discourse on the need to modernize women’s dress, but the decisions were local and involved and mobilized different actors, depending on the locality. As Elizabeth Thompson suggests, much has been written about the revival of veiling in the Middle East, and, as part of this, the Turkish headscarf debate, but “little has been written on the historical contexts that have defined the meaning of those veils.”5 This chapter is an attempt to understand the meaning of veiling and unveiling in Turkey as it was defined in the early Republican era. It particularly aims to analyze how this meaning coincided with, and in many ways served, the Kemalist project of creating a national and modern public sphere, and of redrawing its boundaries. In other words, the spatial dimension of the anti-veiling campaigns and the shift in the gendered boundaries of the city space in the context of Kemalist modernization will be the main focus.

38

Sevgi Adak

ANTI-VEILING CAMPAIGNS IN THE EARLY REPUBLICAN ERA Women’s clothing has been a subject of intense debate since the Ottoman period. The Ottoman state had issued various directives and regulations to control women’s dress, and, especially, to monitor Muslim women’s loyalty to Islamic dress codes, by intervening in the length of veils or thickness of the fabric used for them. The color, size, and form of women’s dress were all subject to state regulation. As Donald Quataert underlines, these regulations were part of a long tradition of Ottoman clothing laws, which aimed at extending state control over society and disciplining the behavior of its subjects.6 In the eighteenth century, for example, when upper-class Ottoman women began to wear fancy feraces, the Ottoman state had to issue some restrictions on ferace styles, especially banning tight models and thin fabrics due to the pressure coming from the ulema.7 Regulations requiring modesty in women’s clothes began to be issued. Muslim women were cautioned not to imitate Christian women or European styles, a practice that was becoming more commonplace due to the increasing influence of the West in the nineteenth century. Upper-class women in urban areas, in particular, had begun to follow and adopt European fashions.8 Women’s clothing and attire became a central issue, a milieu of struggle for the supporters of various political positions as of the late nineteenth century.9 The public debate over the peçe and the çarşaf, which increasingly replaced the ferace as women’s outdoor dress by the late nineteenth century, intensified in the flourishing intellectual atmosphere that emerged after the 1908 Constitutional Revolution, especially with the rise of the Ottoman women’s movement.10 Although women’s right to education and participation in public life were the primary points of struggle for the members of the movement, they also began to discuss the proper form of women’s veiling in the public sphere and what form the national dress of the Ottoman women should assume. For many, Ottoman women’s veiling was improper; it was neither in line with the Islamic veiling codes nor with the necessities of public life.11 The main target was the peçe since there was a near unanimous consensus among the reformists on its non-Turkish character and its inappropriateness with respect to women’s health and social roles; but there were also those who supported a reform of the çarşaf, or even its abolition.12 Among the women’s journals, Kadınlar Dünyası (Women’s World) was particularly vocal in advocating a change in women’s veiling and in underlining the necessity to define the national dress of Ottoman women.13 There were also male intellectuals who argued that the peçe and the çarşaf were in fact barriers to women’s education and participation in the public sphere.14 Especially after World War I, when more women began to work outside

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and women’s visibility increased in the public life, women’s dress in urban settings also began to change. The use of the peçe decreased, and particularly in Istanbul, more women began to wear overcoats or cloaks instead of the çarşaf, together with various different models of headscarves.15 These changes went hand in hand with attempts to control women’s clothing, and women’s veiling continued to be a matter of regulation for the state authorities as well as an issue of intense debate with wider political implications until the end of the empire.16 Like other modernizing regimes, for the Kemalists as well, the importance of clothing primarily originated from the power it had to shape identities in the public sphere. As Alev Çınar argues, clothing can be considered “one of the most powerful tools for the display of identities due to its temporally and spatially proliferative quality,”17 and this quality was what concerned the Kemalist regime most, in terms of both controlling and regulating society and transforming it into a modern, civilized nation. The Hat Law in 1925 was perhaps the earliest and most apparent manifestation of this Kemalist concern.18 Regulating men’s clothing only, the law nevertheless made it explicit that one fundamental aspect of the Kemalist project of building a secular nation-state was to create new, modern subjects who would transform the public sphere into a modern domain through their very existence. Unlike this determined will to directly intervene in men’s clothing, the Kemalist regime was more hesitant and reluctant to apply the same approach to women’s clothing. However, in fact, some of its contemporaries in the Middle East and beyond were more willing to opt for a radical transformation.19 Especially in Iran, where unveiling became compulsory by the official decree of Reza Shah Pahlavi in 1936, it was the most radical component of the Women’s Awakening project of the regime, reflecting a “unique absolutist approach” to the issue of women’s dress.20 Compared to the Iranian example, the Kemalist strategy has been seen in the literature as a more reasonable option since “it was wisely considered that an outright ban on the veil would provoke a catastrophic storm.”21 However, in order to understand the Turkish case in its totality, one needs to go beyond this elite-centered perspective that focuses on the discourse and policy strategies of the regime applied from the center.22 The Kemalist strategy concerning unveiling was mainly to transfer this issue to local administrations and to allow a range of possibilities to maintain dress norms, except for the peçe and the çarşaf. In other words, in the Turkish case, the lack of a law or decree that directly banned veiling countrywide (1) did not mean that there was no state intervention in women’s clothing at the local level; but (2) at the same time, it allowed space for discussions, negotiations, and local variations, which, in the end, resulted in a complex and arguably less radical transformation.

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Part of the reason for the Kemalist choice of not following a radical stance in women’s dress was related to the patriarchal concern the regime shared while trying to modernize gender relations. The emphasis on the necessity of remaking the nation’s women along modern lines existed side by side with an equally strong emphasis on protecting women’s morality, pointing to a process that is characterized by Zehra Arat as the replacement of Islamic patriarchy with a modern one.23 In other words, reforms were within the “modern-yet-modest” formulation, the patriarchal consensus between the elite and nonelite male actors.24 This implied various strategies of initiating these reforms without undermining existing hierarchies and moral codes. Although Europeanization of women’s dress was the ideal, open state intervention mainly targeted the peçe and the çarşaf, and the unveiled “new Turkish woman” was supposed to participate in the public life as an asexualized public subject.25 Second, as local initiatives, anti-veiling campaigns in Turkey were shaped mainly by local communities. Between the poles of compliance and open resistance, there were other possible ways of handling this dramatic change, such as avoiding encounters with public officials, and/or domesticating new clothes by adapting them to local circumstances. Replacing the çarşaf with long overcoats and the adoption of various kinds of headscarf or turbans was common.26 In addition, the content and implementation of the reforms varied considerably in different cities, creating a space for local variation and adaptation, and pointing to the role of local administrators and elites as mediators. Before the 1930s, there had been a number of anti-veiling campaigns, again, initiated at the local level, in the second half of the 1920s. The earliest example was a decision by the members of the Trabzon Turkish Hearth (Türk Ocağı) in October 1925.27 As we learn from the memoirs of Mustafa Reşit Tarakçıoğlu, who was then the head of the Trabzon Turkish Hearth and also of the Trabzon Teachers’ Union, members of the community decided at a mixed-gender meeting that women members should remove their peçes and çarşafs, and men should wear hats.28 This decision was seen by the members as a natural result of the role of the Turkish Hearth in guiding the people of Trabzon in their adaptation to modern ways and in being good supporters of the ideals of the revolution. Members also decided to advise other women of the city accordingly in private meetings and conversations, and to encourage them to participate in public life. A similar strategy was adopted in December 1925 by the mayor of Eskişehir, who issued a statement calling for the women of the city to remove their peştamal, or if they were not able to do so, to at least change their color to simpler and more “dignified” ones (because peştemals were too colorful, thus presenting a rural image), and

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to wear them in a more civilized style.29 A year later, some members of the Trabzon Provincial Council (İl Genel Meclisi) submitted a proposal to ban the peçe (but not the çarşaf ) and to reform women’s dress, thereby transforming it into a modern and national form. The proposal was accepted unanimously and the peçe was prohibited in the city on 11 December 1926.30 In Muğla, the peçe was banned by the provincial council at its meeting following the visit of Prime Minister İsmet Pasha.31 In Rize, a similar decision banning the peçe in the city was made by the provincial council.32 In Aydın, in 1927, the provincial council’s prohibition was not limited to the peçe. It included not only other women’s clothes such as the çarşaf and the peştamal, but also men’s clothing that was peculiar to the region.33 As it is seen in the decisions against the peştamal, the general logic behind the views of the local administrators on clothing was based on the distinction they made between civilized and uncivilized ways of dressing. This distinction was, in fact, reinforced by a number of factors that paved the way for such local decisions concerning women’s dress. The Hat Law of 1925 and the determined way it was applied, albeit only touching upon men’s headgear, helped to create a general atmosphere where the significance of modern and civilized clothing was continuously emphasized, especially in the press. In other words, the Hat Law could function as a reference point for those who wanted to initiate a similar change in women’s clothes. As vanguards of the revolution, some state officials and local elite saw themselves in the position of leading the way, and they were thus the key to the transformation observed in the dress of men and women alike around the country. For example, the statement of the mayor of Eskişehir, which was issued only a few days after the Hat Law advising women to remove their peştamal, was in fact motivated by the introduction of the law. In the statement, the mayor appealed for such a change, arguing that the peştamal, because of its primitive and uncivilized appearance, made the city of Eskişehir look ugly during a period of national revival calling for civilized dress that began after the introduction of the hat.34 The mayor’s request to women wearing the peştamal was to adopt the modern clothing worn by some other women in the city. Not mentioning exactly the kind of dress to which he was referring, the mayor probably meant the way some teachers or other state officials were dressing in Eskişehir at the time. In addition to the Hat Law and the general debate on modern dress that emerged after it, the progress in women’s legal status, particularly with the total secularization of the civil code by the adoption of the Swiss Civil Code in 1926, was seen as a complementary factor in the modernization of women’s outward appearance. Put differently, the survival of traditional women’s clothes at a time of a national celebration of women’s rights and

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modernization in the discourse of the new regime was seen by many Kemalist elite, men and women alike, as a contradiction, as something dissonant with the spirit of the time. Removal of the peçe and the çarşaf was perceived as an indispensable part of women’s emancipation and their civilized status under the Republican regime. Therefore, for some members of the local elite, there was no need for a directive to come from the center for every attempt to be made in modernization. Women could modernize their dress on their own in conformity with the need for change that characterized the historic time in which they found themselves.35 The existence of a significant number of women who had already removed their peçe and çarşaf was also important for legitimizing the new forms of clothing as the modern and national norm, and for consolidating them as symbols of these norms. As mentioned above, change in women’s dress had already begun in the late Ottoman period, and continued gradually in the Republican era. It was, in fact, apparent from the early years of the republic that the new regime favored women’s removal of the peçe and the çarşaf. Until their divorce in 1925, Mustafa Kemal’s wife, Latife Hanım, had never used the peçe (while occasionally preferring the çarşaf and always covering her hair) and accompanied her husband in the public sphere, which was something extraordinary at the time.36 Women teachers were the main vanguards in this regard since the dress of state officials had been determined by a number of state regulations, one of which banned the use of the peçe by school teachers on 15 January 1924.37 The press, in particular, played a significant role in promoting new dress norms for men and women alike, publishing the latest trends in Western fashion regularly as a guide for readers. Women’s journals also had a crucial impact on transforming women’s dress and trying to create a national synthesis of Western styles and local traditions, the latter believed to be the authentic Turkish adornment. Therefore, there had already been a gradual change in women’s dress beginning from the early years of the republic. Another factor creating a supportive environment for anti-veiling campaigns was perhaps the attitude of Mustafa Kemal himself regarding women’s dress. Although he never directly addressed the issue of unveiling or referred to the necessity of such campaigns, it was obvious in a number of his speeches that for him, general habits of dress widespread among women in Turkey in the early years of the republic did not have a national and civilized character. His main concern was with women’s segregation and exclusion from the public sphere. In one of his speeches in Izmir in 1923, he touched upon the issue of women’s veiling and emphasized that women’s veiling should be simple and not be in a form that prevents them from participating in public life.38 During his visit to Konya in March 1923, he mentioned that

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what had to be taken into consideration in the issue of veiling were both the spirit of the nation and the necessities of the time.39 Without mentioning the peçe or the çarşaf, he advised women to abstain from going too far in either direction, meaning neither to veil nor unveil too much. He also mentioned that the form of veiling assumed should be simplified. On one occasion, he referred more explicitly to the form of veiling from which women should abstain. During his visit in August 1925 to Kastamonu, where he gave a speech to introduce the hat as men’s headgear, he also mentioned that he had seen some women who were trying to cover their face with a piece of cloth or peştamal and turning their back or closing up by sitting on the ground when they came across men in the street. He characterizes these acts as strange and primitive and the source of ridicule of the Turkish nation, and says: “Gentlemen, would the mothers and daughters of a civilized nation assume such an absurd and vulgar pose? This is a situation that ridicules our nation. It has to be corrected immediately.”40 As seen in this last example, Mustafa Kemal’s speeches regarding women’s dress can be read as his direct criticisms toward the segregation of women and the covering of their face, thus, the use of the peçe. There is no direct mention of any criticism of women covering their hair, for example. In fact, he criticized women who tried to imitate European women and carried the change in their style to the extreme, and urged Turkish women to maintain their modesty.41 However, as mentioned above, his preference, reflected in the way women around him dressed and in the general discourse of the regime on women’s modernization, was for Turkish women’s adaptation to “civilized” norms—ones with which the peçe and the çarşaf were incompatible—in every field, including clothing. The general opinion regarding Mustafa Kemal’s preferences certainly had an influence on those sectors of the political elite who wanted to lead a similar change in women’s dress in their own localities. In fact, combined with the knowledge of the prohibitions issued in some cities, the new regime’s disapproval of the peçe and the çarşaf was so obvious to some people that they mistakenly thought there was a general ban.42 The stigmatization of the peçe and the çarşaf as backward and uncivilized attire alien to Turkish culture accelerated in the mid 1930s, after the consolidation of the Kemalist regime and its single-party rule. The main wave of anti-veiling campaigns began in 1934, reaching its peak in 1935. These campaigns can be seen as part of the other reforms in the cultural domain through which the republic aimed at a clear break with the Ottoman past, and with all habits and norms coded as traditional, false, or backward.43 Women’s acquisition of their political rights in December 1934 was especially important in understanding the timing of the anti-veiling campaigns.

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Women’s right to elect and to be elected was seen as the final and most important step in the new regime’s effort to increase women’s social status. Lack of these rights in many European countries was a constant reference point in underlining the progressive character of this move for the Turkish women. Thus, this reform would also relegate the old image of Turkish women as “hiders behind the peçe and the çarşaf ” to the pages of history.44 This link between unveiling and women’s gaining of their political rights was also emphasized at the local level. The following remark by a columnist in one of the provincial newspapers in 1934 is a good example in this regard: “The news agency notes the removal of the peçe and the çarşaf in Muğla. Does the women’s right to elect and to be elected to the parliament . . . not mean the abolition of the peçe and the çarşaf anyway?”45 It seems that for many people, women’s acquisition of political rights would mean their increasing participation in public life and, therefore, modernization of their dress. In other words, Kemalists assumed a direct link between women’s visibility in the public sphere and unveiling, since the peçe and the çarşaf were perceived as the ultimate symbols of women’s seclusion, the very obstacles to their visibility. The use of the peçe and the çarşaf in the public sphere was inconsistent with women’s new roles; it would mean carrying women’s seclusion to the public sphere, which was supposed to be a modern, civilized, mixed-gender domain, in short, a space in which to overcome that very seclusion. By the mid 1930s, the anti-veiling campaigns had become a nationwide phenomenon. Decisions were made by local institutions to ban the peçe and the çarşaf in many cities, including Mersin ( July 1934), Kayseri (November 1934), Bolu (December 1934), Antalya (February 1935), Bursa (February 1935),46 Adana (February 1935), Rize (February 1935), Artvin (March 1935), Muğla ( June 1935), Aydın (August 1935), Kastamonu (August, 1935), Konya (August 1935), Afyon (August 1935), Yozgat (September 1935), Denizli (September 1935), Bitlis (October 1935), Siirt (October 1935), Çorum (October 1935), Maraş (November 1935), Trabzon (February 1936), Ordu (April 1937).47 Anti-veiling campaigns, however, varied significantly in terms of content, mechanisms used, and actors involved. Even in cases of outright prohibition, its content varied from one city to another. Some only banned the çarşaf; others, both the peçe and the çarşaf; while in yet others, the ban also included the peştamal or other local varieties of veil. While, for example, the ban in Kayseri was only on the çarşaf, in Artvin it included both the peçe and the çarşaf, and in Antalya and Erzincan, the peçe, the çarşaf and the kafes (lattice window).48 In some cities, the campaign was initiated by members of certain local institutions and implemented mainly through propaganda. One example of this is the anti-veiling campaign in Sinop, which was initiated by

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the local People’s House (Halkevi).49 The administrative board (idare heyeti) of the People’s House in Sinop declared in November 1934 that women who want to participate in the plays, conferences, and other meetings at the People’s House had to wear an overcoat instead of the çarşaf.50 In the case of Diyarbakır, members of the People’s House, who were all men, as understood from the news, organized a meeting where they decided to be the first to remove their family members’ peçe and çarşaf so as to be vanguards of the struggle. A news report indicates that in Çankırı, all institutions and party members met in the People’s House where they decided to abolish the peçe and the çarşaf in order to open the way for women to follow Atatürk’s path.51 For some cities, one cannot even see such decisions by the elite groups or local institutions but rather only propaganda through press. The lack of any decision in Istanbul, for instance, became an issue in newspapers, but the governor declared that they expected women of this advanced city to remove their peçe and çarşaf on their own, and that there was no need for any decision or ban.52 In some examples, the campaign against the peçe and the çarşaf began as an initiative of a group of local elite with an outright ban eventually following. In Antalya, for instance, the campaign began in December 1934 with a mixed-gender meeting at the People’s House where women decided to form a committee among themselves to fight against the peçe and the çarşaf, reasoning that they had to work hand in hand with men for the good of the nation. The city council of Antalya then prohibited the peçe, the çarşaf, and lattice windows in February 1935.53 In most of the decisions to ban the peçe and the çarşaf, women were allowed a certain period of adaptation to the new norms, and to get an overcoat to replace the çarşaf.54 Regardless of whether the anti-veiling campaigns resulted in a ban, their initiators were diverse. The most common way in which prohibitions of the peçe and the çarşaf were achieved was through city councils, as part of the legal capacity of the municipalities, with their initiators mostly being members of the city council. In a few cases, such as in Erzincan, decisions were made by the provincial councils led by governors. In either case, implementation of the bans was mainly in hands of the municipal police (zabıta), and in a few instances, women who continued to wear the peçe and the çarşaf had to pay fines for not obeying the municipal regulations.55 In some of the notices issued concerning the bans, women were warned of the possibility of municipal police intervention in cases of noncompliance.56 The attitude of the central authority in Ankara was more hesitant at the beginning, but it gradually became more involved in the process. In the circular he sent to all governors and general inspectors in December 1934, immediately after women gained their political rights, the Minister of Interior invited the local administrators to take responsibility regarding

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the issue of unveiling.57 He indicated that they needed to avoid taking extreme measures, such as banning veiled women from entering public places, and stick to propaganda only. The circular of the minister shows that there were already attempts to prevent the use of the peçe and the çarşaf at the local level and that Ankara was trying to harness them and make sure they remained moderate initiatives in order to avoid social reactions. The issue was then discussed at the 4th Congress of the governing party, the RPP, in May 1935, but this was also after the peçe and the çarşaf had already been prohibited in many cities. The idea of issuing a law banning the peçe and the çarşaf countrywide was suggested to the congress by the delegates of Muğla and Sivas, but it was discussed and rejected at the general meeting. It was argued that such a move would be unnecessary, since the number of women wearing the peçe and the çarşaf was low in the cities, and in villages, where the majority of the population was living, women were not segregated and their faces were open. The minister of interior, Şükrü Kaya, claimed that this was a minor problem and that if such a law were needed, the leader of the revolution would have issued it already, referring to the unwillingness of Mustafa Kemal to intervene in this issue. Nevertheless, Kaya suggested that the struggle against the peçe and the çarşaf should be led by the local administrations, local party cadres, and the People’s Houses, and that they should enlighten people on this issue.58 This opened the way for the acceleration of the anti-veiling campaigns. Two months after the party congress, the minister of interior sent a circular to all governors and general inspectors indicating that while the Kemalist regime was determined to eliminate the peçe and the çarşaf, this “revolution” was left to the civilized taste of the Turkish men and women as far as the policy implications were concerned.59 In the circular, the minister urged the local administrators to use propaganda to encourage the removal of the peçe and the çarşaf, and particularly pointed to the role of the state officials in this regard. However, he also emphasized that the removal of the peçe and the çarşaf was a process already under way, since these veils had disappeared totally in the major cities, and partially in others. Thus, a few “encouraging steps” would suffice to complete this ongoing social change.60 The general secretary of the party also informed the local party organizations in a secret directive about the significance of this issue and about the necessity of working together with the governors for this change.61 In practice, the local party administrations’ involvement in the campaigns became visible with their support, particularly of the propaganda activities,62 and they intervened in the process especially if there was reluctance in a certain city to issue a decision or implement it. The case of Trabzon is significant here. Some members of the city council had been against the idea of issuing a ban on the peçe and the çarşaf and they had been

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able to postpone the talks in the council meetings several times. They thus caused a delay of one year. However, in the end, they gave up under the pressures coming from the local party administration and the governor.63 Despite the involvement of the central authority in the process through the efforts of the Ministry of Interior and the party, anti-veiling campaigns remained mainly local initiatives. In other words, the regime expected the local administrators to deal with this issue and encouraged them to do so, but there was no unity in terms of content of the struggles organized, and, especially, in terms of their application in practice. This was mainly because the circulars coming from Ankara did not include solid policy advice on how to fight against the peçe and the çarşaf apart from propaganda. The end result of the anti-veiling campaigns in the mid 1930s was thus the coexistence of many forms of veiling and unveiling, such as headscarves, turbans, or hats. The peçe and the çarşaf never totally disappeared, but decreased significantly, at least during the campaigns, though perhaps more in some places than others.64 In some cities, local institutions and associations provided poor families with overcoats, since new clothes were more expensive compared to the çarşaf or the peştamal, and this was one of the factors in women’s inability to adapt.65 There were still considerable local variations depending on the social, cultural, and economic factors in different cities, and differences across social classes in a particular locality.66 However, it is safe to argue that anti-veiling campaigns left a clear mark on the Kemalist understanding of women’s emancipation67 and played an important role in redefining the public sphere as a modern and secular space.

ANTI-VEILING CAMPAIGNS AND REDRAWING THE BOUNDARIES OF THE PUBLIC SPHERE Policies and discourse of the Kemalist elite concerning women’s dress, or, in fact, women in general, were very much entangled with the idea of creating a modern and secular public sphere. “Bringing women into the public sphere” was one of the most important mottos symbolizing the Kemalist revolution.68 This is indeed what Kemalism shared with many other modernizing regimes, especially in non-Western contexts, and to a certain extent, with the demands of first-wave feminism, which had established a link between women’s subordination and their being confined to the private sphere.69 Kemalist understanding was that women’s exclusion from the public sphere had become the main reflection of women’s subordination in society, and likewise, segregation of women was the ultimate reason for the underdevelopment of the nation. Redefining women as equal citizens in

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the public sphere was at the heart of the Kemalist understanding of women’s emancipation. In other words, the public sphere was the milieu where women would be refashioned as modern, equal, and active citizen subjects.70 Among many translations of this understanding into specific policies, anti-veiling campaigns were of critical importance in redefining the public sphere as a modern, national, and secular space. Women who removed their peçe and çarşaf, and replaced them with “civilized” clothes, appeared in the Kemalist mentality as signifiers of a national and modern space. In the propaganda posters of the RPP in the 1930s, women’s adoption of modern clothes was the symbol of the change the new regime had brought about; the images of unveiled women as professionals and inhabitants of modern spaces were among the most canonical images of the Kemalist revolution.71 As Çınar indicates, having perceived the body as a political field, the Kemalist state used and dressed it “to institute the norms of the public sphere.”72 One of these norms was the removal of any sign of the old regime. In many of the decisions banning the peçe and the çarşaf, and also in the commentaries and news reports about the anti-veiling campaigns, these forms of clothing were stigmatized as the remnants of the old regime, the old mentality, and the Ottoman past. In one of the articles published in Trabzon newspaper Halk calling women to remove their peçe and çarşaf, the author characterized the peçe and the çarşaf as the only remaining elements that continued to humiliate the Turkish nation; they were the “black stamp of the palace and the sultanate” on the blameless and clean forehead of a generation that was capable of proving its capacity to reach the highest point in the civilized social life.73 In another article, the same author equated women’s use of the peçe and the çarşaf with men’s use of the fes; like the fes, the peçe and the çarşaf were also Ottoman vestiges, and therefore, it was absurd to insist on wearing this kind of clothing in contemporary civilized times.74 Another norm was to cleanse the public sphere of anything that was coded as a sign of backwardness, and derived from uncivilized modes and behavior. The peçe and the çarşaf had been seen as signs of backwardness ever since they became an issue of debate, but this discourse reached an unprecedented level during the anti-veiling campaigns of the mid 1930s. In other words, equating the peçe and the çarşaf with backwardness, and therefore, with being uncivilized, was perhaps the most frequent reference point in the anti-veiling campaigns. At the meeting of the women members of the Muğla People’s House in December 1934, for example, the women decided to remove their çarşaf by declaring that it was “the sign of backwardness” (gerilik alameti).75 In their petition to the city council to issue a ban on the peçe and the çarşaf, members of the youth and sports clubs in Trabzon, led by the Trabzon Home for Adolescents (Erginler Yurdu), argued that these

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old types of clothing were not compatible with the new advanced lifestyle of the Turkish nation, and contrary to the progressive move Turkish women had just started to make.76 Facing difficulties in getting the city council to issue such a ban because of the opposition of some members of the council, the administration of the local party branch intervened in the process and tried pressure the city council to abolish these forms of clothing, which were “reserved for primitive people.”77 In another newspaper, the peçe and the çarşaf were characterized as the dress of those people who believe in fairies, ghosts, and fortune telling, and therefore, incompatible with the revolution, the republic Atatürk had entrusted to the Turkish youth.78 Removal of the peçe and the çarşaf would thus transform the city into a civilized one and the public sphere into a modern space. Like veiling, antiveiling campaigns were urban phenomena, primarily targeting the transformation of the urban space. Addressing the local authorities to issue a general ban on the peçe and the çarşaf in Trabzon, a writer in one of the local newspapers gave an example of this view at the local level: “This ban can gradually be expanded to the following: A woman cannot sit in the park wearing the peçe and the çarşaf, cannot enter Güzelhisar Park, cannot come to the movie theater, and finally, cannot wander in the market or bazaar.”79 In a similar fashion, in Denizli, some restrictions concerning veiled women’s appearance in the urban space were put into practice even before the beginning of the actual ban on the peçe, the çarşaf and the peştamal: “The ban will be effective as of the Republic Day (29th of October). Until then, face, eyes and hands of those women who go to public places, such as the bazaar, cinema, parks, etc. shall be open.”80 In effect, other than for those women who were living in the city and were expected to participate in the public life, the insistence on changing women’s dress was more ambiguous. Although in some places, decisions banning the peçe and the çarşaf included other forms of local veiling, such as the peştamal, in some others, such local dresses were seen as symbols of authenticity for Turkish village women. During the first round of general elections in 1935, which were the first general elections in which women had participated in Turkey, village women coming to the polling stations in their local attire, like the peştamal, in particular, was covered in local newspapers as a matter of pride.81 An Izmir newspaper, Yeni Asır, published a picture of women gathered in the People’s House to vote for the provincial council, and emphasized the coexistence of women from the city center and the village women, the former dressed in suits and hats, the latter in local clothing and a peştamal-like headscarf.82 Anti-veiling campaigns as a means of reorganizing the public space also had implications for men. The city council of Bergama, a district of the city of Izmir, for instance, while banning the peçe and the çarşaf, also prohibited

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men from sitting outside the coffeehouses, where they could stare at and possibly disturb those women who passed by in “national” dress.83 In Afyon, local authorities were reporting that the majority of women had adopted the “civilized” clothing, but the police had to take some measures on some streets and bazaars since some men were making improper remarks or overtures to women.84 These measures, showing that the local authorities were concerned with the reaction women could receive if they removed the peçe and the çarşaf, also points to the comprehensive scope of the anti-veiling campaigns in redefining gender relations and boundaries in the public sphere. Anti-veiling campaigns, apart from aiming to transform the urban space, tried to reorganize the bureaucratic space, namely, the public buildings, state offices, and official spaces. In the example of Bergama, one can see how directly the bans intervened in the way women appeared in such spaces. The decision of the municipal council to ban the peçe and the çarşaf in Bergama was complemented by a decision to send petitions to state offices in the district, and to ask for the support of teachers and other organizations in launching a general propaganda campaign: The city council, after making this decision [to remove the çarşaf and the peçe], also made a very appropriate request. In order to clearly explain to everybody the social, sanitary and moral harm of this strange clothing, which does not fit into the social texture of Turkish nation, and to speed up the implementation of the decision in a conscious and confident way, the council requested the state offices to assure that women working at the court house and official offices come to work dressed in a way appropriate to our nation. In line with the same goal, it [the council] requested the continuous and effective support of all teachers and institutions.85

The governor of Trabzon sent a directive to the state offices asking the officials not to provide services to women whose faces were covered.86 A similar practice was suggested by one of the members at a meeting of the city council of Bursa, since there were still women who continued to wear the peçe and the çarşaf: “We need to accelerate the implementation of the decision we made. And for example, we should not process the petitions of those who have business with the municipality and come here [the city hall] wearing the peçe and the çarşaf.”87 Likewise, decisions made by the members of People’s Houses in some cities were primarily concerned with women’s participation in the cultural spaces, at meetings, seminars, plays, and parties, without the peçe and the çarşaf. The decision of the board of directors of Sinop People’s House, for example, implied that women could participate in People’s House activities with an overcoat only.88 One other way of encouraging women to remove

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their peçe and çarşaf and to participate in the city life was to organize special events where women could appear in new clothing. In many cities, governors or mayors organized tea parties or special movie screenings where the peçe and the çarşaf were not allowed, and where women who had recently removed them could take part in them as groups, under the protection of the highest administrators of the city.89 Sometimes, these events were organized by the members of the People’ Houses, sports clubs, or other associations in the form of parties or informal meetings, where people could socialize in mixed-gender environments, with women participating without the peçe and the çarşaf.90 In Çankırı, for example, members of the People’s House who decided to remove their families’ peçe and çarşaf also decided to organize a mixed-gender New Year’s celebration at the People’s House, to which they would all come with their family members, meaning, with their wives and daughters who had removed their peçe and çarşaf. Such organizations certainly aimed at normalizing women’s removal of the peçe and the çarşaf, and encouraging their adoption of new clothes and new roles in the social life, but they were also part of a broader process. They functioned as instruments of redefining the public sphere and redrawing its boundaries based on a new gender regime in which coexistence of men and women was the norm. As such, anti-veiling campaigns can be seen as part of the attempts of the Kemalist regime to homogenize the public sphere ideologically, and to reshape it visually along the lines of the new norms it propagated so that it could reflect the “new Turkey” in front of global audiences.

IN THE EUROPEAN MIRROR: THE PUBLIC SPHERE AS A STAGE TO DISPLAY THE NEW TURKISH WOMAN Çınar argues that one of the reasons why the female body, especially women’s clothing and public visibility, became a significant means through which the state could display Turkey’s new image as a secular nation-state in the early years of the republic was the European perceptions of the Ottomans, which were shaped by Orientalist representations of veiled women hidden behind the harem.91 Since “no single item of clothing has had more influence on Western images of Middle Eastern women than the veil,”92 its removal would be the most powerful symbol of social change. In other words, changing these images by emancipating women from the “chains” of the peçe and the çarşaf and bringing them into the public sphere were the best ways of distancing the new republic from its Ottoman past, and creating a sense of a break with and triumph over it. However, the discourse and motivations behind the anti-veiling campaigns went even beyond this aim,

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and were in fact fashioned by the same Orientalist perceptions completely internalized by the Republican elite. “What would a European think about us” was the main question here. In other words, the discourse and mentality observed in the anti-veiling campaigns can be seen as examples of what Yeğenoğlu underlines as “the Orientalization of the Orient,” as reflections of “how the Orientalist discourse reproduced itself in the Orient via nationalist projects.”93 Therefore, one constant reference point in any discussion or comment related to dress (of women, men, villagers, state officials, etc.) was European dress codes and habits. At the congress of the inspectors of elementary education in Izmir, the head of the congress explains the civilizing aims of people’s education (halk terbiyesi) as Europeanizing Turkish people’s dress, along with eating habits and childrearing, for example.94 Even the issue of whether state officials could remove their jackets in summer in Izmir was discussed based on examples of how state officials in European countries dressed in hot weather. These constant references were usually claimed to be based on close observations and examinations of the European way of life. However, in reality, the compatibility of Turkish dress with European counterparts was often cross-checked by looking at how Europeans saw and interpreted the social and cultural life in Turkey. As a result, the reflections of the clothing reforms in Western newspapers were closely followed by Turkish public opinion. In fact, even before the anti-veiling campaigns in the 1930s, beginning in the early years of the republic, articles written in the West about the transformation of Turkish women had been regularly translated and published in national and local newspapers.95 Since one of the main driving motives behind women’s unveiling was backwardness, the embarrassment felt about veiling vis-à-vis the West, the way Westerners approached Turkish women’s new appearance was especially important for the national and local elite alike. As it was for the Western observers, in the eyes of the Kemalists, too, the transformation of women’s dress was perhaps the most significant sign of the transformation of Turkish society into a modern one. Among the Turkish elite, “you look like a foreigner” was the biggest courtesy a woman could receive.96 Likewise, for the Europeans, “modernity of dress was often taken to mean that the women who wore ‘modern’ clothes had automatically become ‘just like Western women.’”97 One aspect of the Western perception of the situation of women in Turkey was the dichotomy between the old regime and the new, which also constituted one of the main sources of legitimacy for the Republican elite. In other words, the position of women in the Ottoman Empire was contrasted to the “new Turkish woman” and this comparison was made on two

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main bases: women’s public visibility and veiling. European commentators, shaped by the Orientalist imaginations of the harem and veiling, characterized Ottoman women as totally segregated from public life and hidden behind the peçe, the çarşaf, and the kafes. In contrast, Turkish women under the Republican regime were liberated from this prison, and the ultimate indicator of this liberation was their presence in the public sphere without the peçe and the çarşaf. For them, this was a result of the Europeanization process that the republic had initiated; the more Turkish women were Europeanized, the higher was their public visibility and their reclamation of their respectful place at home and in public life.98 In Bergama, for example, the idea of initiating a fight against the peçe and the kıvrak (a local veil) was suggested to the city council by a lawyer, Mustafa Fehmi Bey, as an urgent necessity for the civilized and historical town of Bergama. The reasoning behind this suggestion was the ongoing archeological research in the town. Members of the council mentioned the responsibility of the municipality in preparing the city for the expected increase in the popularity of the city and tourist attraction, and for them, one main part of this responsibility was to remove the “strange” style of dress that was not appropriate for the modern and civilized position that had been gained by Turkish women. In other words, a probable rise in the number of foreign visitors, which had already begun after the beginning of the excavations, was the real concern behind the anti-veiling campaign in the city.99 Similar concerns can be seen in most of the news reports, commentaries, and articles published during the anti-veiling campaigns in the 1930s. Particularly emphasized was the harm the peçe and the çarşaf did to the Turkish image, not only because of their connation with being uncivilized but also because they were the symbols of women’s subordination. In other words, the existence of the peçe and the çarşaf signified the continuation of women’s secondary position, the survival of traditional society, and therefore, significantly tarnished the image of the new regime as a revolution and a modernization project. An article published in a Trabzon newspaper criticizing the reluctance of the city to follow other cities in anti-veiling campaigns is indicative of this state of mind. Characterizing the use of the peçe and the çarşaf as an act of wobbling between two different worlds, as a black veil over women’s social and civilized existence, the author asks: “is this not a situation that gives us, that has to give us, the deepest feeling of compunction vis-à-vis the whole world, whose eyes were dazzled by the light of our revolution?”100 Addressing directly the women of Trabzon in another article, the same author compares them with women of the civilized world and openly criticizes their reluctance to remove the peçe and the çarşaf:

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You see the advanced lifestyle of the civilized world and the advanced world of women. In view of this extensive and advanced world of women in which they undertake more important duties than men do in social life and are more successful at them than men, we cannot stand the fact that you are unable to get rid of the peçe and the çarşaf. You know that wearing the peçe and the çarşaf is nothing but a custom. Bad habits and customs are of no value in the eyes of those who can see, feel and think of the advanced life [ileri hayat].101

For him, it was a total contradiction that the women of Trabzon, who managed to establish an advanced and modern lifestyle inside their home, were still backward outside.

CONCLUDING REMARKS: ANTI-VEILING CAMPAIGNS AND WOMEN’S AGENCY How effective were the anti-veiling campaigns? It is hard to give a comprehensive answer to this question based on extant sources. Bans were certainly much more limited in scope (in only a few cities) and ineffective in the 1920s. This is obvious from the fact that similar decisions were made in the same cities again in the 1930s, as in Mersin and Trabzon. There is also no question that the anti-veiling campaigns in the mid 1930s were more organized, widespread, and determined. They more steadily targeted the use of the peçe, the çarşaf, and other local veils and replaced them with modern clothing (and veils) through the power of local institutions: municipalities, governors, local party offices, the People’s Houses, local newspapers, and state officials. Inconsistent and ambiguous in practice, and unsteady and diverse in discourse, these campaigns nevertheless touched the lives of many women. Therefore, apart from their “visible” actors, women were at the center of both resistance against and support for this dramatic change. Although there was no massive, organized reaction to these campaigns, the most common way of resisting unveiling was disobedience, either by continuing to wear the peçe or the çarşaf in the public sphere, or by trying to escape the authorities. One indication of women’s reluctance to adopt the new clothes was the frequency of notices published in the newspapers calling on women to abide by the decisions. In Trabzon, for example, where there was also a resistance by some male members in the city council against issuing a ban, some women were hesitant to remove their peçe and çarşaf; thus, several articles and notices were published in the local newspapers to convince women that the peçe and the çarşaf were inappropriate customs, not Islamic, and were the major obstacles to women’s progress and participation in public life. In one of these articles, the author particularly addressed

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those women who wait until the deadline imposed by the city council to remove their peçe and çarşaf, warning them to not listen to men who preach to them to do so.102 In some other newspapers, there were news reports about women who continue to wear the peçe and the çarşaf especially in the remote neighborhoods of the city.103 As mentioned above, reports about women who were fined for wearing the peçe and the çarşaf also show that some women tried to resist the bans. Such news reports and comments on them usually did not use incriminating language. However, there were some examples of a more radical tone that tended to represent those women who continued to dress in the black çarşaf as reactionaries, who opposed the revolutionary ideas of the new regime. Their participation in the public sphere was seen by some as a direct attack on the creation of a civilized, modern public life, which was seen as the first condition for entering the world of civilized nations. In one of his articles, Aka Gündüz, a prominent columnist and playwright of the time, characterized women who dressed in black çarşaf as “demonstrators” of a different kind; those who do not protest in usual gatherings or by organizing uprisings, but by simply wandering around in the public sphere with their “silk, chic and black” çarşaf.104 For Gündüz, older women who could not leave decades-old traditions, and those women who were forced to wear the çarşaf, could be excused, but disobedience to the dictates of the civilized life by younger generations, who insisted on participating in the public sphere in the “uniform-like” çarşaf, was unacceptable. “Çarşaf demonstrations” were a clear sign of reaction to the new—to what was civilized and modern. On the other hand, news reports and articles about the anti-veiling campaigns tended to mention women’s approval of the changes and their willingness to adopt the new clothes. This was partly a result of the propaganda that the local newspapers had initiated; they shared a similar language to imply women’s agency in these campaigns by using titles like “women remove their peçe” or “women throw off their çarşaf.” However, there were, in fact, women, mostly from the local elite families or among state officials, who organized meetings, gave speeches, and supported unveiling by being part the campaigns.105 Local women’s associations, women members of other associations or of the local branches of the Red Crescent and the Turkish Airplane Association were actively involved in the anti-veiling campaigns, not only as supporters, but also as initiators. The Diyarbakır Women’s Association, for example, organized a meeting where the head of the association, Behiye Baturay, declared their wish for the removal of the peçe and the çarşaf, which, she argued, have no connection with women’s honor or Turkish women’s dignity.106 Women became the vanguards of the anti-veiling campaigns especially in the context of their acquiring the right to elect and to

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be elected. In gatherings women organized in various cities to celebrate this right, removal of the peçe and the çarşaf was mentioned as part of women’s efforts to be worthy of this improvement. A news report indicates that in Ordu, for example, women who gathered in the People’s House to celebrate and to send telegram messages to Atatürk and Prime-Minister İnönü thanking them for granting them this right, decided to no longer wear the çarşaf, which they saw as the legacy of the sultanate.107 Likewise, in Kilis, about 150 women gathered to celebrate their political rights and decided to remove the peçe.108 In similar meetings in Izmir and Konya, women’s speeches drew a direct link between the opening of the doors of public life in the Republican regime and their liberation from the social seclusion symbolized by the peçe and the çarşaf: “The Turkish woman, who, until yesterday, was supposedly incapable of doing anything else than napping behind her kafes and stumbling in her çarşaf, has progressed as fast as an eagle in flight in her short life of 11 years.”109 Women were also writing in the local newspapers to promote unveiling, directly addressing the women of the city. The idea frequently emphasized in these articles by women was that they could modernize their dress themselves, without any need for men’s guidance, in conformity with modernization and with the aim of reaching a better position in society. The discrepancy in terms of veiling between Istanbul and Ankara, on the one hand, and Anatolia, on the other, had often been mentioned as a sign of the disadvantaged position of the women living in the periphery of the country, and, thus, the anti-veiling campaign was promoted as an opportunity to fill the gap. In her article entitled “Let’s do away with veiling,” Nihal Güzey called attention of the women of Antalya to this opportunity: “Why do we [as women of Anatolia] not benefit from the right that our revolution has given to women? Are we still going to continue to wear this dress that does not belong to us at a time we passionately struggle against foreign culture and get rid of the Arab alphabet?”110 For her, women of Anatolia should also adopt civilized clothing in order to be part of the social life, and “enlightened” women should be the vanguards for them, especially in removing the peçe before all else. She also warned these enlightened women against wearing fancy overcoats and hats, since ordinary women were possibly not removing their çarşaf because it would be too expensive to replace them with modern clothes. That is why she stressed the necessity of creating options for adopting modern clothes in an affordable manner, and one solution would be to provide free courses to train women to make their own overcoats and hats. She suggested that these free courses could be organized by People’s Houses.111

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This acceptance of new clothing by a significant number of women was represented as “women’s struggle against the peçe and the çarşaf.” These examples indeed reflect some women’s support for the anti-veiling campaigns. As Bozdoğan emphasizes, many women had seen the Kemalist reforms as progressive; “they felt empowered by their new rights and new visibility in public life.”112 The regime was also content with the gradual change that women’s support for the anti-veiling campaigns would bring. In the eyes of the Kemalist elite in the center, women’s approval and adoption of modern clothing was the most significant precondition of the success, and unlike with other reforms, they were more patient to wait for the ultimate success, trusting in women’s agency to spread the reform. Thus, for particular groups of women at least, it was an alliance with the regime, an alliance by which they had finally gained the political support for their decades-old struggle against traditional norms and achieved the right to participate in the public sphere as the agents of modernization. In other words, although Çınar argues that the clothing reforms of the Kemalist regime in the early Republican era defined and represented women as the victims to be liberated and men as the liberators, and thus associated political agency only with men, roles attributed to women were far more complex. One can argue that the anti-veiling campaigns in fact aimed at transforming unveiled women into the agents of the new regime. That is to say, one of the goals of the anti-veiling campaigns was to create modern female subjects that would not only passively follow the Kemalist male elite, but would actively participate in and further the modernizing reforms, especially at the local level. This agency was of course within certain limits; it was conditioned by women’s acceptance of the priorities of the Kemalist project. Nevertheless, women did play a role in the Kemalist redefinition of the public sphere as a modern and secular space, and this definition continues to shape the parameters of women’s participation in that sphere in Turkey today.

NOTES 1. For more on the terminology on veiling, see Beth Baron, “Unveiling in Early Twentieth Century Egypt: Practical and Symbolic Considerations,” Middle Eastern Studies 25, no. 3 (1989): 370–386. 2. As such, they also entailed a direct state intervention in the private concerns of ordinary people. Existing research works show that sartorial changes received widespread reaction from society and/or have been used as excuses for collective protest. See Gavin D. Brockett, “Collective Action and the Turkish Revolution:

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3.

4.

5. 6. 7.

8.

9. 10.

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Towards a Framework for the Social History of the Atatürk Era, 1923-1938,” Middle Eastern Studies 34, no. 4 (1998): 44–66; HE Chehabi, “The Banning of the Veil and Its Consequences,” in The Making of Modern Iran: State and Society under Riza Shah, 1921-1941, ed. Stephanie Cronin (London: Routledge, 2003), 193–210; HE Chehabi, “Dress Codes for Men in Turkey and Iran,” in Men of Order: Authoritarian Modernization under Atatürk and Reza Shah, ed. Touraj Atabaki and Erik J. Zürcher (London: I. B. Tauris, 2004), 209–237. For a discussion on the regulation of women’s clothing in the early Republican era that also uses oral historical sources, see Hale Yılmaz, “Reform, Social Change and State-Society Encounters in Early Republican Turkey” (Ph.D. dissertation, The University of Utah, 2006). The Turkish çarşaf is similar to the Iranian chādur, but it is either gathered at the waist or in two pieces, consisting of a long skirt and a cloak also covering the head. It is usually black, but it can be in other colors as well. Although they were very rare, there were even patterned ones. Elizabeth Thompson, “Public and Private in Middle Eastern Women’s History,” Journal of Women’s History 15, no. 1 (2003): 52. Donald Quataert, “Clothing Laws, State, and Society in the Ottoman Empire, 1720-1829,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 29, no. 3 (1997): 406. Cihan Aktaş, Tanzimat’tan 12 Mart’a Kılık-Kıyafet ve İktidar (Istanbul: Kapı, 2006), 54; Serpil Çakır, Osmanlı Kadın Hareketi (Istanbul: Metis, 1994), 175. The ferace is a long mantle, a full coat with wide arms and body, and skirts to the floor, worn by Ottoman women as outdoor clothing. The ferace changed significantly, especially in the nineteenth century. Its form and color diversified and it turned into an overcoat-like cloth by the end of the empire. For more on Ottoman women’s attire in the nineteenth century, see Melek Sevüktekin Apak, Filiz Onat Gündüz, and Fatma Öztürk Eray, Osmanlı Dönemi Kadın Giyimleri (Istanbul: İş Bankası Yayınları, 1997) and Nora Şeni, “Fashion and Women’s Clothing in the Satirical Press of Istanbul at the End of the 19th Century,” in Women in Modern Turkish Society, ed. Şirin Tekeli (London: Zed Books, 1995), 25–45. See Sarah Graham-Brown, Images of Women, The Portrayal of Women in Photography of the Middle East, 1860-1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). Şeni indicates that in their transformed form, elite Ottoman women’s outdoor clothes were in fact very similar to those of the European women, and this similarity was criticized by the Ottoman satire of the time. Şeni, “Fashion and Women’s Clothing,” 30. Women’s covering, together with polygamy, was one of the dominant themes of the modernist literature at the end of the century. Ibid., 27. According to some scholars, the çarşaf originated in the Arab provinces, and the first woman that appeared in Istanbul in the çarşaf was the wife of the Syrian governor, Suphi Pasha, in the mid nineteenth century. It is argued that it was adopted as a reaction to cultural Westernization of the nineteenth-century Ottoman society since the çarşaf was supposed to provide better veiling com-

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11.

12. 13. 14.

15. 16.

17. 18.

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pared to the ferace. During the reign of Abdülhamid II, the çarşaf was banned because of the security concerns of the sultan, but this ban was short-lived. See Çakır, Osmanlı Kadın Hareketi, 176; Aktaş, Tanzimat’tan 12 Mart’a, 68–70. See also Muhaddere Taşçıoğlu, Türk Osmanlı Cemiyetinde Kadının Sosyal Durumu ve Kadın Kıyafetleri (Ankara: Akın Matbaası, 1958). On the Ottoman women’s movement, see Çakır, Osmanlı Kadın Hareketi. For a summary of the debate on women’s veiling during the Second Constitutional Era, see Kemal Yakut, “Tek Parti Döneminde Peçe ve Çarşaf,” Tarih ve Toplum 220 (April 2002): 23–25. One of these women who criticized the social pressure on women regarding veiling was Emine Semiye Hanım. Yaprak Zihnioğlu, Kadınsız İnkılap: Nezihe Muhittin, Kadınlar Halk Fırkası, Kadın Birliği (Istanbul: Metis, 2003), 54. In fact, even before this period, there were a few Ottoman women intellectuals, like Fatma Aliye Hanım, who openly criticized the peçe and the çarşaf. Ekrem Işın, “Tanzimat, Kadın ve Gündelik Hayat,” Tarih ve Toplum 51 (March 1988), 22–27. For discussions on women’s dress in one of the women’s journals of the time, Kadınlar Dünyası (Women’s World), see Çakır, Osmanlı Kadın Hareketi, 177–184. Aynur Demirdirek, Osmanlı Kadınlarının Hayat Hakkı Arayışının Bir Hikayesi (Ankara: İmge, 1993), 105. For examples of the articles by these male intellectuals, such as Abdullah Cevdet, Kılıçzade Hakkı, Celal Nuri, and Suphi Nuri, see Yakut, “Tek Parti Döneminde Peçe ve Çarşaf,” 24; Zihnioğlu, Kadınsız İnkılap, 85–88. There were, of course, reactions to women who removed their çarşaf. For example, to counter the propaganda that the Balkan Wars were lost because of uncovered women, Mehmet Tahir had to write and publish a small brochure in which he tried to convince the public that these women had made important sacrifices and aided the Turkish army. See İbnü’l-Hakkı Mehmet Tahir, Çarşaf Meselesi (Istanbul: Sancakciyan Matbaası, 1331 [1915]). Meral Akkent and Gaby Frager, Başörtü (Frankfurt: Dağyeli, 1987), 186. For an announcement of the Istanbul Police Department in 1917 asking women to avoid wearing shorter skirts, corsets, and thin çarşafs and a subsequent announcement declaring the previous order null, see Bernard Caporal, Kemalizmde ve Kemalizm Sonrasında Türk Kadını (1919-1970) (Ankara: Türkiye İş Bankası Kültür Yayınları, 1982), 147–148; Graham-Brown, Images of Women, 130. For examples of various statements issued between 1912 and 1919 by the office of Şeyhülislam, the highest religious office of the Ottoman state, concerning women’s loyalty to Islamic veiling, see Yakut, “Tek Parti Döneminde Peçe ve Çarşaf,” 24–25. Alev Çınar, Modernity, Islam, and Secularism in Turkey: Bodies, Places and Time (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 57. For discussions on men’s headgear in the Ottoman/Turkish context, see Patricia Baker, “The Fez in Turkey: A Symbol of Modernization?” Costume 20 (1986), 72–85. See also Mahmut Goloğlu, Türkiye Cumhuriyeti Tarihi I: Devrimler ve Tepkileri (1924-1930) (Istanbul: Türkiye İş Bankası Kültür Yayınları, 2007); Chehabi, “Dress Codes for Men in Turkey and Iran.”

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19. For the Uzbek example, see Marianne Kamp, The New Woman in Uzbekistan: Islam, Modernity and Unveiling under Communism (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006). 20. Nikki Keddie, Modern Iran: Roots and Results of Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 100. For more on the Iranian case, see Patricia L. Baker, “Politics of Dress: The Dress Reform Laws of 1920-1930s in Iran,” in Languages of Dress in the Middle East, ed. Nancy Lindisfarne-Tapper and Bruce Ingham (London: Curzon Pres, 1997), 178–192; Jasamin Rotsam-Kolayi, “Expanding Agendas for the ‘New’ Iranian Woman: Family Law, Work, and Unveiling,” in The Making of Modern Iran: State and Society under Riza Shah, 1921-1941, ed. Stephanie Cronin (London: Routledge, 2003), 157–180; Shireen Mahdavi, “Reza Shah Pahlavi and Women: A Re-evaluation,” in The Making of Modern Iran: State and Society under Riza Shah, 1921-1941, ed. Stephanie Cronin (London: Routledge, 2003), 181–192; Chehabi, “The Banning of the Veil and Its Consequences.” 21. John Norton, “Faith and Fashion in Turkey,” in Languages of Dress in the Middle East, ed. Nancy Lindisfarne-Tapper and Bruce Ingham (London: Curzon Press, 1997), 149–177. 22. In fact, this elite-centered framework has shaped most of the studies of sartorial change in the Middle East. As Tapper and Ingham argue, approaches to dress and clothing change in the region have been focusing exclusively on the role of political or religious authorities. According to this approach, the impetus for sartorial change comes only from above and inevitably and automatically changes social and cultural identities in the way the imposer of the change/reform imagined. See Bruce Ingham and Nancy Lindisfarne-Tapper, “Approaches to the Study of Dress in the Middle East,” in Languages of Dress in the Middle East, ed. Nancy Lindisfarne-Tapper and Bruce Ingham (London: Curzon Press, 1997), 14–15. 23. Zehra F. Arat, “Kemalizm ve Türk Kadını,” in 75 Yılda Kadınlar ve Erkekler, ed. Ayşe Berktay Hacımirzaoğlu (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yayınları, 1998). See also Zehra F. Arat, ed., Deconstructing Images of “the Turkish Woman” (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998). 24. See Fatmagül Berktay, “Cumhuriyet’in 75 Yıllık Serüvenine Kadınlar Açısından Bakmak,” in 75 Yılda Kadınlar ve Erkekler, ed. Ayşe Berktay Hacımirzaoğlu (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yayınları, 1998), 1–12. See also Afsaneh Najmabadi, “Veiled Discourse—Unveiled Bodies,” Feminist Studies 19, no. 3 (1993): 487–518. 25. On the other hand, reflecting the inner contradiction in the Kemalist perception, women who remained in the private sphere were expected to follow fashion trends, and to be elegant and modern mothers and housewives. See Ayşe Saktanber, “Kemalist Kadın Hakları Söylemi,” in Modern Türkiye’de Siyasi Düşünce, vol. 2, Kemalizm, ed. Ahmet İnsel (Istanbul: İletişim, 2001), 323–333; Berktay, “Cumhuriyet’in 75 Yıllık Serüvenine Kadınlar Açısından Bakmak”; Yeşim Arat, “The Project of Modernity and Women in Turkey,” in Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey, ed. Sibel Bozdoğan and Reşat Kasaba (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997), 95–112. Even during the heyday

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26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

32. 33. 34. 35.

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of the anti-veiling campaigns in the mid 1930s, the control over women’s sexuality and the obsession with preventing women from being “too much Westernized” were very visible. Various commentaries in local newspapers were warning women to remain loyal to moral codes in the public life. The length of women’s skirts, their hairstyles or how much makeup they should use were all constant issues of concern. For example, see “Kadın ve Erkek,” Babalık, 2 December 1934; Orhan Selim, “Çok Boyanıyorsun Kadınım. . . ,” Babalık, 18 December 1934; “Çok Açılıyorsun Kadınım,” Babalık, 19 December 1934; “Kız talebeler hakkında verilen güzel kararlar. . . ,” Hakkın Sesi, 28 February 1936. For various examples of women’s adaptation to new clothing and to new forms of covering their hair, see Oya Baydar and Feride Çiçekoğlu, eds. Cumhuriyet’in Aile Albümleri (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 1998). The Turkish Hearths was an association founded in 1912 to promote Turkish nationalism. For more, see Füsun Üstel, İmparatorluktan Ulus-Devlete Türk Milliyetçiliği: Türk Ocakları (1912-1931) (Istanbul: İletişim, 1997). See also François Georgeon, “Kemalist Dönemde Türk Ocakları (1923-1932),” in Osmanlı-Türk Modernleşmesi (1900-1930), trans. Ali Berktay. (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2006), 39–76. Mustafa Reşit Tarakçıoğlu, “Trabzon’un Yakın Tarihi,” in Mustafa Reşit Tarakçıoğlu, Hayatı, Hatıratı ve Trabzon’un Yakın Tarihi, ed. Hikmet Öksüz and Veysel Usta (Trabzon: Serander, 2008), 119–204. Mesut Çaha, “Giyim Kuşamda Medeni Kıyafetlerin Benimsenmesi ve Trabzon Örneği,” Toplumsal Tarih 30 (June 1996): 24. Peştamal was a local fabric cover that was used especially by rural women. Its color and pattern were different in different regions. Peçe and peştamal were banned by the city council of Eskişehir in 1926, but the exact date of the decision is not clear. See also Yakut, “Tek Parti Döneminde Peçe ve Çarşaf,” 27–28. Yakut also mentions that similar anti-veiling campaigns were organized in Bursa and Ordu in the 1920s, but he does not provide any details about the time and content of these campaigns. Ibid., 27. Çaha mentions that the proposal submitted to the provincial council was discussed in a meeting in the local party branch before it was discussed and voted on in the council, which indicates the support and involvement of the local party members in the process. Çaha, “Giyim Kuşamda Medeni Kıyafetlerin Benimsenmesi,” 27. Circular from RPP Muğla Administration to RPP General Secretary, Turkish Republic Prime Ministry Republican Archives (hereafter PMRA) 490.01/17.88.1, 15 October 1935. The date of the meeting is unclear in the document, but as understood from some indications, it was probably in 1926. Caporal, Kemalizmde ve Kemalizm Sonrasında Türk Kadını, 648–649. Circular from the Governor of Aydın to Prime Minister İsmet Pasha, PMRA 030.10/53.346.6, 3 February 1927. Yakut, “Tek Parti Döneminde Peçe ve Çarşaf,” 27. For expressions of such ideas in local newspapers in the 1920s, see ibid. Similar views were voiced during the anti-veiling campaigns of the 1930s.

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36. Most of the news about the couple’s visits and other public appearances did not miss mentioning that Latife Hanım was participating without the peçe (peçesiz olarak). For more on Latife Hanım, see İpek Çalışlar, Latife Hanım (Istanbul: Doğan Kitap, 2007). Foreign journalists and correspondents also mentioned her difference from the majority of the Turkish women by emphasizing her removal of the face veil. For example, see Issac F. Marcosson, Turbulent Years (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1969), 170. 37. Yakut, “Tek Parti Döneminde Peçe ve Çarşaf,” 26. 38. Atatürk’ün Söylev ve Demeçleri II (Ankara: Atatürk Araştrma Merkezi Yayınları, 1989), 91. 39. Ibid., 154. 40. Quoted in Zehra Arat, “Turkish Women and the Republican Reconstruction of Tradition,” in Reconstructing Gender in the Middle East: Tradition, Identity and Power, ed. Fatma Müge Göçek and Shiva Balaghi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 61. For the whole speech in Turkish, see Atatürk’ün Söylev ve Demeçleri II, 227. 41. Arat, “Turkish Women and the Republican Reconstruction of Tradition,” 62. 42. For example, there were rumors in Istanbul that Atatürk ordered women to remove their çarşaf, just like men were ordered to remove their fez and turban. Akkent and Frager, Başörtü, 189. 43. Music reform (modernization of classical Turkish music) and language reform (purification of Turkish, and elimination of words with Persian and Arabic origin) were among the most radical of Kemalist reforms in the 1930s aiming at cultural modernization. In fact, there was also a clothing law regarding the religious personnel in 1934 that prohibited the clergy from wearing their religious dress outside of service. The law included the people of all religions, including Jewish and Christian clergy. The Surname Law was also issued in 1934. For more on the Kemalist reforms in the 1930s, see Erik J. Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History (London: I.B. Tauris, 1993): 186–195. 44. Mustafa Kemal himself also made a connection between women’s political rights and removal of the peçe and çarşaf. See “C.H.F. Grup Kararları,” Yeni Asır, 6 December 1934; “Atatürk Ulusal Savaşında Kadından Saylav Yapacağını Söylemişti,” Yeni Asır, 16 December 1934. 45. “Cevat Alap, “Ayinesi iştir kişinin Lafa bakılmaz,” İkbal, 13 December 1934. 46. In Bursa, on 1 February, the first decision of the city council was to prohibit tailors from sewing the çarşaf. In the next meeting of the city council on 10 February 1935, lattice windows were banned. I could not identify the date of the decision that banned the use of the peçe and the çarşaf, but some news reports later that year indicate that there was such a ban. See “Çarşaflar kalkıyor. . . ,” Hakkın Sesi, 10 October 1935. 47. This does not claim to be a comprehensive list. This is what I could gather based on my research and by consulting the available issues of six local newspapers: Yeni Asır (Izmir), Anadolu (Izmir), Babalık (Konya), Hakkın Sesi (Bursa), Halk (Trabzon), and İkbal (Trabzon). I could not provide the exact date of the

The Post-Ottoman Public Sphere

48.

49.

50.

51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56. 57. 58.

59.

63

decisions, since provincial newspapers do not specify on which day exactly the decision was made when reporting on the bans. Caporal gives different dates for some cities. See Caporal, Kemalizmde ve Kemalizm Sonrasında Türk Kadını, 649. Anti-veiling campaigns were not unique to the provincial centers. Municipalities of some district centers, such as Bergama (district of the province of Izmir), Bodrum (district of the province of Muğla), and İnegöl (district of the province of Bursa) also issued bans. In Rize, the city council also asked women to remove their umbrellas, which they used to hide themselves. See “Rizede Peçeler ve Çarşaflar Kalkıyor,” Yeni Asır, 1 March 1935. People’s Houses was a Kemalist cultural organization established in 1932, aiming primarily at educating and mobilizing people in accordance with the ideals of the new regime. For more, see Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History, 179–181. In Sinop, after making this decision, the administrative board of Halkevi requested from the city council that the çarşaf, as a dress not appropriate to civilized clothing, should be removed by a general ban. The end result of the request is not clear. See “Sinopta Kadınların çarşafları kaldırılacaktır,” Yeni Asır, 29 November 1934. “Çankırı’da Peçe Çarşafların Atılması Kararlaştırıldı,” Yeni Asır, 1 January 1935. “İstanbul münevver kadınları bu garip örtüyü kendiliğinden atacakdır,” Halk, 16 September 1935. See “Antalyada Çarşaf ve Peçelerle Mücadele Başladı,” Yeni Asır, 23 December 1934; “Antalyada kafesler ve çarşaflar yasak edildi,” Yeni Asır, 14 February 1935. This period was different in every city, but the general tendency was to grant a shorter time for the removal of the peçe, and longer one for the çarşaf. In Denizli, some women paid fines for not abiding by the decision of the municipality. See Hakkı Uyar, “Tek Parti Döneminde Denizli’de Siyasal Hayat,” in Uluslararası Denizli ve Çevresi Tarih ve Kültür Sempozyumu: Bildiriler I-II, ed. Ayfer Özçelik et al. (Denizli: Pamukkale Üniversitesi, 2006). Uyar does not give any information about how many women exactly were fined, but one gets the impression that these acts of the municipal police were rather symbolic, to prove that the municipality was monitoring their compliance with the decision. A news report in a Bursa newspaper mentions that more than a hundred women were fined in a few months time by the city council. See “Çarşaflar Kalkıyor,” Hakkın Sesi, 10 October 1935. See “Çarşafların yasağı hakkında Belediye Riyasetinden,” Halk, 30 April 1936. Circular from the Minister of Interior to all governors and general inspectors, Turkish National Police Archives 13216-7/1, 17 December 1934. For more on the discussion on the peçe and the çarşaf in the congress see CHP Dördüncü Büyük Kurultayı Görüşmeleri Tutulgası, 9-16 Mayıs 1935 (Ankara: Ulus Basımevi, 1935), 144–159. Cumhuriyetin 75. Yıldönümünde Polis Arşiv Belgeleriyle Gerçekler (Ankara: Emniyet Genel Müdürlüğü Araştırma, Planlama ve Koordinasyon Daire Başkanlığı, 1998), 89–90.

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60. The minister, however, was also indicating that the local administrators should be more careful about the use of the peçe and the çarşaf to the extent that their use was related to security issues, i.e., where those who were wearing the peçe and the çarşaf were trying to hide their identity. Ibid. 61. This circular is mentioned in the letter from the RPP Yozgat Administration to the RPP General Secretary, PMRA 490.01/17.88.1, 13 November 1935. In the letter, the general secretary of the party also informs the local party organizations that the interior ministry had sent a directive to the governors about this issue. It seems that the local administrations and the party elite were expected to work together in the fight against the peçe and the çarşaf. 62. See Uyar, “Tek Parti Döneminde Denizli’de Siyasal Hayat.” 63. For news showing the influence of the local party administration in Trabzon, see “Halkevinde Peçe ve Çarşaf mes’elesi görüşüldü,” Halk, 26 March 1936. The party was particularly determined to take the necessary measures to eliminate the peçe and the çarşaf before the time period granted by the city council was over. “C.H Partısında,” Halk, 26 March 1936. For more on the case of Trabzon, see also Çapa, “Giyim Kuşamda Medeni Kıyafetlerin Benimsenmesi.” See also Hakkı Uyar, “Çarşaf, Peçe ve Kafes Üzerine Bazı Notlar,” Toplumsal Tarih 33 (September 1996): 8–10. 64. Yılmaz indicates that the regional differences can be explained in part by the limits of the RPP penetration in the periphery. Yılmaz, “Reform, Social Change and State-Society Encounters,” 66. 65. The Trabzon People’s House formed a committee to provide poor families with 300 to 400 overcoats. The committee also included representatives from the municipality, the Red Crescent, the party, and the Chamber of Commerce. See “Halkevi çok fakir ailelere Manto yaptıracak,” Halk, 27 February 1936. For similar activities by the Red Crescent and the municipality see “Kızılay fakirlere 50 manto dağıttı,” Halk, 30 April 1936; “Kızılay bugün 150 manto daha dağıtıyor,” Halk, 4 May 1936; “Kızılay mantoları dağıttı,” Halk, 11 May 1936; “C.H. Partisi 100 Manto dağıtacak,” Halk, 11 May 1936. 66. As Graham-Brown suggests, this was partly a result of the shift in the meanings attributed to certain dress forms: “In Turkey, in 1890, the wearer of a yashmak and a charchaf would have been assumed to come from a well-to-do elite family. In 1930, a woman from that class would have been recognizable by the fashionable cut of her dress and coat or suit. . .” Graham-Brown, Images of Women, 132. In Graham-Brown’s book, one can see images of the coexistence of many forms of women’s clothing in the 1920s and 30s, veiled and unveiled alike. Yashmak (Yaşmak) is a veil that was used together with the ferace, which consisted of two pieces, a head veil and a face veil. It was replaced by the peçe (face veil) with the spread of the çarşaf. 67. For more on the Kemalist perspective on women’s emancipation, see Deniz Kandiyoti, “Emancipated but Unliberated? Reflections on the Turkish Case,” Feminist Studies 13, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 317–339.

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68. The public/private distinction played an important role in reinforcing the Kemalist perception of women’s emancipation. Within this context, even women’s roles in the private sphere, such as housework or motherhood, gained public meanings and they were attributed a particular significance for the well-being of the nation. See Gülnur Acar-Savran, Beden, Emek, Tarih: Diyalektik Bir Feminizm İçin (Istanbul: Kanat, 2004), 99. For more on the Kemalist woman project see Arat, “The Project of Modernity and Women in Turkey.” 69. This was why women’s rights to education, to work, and to vote were very important for these feminists. Accordingly, it was believed that women’s participation in public life would put an end to their subordinated position. In fact, the role of the public/private distinction in women’s subordination continued to be voiced by feminists, perhaps more radically and from a different angle in the 1960s and 1970s. See, for example, Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, eds., Woman, Culture and Society (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1974). One implication of this was the tendency to see the women of non-Western countries as the true “victims” compared to more “liberated” Western women who were more visible in the public sphere. This tendency was challenged by non-Western feminists, especially by postcolonial feminism. See Chandra T. Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” in Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Colombia University Press, 1994): 196–220. See also Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). 70. It should be underlined, however, that as mentioned before, Kemalist perception of women’s emancipation did not envision women’s participation in the public sphere as a denial of patriarchal gender roles. In other words, women would be part of the public sphere as asexual subjects and their primary role as mothers and house managers would remain intact. For more on this see Kandiyoti, “Emancipated but Unliberated?”; see also Saktanber, “Kemalist Kadın Hakları Söylemi.” 71. Sibel Bozdoğan, Modernism and Nation Building: Turkish Architectural Culture in the Early Republic (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001), 82. 72. Çınar, Modernity, Islam, and Secularism in Turkey, 55. 73. Cemal Rıza, “Peçe ve Çarşaf,” Halk, 31 October 1935. See also Cemal Rıza, “Çarşaf,” Halk, 12 November 1935. 74. “Peçe ve Çarşaf, Şehrimizin sayın Bayanlarına,” Halk, 19 December 1935. 75. “Muğla Kadınları Çarşafları Kaldırıyor,” Halk, 31 December 1934. 76. “Kadın Peçe Çarşaflarının kaldırılması hakkında erginler yurdu belediye meclisine muracaat ediyor,” Halk, 11 February 1935. See also, “Belediye meclisi genclerin tekliflerini kabul etti. Bugün meclisde kat’i karar verilecek,” Halk, 14 February 1935. 77. “Peçe ve çarşaf meselesi C.H. Partısında görüşüldü,” Halk, 17 October 1935. 78. “Trabzon Kadınları ve Çarşaf,” İkbal, 29 October 1934.

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79. Cevat Alap, “Çarşaf, Peçe Artık Yok Olmalıdır,” İkbal, 23 December 1934. 80. G. Şarman, “Peştamal Üstlük Yasaktır,” Denizli, 11 September 1935, quoted in Uyar, “Tek Parti Döneminde Denizli’de Siyasal Hayat.” 81. For example, see “Peştamallı Kadınlar Gece Fenerlerle Rey Attılar,” Yeni Asır, 24 January 1935. 82. “Umum Vilâyet Meclisi Üyeleri de Seçildiler,” Yeni Asır, 10 February 1935. Elections were very important occasions for women’s increasing public visibility. In many local newspapers, women’s arrival to the polling stations, usually in groups to celebrate their political rights, was emphasized as a sign of women’s determined will to be part of the public life and to exercise their rights alongside with men. For example, see “Köylerde. Kadınlarımız Siyasi Haklarını Kullanıyorlar,” Yeni Asır, 23 October 1934. Women’s membership in the party and associations was equally significant to the fact that there were a lot of news reports about them as well. See “Kadınlar Derneği,” Yeni Asır, 21 January 193; “Gümüşhane Bayanları İstekle Fırkaya Yazılıyor,” Halk, 21 January 1935. 83. “Bergama’da Halk Kıvrak ve Peçeleri Atıyor,” Anadolu, 7 November 1934. 84. Yakut, “Tek Parti Döneminde Peçe ve Çarşaf,” 30. 85. “Bergama’da Halk Kıvrak ve Peçeleri Atıyor,” Anadolu, 7 November 1934. 86. For the case of Trabzon, see Cevat Alap, “Çarşaf, Peçe Artık Yok Olmalıdır,” İkbal, 23 December 1934. 87. “Dünkü Uray Kurulunda,” Hakkın Sesi, 15 February 1936. 88. “Sinopta Kadınlar Çarşaflarını Kaldıracaklardır,” Yeni Asır, 29 November 1934. 89. “Kayseride Çarşafların Kaldırılması Savaşı İlerliyor,” Yeni Asır, 4 December 1934. 90. “Halkevi aileli bir toplantı yapacak,” Halk, 6 April 1936. 91. Çınar, Modernity, Islam, and Secularism in Turkey, 60. 92. Graham-Brown, Images of Women, 134. 93. Medya Yeğenoğlu, Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 122. 94. “Tedrisiye, Terbiye İşleri,” Anadolu, 5 September 1934. 95. In fact, the reflections of the Kemalist reforms on women’s status and clothing in other Middle Eastern countries were equally important. News and commentaries from Syrian, Egyptian, and Iranian newspapers were also translated and published in national and local newspapers in Turkey. The idea that Turkey should be the model for these countries was very pervasive. 96. Taşçıoğlu, Türk Osmanlı Cemiyetinde Kadının Sosyal Durumu, 74. 97. Graham-Brown, Images of Women, 132. 98. For one example of such articles about Turkish women appeared in European newspapers, which were then translated and published in newspapers in Turkey see “Türk Kadınının Vaziyeti. ‘Revue de Lausanne’in 18 Temmuz 1934 tarihli nüshasında dikkate şayan bir makale,” Yeni Asır, 30 July 1934. See also “Türk Mucizesi,” Hakkın Sesi, 7 November 1935; “Yeni Türkiyeye dair. . . ,” Hakkın Sesi, 22 December 1935. 99. “Bergama’da Halk Kıvrak ve Peçeleri Atıyor,” Anadolu, 7 November 1934.

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100. Cemal Rıza, “Peçe ve Çarşaf,” Halk, 17 October 1935. 101. Cemal Rıza, “Peçe ve Çarşaf, Şehrimizin sayın Bayanlarına,” Halk, 19 December 1935. 102. “Çarşafı Atalım,” Halk, 13 April 1936. 103. For Denizli, see Uyar, “Tek Parti Döneminde Denizli’de Siyasal Hayat.” For Bursa, see “Kendi kendilerini cezalandıranlar. . . ,” Hakkın Sesi, 30 November 1935; “Peçeli Kadınlar,” Hakkın Sesi, 24 December 1935; “Dünkü Uray Kurulunda,” Hakkın Sesi, 15 February 1936. For Konya, see “Zaman ilerler ilerlemezden sürükler,” Babalık, 18 January 1936. 104. Aka Gündüz, “Çarşaf Nümayişleri,” Yeni Asır, 17 July 1934. The article was originally published in a national newspaper, Hakimiyeti Milliye, but then reprinted in some local newspapers. 105. Removal of lattice windows in Bursa, for example, was suggested to the city council by the deputy mayor, Zehra Hanım, who was the first woman deputy mayor in Turkey. “Belediye Meclisinde,” Hakkın Sesi, 3 February 1935. In Antalya, as mentioned earlier, the campaign began with the formation of a committee composed of the women members of the People’s House. “Antalyada Çarşaf ve Peçelerle Mücadele Başladı,” Yeni Asır, 23 December 1934. For some examples of women’s voices, see also “Türk Kadının Cemiyetteki mevkii,” Halk, 26 March 1936; Hayriye Ural, “Çarşafları Atalım,” Halk, 30 Mart 1936. 106. “Diyarbekir kadınlar derneği. . . ,” İkbal, 27 January 1935. 107. “Türk Kadınlığının Kıvancı,” Yeni Asır, 9 Aralık 1934. 108. “Atatürk Kadınlarımıza Değerli Işler Dileyor, Her Tarafta Kadınlar Kıvanç Içinde,” Yeni Asır, 11 December 1934. 109. “Kadınların söylevleri,” Babalık, 16 December 1934. For women’s speeches in Izmir, see “İffeti Kara Peçede ve Kafesin Arkasında Arıyan Zihniyet Yıkılmıştır, Bayanlarımızın Heyecanlı Söylevleri,” Yeni Asır, 16 December 1934. 110. Nihal Güzey, “Örtünmekten Vazgeçelim,” Antalya, 10 January 1935. 111. In fact, many sewing courses were created in the 1930s. Although it is not clear whether they were organized in relation to the anti-veiling campaigns, they certainly had a role in the spreading of new forms of women’s clothing. The Girls’ Institutes, vocational schools established in 1929 specifically for training girls, also had an important role in training women in sewing and promoting modern clothing for women. See Fatma Gök, “The Girls’ Institutes in the Early Period of the Turkish Republic,” in Education in ‘Multicultural’ Societies: Turkish and Swedish Perspectives, ed. Marie Carlson, Annika Rabo, and

Fatma Gök (Istanbul: Swedish Research Institute, 2007), 93–105. See also Elif Ekin Akşit, Kızların Sessizliği: Kız Enstitülerinin Uzun Tarihi (Istanbul: İletişim, 2005). 112. Bozdoğan, Modernism and Nation Building, 82.

Part II

‫ﱬﱫ‬ Male Spaces, Female Spaces? Limits of and Breaches in the Gendered Order of the City

Chapter 3

Playing with Gender The Carnival of al-Qays in Jeddah Ulrike Freitag

‫ﱬﱫ‬ THE FESTIVAL In the course of conducting interviews on the urban history of Jeddah, a port city in the Hijaz region of present-day Saudi Arabia, I came across the story of al-Qays or, in the local rendering, al-Gēs. It was told to me first by a gentleman, about sixty years of age and hailing from one of the important families of old Jeddah. He had himself grown up in the old walled city of Jeddah, commonly known as al-Balad.1 Talking about places of religious importance, traditional festivals, and social life, he suddenly remembered something from his youth which he said might interest me as a female researcher, namely, the “carnival” (he used the English term) of al-Qays. This was, he assured me, a women-only affair. It began during the night of ʿArafāt, i.e., the night from the eighth to the ninth day of the month of Dhū al-H˘ijja.2 At this time of the year, known as khulayf, most men would have left Jeddah for Mecca and onward to Mount ʿArafāt. Most Jiddāwis were, at that time, busy with the pilgrims in one way or the other. They might have accompanied them as wukalāʾ or mut≥awwifūn (pilgrims’ guides), or might have been engaged in other services and trade related to the annual h≥ajj or Muslim pilgrimage. Significantly, and due to the slow means of communication, this involved often many days and even weeks of absence before and during the h≥ajj.3 With the men safely outside of town, the women would dress up as men, apparently both in traditional garb as well as in the dress of the new pro71

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fessions. My interlocutor mentioned shuyūkh (headmen of quarters, elders) and policemen as examples. One person might dress as a gazelle, the animal that gave the festival its other name, al-Ghazāla, while others might keep their normal dress. For four nights running, they would take to the streets with drums and perform dances, and thus lay a conscious claim to the urban spaces which, in the ideal circumstances, they otherwise mostly observed through the intricately carved wooden screens (rawāshīn) of their whitewashed coralstone houses. The most famous of these performances was al-Ghazāla, during which the following lines were recited: Yā Qays yā Qays, qūm ikhbiz al-ʿaysh, al-nās h≥ajjat wa-inta jālis laysh? [Meaning] Oh Qays, oh Qays, get up, bake bread, the people went on h≥ajj and you stayed behind, why?4

If the women saw the odd man in the street, they would chant a mocking song which included the line: Qays yā qays, al-nās h≥ajjat, wa-inta hunā laysh yā tays [Meaning] Qays, oh Qays, the people went on h≥ajj and you stayed behind, you ram.5

They could also take a more aggressive posture, such as attempting to beat up those men who did not let them celebrate unhindered. My interlocutor reported that over the course of his own lifetime the festival had become an occasion in which only lower-class women participated. Among them were Bedouin women who stayed outside the walled city and performed dances on the occasion. He contended that, in earlier times, it had been a universal festival that had taken place in the streets of the old town and in which women of all walks of life had taken part. This article aims to trace the elements of this festival that have been preserved to this day. In doing so, it assumes that such traditions, often no longer celebrated, constituted an important part of social life and need to be taken into account in writing social history. Their special importance derives from the fact that they allow for a rare glimpse at the social world of women, which is otherwise frequently obscured by a conjunction of sources that often do not mention them. Furthermore, normative literature often assumes the invariable application of religiously justified prescriptions without taking into account the far more varied life worlds of women that include many occasions on which prescriptions are not meticulously applied, and some, such as al-Qays, on which they are consciously caricatured. This will be discussed further in the last section of the article. The literature on

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Jeddah only rarely mentions this festival, which has been extinct for some time. Hind Bā Ghaffār, an author specializing in matters of folklore and tradition, describes al-Qays as a kind of costume festival that took place at night in enclosures (h≥awsh) only sparsely lit by small lamps.6 According to her, the festival was prepared many months in advance. The women would agree who would dress as sharīf, as shaykh of a quarter, or as a soldier, etc., and prepare their costumes. A fire of coal and wood would be lit in the middle of the enclosure or—earlier—the street. Each quarter had its own female music group, consisting of a shaykha and of girls trained by her for such occasions.7 They would assemble and play music on copper basins (marājif ) and tambourines (nawbāt). The shaykha would lead the music and those present join in the dance around the fire. While the dance itself was not accompanied by songs, and different tunes were played, a number of songs were specific to the festival. Among them—in yet another variation—was the following invitation, which had clear erotic overtones: Yā Qaysunā Yā Qaysunā, hayyā maʿānā baytanā, nasqīka min sharbītanā, wanut≥liʿuk fī buyutinā. Yā Qays, yā Qays, al-nās s≥abuh≥at wa-inta qāʿid laysh? [Meaning] Oh our Qays, oh our Qays, come with us to our house, drink from our sherbet, we’ll show you our houses. Oh Qays, oh Qays, the people got up —but why are you staying behind [not coming with us]?

to which a lady dressed as the shaykh of the quarter would respond: shībsh, yā lah≥rabī, h≥āmī dayratih, wa-in jā yahrujunī mā abghī ahrujuh [Meaning] Shībsh, oh Lah≥rabī [possibly a mock version of al-H˘arbī], guardian of his home. If he comes to jest you, I will not join in.8

In contrast to my interlocutor cited above, Bā Ghaffār mentions the dance of al-Ghazāla as a separate occasion, which took place in both Jeddah and Mecca during the h≥ajj. One woman would prepare a costume with the head of a gazelle.9 However, she is not very clear on the distinctions.10

INTERPRETATIONS OF AL-QAYS There can be little doubt about the carnivalesque character of al-Qays. Interestingly, the term qays seems to be derived from qāsa, meaning “comparing” or “contrasting,” and thus already indicating the inverse relation to everyday norms.11 al-Qays not only linguistically contrasts the norms. It conforms quite closely to Bakhtin’s discussion of an obvious role reversal in which social and—in this case gendered—hierarchies are overturned. Women—traditionally conceived of as guardians of the house and ideally not seen outside

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unless covered—take control of the streets in male garb, accompanying this with music, dance, and merry-making. In a scene with clear erotic overtones, they invite a man into their house—another clear and dramatic breach of societal norms that hints at another possible explanation for the name: it might allude to Qays b. al-Mulawwah≥, the poet famed for his odes to the unattainable Layla. The invitation to Qays to enter the house, and thus to figuratively satisfy his longing, might yet be another ironic turn. The dislike shown to the guardian of the house (or area), the lah≥rabī, only accentuates this role reversal.12 At the same time, al-Qays seems to have been highly organized to the extent that ʿAbd al-Wahhāb Abū Zinnāda even asserts that al-Qays resembled a theatrical performance, possibly comparable to popular theater found elsewhere.13 The festival, which was first mentioned in the eleventh century, seems to have become extinct in the city some decades ago.14 Apparently, it became first confined to enclosures within al-Balad and later was only celebrated outside, most notably in the former suburb of al-Nuzla al-Yamāniyya. It also seems to have become more and more associated with lower classes and rural and/or Bedouin women. The townswomen of Jeddah still attended it as an amusement, often staying in their (summer) houses or with friends, wherever possible.15 The most detailed account of this later phase is that by al-Fad≥lī, author of a recent book on the quarter, who witnessed the festival in his own youth and interviewed old women. He describes how the visitors would bring with them all manner of food and, after fasting on the day of ʿArafat (as is common in the Hijaz), would eat delicious food brought along. The elevated seating areas in front of the houses (dakāk, singl. dakka) would be furnished with cushions for the women to settle down after dinner for tea, coffee, and light refreshments to await the spectacle that took place on different open squares of the quarter. Copper drums beaten with sticks would be used, emanating a high sound, whereas during the last years of the festival, a harmonica might chime in as well. al-Fad≥lī adds to Bā Ghaffār’s list of typical characters impersonated by the participants. He mentions a bride (al-ʿarūsa), al-jāmā (or “Turk,” referring to somebody dressed in a long overcoat), al-jaʿīdī (the “good for nothing”) and al-muh≥ashshī, a character whose clothes had been stuffed to give the impression of obesity. This character was protected by the women dancers from small children, who had come with their mothers but joined in the play by mocking al-muh≥ashshī for its immobility. Another character was the darwīsha or majnūna, who would carry a vessel with a chicken. Whenever the vessel was hit with a stick, the chicken would cry out. The person most popular with the crowd was the shah≥āda or beggar, who would be given most of the little gifts handed by the onlookers to the performers.16

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According to al-Fad≥lī, the different groups performing al-Qays in different subquarters (h≥āra) visited each other on different nights of the festival in a defined rhythm, accompanied by more special songs.17 During the fifth and last night of the festival, when al-Qays was “buried,” i.e., when it came to its seasonal end (laylat dafnat al-qays), the “grand Qays” (Qays kabīr) was staged.18 Interestingly, al-Fad≥lī claims that the Qays in al-Nuzla was not accompanied by song and dance, in contrast to the celebrations of the same name held in the quarter of al-Muʿābida in Mecca—thereby contradicting most other, albeit briefer, accounts of the festival that relate specifically to Jeddah, such as T˘rābulsī, as well as the oral accounts that I gathered.19 This apparently somewhat sobered celebration of al-Qays in al-Nuzla, as compared to the description of the festival in the inner city, might well be linked to the different historical developments that eventually led to the banning of the festival in al-Nuzla al-Yamāniyya in the early 1960s. Discussing this, its ʿumda (or shaykh of the quarter) told al-Fad≥lī that “al-Nuzla no longer belonged to its inhabitants and there were many new residents, and the understanding and nature of people changed.”20 This allusion to urban expansion and notably to the migration into the city and the social reconfiguration of various quarters, due to the developmental processes sparked by the oil boom in Saudi Arabia from the 1950s, is certainly a major aspect that caused the disappearance of the festival. The ban most likely also reflected the cultural politics of the time, which were imposed after the conquest of the Hijaz by the Āl Saʿūd in 1924–25. The puritan teachings of the Wahhābiyya were applied not only to strictly religious practice, but included such issues as the criticism (and often ban) of playing music in public places, and other public celebrations.21 Although I have no direct evidence pertaining to the opposition by religious scholars to al-Qays in particular, the general thrust of a policy directed against the playing of music, merry-making, and cross-dressing, and aiming at a strict observation of religious prescription, must have included such a festival.22 We have here an interesting parallel to developments in the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Ottoman Empire. Dror Ze’evi has argued that the emergence of print culture, in conjunction with reactions to Western perceptions of the Ottoman Empire, led to Ottoman writers emphasizing “their own society’s morality as based on rigidly defined social spaces, on the seclusion of women to save them from the fate of their European counterparts, on a heterosexual ethic, and on conservative values.”23 While the puritan interpretations of Wahhabism were clearly not linked to print culture, and while their implementation in the Hijaz had much more to do with a process of building a Saudi state based on the implementation of the same religious-ideological fundamentals in all parts of the country,

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than with a reaction to Western travelers, the result was in some ways remarkably similar: “Life, at least [but not exclusively] on the discursive plain, now had to conform to a literary ideal of superior morality.”24 It would seem that this aversion to the disturbance of the religious prescriptions has also influenced recent academic works, such as a thesis written in Jeddah in the early twenty-first century. While the verses quoted earlier seem to indicate quite clearly that women (in their songs) rather frivolously invited Qays into their homes, the (male) author of the thesis in question suggests that “the majority of women expressed their longing for their husbands, absent on the pilgrimage, in the special songs,” thus somewhat “regularizing” or domesticating the otherwise morally outrageous poetry. The most famous line, according to this view, was “h≥abībī, jī jāb al-hadiyya”—my beloved one, come and bring me a present.25

The author does not even consider whether the “beloved one” mentioned in this line could have been a lover other than the husband. This seems to contradict rather clearly the gist of the verses quoted earlier. Asked about this interpretation, my interlocutors suggested that this was another twist in the domestication of a ritual that no longer fits the religious and moral views of the modern inhabitants of Jeddah, thus evoking resonances of the dilution and removal of certain sexual connotations in late Ottoman and early Republican Turkey.26 An interesting sideline seems to be the association of leading dramatis personae in al-Qays with men being responsible for the defense and security of the population, such as the qāʾimmaqām (the governor of the city) and the shaykh al-h≥āra (or ʿumda), namely, the shaykh of the quarter.27 Women might have challenged men’s rules, as the Meccan quoted above mentions, but did they, possibly by the same token, also provide symbolic protection for their cities and villages in the absence of men?28 This might sound like an apologetic argument to justify retrospectively a behavior deemed deviant from today’s perspective. However, the pilgrimage season was considered to be a period of high crime, even if it remains an open question who the main perpetrators were.29 Be that as it may, there seems to have existed a strong popular belief, illustrated by folk tales and present in the minds of young and old, that thieves exploited the nights of khulayf to enrich themselves.30

THE CONTEXT OF AL-QAYS al-Qays was not only a Jiddāwi tradition but seems to have been practiced in many parts of the Hijaz, although both details of its celebration and the

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history of its eventual cessation seem to be highly localized. Thus, Nasr and Bagader give a detailed description and analysis of the festival in Mecca, where it left a deep imprint on a young girl growing up in the 1930s: The image of women, costumed as men, claiming the streets of Mecca during hajj is the most vivid of my childhood memories. This ancient custom continued until the 1930s, and I feel a chill of excitement whenever my elders talked about it. The most daring Meccan women would take over the streets, challenging men’s rules that kept them housebound.31

There, as in Mecca, the festival was successively pushed out of urban life, but continued in villages until the 1970s.32 Something similar seems to have happened in the city of T˘āʾif. Marianne Ali Reza remembers, from the late 1940s, a performance of “gaysa” by Bedouin who were specifically called to T˘āʾif to entertain rich townspeople. This seems to indicate that, by the 1940s, the festival was no longer celebrated by the townswomen, and might even have become folklorized in the sense of being performed out of its original context.33 However, in the late 60s, the festival was still vibrant in Wādī Fāt≥ima, situated between Mecca and Jeddah, and it seems to have been celebrated in villages in the region as recently as ten years ago.34 It seems furthermore worthwhile to point out that al-Qays was part of a wider system of female celebrations linked to the Muslim holidays.35 Thus, the festival of al-Jakar is often evoked in conjunction with al-Qays. It was another Hijazi tradition, celebrated in particular urban quarters with a dance and music some days after the ʿĪd al-Fit≥r. In this, it closely seems to resemble the “Girls’ Festival” or ʿĪd al-Banāt, described by Katakura for Wādī Fāt≥ima.36 Already during the last days of the ʿĪd al-Fit≥r, a number of female Bedouin groups toured the suburb of al-Kandara, moving from house to house, singing and dancing the nāqī, another traditional dance. On the last day of the ʿĪd, when it was “buried” (dafnat al-ʿīd), they would assemble in a square and perform publicly.37 In addition, women (and men) maintained a host of other celebrations during life-cycle celebrations (birth, circumcision, marriage). Other regions of the Arabian Peninsula might have had different dances and songs, but also seem to have had comparable female celebrations.38

GENDER HISTORY AND AL-QAYS Are there any wider implications that we can derive from the existence of a female carnival in Jeddah, and, indeed, in the wider Hijaz region? It certainly, I would argue, opens a window into a world otherwise often shrouded by historical silence. Thus, only a few of the available historical sources

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discuss women and their participation in social life.39 The observations by Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje of 1884 are a rare exception to this rule. He did not witness al-Qays, but describes how he noticed a female musical performance during the ʿĪd al-Ad≥h≥ā in one of the houses of Jeddah. He also comments on female participation in excursions outside the old city in the area of al-Nuzla al-Yamāniyya during celebrations for the end of the month of S≥afar. Whole families went for an outing on that occasion, many spending the nights in tents or in the open.40 Such observations are significant, as they stand somewhat in contrast to the cherished image of Hijazi women as carefully secluded guardians of the home. While not necessarily questioning the general observance of the norms of gender segregation, they open a rare window onto the lively world of female sociability. The festival of al-Qays seems to have been an important part of this sociability, as indeed were female gatherings to celebrate the mawlid of the Prophet or visits (ziyārāt) by groups of women to the tombs of Sīdī ʿAydārūs and Sīdī ʿAlawī, two local saints. Interestingly, these latter ceased, according to oral tradition, through the intervention of a learned Indian lady, S≥adīqa Sharaf al-Dīn, who came to Jeddah in approximately the 1930s to perform the pilgrimage. As her father was well acquainted with the famous notable and intellectual, Muh≥ammad Nas≥īf, himself well known for his Wahhābī leanings, she took up residence in his house. It is said that Muh≥ammad Nas≥īf was so impressed by her learning that he married her to his son, ʿUmar Muhammad. Apparently it was her desire to further girls’ education, which was instrumental in convincing Muh≥ammad Nas≥īf to found the Madrasa Nas≥īfiyya, a girls’ school licensed by King Saʿūd, in 1956– 57.41 To this day, she is remembered as a beacon of Islamic learning in Jeddah.42 This development is significant in itself, as it shows how educated women participated in the spreading of salafī teachings and could have a very real impact on social developments. These last events take us well into the second half of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, they are important as they show how women participated both in the intellectual and educational transformations of the period during which al-Qays and other traditions disappeared. The above story also hints at another important feature of Jeddah, as well as of other cities of the Hijaz. Not only was their population composed of people of different origins, the annual pilgrimage also contributed to encounters and seems to even have contributed somewhat to an easing of the rules of gender segregation that dominated Hijazi society. For example, women could invite male pilgrims and offer them accommodation inside their houses.43 This is very much in line with the general gender rules governing the h≥ajj in which women and men practice their religion together.

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As elsewhere, the generally strict norms were not only influenced by the functions of Jeddah as the main port of H˘ijāz. They were also mitigated by social status and differed additionally between town and countryside, i.e., town dwellers and Bedouin, as well as between the settled population of the walled town and of the suburbs outside.44 In addition, and possibly also due to the mobility required for the h≥ajj, the rules for who could be considered a mah≥ram, a legal guardian, were handled in a fairly relaxed way, at least in Mecca. Nevertheless, the general norms of gender segregation dominant in other Ottoman cities certainly applied in Jeddah as well. They were probably stricter than in many of the Mediterranean cities, given the absence of a significant indigenous Christian population, the absence of missionary schools, and the relatively late appearance of formal girls’ education beyond the kuttāb.45 Thus, townswomen were not expected to leave the house in order to buy goods in the market—this was performed by young boys. More lasting goods, such as fabric for the clothes, which were mostly sewn in the houses, were brought to the houses for the women to choose from, and then taken away again. It seems that female excursions to shops, a popular pastime today, only started in the 1950s, when the oil boom led to a rapid urban expansion, coupled with the means for buying ready-made goods.46 Nevertheless, as has been shown, women in earlier times had other outlets for their needs to socialize, to visit and enjoy themselves, and to fulfill their religious needs.47 In addition to the life-cycle celebrations and the ʿĪd–related festivals discussed in this chapter, visits as well as all-female outings to the seaside or, in Mecca, to the surrounding gardens could be mentioned, not to speak of the well-known social visits between families and friends. Obviously, women covered themselves during such outings, although their dress also changed over time, from a colored overdress in the late nineteenth century to an all-black veil by the 1940s.48 Such rules notwithstanding, Jiddāwī women shared with Ottoman women elsewhere the involvement in the local economy through their involvement in the real estate market or commercial activities such as sewing, although the extent and range of such activities has not yet been investigated due to problems with access to the court records.49 How should the existence of a carnival, or a carnivalesque performance, be evaluated in such a wider context? Should it be seen as a rebellion (albeit temporary) against the existing hierarchies and gender system? Such an interpretation has been suggested by Gluckman, who investigated a rain cult among the Zulu, and by Boddy’s discussion of the zār cult in the Sudan.50 Referring to Gluckman, Boddy argues about the zār cult that “possession is more than a contained rebellion against an established social order . . . it is also rebellion of the human mind against the fetters of cultural constructs.”51

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Recent literature has warned that such an interpretative approach, appealing as it may seem, risks falling short of the complexities of cultural expressions and strategies. Regarding the use of Bakhtin, he is being praised precisely for overcoming, rather than creating, binary distinctions (including those between the genders).52 On a more ethnographic note, Sanders discusses a Tanzanian rain cult similar to the cults analyzed by Gluckman in its reversal of gender roles. He argues that this particular rain cult, in which the women take to the streets without clothes and chanting lewd songs, threatening men who cross their paths, constitutes more an expression of gender complementarity than of rebellion.53 Responding to a growing literature on rituals of resistance, among it the work by Boddy, Saba Mahmood questions the notion, underlying much of the abovementioned analyses, of “the universality of the desire—central for liberal and progressive thought, and presupposed by the concept of resistance it authorizes—to be free from relations of subordination and, for women, from structures of male domination.”54 She proposes to discard the normative notion of liberatory subjectivity, inherent in much feminist scholarship, and argues instead in favor of a more open and culturally specific understanding of female agency.55 The voices of caution, in spite of being situated in a highly contested political field, fit in well with a constructivist approach that sees in the dissolution of order in heathen carnival rituals a chance to experience order (through its absence).56 This is borne out by the fact that, in the “Weiberfastnacht” celebrated in the German city of Cologne, men accepted wild female celebrations and considered them to be part and parcel of an overall period of celebration. It is even argued that the very confidence that the Cologne women displayed during these celebrations reflected their dominant position in the homes. Only with the extension of Prussian influence in the early nineteenth century was this female-dominated part of the carnival sidelined and replaced by overwhelmingly male-dominated and well-organized events.57 This notion of complementarity would fit much better with accounts of al-Qays and Jakar that stress, at least for the last periods before their disappearance, the male compliance with and protection of these celebrations. It would also help to make sense of the local interpretation, mentioned above, of al-Qays as fulfilling the function of securing the otherwise deserted city. While this appears as a defensive argument that might well serve to posthumously justify a tradition regarded as both offensive and primitive by today’s standards, a perspective stressing gender complementarity could easily accommodate the view that the sheer presence of women in the street might have also had a certain effect of discouraging thieves, even if their dress as men of authority would have easily been recognized as a disguise.

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If one combines Mahmood’s call for a more cautious approach with the recent discussions both of carnivals and other female rituals previously discussed in terms of “rebellion,” this should at least be taken as a methodological lesson: we need to pay much closer attention to the often neglected genre of folklore if we want to reconstruct the uses made by women, as well as possibly by other groups absent from the mainstream historical record, of urban (and other) spaces. This seems particularly in place in a context where the fairly strict separation of the sexes, historically often combined with gendered access to literacy and thus to the composition of the historical record, mostly seems to be associated with an automatic notion that difference equals oppression. While not denying historical gender inequality, a more nuanced investigation is necessary for a realistic assessment of its specific contours.58 Does the narrowing of the social space signified by the abolition of this carnival point to any parallels with similar developments in other societies, such as the sidelining of women in the Cologne carnival? Was this part of the disciplinary program of modernizing states aiming at clear boundaries between genders, public and private space, etc., as has been shown also in the case of Ottoman Empire? Or is it the outgrowth, as has been argued with regard to the disappearance of Sufism, for example, of the Wahhābī penetration of the Hijaz? Presumably, both factors need to be considered, once more, as complementary, since the modernizing Saudi state had adopted the Wahhābī doctrine as its official ideology. To this, other historical developments, such as changing lifestyles, need to be added if we aim at a better comprehension of the disappearance of the tradition. However, we also need to pay attention to the reshaping of urban spaces, and their use, by both genders, before we nostalgically lament lost space. Thus, returning to our case study of Jeddah, women have managed to lay claim to new urban spaces such as educational and work spaces, shopping malls, and leisure areas (parks, beaches).59 This has taken place partly in compliance with, partly in revolt against the dominant (but changing) gender ideology, and certainly has changed the types and rhythm of their use of urban space.

NOTES The research for this chapter has been supported by Zentrum Moderner Orient, which is generously supported by the Federal Ministry for Education and Research. It was conducted during two stays in Jeddah between 2010 and 2013, which were sponsored by Effat University. My thanks are due to these institutions, but also to my generous hosts in Jeddah, Sultana and Sultan Ghalib al-Quʿayt≥ī and Dr. Mona

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Bagour, as well as to the many people (not all of whom wished to be mentioned by name) willing to share their memories of old Jeddah. I am grateful to the discussions at Orient Institute Beirut in March 2011 and to the students and staff of Effat University who commented on the chapter in February 2013. At ZMO, I thank Chanfi Ahmed, Nushin Atmaca, Antia Mato Bouzas, Nora Lafi, Nazan Maksudyan, and Larissa Schmid, as well as the anonymous reviewers. 1. The following is based on a conversation in Jeddah on 18 March 2010. I had then not yet seen the article by Ahmad A. Nasr and Abu Bakar A. Bagader, “AlGēs: Women’s Festival and Drama in Mecca,” Journal of Folklore Research 38, no. 3 (2001): 243–262. 2. Most authors and people interviewed by me agree that Qays started on the day of ʿArafāt, i.e., 9 Dhū al-H˘ijja (or rather the night before that, laylat ʿArafāt), e.g., ʿAbbās b. Muh≥ammad Saʿ īd al-Fad≥lī, al-Nuzla al-Yamāniyya: h≥ayy fī dhākirat “Jidda” ( Jeddah: Maktabat Dār Zahrān, 2010), 121–124; whereas Muh≥ammad Yūsuf T≥rābulsī, Jidda: H˘ikāyat Madīna, 2nd ed. ( Jeddah: al-madīna al-munawwara li-lt≥ibāʿa wa-l-nashr, 2008), 339, probably erroneously refers to the third day of the ʿĪd al-Ad≥h≥ā (i.e., 12 Dhū al-H˘ijja). 3. Oral communication, Dr. Amal Ilyās, Jeddah, 27 February 2013. 4. T˘rābulsī, Jidda, 339. T˘rābulsī and the gentleman who first related the story to me are of about the same age. 5. The local pronunciation would render the verse something like: Gēs, yā gēs, al-nās h≥ajjat, wa-inta hunā lesh yā tēs. 6. The following is based on Hind Bā Ghaffār, al-Aghānī al-shaʿbiyya fi-l-mamlaka al-ʿarabiyya al-saʿūdiyya ( Jeddah: Dār al-Qādisiyya li-l-nashr wa-l-tawzīʿ, 1994), 156f. 7. Ibid., 153. 8. Bā Ghaffār, al-Aghāni al-shaʿbiyya, 156f. I am grateful to Nora Lafi, Dyala Hamzah, and Gamal Abd al-Nasser for suggestions regarding the translation. In Nasr and Bagader, “Al-Gēs,” this comes out in a slight variation as “Shibēsh al-H˘arbī H˘āmi dīrtuh,” translating as: Shibēsh al-H˘arbī [i.e., of the H˘arb tribe, U.F.] is the Protector of his locality,” 250. 9. Bā Ghaffār, al-Aghāni al-shaʿbiyya, 157–159. 10. Ibid., 158. 11. Nasr and Bagader, “Al-Gēs,” 247. 12. Michael M. Bachtin, “Der Karneval und die Karnevalisierung der Literatur,” in idem, Literatur und Karneval. Zur Romantheorie und Lachkultur (München: Hanser, 1969), 47–60; Nasr and Bagader, “Al-Gēs,” arrive at the same conclusion. 13. ʿAbd al-Wahhāb Abū Zinnāda, “Muqābasāt ʿalā kitāb Jidda al-tārīkh wa-l-h≥ayyāt al-ijtimāʿiyya,” Majallat al-Thaqāfa 18 (30 June 2003), www.al-jazirah.com.sa/ culture/30062003/warak29.htm, accessed 5 April 2011; interestingly, ʿAbdallāh Mannāʿ, Baʿd≥ al-ayyām baʿd≥ al-layyālī: at≥rāf min qis≥sa≥ t h≥ayyātī, 2nd ed. ( Jeddah: Dār al-Marsā li-l-nashr wa-l-tawzʿi, 2009), 80, also discusses “tamthīliyāt.” 14. The following is based on conversations with Mariyām Jamjūm, S≥afiyya Bin Zaqr, and Hind Bā Ghaffār in Jeddah in March 2011. Abu Bakr Bā Qādir, Saʿd

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15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21.

22.

23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28.

29.

30. 31.

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S≥uwayān, and Sultan Ghālib al-Quʿayţī also provided me with valuable suggestions. For the date of origin, see Nasr and Bagader, “Al-Gēs,” 246. al-Fad≥lī, al-Nuzla al-Yamāniyya, 121–124; and T˘rābulsī, Jidda, 339. al-Fad≥lī, al-Nuzla al-Yamāniyya, 122. Similarly, during ʿĪd al-Ad≥h≥ā, the inhabitants of the different quarters of the old town visited each other in a defined manner on different days of the ʿĪd. The information regarding the length of the festival varies. Given that the return journey from Mecca also would have taken a day and a night before motor vehicles, it is possible that originally, men were absent, whereas they might have well been present in later years when travel became less cumbersome. The term dafna (burying, laying to grave) is also used locally to mark the final days of other celebrations. al-Fad≥lī, al-Nuzla al-Yamāniyya, 123; T˘rābulsī, Jidda, 339: interviews in Jeddah, March 2010 and 2011. al-Fad≥lī, al-Nuzla al-Yamāniyya, 124. The notes by Nasr and Bagader on this topic for Mecca also apply to Jeddah, “Al-Gēs,” 256–258; for the general attempt at a “Wahhabisation,” see Guido Steinberg, Religion und Staat in Saudi-Arabien. Die wahhabitischen Gelehrten 19021953 (Würzburg: Ergon, 2002), 511–552. On Wahhabi positions regarding music and traditional dances, Muhammad Al-Atawneh, Wahhābī Islam Facing the Challenges of Modernity: Dār al-Iftā in the Modern Saudi State (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2010), 108–112. Dror Ze’evi, Producing Desire: Chaning Sexual Discourse in the Ottoman Middle East, 1500-1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 169. Ibid. Muh≥ammad Nās≥ir ʿAlī Āl Hashbūl al-Asmarrī, “Tārīkh al-h≥ayyāt al-ijtimāʿiyya fī madīnat Jidda 1300 h.—1342 h/1882 m—1924 m.” (unpublished M.A. thesis, King Abd al-Aziz University, Jeddah, 2008), 99. Ze’evi, Producing Desire, 170f. Abū Zinnāda, “Muqābasāt ʿalā kitāb Jidda al-tārīkh wa-l-h≥ayyāt al-ijtimāʿiyya,” draws special attention to this fact. This was suggested to me in a number of interviews in 2010 and confirmed in an interview with ʿumda Malāk Bā ʿĪsā, 4 March 2013, in Jeddah, c.f. ʿAzīza ʿAbdallāh Muh≥ammad al-S≥ayrafī, Lafayt al-sabʿa al-laffāt ( Jeddah: sharikat almadīna al-munawwara li-l-t≥ibāʿa wa-l-nashr, 2012), 170. Interview with ʿumda ʿAbd al-S≥amad Muh≥ammad ʿAbd al-S≥amad, Jeddah, 21 March 2011; French consular documents from Jeddah (e.g., Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, CADN Nantes, Const. Amb. 1841-1857) suggest that it was sometimes locals, sometimes Bedouin and sometimes pilgrims who committed robberies and crime, thus contradicting the assumption that it was mostly the outsiders who violated the norms. See the vivid memories of ʿAbdallāh Mannāʿ, Baʿ al-ayyām baʿ al-layyālī, 19f. Ferial Masry and Susan Chenard, Running for All the Right Reasons: A Saudi-born Woman’s Pursuit of Democracy (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2008), 20.

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32. Nasr and Bagader, “Al-Gēs,” 257. 33. Marianne Ali Reza, At the Drop of a Veil, 2nd ed. ( Jeddah: Mazda Pub., 2008), 80f. She describes how dancers (it remains unclear whether they were men or women) were dressed with animal heads and enacted a hunt, dancing to drums. 34. Motoko Katakura, Bedouin Village: A Study of a Saudi Arabian People in Transition (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1977), 100f., and verbal communication by Mariyam Jamjūm, Jeddah, 10 March 2011. 35. For an overview see Soraya Altorki, “Some Considerations on the Family in the Arabian Peninsula in the Late Ottoman and Early Post-Ottoman Period,” in Gulf Women, ed. Amira El-Azhary Sonbol (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2012), 277–309, here 301–305, which is largely based on Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje, Mekka, Vol. II (Den Haag: Nijhoff, 1889), 52–62 and passim. 36. Bā Ghaffār, al-Aghānī al-shaʿbiyya, 152f.; al-Fad≥lī, al-Nuzla al-Yamāniyya, 124f.; Katakura, Bedouin Village, 98–100. 37. al-Fad≥lī, al-Nuzla al-Yamāniyya, 126f., Bā Ghaffār, al-Aghānī al-shaʿbiyya, 154f. 38. Oral communication, Prof. Saʿd S≥uwayān, Riyadh, 8 March 2011. 39. It is noteworthy that the records of the shariʿa courts of Mecca, Medina, and Jeddah still seem to exist, but are not readily available for historical research, al-Asmarrī, “Tārīkh al-h≥ayyāt al-ijtimāʿiyya,” 3. 40. Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje, “Jeddah Diary” manuscript, Leiden University Library, Or, 7112, 19f. and 43. 41. Abū Zinnāda, “Muqābasāt ʿalā kitāb Jidda al-tārīkh wa-l-h≥ayyāt al-ijtimāʿiyya”; T˘rābulsī, Jidda, 440f., H˘alīma Muz≥affar, “Madrasat al-nas≥īfiyya tah≥tafil bi-lyūbīl al-dhahabī li-taʾsīsihā ka-awwal madrasa li-lbanaī ‘l-saʿūdiyya,” al-Sharq al-awsat≥, 4 May 2005. 42. Personal communication by a member of an old Jiddāwī family, Berlin, June 2013. 43. Interview with Dr. ʿAdnān Yāfī, 22 March 2006. 44. This becomes obvious from Savignac’s photographs of old Jeddah and the suburbs. 45. Bakrī Shaykh Amīn, al-H˘araka al-adabiyya fī ʿl-mamlaka al-ʿarabiyya al-suʿūdiyya, n.p. 1972/1392, 154; on the kuttāb for girls see T˘arablus≥ī, Jidda, 432–434. 46. Interviews, Jeddah, March 2010. On the provision with cloth, see Ali Reza, At the Drop of a Veil, 67; on outings to shops in town, see ibid., 248f. 47. Another social occasion for many women was participation in the zār cult, about which fairly little is known. 48. Interviews in Jeddah, March 2010. The current veil is still predominantly black, but becoming more colored and decorated by the year. 49. Altorki, “Some Considerations,” 299–301. 50. Max Gluckman, “Rituals of Rebellion in South-east Africa,” in idem, Order and Rebellion in Africa (London: Free Press of Glencoe, 1963), 110–136; and Janice Boddy, Wombs and Alien Spirits (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1989). 51. Boddy, Wombs and Alien Spirits, 309.

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52. Clive Thomson, “Bakhtin and Feminist Projects: Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble,” in Bakhtin: Carnival and other Subjects, ed. David Shepherd, (Amsterdam; Atlanta: Editions Rodopi, 1993) (Critical Studies 3, no. 2, and vol. 4, no. 1–2), 210–228, here 216. 53. Todd Sanders, “Rains Gone Bad, Women Gone Mad: Rethinking Gender Rituals of Rebellion and Patriarchy,” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 6, no. 3 (2000): 469–498. 54. Saba Mahmood, “Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival,” Cultural Anthropology 16, no. 1 (2001): 202–236, here 206. 55. Ibid., notably 211f. 56. Helene Klauser, Kölner Karneval zwischen Uniform und Lebensform (Münster; New York: Waxmann, 2007), 231. 57. Ibid., 239–241. 58. Altorki, “Some Considerations,” comes to a not dissimilar conclusion when arguing that one needs to consider tradition as much as shariʿa when trying to understand the lot of Hijazi women in the late Ottoman period, 309. 59. Stefan Tobias Maneval, “The Architecture of Private Space in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia,” Paper given at the conference Gulf Cities. Space, Society, Culture, AUK 22-24.3.2013.

Chapter 4

Mixed Marriage, Prostitution, Survival Reintegrating Armenian Women into Post-Ottoman Cities Vahé Tachjian

‫ﱬﱫ‬ The incident took place at the end of 1918, a short time after the Armistice. The well-known intellectual and writer, Yervant Odian, after his exile to the Syrian deserts, eventually returned to his home, Istanbul. He boarded a train in Konya and found that there were many people seated in the carriage, among whom were Turkish policemen. These last drank, sang, and played musical instruments without pause, occasionally inviting their mistresses in from the next car. Among these women was a beautiful Armenian from Bandırma. Very well educated, she had read Odian’s works and wanted to meet him. He took advantage of the situation to give her a lesson in morals, but she would have none of it; the majority of Armenian women in Konya who had lost their husbands, she said, had either become prostitutes or taken Turkish lovers in order to avoid exile to Der Zor. Now that the war had ended and the survivors could at last feel that they had been emancipated, she was convinced that her fate had been sealed and that she would never be able to return to Armenian society. Odian writes: “‘It’s far too late,’ said the poor woman. ‘Things have gone too far. I have lived this life for three years now; who will look me in the face? You see, I’m the daughter of an honorable family from Bandırma. Still, I don’t dare go back home now; I feel ashamed to look my relatives and friends in the face, since many of them know what sort of life I’ve been living in Konya.’”1 86

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It is not usual to find such incidents in testimonies concerning the Armenian genocide. Clearly the narration of the woman from Bandırma is an unusual testimony, a different voice that for a long time has not had a place in the many and various works about the Armenian genocide. Such stories are often effaced; such voices are generally silenced. They are the demonstration of a continuing Catastrophe. Deported because of her ethnicity, a victim of mass violence, the woman from Bandırma is unable to emerge from her victim status after the Catastrophe. Countless other Armenian women and girls are in the same state. She knows very well that within her community certain internal boundaries have been created—all of them the result of mass crime, all of them the continuation of a human tragedy. The community imposes its internal moral perceptions of shame, dignity, and revenge. There come into existence, under these circumstances, isolated individuals, expendable elements, condemned people. It is significant that in these post-Catastrophe reactions the gender approach is very obvious. This chapter concerns the experiences of the surviving women. An attempt will be made to examine the first postgenocide years, when the question of Armenian women who had converted to Islam was an urgent matter within the Armenian environment. There were public statements, and articles were written and decisions made about it. The implementation of the plan by the ruling power of the Ottoman Empire—the Committee of Union and Progress—to exterminate the Armenian people during the war years had its immediate effect on Armenian thought at the time. Clearly, an attempt was made to destroy a complete ethnic group during the previous years; alongside the systematic massacres that were perpetrated, Armenian women were subjected to what Adam Jones qualified as genocidal rape;2 with it, Armenian girls, children, and women became spoils of war for the perpetrators and its adherent masses, the objects of sexual slavery. The collapse of the empire was the opportunity for the Armenian national community bodies to change the course of the process of destruction and obliteration. This time the Armenians started collecting the remnants of their exterminated people. They searched for surviving Armenian women, children, and girls to be found in Turkish, Kurdish, and Arab homes. This large-scale work of collection and reconstruction would soon show its contradictions and difficulties, just like through the example of the Bandırma woman. The geographical area I will refer to includes the newly established Arab states, especially Syria and Lebanon. After the destruction of the Ottoman Empire, the borders of the former Arab provinces were redrawn and new states appeared in their places. Tens of thousands of Armenians had found refuge in Syria and Lebanon and, under the leadership of their elite and in a transnational environment, were trying to forge new lives for them-

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selves and to re-create their community and way of living. This essay will be restricted to one important aspect of this vast subject, the recovery and social integration of the surviving girls and women into the Armenian national community. More than a social problem, it had become an important national issue for Armenian circles of the time. The examples to be found in this chapter are mostly based on the work carried out by the shelters for those women who survived and were in the city of Aleppo. The published articles we have on women appeared in the Armenian press in Aleppo, Beirut, Cairo, Adana, Istanbul, and Izmir.3 It is true that they had no direct link to the circumstances of the many Armenian women and girls who lived in Turkish or Kurdish homes in the interior provinces of Turkey, but at the same time I think that in the adopted position of the Armenian leadership and elite the same principles and their contradictions applied to all women of this class. In this sense, too, from the point of view of the Armenian leadership, the essential thing was not these women’s geographical location, but the fact that they were in non-Armenian environments, living in Muslim families (Turkish, Kurdish, or Arab), and had created families with non-Armenian spouses. Thus, the reintegration of these women into the national community was the leaders’ main objective, but, as discussed in this article, the process had its contradictions, depending on the characteristics of these abandoned persons. Under these circumstances, whether they were in Aleppo, Istanbul, Damascus, Rakka, Dayr Zor, Harput, Palu, Diyarbekir, or anywhere else, the attitudes and practices of the Armenian leaders and elite toward these women were determined by a complex set of circumstances. In this respect, there is no reason to suppose that the attitude of Armenian community leaders in the Arab countries fundamentally differed from those in Istanbul during the post–World War I period. The Armenian leadership of Istanbul at the time (and the Armenian institutions of Cairo to a certain extent) was the primary reference point for Armenian survivors who had remained in Arab provinces. Many Armenian leaders expressed publicly their attitude toward abandoned and defenseless women survivors in the pages of Armenian newspapers in Istanbul and Izmir. Some of them voiced their intolerance toward a certain stratum of women Armenian survivors. These thoughts found reverberations in Aleppo, Beirut, and Adana—as was the case for many other issues.

THE FATE OF THE WOMEN SURVIVORS Who were these surviving women and girls, written about in such a wealth of articles in the postgenocide Armenian press? It was obvious that they

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weren’t considered ordinary survivors. In the tragedy of their lives, each of them had become a “Hobbesian hero” in just the same way as Frederick D. Homer used this term in his book on Primo Levi.4 Catastrophic circumstances had often left them isolated and exhausted, without family cohesion or protection. These same circumstances—in words borrowed from Lawrence Langer—had given birth to a “diminished self,”5 which led them to perform acts that in ordinary social situations they would not have carried out, as they often testified. The will to survive sometimes overrides the norms of society and presents opportunities for the suffering masses to adopt new social criteria. The Armenian genocide was no exception. The literature on the Armenian women’s various experiences during these years of mass violence is relatively rich and often examines the violence and rape or abduction.6 But what is less well-known in historiography is the position the Armenian leadership and elite adopted toward them, especially in the first years after the war. The immediate postwar period saw an unprecedented national mobilization of the Armenian people, who devoted themselves to gathering up the remnants of their nation and bringing about national rebirth. For the Armenians who had gone through this fearful experience, matters were simple: the break with the Ottoman world was to be absolute. From this period on, their attitude toward those who had planned and carried out the genocide was one of utter intolerance. Under these circumstances, Armenian leaders worked to eradicate all everyday phenomena that continued to link the Armenians to the Turks and the Turkish-Ottoman environment. The memory of the catastrophe, as well as the feelings of hatred toward the Turks, became the main cement in the efforts of national reconstruction that began in the Middle East. These two elements were quickly transformed into the main means of ideological homogenization.7 On the other hand, immediately after the war, it become clear that the majority of the survivors were infants, girls, and women, a significant number of them held by Turks, Kurds, or Arabs. Once this was understood, all efforts were concentrated on locating and collecting the remnants of the Armenian people in the hope of rebuilding the nation. However, the insertion of thousands of these human beings into their communities of origin proved to be a very complicated task. In the case of orphans the question was relatively simple. Here it was about immature orphans, whose numbers after the war were in the tens of thousands. These little girls and boys lived either a nomadic exile existence in places without aid or were to be found in Turkish, Kurdish, or Arab families throughout the entire area of the fallen Ottoman Empire. In the first instance it was an imperative for the Armenian and non-Armenian estab-

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lishments (especially Western missionary organizations) and individuals to collect these orphans. But it is notable that, for Armenians, the real problem was their education. These were children who, during the period of the Catastrophe, had in many cases lost their parents, had lived long separated from their national communities, and had become Kurdish-, Arab- or Turkish-speakers during the years of exile. In other words, the question of the identity of these orphans—how would it be possible to resurrect these children’s Armenian identity and turn them into the most vital element of the future Armenian society?— had been tabled. The solution to the problem—and there were generally no disagreements about this—was adoption by Armenian families or bringing them up with Armenian education in orphanages. The editorial that appeared in the Istanbul newspaper Djagadamard titled “Let us save tomorrow’s Armenians” (March 1919) included the following about the orphans’ situation: “The Turks have not only killed their parents, but have also killed many of their native virtues.”8 The same journal a few days later published another editorial about the orphans’ education and added: “. . . Anyone who looking after their care and sustenance has, before everything, to centre his attention on these poor orphans’ moral education, to wipe away every Turkish stain, and hand them over to the fatherland before they suffer even a trace of degradation.”9 Newspapers of the time often used the verbs “to wipe away” or “to cleanse,” when the question was the orphans’ education, their Armenianization. This same approach therefore, this process of education, could turn orphans into model Armenians, “tomorrow’s Armenians.” Yervant Odian wrote: “. . . to free Armenian orphans from the claws of death and poverty, to educate them, make men of them and present them to the Armenian people that so needs new energies: what a sublime and beautiful work. . .”10 A. Leylani (Movses Der-Kalousdian) wrote of the orphans collected in the orphanages of Aleppo: “But there are buds. Very beautiful buds, rescued from terror and catastrophe. Thousands of Armenian orphans are being looked after and educated in various establishments. The capital city of Armenian pain—Aleppo—that a criminal government designated the graveyard of our race, is preparing the citizens of tomorrow’s free, independent and united Armenia.”11 The question was different in the case of women and girls who had lost their husbands and other family members; many had been raped, and all their possessions had been stolen from them during the deportations. They had endured famine and occasionally given birth to illegitimate children. Other refugees often shunned the women who had undergone these terrible experiences as well. This was one reason that, simply in order to survive, some of them became prostitutes in large towns such as Aleppo, Damascus,

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Baghdad, or Mosul. Others, kidnapped by Turks, Kurds, or Arabs and forcibly married, had given birth to children; after the war, they continued to live in their new homes. Others found Muslim protectors who also became their sexual partners. These individual or mass actions were undoubtedly expressions of the logic of survival. Armenian leaders’ correspondence, personal diaries, and memoirs, and even occasionally the Armenian press, discussed this subject. The leadership and public figures of the time took two main standpoints toward these surviving women. The first considered the forced cohabitation of Armenian women with Turks, Kurds, and Arabs to be a red line. To this way of thinking, the person who stepped over that line—under whatever circumstances that cohabitation happened—had trampled on national morals and therefore was not worthy of taking her usual place in the Armenian community. This unmerciful approach was the reason for the noticeable increase in the number of Armenian prostitutes in Middle Eastern towns and urban centers. Clearly, such cohabitation with a Turk, Kurd, or Arab was often why these women’s own families and community closed their doors in front of them. In extreme cases, the family or compatriotic social structure (in other words a membership based on a common locality of origin such as a town or a village) was the basic means of survival. When that environment was missing, the individual was denied intra- and interfamilial, intra-kin/clan, or compatriotic mutual help and solidarity. The person was left to her fate, while the basic social environment deemed necessary was greatly narrowed and reduced. Under such circumstances, individuals were forced to carry out acts that, in normal circumstances, they would never have done. In other words, what they had to do to survive very often violated the accepted norms of society. Many Armenian leaders in those postwar and post-Ottoman years judged these women’s way of living by these standards, by which they determined their own position. That these women had gone through the most awful moments of the Catastrophe and survival weighed very little. For this standpoint, these women had done the inadmissible and the unforgiveable. The people gathered around the second viewpoint were more heterogeneous, so the leading opinions should be more closely examined to understand their subtleties. Common to this group was that these people did not take maximalist positions like those in the first class. They made the effort to try to understand the Catastrophe—at least within certain limits and tended to put these women in the first rank of the victims of mass violence. The individuals who initiated the founding of Armenian women’s shelters in various cities in the Middle East should be sought in this group. Women and girls who had suffered many different fates were grouped in these estab-

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lishments. Here was to be found the woman bereft of any family protection; the Armenian woman who had formed a family with a Turk, Kurd, or Arab during the deportations, then escaped; the Armenian prostitute brought from the brothel; and so on. The refuge provided these women with protection and food and would also prepare them for their re-adaptation to their communities. For this reason, these Armenian women in the shelters would learn a trade (generally sewing), while the shelter directors would work to find their loved ones or a suitable husband, with the object of transferring their care to them.12 So the people who made up this second group regarded these women’s social adaptation as necessary. They did not question these Armenian women’s national identity. For these community leaders and public figures, it was clear that they were dealing with victims of a human disaster, who now had great need of support, care, and orientation. Ideas, however, completely changed on the question of forced maternity. What position should be adopted toward this absolute proof of cohabitation with a Turk, Kurd, or Arab, the child who was the fruit of such a union? The majority of voices known to us were against their entry into Armenian society. For them, these small boys and girls were born of foreigners, of the enemy, and for that reason were not Armenian and had no place within Armenian society. The people who thought like this permitted these women only one choice: to leave their children with their Turkish, Kurdish, or Arab spouses and return to the Armenian community—alone.

EXAMPLES OF VARIOUS POSITIONS ADOPTED TOWARD WOMEN WHO SURVIVED THE CATASTROPHE The story of a minor incident that took place in Aleppo during the years of the First World War will show more clearly the basic position Armenians adopted toward the women who were their compatriots and during the war years had stepped over the abovementioned “red line,” trampling on national morals. The storyteller was Khoren Tavitian, who was from Zeytun and had been in Aleppo for a time during the war. He saw a prostitute, a girl from his own village, quite by accident. “My blood rushed to my head: what is this—to be from Zeytun and a prostitute? It was impossible for me to believe it.”13 In concert with another person from Zeytun, he decided to kill the girl. They had to arrange a rendezvous with her. But the girl had become one of the foremost and most expensive whores in Aleppo, sought after by the rich and by high-ranking military men. The cost of one night with her was five Ottoman gold liras, which in those days was the equivalent to two

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to three months’ pay for an ordinary worker. But the two men from Zeytun undertook to pay this enormous sum. An intermediary secured an appointment with her, and one evening the two comrades went to the girl’s house, taking a large butcher’s knife with them. The girl didn’t recognize them. In accordance with the custom, they were entertained at dinner; they spoke in Turkish, and the girl presented herself as a native of Aleppo. The two guests requested another helping of dinner. The girl, in Zeytun Armenian dialect, called to her mother—who was in the next room—and said “these sons of dogs want soup. Have you any?” The mother entered. Khoren immediately recognized her: she was their neighbor—Hovagim Ghugasian’s wife. He asked her, in the same dialect, what she was doing there. The women were astonished; the two men from Zeytun reproached them and recalled how they had personally witnessed their father and husband murdered on the banks of the Euphrates. His comrade then pulled out the knife, but Khoren stopped him and first wanted to hear these women’s story. Terrified, mother and daughter began to tell how they and thousands of other people from Zeytun were deported. The men had been massacred already and the killers, having gathered all the women together, divided their human booty among themselves. A captain had chosen the girl, but the mother had tried to resist; she begged and pleaded, saying that the girl was all that was left of the family. The captain then took both of them and the three went to Aleppo and settled in their present house. After a time the captain went to the front and the house was passed to a major. The girl became a whore, serving the major and other high-ranking officers. The circle of people who knew her gradually grew larger and local notables began to appear among her customers.14 Khoren’s friend once more insisted on carrying out their plan and again drew out the knife. Khoren tried once more to restrain him. Mother and daughter began to plead with them, recalling Khoren’s relatives, giving their names. Both comrades were also affected; the proposed act ended in general tears and wailing, with the men, who had been bent on crime, joining in. At the end the mother and daughter returned the five Ottoman gold liras and sent the two on their way.15 The two friends went to another comrade who commended them and said, “Good, I’m pleased that it ended like that; I was against it. Which town’s girls haven’t become prostitutes? I know ten from Darson (Tarsus); don’t forget Aghavni from Bardizag—shall I count some others?”16 There is another document in the Aleppo diocese archives that shows that the persecution of this prostitute by Armenian men from Zeytun continued even after the war. We learn from the letter sent by the diocesan office dated 30 July 1919 that Antaram Ghugasian was to be found in the

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women’s shelter under the direction of the American Red Cross. The diocesan authorities planned to send her to Zeytun, where her mother was; her father had been killed in the massacres. The letter pointed out that “local” young man “wanted revenge” on this girl because of the “low life” she had lived during the war years and were making great efforts to trace and punish her.17 The diocese noted that it would never be safe to transfer this woman from Aleppo to Zeytun by the usual means. Therefore it requested that two seats in one of the motor vehicles going to Marash be reserved—one for the girl, the other for the official acting as her guard.18 This incident concerning Antaram must be distinguished from later examples. It is true that—until the story’s final act—these women’s surroundings and community took an intolerant attitude toward their way of living, but all this must be examined within the context of a personal relationship. Here there was a direct link between two friends and the woman from Zeytun who was the target of their criminal plan. Their meeting, and their listening to the story told by mother and daughter, adds another dimension to this relationship. This situation is quite different from that of the postwar years, when the Armenian leaders were forced to judge the direction taken, not in one woman’s life, but in those of hundreds and thousands of surviving Armenian women. There was no such individual link between the Armenian intellectual figures and the community leadership class on the one hand and this group of women survivors on the other. This brings us back to the viewpoints held by the two main groups, which included writers, speakers, and decision makers concerned with this category of women. The first, as we have already seen, was a predominantly intolerant and rejectionist attitude. Mikayel Natanian, the Armenian General Benevolent Union’s (AGBU) delegate in Syria and Cilicia, was typical of those who reasoned in this fashion. In a letter dated June 1919, he wrote about efforts to recover Armenian women from Muslim families in Syria: “If older girls and women want to come, there’s no problem. If they don’t come, there’s still no problem: they do well to stay where they are. They’re of no use to us, and may even be harmful. I have seen many who are already adults and do not come willingly.”19 We see the corresponding attitude in the journal Hai Gin (Armenian Woman), which was published in Istanbul and considered feminist. The author of the editorial (March 1920) was most probably the chief editor, Haiganush Mark. She valued the Armenian women who were the subject of her publication as “fallen women” (angyal giner), many of whom she judged to be condemned to remaining permanently in the abyss they found themselves in. “What did the war do to us? In physical terms it harvested several million lives and destroyed the same number of homes. But morally the destruction

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was greater. It poisoned our race’s present and many successive generations. The Armenian women who returned from the deportations are morally and physically dead. In their veins most of them carry bad and disease-inflamed Turanian blood. They cannot scientifically provide a healthy generation for the nation.”20 The people who argued against this uncompromising standpoint emphasized that, before everything else, the problem of these women was a social and humanitarian question. They therefore demanded that their fellow Armenians examine it from a wider angle and be more open-minded. In the Izmir newspaper Horizon, Suren Bartevian writes in this vein: “The case of tortured Armenian women is such a huge socially catastrophic question that those approaching it must, of necessity, be possessed of a certain broad humanitarian open-mindedness, be sympathetic and have very deep understanding. The curt viewpoints of the morals police and current simple moralistic and shabby quibbling have no place.”21 The feelings of mercy, sympathy, and anger, but also of tolerance, are all mixed together in A. Leyani’s words concerning Armenian women survivors collected in Aleppo: These tarnished flowers of the hurricane of terror are the tender victims of a barbarous race’s monstrous whims—those poor Armenian women that have been collected from harems and brothels. Each is from a different town, each belongs to a different family, and each relives the memory of a different drama. They have no one to look out for them, apart from the nation. They’ve lost everything—home, family, parents, relatives, brothers and sisters, finally everything they had in this world. The American Red Cross vehicles are constantly at work every day, bringing tens of them by the hour. . . There are so many of them!22

In a word, those who championed this way of thinking had the will to immediately reintegrate these women into the Armenian community, whatever their lives had been during the previous few years. The women’s shelters in Aleppo, Damascus, Istanbul, Adana, and other places were established to this purpose. But these establishments couldn’t, alone, find answers to this numerically massive and complex social problem. In a leading article entitled “The sacred remnants” and published in the Izmir newspaper Tashink, G. Varbedian invited Armenian males to marry these women and thus aid in their rehabilitation: “The legacy handed down to us—demoralized, exhausted, despoiled or not—is ours and the securing of its future is our obligation.” Then the author adds, aiming his words this time at Armenian males: You, Armenian braves, go to them. Open your vigorous arms; hug them, take them to your burning hearts.

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Tie your lives to these sacred remnants who have escaped the storm. Your warmth will revive them, their secret spiritedness will grow, and their wounded hearts, which are still faded, will be re-animated with the new shoots of returning springs. And you will live close to these heroines, giving breath to them with your unique vigor, and will reconstruct, with your noble gesture, immutable rights to a hopeless group. . . . they are women—the defenseless fragments of the gentle sex—who with a savagery unknown for centuries became the victims of an abominable crime. They are women whom you should take into your manly arms and be sure that the whole Armenian community will take part in your marriages.23

Was this a sublime humane attitude, an imperative demand springing from the ideals of national reconstruction? I think that all these factors were present in the views held by the second group. But refusal and lack of acceptance in this group appears when the “sacred remnant” decides not to leave her new Turkish, Kurdish, or Arab husband. What stance should the national community bodies take toward this situation? There are many reasons why women chose to remain with their Turkish, Kurdish, or Arab husbands, despite the appeals made to them by the national community bodies. Fear of an unknown future, the feeling of being defenseless, an actual love for the husband, and the unwillingness to lose one’s children could be the most obvious ones. The writer and publicist Zabel Yessayian, who understood very well the various social problems faced by these women, wrote in her report addressed to the chairman of the Armenian National Delegation, Boghos Nubar Pasha: Some were purchased by rich Muslims or freed by them from the hands of the police and have succeeded, as a result, in making relatively tolerable lives for themselves. These women accordingly feel gratitude towards those who saved them from a terrible fate. Some have lost their whole families, and so face an uncertain future. Some have had children by their Muslim husbands, and do not want to abandon these children. Some, after living disreputable lives, are weighed down by feelings of shame and lack the courage to return to their compatriots. Some have lost all sense of moral value. Some have no confidence that they can live in safety in their country. It is therefore necessary to create women’s groups to address the situations of these women, inspire them with courage, provide them moral support, and examine and solve their complex situations calmly, with justice and humanity.24

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It is with this aim too that, immediately after the end of the war, in the areas under the protection of the victorious Allied forces—Aleppo, Adana, and Istanbul—so-called Neutral Houses were created that in actual fact were women’s refuges. The women staying in them were those who were subject to conflict. For example, an Armenian woman might be forcibly removed from her Turkish, Kurdish, or Arab husband who had abducted her in the first place, but the latter, as her “legal” spouse, would insist on her being returned. In other circumstances the woman herself wanted to return to her Turkish, Kurdish, or Arab spouse, but the Armenian national community bodies demanded that she rejoin her family, or what was left of them. The aim of the Neutral House was therefore to create a safe environment for these women, to inspire self-confidence in them and finally to make them the arbiters of their own fates. The directors of the establishments known to me were either American or French and had Armenian and Turkish assistants. My aim here is not to examine how successful these establishments were in inspiring feelings of safety in these women survivors. But the reality was that many decided to remain within their Armenian community, while others preferred to return to their Turkish, Kurdish, or Arab spouses.25 The idea of founding such establishments was backed in H. Mamurian’s article, in which we can also find a clear viewpoint regarding the women who did not want to forsake their Turkish, Kurdish, or Arab husbands. We think that this bad-hearted woman and others like her should be forcibly detained, be held and, if necessary, be imprisoned for at least three months, then left to decide their own fate. If after the end of the term they once more persist in wanting to continue their relationship with Turks, only then should they not be prevented, leaving them face-to-face with their fate, with the clear condition that in the future if, repenting, they want once more to return to their Mother Church or the nation, they will be considered to be expelled forever and absolutely refused.26

We understand, from Mamurian’s words, that the action would be national excommunication, extirpation from the nation. The woman in question, due to her “sin,” would find the national community’s doors closed to her, even if she wanted to retain her Armenian identity alongside her Turkish, Kurdish, or Arab husband, to continue to attend the Armenian Church, and to give her children an Armenian education. The writer and well-known political figure Avedis Aharonian thought no differently; parts of his speech given in Istanbul on the subject were printed in the journal Nor Giank (New Life): “. . . if an Armenian woman has accidentally become the lot of a comparatively tolerable Turk and has accepted her new life in some way, has had children, and is not unhappy—don’t follow after her, let her stay where she is;

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our forces cannot satisfy all such demands.”27 This is immediately followed by a sentence that carries the color of national excommunication: “There is no further profit for our nation from women such as these.” The question remained of how to behave toward the women who survived, who were ready to leave their Turkish, Kurdish, or Arab spouses, but who returned to the national community, bringing with them a child or children born of that forced marriage during the war years. Our knowledge of attitudes on this issue is anecdotal. We have the impression that the general rule was to refuse to accept these children within the Armenian environment. The Aleppo women’s shelter dealing with this question and linked to the Armenian diocesan authorities was a wonderful exception. The biographical notes on the women living there clearly show that certain women had brought children who were the result of forced impregnation and whom the shelter looked after.28 But these women couldn’t stay long in these refuges. Their directors always looked for means to realize their social integration, by marrying them off to Armenians or by finding their relatives. The situation for those who had children became more complicated precisely when these searches achieved results and the woman survivor had the opportunity to reenter her social group. The complication was simply the presence of the child. Arpuni’s case is very significant. This woman survivor was born in Izmir and, at the end of the war, was admitted to the shelter in Damascus with her newborn child, the fruit of her marriage with a Muslim Arab. In 1919, the Syrian Arab authorities led by Emir Faysal had forced Armenian women who wanted to leave their Muslim husbands to relinquish their children to their Muslim families. Arpuni was still nursing her child, and it was vital that it remain with her. The authorities had given permission for her to keep it until it was weaned. On the other hand, her Armenian husband was alive and living in Izmir. Arpuni’s brothers spared no effort to send their sister back to her lawful husband, on the sole condition that she give up her newborn child. But Arpuni rejected this condition, remaining in Damascus with her baby.29 When we examine the prevalent points of view and positions, it becomes obvious that the situation of these children born in deportation differed greatly from the parentless Armenian children held within Turkish, Kurdish, or Arab families during the years of the Catastrophe. The positions adopted by Armenian national community bodies toward the latter, as we have seen, were generally uniform. The dominant mentality was that by giving these children an Armenian education it would be possible to “Armenianize” them again and turn them into the most important factors in the reconstruction of Armenian society. Of course, it is possible to ask whether

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the same result could be achieved with the children resulting from forced impregnations, whose male parents were Turks, Kurds, or Arabs. The popular answer was negative.30 The living evidence of the mass violence carried out on a whole people was the group of children born as a result of forced impregnation during those dark and gloomy days, the indelible stigma of a collective denigration. After the Rwanda Catastrophe, the analogous class of boys and girls was called the “children of hate,” “unwanted children,” or “children of bad memories.”31 We do not find many elucidations of this subject during the years immediately after the massacres and deportations of the Armenians, but I am convinced that the predominant ideas were clichés of children born of the enemy. It is interesting that, at almost exactly the same time, France was debating the same issue, regarding the children born as a result of the rapes carried out in the French border regions overrun by German troops in 1915. A short presentation of the French example may also give a general idea of the mentality prevalent in the Armenian environment about the same subject. In the French debate, it was often said that these children would “degenerate” French society and that they were a threat to “racial purity.”32 Many people thought that the children’s patrimony would dominate and would make them future enemies (i.e., Germans) growing up in French society: “It was German blood, basically polluted and polluting that, according to some debaters, made these children, born of rapes, inadaptable . . .”33 The people who took this point of view to an extreme publicly began to encourage these mothers to commit infanticide.34 In reality, as Robyn Charli Carpenter demonstrates so well in her work, even today there is a lack of clarity in the academic and legal fields about which group these children of forced impregnation should belong to. Should they be considered the victims of a planned genocide against a whole group? Do they form a part of this group of victims or, on the contrary, does their paternity make them members of the perpetrating group? But if the perpetrating group rejects them, how should these children be classed?35 We do not find a debate like that among the French in the Armenian sources that I know about. But I think that the attitude adopted by the orphanage/widows’ refuge founded by the Danish missionary Karen Jeppe toward this class of children is significant. In the 1920s, this establishment collected orphans and women who had survived among the various tribes in Syria. Its patron was the “Commission pour la protection des femmes et des enfants au Proche-Orient,” attached to the League of Nations, which would later be known as UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees). The Armenian refugees venerated Karen Jeppe, especially because she was in Urfa, where she had witnessed the Armenian deportations

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and massacres, during the war years. Later, in Aleppo, her work provided great humanitarian assistance to the Armenian refugees.36 The 1924 annual report of the institution she directed says: We don’t accept those born of Muslims, because it is against the law. A child belongs to its father, and an establishment cannot encourage steps that are against the law. Even when a mother who has a child born of a Turk arrives, if the child is taken by any national body, we still don’t accept the mother. They went alone, and will return alone. . . . It is impossible to bring those who don’t want to return to the Armenian community at present. The main reason for their non-return is the concern over the loss of their spouses; in fact the woman who places her nation below her sexual gratification is not worthy of any help. May such women be lost forever.37

CONCLUSION During the last decade, voices have been raised in Turkey the likes of which have not been heard in any form of media, in publications or in Turkish society generally, since the foundation of this state. On the contrary, such voices were intolerable to Kemalist-nationalist ideology and every effort was made to stifle their public expression. But in recent years Turkey has been notable for an unusual thaw; great gaps appeared in the general ideological order that established new political and social standards of perception in the country. Previously stifled voices gradually began to be heard and stories that had been deemed intolerable began to be told in public. It is true that such voices and histories contradicting the theses of state historiography had no mass audience, but even their presence was proof of historic changes. In reality Turkey is now living through a fateful process whose future phases are impossible to predict. Among these new voices must be ranked all those who have begun to write and tell of their grandmother’s or great-grandmother’s Armenian origin. Their precursor is Fethiye Çetin. Her book, My Grandmother,38 presents her grandmother’s real identity. Hranush was an Armenian girl from Palu. She was abducted on the road to exile and renamed Seher. Later she was raised as a Muslim, married to a Turk, and never talked about her past until she was about to die. Çetin’s work had an inspirational effect on many others. Many taboos concerning this subject gradually began to fall away and tongues were loosened. New articles, new books, and new documentary films on this theme continue to appear to this day.39 The method of presentation has greatly differed from one work to another, but nevertheless the subject is the same: an Armenian woman or girl, having escaped the

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genocide, separated from her family and community, starts a new life in Turkish society, converts to Islam, brings up a family and tries to conceal her identity from her surroundings. After her death it is always a third- or fourth-generation member of the family who describes and introduces their grandmothers or great-grandmother’s heart-rending story to the public. It is obvious that the number of women who shared this fate in Turkey is large. Some openly presented proof of having an Armenian forebear, to such an extent that they sometimes left the impression that what they had done was a political act against the still predominating nationalistic mentality existing in Turkey. In the end one must not forget that we are dealing with a country where one of the best ways of denigrating an opponent is to characterize him as being of Armenian descent. To “carry” Armenian blood is a humiliating attribute and this kind of calumny has forced many to refute it publicly immediately. One of the best examples of this is the president of the Republic of Turkey, Abdullah Gül, who officially declared that the news that he had an Armenian mother was a fabrication spread by his political enemies. In any event, Çetin’s work and others like hers were blows against the walls of intolerance and silence. They certainly encouraged many within Turkish society, while scandalizing many others. They make voices audible that haven’t had a place in Turkish society . . . and not only in Turkish society . . . Here we change the scene and enter the Armenian environment. It is obvious that the Armenians, be they in Armenia or the diaspora, have watched the changes happening in Turkey in the last few years with great attention. The new positions that have been adopted and the voices now heard in Turkey concerning Ottoman Armenian history and, in the first instance, about the genocide naturally greatly excite the interest of the Armenians. Although translations of books into Armenian have been rare in the last few years, Çetin’s work was an exception and has so far two translations. Çetin and new voices like hers emanating from Turkey are often present in lectures organized by Armenians. Episodes concerning Armenian women who, during the years of deportation, remained in Anatolia and became Muslim also affect the Armenian public. Armenian political parties and national community leaders have already adopted their positions toward the women who suffered this fate. They also include in this group the offspring of all those Armenians (both men and women) who became Muslim in the genocide years or well before these events. Certain Armenian political activists have increased the estimate of the number of citizens of Turkey of Armenian origin to up to four million and consider this mass as an undoubted legacy that Armenians must be responsible for.

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In this article we have already seen that in the years after the war two large groups existed, the members of which certainly had little hope of finding their natural places within the national community group. The first of these was Armenian women survivors who for various reasons refused to leave their Turkish, Kurdish, or Arab husbands. The second group included those women who refused to relinquish their children born of forced impregnation. This large group of children can also be placed in the class of those who were refused and were abandoned. These two large groups were living evidence of the often insurmountable social problems resulting from genocide. The contradiction is, of course, that within the Armenian environment, the Armenian identity of the very people who were rejected in the past and their descendants is today often emphasized by the same national community bodies that once had a decisive role in expelling these women survivors from their own society. How can such a position be accepted? Perhaps as an expression of open-mindedness? Or, after one hundred years, an expression of noticeable progress in the examination of the question of these women survivors? Perhaps these two factors are present. But the thoughts that public speakers and journalists have expressed in recent years about Muslim Armenians, be they in Armenia or in the diaspora—which I have not had the opportunity to present in this article—display no critical approach. The dominant thing for them is emphasis on these individuals’ Armenian origin— among historical or considerable contemporary examples. What is greatly missing is an effort to understand the social reality, something that is going to take us as far back as the Catastrophe and especially the years following it, when their own national group rejected numerous Armenian women survivors. But these women’s new lives within modern Turkish society would not always run smoothly. Despite the severing of all organic links with Armenian society, these women and their children were often pointed out as Armenians—putting them once more in the position of social pariahs. The fact of being a woman in this whole question, of course, makes these Armenian women survivors’ position even more vulnerable within their national group. Clearly great gender bias can be seen in the negative positions adopted. In reality, the extreme circumstances of the massacres and deportations forced many Armenian deportees—and not only women—to act in ways that would never have occurred in normal life. We know, for example, that during the war years, mass conversion to Islam took place among the refugee Armenians of Bilad al-Sham. We also know that thousands worked in factories (imalathane), which often had Armenian managers, but belonged to the Ottoman army. These are acts that could have been included in the “grey zone” as determined by Primo Levi. In this sense they could have been

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considered to be intolerable in postwar rhetorical terms and for that reason they could be similarly considered for national excommunication. But all of this was quickly forgotten after the war and has not been found in collective memory. It was natural that many Armenians waited for the end of their suffering, so that they could rejoin their families, groups, communities, and national society—and in many cases, this happened without much difficulty. But the class of women examined here, who had the same yearning, often found the doors of their original communities closed to them. For many of them it was the beginning of deprivation, abandonment, and a new period of identity crisis.

NOTES 1. Yervant Odian, Accursed Years: My Exile and Return from Der Zor, 1914-1919, trans. Ara Melkonian. (London: Gomidas, 2009), 300–301. 2. Adam Jones, “Gender and Genocide in Rwanda,” in Gendercide and Genocide, ed. Adam Jones (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004), 118–120. 3. Adana, the main city in Cilicia, remained under French rule until the end of 1921. Istanbul likewise remained occupied by the British Army until 1923. Finally, Izmir was ruled by the Greeks until the Greek army’s withdrawal in 1922. Many Armenian newspapers appeared in these three cities. 4. Frederic D. Homer, Primo Levi and the Politics of Survival (Columbia; London: University of Missouri Press, 2001), 41. 5. Lawrence L. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1991), 176–177, 197. 6. See mainly Matthias Bjørnlund, “‘A Fate Worse Than Dying’: Sexual Violence during the Armenian Genocide,” in Brutality and Desire: War and Sexuality in Europe’s Twentieth Century, ed. Dagmar Herzog (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 16–58; Rubina Peroomian, And Those Who Continued Living in Turkey after 1915: The Metamorphosis of the Post-Genocide Armenian Identity as Reflected in Artistic Literature (Yerevan: Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute, 2008); Vahram L. Shemmassian, “The Reclamation of Captive Armenian Genocide Survivors in Syria and Lebanon at the End of World War I,” Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies 15 (2006), 113–140; Raymond Kévorkian, Le Génocide des Arméniens (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2006); Katharine Derderian, “Common Fate, Different Experience: Gender-Specific Aspects of the Armenian Genocide, 1915–1917,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, V19, NI, Spring (2005), 1–25; Vahakn N. Dadrian, “Children as Victims of Genocide: The Armenian Case,” Journal of Genocide Research 5, no. 3 (2003): 421–437; Vahram Shemmassian, “The League of Nations and the Reclamation of Armenian Genocide Survivors,” in Looking Backward, Moving Forward: Confronting the Armenian Genocide, ed. Richard Hovanni-

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7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19.

20.

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sian (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2003); Ara Sarafian, “The Absorption of Armenian Women and Children into Muslim Households as a Structural Component of the Armenian Genocide,” in In God’s Name: Genocide and Religion in the Twentieth Century, ed. Omer Bartov and Phyllis Mack (New York: Berghahn, 2001); Donald E. Miller and Lorna Miller Touryan, Survivors: An Oral History of the Armenian Genocide (Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press Berkeley, 1993). Vahé Tachjian, “Adana Ermenileri: Milliyetçi ideolojilerle ters düşen farklı bir kimlik,” Toplumsal Tarih, no. 191 (2009), 59–69. “Փրկենք վաղուան հայերը [Let us save tomorrow’s Armenians]” (editorial) Djagadamard no. 101/1922 (9 March 1919), Istanbul. “Որբերուն դաստիարակութիւնը [The orphans’ education]” (editorial) Djagadamard no. 105/1926 (14 March 1919), Istanbul. Yervant Odian, “Ամէնէն կենսական գործը [The most imperative work],” Jamanag no. 3638 (19 September/2 October 1919), Istanbul. A. Leylani, “Տպաւորութիւններ Հալէպէն [Impressions from Aleppo],” Husaper no. 86 (12 October 1919), Cairo. Vahé Tachjian, “Gender, Nationalism, Exclusion: The Reintegration Process of Female Survivors of the Armenian Genocide,” Nations and Nationalism 15, no. 1 (2009), 71–73. Khoren Tavitian, Կեանքիս գիրքը [The book of my life], 1967, 234. Ibid., 234–237. Ibid., 237–238. Ibid., 238. Armenian Diocese of Aleppo Archives (ADAA), “Առաջնորդարան, թղթակցութիւն, տետրակ թիւ 20 [Aleppo diocese, correspondence, book 20].” Letter No. 178 (page 173), sent to the Red Cross Society’s directorate, 30 July 1919, Aleppo. Ibid. Nubarian Library Archives, “Mikayel Natanian’s Correspondence,” December 1914—October 1919, letter no. 14 from Natanian to Vahan Malezian, 12 June 1919, Damascus, p. 198. “Անկեալ կիներու հարցը [The question of fallen women],” Hai Gin, no. 9 (1 March 1920), Istanbul. This section is omitted in a recent article by Lerna Ekmekcioglu on the abandoned Armenian women survivors. She quotes several times the journal Hai Gin and at one point she quotes a section by the paper’s chief editor Haiganush Mark, the Istanbul Armenian “feminist,” in which the author stresses the importance of multiplying the number of Armenians in the name of the new Armenia to come. But it is sufficient to read H. Mark’s article to note that there is no direct reference at all to “Islamized Armenian” women. Ekmekcioglu, in her article, posits the issue in such a manner that the reader believes that H. Mark was only writing about the integration of these women (Lerna Ekmekcioglu, “A Climate for Abduction, a Climate for Redemption: The Politics of Inclusion during and after the Armenian Genocide,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 55, no. 3 (2013): 543–544).

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21. Suren Bartevian, “Խոշտանգուած հայուհիները [The tortured Armenian Women],” Horizon 1, no. 37 (28 July 1919), Izmir. 22. A. Leylani, “Տպաւորութիւններ Հալէպէն [Impressions of Aleppo].” 23. G. Varbedian, “Նուիրական խլեակներ [Sacred Remnants],” Tashink no. 1832 (2 January 1919) Izmir. 24. Nubarian Library, National Delegation Archives, 1–15, Correspondence February–March 1919, report prepared by Zabel Yessayian titled “La libération des femmes et enfants non-musulmans en Turquie,” 1919, p. 9. 25. On the Neutral Houses, see Lerna Ekmekcioglu, “A Climate for Abduction, a Climate for Redemption”; Keith David Watenpaugh, “The League of Nations’ Rescue of Armenian Genocide Survivors and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism, 1920-1927,” American Historical Review 115, no. 5 (2010): 1315– 1339. 26. H. Mamurian, “Լուծելի խնդիրներ [Solvable problems],” Tashink no. 1859 (4 February 1919), Izmir. 27. Chituni, “Պր. Ահարոնեանի բանախօսութիւնը ճրագալոյցի իրիկունը [Mr Aharonian’s speech on the evening of the Lighting of the Lamps],” Nor Giank (New Life) no. 95 (22 January 1919), Istanbul. 28. AGBU central archives (Cairo), Aleppo file, correspondence June 1920–March 1922, letters from the Aleppo branch to the Cairo centre, 17 March 1920, 4 May 1920, 1 April 1920, 14 July 1920, 10 October 1920, 4 November 1920, 7 December 1920, 15 March 1921, 11 May 1921. 29. AGBU central archives (Cairo), Damascus file, no. 12, 21 July 1910—26 March 1931, letter from the Damascus branch to the Cairo center, 20 June 1919. 30. In an article otherwise containing certain new material of value and interest, Lerna Ekmekcioglu, in a footnote, refers to previous articles that I have written regarding women survivors. According to her, I defend the position that Armenian community leaders adopted a negative stance regarding abandoned Armenian women. This is an oversimplified opinion that fails to express the overall concept developed through the totality of my writings on the subject. The subject is much more delicate and multifaceted. The entire process of the reintegration of abandoned and defenseless women has its contradictions and I have attempted to research and expose them using a critical approach. Ekmekcioglu’s article shows that, in an attempt to advance her questionable arguments regarding such an important topic, she has never really seriously studied the Armenian press of the period, which, in truth, serves as one of the best primary sources for the years in question. The only exception is Hai Gin, a biweekly that only had a few score of editions. Her research also fail to take into account numerous and rich relevant archival materials (see Lerna Ekmekcioglu, “A Climate for Abduction, a Climate for Redemption”). 31. Yaschica Williams and Janine Bower, “Media Images of Wartime Sexual Violence: Ethnic Cleansing in Rwanda and the Former Yugoslavia,” in Women, Violence, and the Media: Readings in Feminist Criminology, ed. Drew Humphries (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2009), 161.

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32. Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, L’enfant de l’ennemi, 1914-1918 (Paris: Aubier, 1995), 144, 157. 33. Ibid., 181. 34. Ibid. 35. Robyn Charli Carpenter, “Forced Maternity, Children’s Rights and the Genocide Convention: A Theoretical Analysis,” Journal of Genocide Research, no. 2/2 (2000): 230–239. On the same subject, see Lerna Ekmekcioglu, “A Climate for Abduction, a Climate for Redemption.” 36. On the humanitarian activities of Karen Jeppe in Aleppo, see Hagop Cholakian, Քարէն Եփփէ, Հայ Գողգոթային եւ Վերածնունդին հետ [Karen Jeppe: With the Armenian Golgotha and Rebirth] (Aleppo: Arevelk, 2001); Dzovinar Kévonian, Refugiés et diplomatie humanitaire: les acteurs européens et la scène proche-orientale pendent l’entre-deux-guerres (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2004); Watenpaugh, “The League of Nations’ Rescue of Armenian Genocide Survivors.” 37. M. Herartian, “Ազգերու Դաշնակցութեան Սիւրիոյ Որբահաւաք Միսիօն [League of Nations mission to collect orphans],” Piunig, no. 40 (6 October 1924), Beirut. 38. Fethiye Çetin, Anneannem (Istanbul: Metis, 2004). 39. See mainly Ayşe Gül Altınay and Yektan Türkyılmaz, “Unraveling Layers of Gendered Silencing: Converted Armenian Survivors of the 1915 Catastrophe,” in Untold Histories of the Middle East: Recovering Voices from the 19th and 20th Centuries, ed. Amy Singer, Christoph K. Neumann, and Selçuk Akşin Somel (London; New York: Routledge, 2011), 25–53; Ayşe Gül Altınay and Fethiye Çetin, eds., Torunlar (Istanbul: Metis, 2009); Erhan Başyurt, Ermeni Evlatlıklar: Saklı Kalmış Hayatlar (Istanbul: Karakutu, 2006); Baskın Oran, ed., M.K. Adlı Çocuğun Tehcir Anıları: 1915 ve Sonrası [Deportation Memoirs of a Child named M.K.: 1915 and After] (Istanbul: Iletişim, 2005); Ibrahim Ethem Atnur, Türkiye’de Ermeni Kadınları ve Çocukları Meselesi (1915-1923) (Ankara: Babil, 2005); Irfan Palalı, Tehcir Çocukları: Nenem bir Ermeni’ymiş. . . [Children of the Deportation: My Grandmother Turns Out Armenian. . .] (Istanbul: Su Yayınevi, 2005); Kemal Yalçın, Sarı Gelin—Sari Gyalin (Istanbul: Birzamanlar Yayıncılık, 2005).

Chapter 5

“This time women as well got involved in politics!” Nineteenth Century Ottoman Women’s Organizations and Political Agency Nazan Maksudyan

‫ﱬﱫ‬ In March 1892, Jewish ladies of Péra and Galata founded a new charitable society to relieve the pains of poor women and children who emigrated from Russia and Corfu and who were in distress in Istanbul. The misfortunes of many poor Jewish families of different quarters of the city also attracted their attention. By the same token, in 1904 Bulgarian women’s organizations were applying to the Consulates of the Great Powers to secure the release of a few Bulgarian women who were arrested by the Ottoman authorities due to their participation in the Ilinden Uprising of 1903. Again with objectives of helping other women in need, the Greek Women’s Society in Péra applied to the government in 1907, requesting authorization for their already functioning maternity clinic, opened to serve young, poor, and unwed women. Likewise, in 1909 Armenian intellectual and elite women of Istanbul reorganized the activities of their charitable societies in order to relieve the pains of massacre-stricken orphans and widows in the Adana district. This selection of women’s organizations and activities from the last decades of the Ottoman Empire points to the fact that women were remarkably active in numerous nineteenth-century social and political questions, from the expansion of female education to refugee crises, from prostitution to illegitimate births and child abandonment, from nationalist movements to relieving the pain of ethnic conflicts. Ottoman women were active agents 107

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in the public sphere. They provided medical services to the poor, the refugees, destitute women and children. They were involved in different forms of social care, such as holding workshops, offering classes, and providing shelter. They also became prominent figures in the reformation of educational institutions and establishments of schools for girls. They were pioneers in initiating philanthropic organizations, particularly in establishing orphanages and poorhouses.1 Given the wide-ranging nature of these outlets for the actual participation of women in the most significant issues of their times—apart from those being within the ideology of motherhood, nationalism, and militarism2—their presence and influence has not been presented in the historiography as a form of agency, especially not from the perspective of social change. It is frequently argued that horizons of women’s work in the nineteenth century were to a large extent enlarged thanks to the profession of philanthropy, or social work as a general category, which is defined as an essentially apolitical occupation. Kandiyoti, for instance, differentiates women’s organizations into “primarily philanthropic organizations” and “those more explicitly committed to struggle for women’s rights.”3 It is fairly common in the literature to pose a dichotomy of philanthropic versus feminist, or political, as if philanthropy can be conceived as an essentially unconcerned, uninterested, and purely apolitical field. Tucker, in a similar respect, separated the women’s societies in Iran into two categories, those “organized for nationalist political purposes” and those working “for the support of girls’ schools, women’s clinics, orphanages, and so on.”4 The approach is again similar, tending to separate educational and health-related affairs from real politics. Although what is meant by the “nationalist political purposes” is obvious, applying the adjective “political” only to nationalist purposes tends to ignore the highly political nature of opening a maternity clinic or an orphanage that this essay intends to demonstrate. As Beth Baron underlined, women’s engagement in philanthropic initiatives has rarely been the main theme of the histories written.5 The women’s organizations and their charitable activities have typically been seen in analysis as subsumed under a number of larger agendas, such as “the feminists’ concern for the poor and the reach of their movements, women nationalists’ fervor and desire to uplift the nation, or women’s search for an outlet for their energy and a path to wage-earning jobs and professions.”6 Ottoman women’s political, feminist, religious, and philanthropic agendas in the late nineteenth century cannot be easily perceived as independent of one another. Women’s organizations’ activities were unavoidably located among and between these seemingly separate yet intricately interrelated fields. Charitable activities, fundraising campaigns, and various initiatives

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undertaken by Ottoman women’s organizations, such as helping the refugees or the victims of a failed insurrection, were organically coupled with discussions of women’s rights and enlargement of the political and social sphere for women. Differing fields of work, be it feminist, charitable, nationalist, or social, should be regarded as both independent and interdependent. A comparative analysis of women’s movements in the late Ottoman Empire proves that defining philanthropy as apolitical or afeminist would be shortsighted. Charitable Ottoman women of different ethnoreligious origins were also engaged in the political questions of their time. The fact that they focused their attention toward the needy, especially women and children, does not weaken but only supports this argument, since the late Ottoman political sphere and discourse also included unattended children, orphans, refugees, and widows. The seriousness of women’s involvement in politics is also discernible from the way they were perceived by the state authorities. During the Hamidian era and in the Young Turk period alike, women’s organizations were subject to an extremely high level of interference and surveillance. The activities of many women’s societies caused disturbance and were approached with suspicion by the government. The abovementioned Jewish ladies were accused of transferring money to overseas banks. Bulgarian women, in a similar respect, were seen as harmful tools in the hands of the politicians, trying to arouse the attention of the Western powers. Greek women were presented as trying to disturb the customs and morality of the Ottoman society with their philanthropic concern for illegitimate pregnancies. The bureaucratic apparatus of the constitutional period strictly and critically observed and kept under control the activities of Armenian women’s societies after the Adana massacres of 1909, with the declared objective of strengthening Ottomanism. Based on thorough archival research in the Prime Ministry’s Ottoman Archives (BOA) and French Foreign Ministry Archives (AMAE), together with an analysis of contemporary press and publications of women’s organizations, this chapter aims to present in a comparative perspective the centrality of Ottoman women’s involvement in nineteenth-century social issues and how they appear as protagonists of Ottoman social and political history.

THE OTTOMAN JEWISH WOMEN’S INITIATIVE FOR JEWISH REFUGEES FROM RUSSIA Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Jews in Russia were leading a difficult and precarious life. Novelist and New York Times correspondent Harold

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Fredric, who spent the year of 1891–92 covering the Russian famine, often referred to the Russian Jews as the “Pariah Community.”7 Especially the May edicts of 1882, prepared by Tsar Alexander III and his minister of the interior, Nicholas P. Ignatiev, enforced the Russian Jews’ pariah status with harsh economic sanctions and repression. These laws required the majority of the Jews of Russia to live in the Pale of Settlement, twenty-five provinces of the Russian Empire that included fifteen western districts of Russia and ten districts of the former Kingdom of Poland. Jews were forbidden from venturing outside that restricted province for a visit or for purposes of settlement unless they had a special permission from various Russian authorities. The severity of this imposition took on graver meaning under the social impact of the Russian famine of 1891–92, the 1892 cholera pandemic, and the resulting desire among Russian Jews to migrate to safer regions. Forcibly evacuated at the end of September 1891 by the provincial governor from famine-stricken Volhynia, within the Russian Pale, a large group of Jews traveled on foot to Podolia. They were as unwelcome there as they were in their home province and they continued their travel to Odessa, hoping to escape the famine, disease, and tyranny. On 4 October 1891, approximately five days after their arrival in Odessa, the provincial governor issued an order expelling the 1,168 Russian Jews. The edict gave them forty-eight hours to leave. The exiled Jews had few options. Quickly arranging their passage out of Odessa and packing the few belongings and clothing they owned, the group of laborers, petty artisans, butchers, dray-men, and their families left Russia with the hope of emigrating to Palestine.8 The exiled Jews boarded a steamer that would take them across the Black Sea to Istanbul. Some of them carried papers approved by the Odessa authorities giving them dual status as Russian and Ottoman subjects. These were the lucky ones. The Ottoman authorities differentiated between those who had Ottoman status and those who did not have such status.9 In 1891, the government ordered that those Jews who held Ottoman citizenship be allowed to settle within its domain, whereas numerous others were denied travel papers. They were told to find a way to go to the United States or Argentina.10 Soon after the arrival of the Russian Jews, a new law was enacted by the Ottoman government expressly forbidding the passage of Russian Jews through the Ottoman Empire to any other country, based on “sanitary grounds.”11 The Ottoman authorities were especially alarmed due to cholera and typhus epidemics in Russia. In practical terms, their entry to the Ottoman lands was banned.12 For the ones who were already settled in the city, the government searched for ways of ensuring sanitation and hygiene of their dwellings in order to prevent the introduction of diseases. The gov-

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ernment assumed in mid 1892 that Jewish refugees from Russia could have been infected with cholera and it was requisite to send them elsewhere and to warn the Russian authorities not to send more refugees.13 Furthermore, in the wake of the constant influx of Jewish migrants arriving in the Empire, the Sublime Porte announced its intent to curb further settlement in Palestine and to generally safeguard public health by assuring that large numbers of these immigrants not settle in any single location.14 Émigre Jews, therefore, instead of making the planned escape to Palestine, were forced to hide in the ghetto-like Jewish neighborhoods15 and synagogues of Istanbul,16 places described in the Yiddish American press as a den of “pestilence, sin and death.”17 There they remained, fugitives without a national identity, while the Ottoman authorities deliberated their fate. When the capacity to offer them settlement in synagogues and private homes was almost exhausted, temporary barracks in the form of a refugee camp were built in Kuruçeşme and Ortaköy.18 The original aim of the Ottoman authorities was to forbid their stay in Istanbul and eventually transfer the refugees who could prove Ottoman nationality to the provinces of Salonika and Aydın at the government’s expense.19 In December 1892, many Jewish refugees were given expulsion orders, and without many choices, they were deported to the pre-determined provinces.20 Apart from the efforts of the Ottoman Jewish religious authorities to help these refugees, Jewish philanthropies based abroad, including those of the Baron de Hirsch, helped relocate many of the immigrants to settlements in the Americas. Furthermore, a series of local charitable organizations, largely run by Ottoman Jewish women, emerged with the sole aim of aiding the refugees who remained in the Empire. These efforts coincided with a general explosion of Ottoman Jewish philanthropic societies during this period. It is claimed that philanthropy had never made such advances in Ottoman Jewish society as it did during those years.21 In late 1891, the Ashkenazim of Istanbul formed a committee for the refugees from Russia.22 Several fundraising campaigns were organized in Salonika for the benefit of immigrants.23 One of the largest and better organized of such initiatives was a society founded in Beyoğlu, particularly for helping women and children of the refugee Jews. It was called Société de Bienfaisance des Dames Israélites de Péra (Philanthropic Society of the Jewish Ladies of Péra), Beyoğlu’nda Musevi Kadınlar Cemiyet-i Hayriyesi as it appears in official correspondence. As announced in the Ladino press of Istanbul, this new charitable society was established by Jewish women of Péra and Galata, shortly after the arrival of the refugees, in March 1892.24 The initiative was taken by Madame Emilia Fernandez, the wife of Isaac Fernandez, who was a member of the regional committee of the Alliance Israélite Universelle in Istanbul.25 Madame

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Fernandez was also an active charity worker after the 1877–78 refugee crisis and as a result of her valuable work for the “migration of refugees,” she was given an imperial decoration of charity (şefkat nişanı).26 In order to respond to “the suffering of their poor co-religionists who emigrated from Russia and Corfu and who suffer in Istanbul,” and, moreover, to take care of the misfortunes of many poor Jewish families of different quarters of the city, she called on the women of Galata. These women immediately proceeded to form the committee that would direct the project. Madame Esther Cohen, the wife of Dr. Elias Pasha, was elected president. Madame Isaac Molho, the director of the House of Camondo, became the treasurer and Madame Weismann, the director of the Galata Alliance Girls’ School, was elected secretary. As apparent from the committee members of the society, the initiative was closely related to the Alliance Israélite organization in Istanbul. According to the official statute of the organization, the main aim of the association was to help the unfortunate Jews exclusively with food, fuel, clothing, and in exceptional cases with money.27 According to the society’s annual financial statement, prepared at the end of its first year of establishment in 1893, the organization spent 22,747 guruş for the distribution of different sorts of materials, such as blankets, shoes, coal, milk, meat, coats, and allowances to the poor and needy.28 On the whole, the working budget of the society reached a remarkable sum of 47,910 guruş—45,336 of which was coming from fees and donations (cotisations et donations). The minimum yearly amount that can be paid as membership fee was 60 guruş.29 The voluntary contribution of certain members could go up to 240 guruş.30 Apart from fee-paying active members, who had to be women, the society also collected donations from nonmembers, who wanted to contribute to the organization, both from Istanbul and abroad. Their names were inscribed on a special board of honor in the central office of the society.31 Among those contributors, there were familiar names who donated real large amounts. The Ladies of the Fernandez family and Madame Baronne de Hirsch contributed 4750 guruş each to the society. Madame Salomon Fernandez herself donated 1080 guruş. These numbers were very impressive compared to the common standard of donating a few hundred guruş. The contribution of Baronne de Hirsch implies that the society was considered to be part of the relief efforts for the Jewish refugees of Russia. The Jewish Colonization Association of Baron de Hirsch (1891) subsidized and assisted a large number of societies all over the world, when their work was connected with the relief and rehabilitation of Jewish refugees.32 During the 1890s, philanthropic activity and benevolent organizations became widespread and effective in their fundraising activities. The Ottoman state, for its part, was seriously alarmed, and so heightened the level

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of its surveillance.33 The Jewish benevolent women’s societies that were involved in assisting the refugees became suspect. In October 1892, the Sublime Porte argued that several Jewish organizations, which were collecting donations supposedly for the education of orphans, and the support of widows and the unemployed, were actually transferring these sums to banks in Greece.34 The Porte could not be sure of their “real” objective. Still, the Hamidian regime was insistent on controlling and containing the formation of charity organizations and raising of funds especially among non-Muslims of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman government’s restrictive or oversuspicious policy regarding voluntary initiatives among the non-Muslim communities was directly linked to concerns about separatist activities within these communities. From the government’s point of view, any fundraising activity could turn into a source of separatist nationalism.35 In line with this observation, in March 1893, the Ministry of Police prepared a report on the philanthropic associations of the non-Muslim communities (milel-i gayr-ı müslime).36 It was argued that several of these organizations were opened all over and that they were collecting money under such pretexts as helping schools, helping places of worship, and helping the poor and needy.37 However, the government was left clueless about their actual expenditures (sarfiyat) and their transactions (muamelat). In that respect, Ottoman authorities underlined the need to prepare new regulations ensuring access to detailed information on these societies’ revenues, expenses, and affairs. The Jewish communities in Salonika and Izmir also organized relief measures to help Jewish refugees from Russia. The extent of the Izmir community’s activities had to remain much smaller, since the government strictly controlled the charitable works of the Jewish community in Izmir. The governor (vali) prohibited any form of fundraising for the refugees and he took the charities under his total control.38 The authorities assumed that so-called charitable organizations were actually raising money for some secret societies with unpopular political agendas.39 The issue of Jewish refugees was discomforting for the Ottoman state largely due to the possibility of the emergence of a Jewish state in Palestine. The issue exerted itself through purchases of land by Jewish settlers in the area and through the strengthening of Zionism.40 Under the circumstances, the Alliance Israélite was also suspected of working toward the creation of a Jewish state, especially because they were purchasing land in Syria and Beirut, together with the Rothschild company.41 The organic and financial links of the Jewish women’s organizations that were founded to help the refugees, including Société de Bienfaisance, with both the Alliance and Baron de Hirsch, made them usual suspects in the eyes of the government. All the

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organizations and fundraising campaigns of the society were approached with caution and surveillance.42 Helping the poor and homeless refugees was not seen—either by the Jewish organizations or by the state—merely as a benevolent activity for the needy. Like every philanthropic activity, refugee relief had its larger spheres of influence and consequences.

THE GREEK SISTERHOOD SOCIETY OF AGIOS ELEFTHERIOS AND THEIR MATERNITY CLINIC The medical history of birth and maternity is one of the new and growing fields of Ottoman history.43 The first maternity clinic, the Vilâdethane, was founded in 1892 by Besim Ömer.44 This famous pediatrician was educated in Paris. He had to have a long and fierce fight before managing to open this clinic.45 In the end, he could only establish a very small department with three rooms in a two-story building, located in an obscure corner of the Military Medicine School (Askeri Tıbbiye). The hospital was opened in a quasi-official way, without any imperial recognition. The doctor was severely criticized and his house was attacked, since his institution was labeled as a piçhane (bastard home).46 Besim Ömer thought that the Ottoman government’s rejection of the hospital resulted from that biased and distorted image of the “bastard home.” This label captured the attention of large segments of society, including the sultan Abdülhamid II himself.47 This critical interpretation is understandable, given the social realities of the time. Traditionally, and under normal circumstances, pregnant Ottoman women would give birth in their own beds, in their own homes. The ones who had to do it somewhere else were those who had to hide their pregnancies, namely, unwed mothers, those who had extramarital relations, and those who were working as prostitutes.48 Moreover, it was not rare to see maternities and foundling asylums next to one another, as in the famous examples of Paris, Moscow, and St. Petersburg, so that children born out-ofwedlock could be easily and discretely abandoned by their mothers in those asylums.49 Therefore, it may actually be true that the babies born in the Vilâdethane were most often “bastards.” For instance, in February 1908, a Jewish girl gave birth to a baby girl in the maternity hospital (Vilâdethane). Arguing that the father of the baby had died previously and that she was “sick and poor, and was not able to feed her baby” (âlil ve fakir ve çocuğunu ırza’a gayr-ı muktedir), she abandoned her at the maternity clinic. After the investigation of the records of the hos-

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pital, it turned out that her name was Fortüne bint-i Baruh and that she was a resident of Balat, from among the wealthy (erbab-ı yesardan bulunduğu). The only reason that she gave birth in the maternity hospital was that she was unmarried and the baby was the result of an illicit affair (münasebet-i gayr-ı meşru’ neticesinde).50 In order to change the habit of giving birth with the help of the midwives at home and to improve the infamous reputation of the institution, Besim Ömer wrote a number of articles and pamphlets in which he tried to appeal to indigent women, who lived in miserable conditions that were extremely dangerous for the lives of their newborn babies. Doctor Spyridon Zavitziano of the Greek community initiated in 1889 a “Department for Foundlings” (Service des enfants trouvés de Notre-Dame de Péra) in order to reform the provisions for abandoned children of the Greek Orthodox community of Beyoğlu. Specifically, he introduced a monitoring mechanism for wet-nurses. He suggested the opening of a birth clinic as well, where desperate and unwed pregnant women ( filles mères) would give birth in safety. However, with the annual budget at the disposal of the community, even the purchase of a couveuse seemed to be too ambitious and unrealistic an objective.51 Apparently, the aim was not abandoned by the community. A Greek women’s society would manage to open such a clinic two decades later in January 1906. Women’s Sisterhood Society for the Protection of the Poor (Beyn-el İnas Fukaraperver Uhuvveti) was founded in 1887 by some “virtuous Christian women” (muhadderât-ı hıristiyane).52 In the society’s petition to the sultan, dated 16 April 1887, the activities of the society were clustered in three areas. One was supplying the poor with food, clothing, and medication. The society, for instance, distributed 360 sets of clothes to the victims of the fire at Kasımpaşa in 1888.53 The second was assigning and sending doctors to the poor households in cases of illness (li-ecli tedavi ettıba tayin ve esrâ). As a third facility, the society opened a tailoring workshop for unemployed and unsupported women so that they could gain a livelihood while maintaining their chastity and decency (ırz ve namus). It was argued that the society succeeded in helping hundreds of needy women ( yüzlerce havatin-i muhtace) through their tailoring facility. The curious coupling of medical treatment and helping women protect their honor and decency was also the defining theme of the society’s maternity clinic. In Greek, the society was called “Sisterhood of Saint Eleftherios of the Ladies at the Parish of Saint Constantine and Saint Helen in Péra.”54 Both Ottoman and Greek documents usually referred to it as Agios Eleftherios.55 In 1907, the society had around sixty female members56 and was organized

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Figure 5.1. The official seal of the “Sisterhood of Saint Eleftherios.”

under the presidency of Madam Ekaterina P. Papakonstantinou, the wife of Panayot Papakonstantinis, who was a teacher at the Greek school of Fener. The aims of the society were enlarged to help poor and lonely pregnant women, without any religious discrimination, by providing them with shelter and medical care in the hospital, where they could stay during the last weeks of their pregnancy until the end of the puerperium.57 The clinic (tedâvihâne) was opened in Tarlabaşı, Beyoğlu, in a three-story stone building and consisted of six rooms, including a kitchen, a balcony, and a garden.58 As the permanent staff of the institution, there was a midwife (kabile) and a servant. Two doctors were also called in in cases of complication and illness. The official petition of Papakonstantinou defines the targeted constituency of the hospital mainly as women living under real poverty ( fakr u zaruret). Still, the maternity clinic would first and foremost house young and unwed pregnant women and mothers in order to offer a healthy solution to the issues of infanticide and child abandonment. The list of women who gave birth in the institution in its first year of activity attests that the hospital managed to meet a strongly felt need of desperate women among the Greek community. From January 1906 to January 1907,

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thirty women living in Beyoğlu and Tatavla gave birth in the institution, staying between eight and thirty-five days in the clinic. Within its first year of functioning, the total expenses spent on meat, milk, soap, sugar, underwear, medication, and doctors reached 7,000 guruş. The government learned about the venture of the Agios Eleftherios only when the society applied to the Municipality of Istanbul to secure permission to organize a theater performance, which would bring revenue for the administration of the maternity clinic opened for “poor and destitute pregnant and puerperal women.”59 When the police department of the district looked into the issue, it was discovered that the clinic did not have an official authorization from the Ottoman authorities.60 The association could not collect donations for an initiative unrecognized by the government. Consequently, the society applied for official authorization with the petition of Madam Ekaterina P. Papankostantinou in December 1906. A broad investigation was undertaken by the concomitant efforts of the Ministry of the Interior, the police department, the Municipality, the Council of State (Şura-yı Devlet), and the Directorate of Imperial Military Schools (Umum Mekatib-i Askeriye-i Şahane Nezareti). The reports prepared by each of the abovementioned bodies looked for pretexts to hinder the functioning of the clinic. Holding an obstructive attitude toward the existence of the maternity hospital, the Directorate of Imperial Military Schools argued that although “the initiative deserved admiration” (teşebbüsat-ı vaki şayan-ı takdir olub), both the initial and permanent costs of such an establishment could not possibly be met with the charitable donations of the members of the association.61 The Directorate also claimed that there were already a number of hospitals for poor and destitute women, and that each municipality employed a gynecologist to help such women in need. Thus, a new clinic was not necessary.62 The first assertion of the Directorate regarding the insufficiency of the financial resources of the association seems to be unfounded. The income of the association was not coming solely from the benevolent contributions of its members. There is evidence, in the records of the police department, that the association organized a number of artistic performances for fundraising. As previously mentioned, the association had applied to organize a theater production in December 1906.63 Although the application of the Agios Eleftherios was initially rejected by the police department due to the association’s unrecognized status, other documents prove that the theater production was actually held around February 1907.64 It was performed in the famous Odeon Theatre and generated a revenue of 13,955 guruş.65 The association also asked for permission to organize another theater production in February 1908, again in the Odeon Theatre, with the participation

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of Greek “Panadi and Rona Companies.”66 The police department approved the petition of the association, with the requirement that a detailed ledger be prepared and handed to the police providing information on the revenues and expenses of the association.67 The second claim of the Directorate, regarding the multiplicity of maternity hospitals, seems to have been an exaggeration, since there were only a few such institutions in the city to respond to the needs of needy and destitute women: Haseki Women’s Hospital (Nisâ Hastanesi),68 Besim Ömer’s Vilâdethane, maternity clinic of Dâr’ül-aceze,69 and the Midwifery School in Kadırga.70 However, there is evidence for the last argument. At least the Municipality of Beyoğlu (Altıncı Daire-yi Belediye) tried to provide a service that sent doctors to the domiciles of needy and sick pregnant women.71 The police department, in its turn, argued that at least three of the neighbors of the maternity clinic of Agios Eleftherios were against the existence and functioning of the institution.72 Although the actual testimonies of the persons involved were not attached to the report, concerns regarding immorality and unwed pregnancy were underlined. As in early discussion relating to the Besim Ömer’s Vilâdethane, the authorities refrained from collaborating in an undertaking providing relief to unchaste women. As a result of ongoing objections and criticisms of the authorities, the clinic was officially closed, but probably was still functioning in a clandestine manner. In correspondence between the association and the police department between 1907 and 1908, Agios Eleftherios defined its purpose as working “for the needs of pregnant women and little children”73 or as “for pregnant women and for the children they will give birth to.”74 Yet, there was no mention of the clinic, as if the association was targeting the pregnant women of the neighborhood at large, without particularly leaning on those lying-in at their own maternity clinic. Thanks to this reformulation of the field of activities, the organization was granted permission to remain open and was allowed to collect contributions. The maternity clinic of Agios Eleftherios, despite its purely charity-based mission of helping poor and destitute women, definitely passed beyond the borders of health care and philanthropy in its overall social contribution. As the issues of prostitution and extramarital births became significant subjects in the feminist agenda of the period, organizing forms of help to the poor and pregnant women was a path-breaking and highly political issue. Moreover, as the Ottoman bureaucratic apparatus was reorganizing and centralizing itself toward a more modern state structure, the communal efforts, even in the realms of education and health, that were traditionally denominational fields of activities free from state control were under challenge.

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THE ILINDEN UPRISING OF 1903 AND WOMEN’S ORGANIZATIONS IN ITS AFTERMATH Literature on the French Revolution, human rights, and the European social democratic movement came to Macedonia, in other words to the vilâyet of Monastir, via Salonika and greatly influenced both female intellectuals and the women’s emancipation movement. Numerous women’s societies and organizations were established in the mid nineteenth century, many of them led by female teachers—including Kostur [Kastoria] Women’s Association, Secret Women’s Association in Struga, Women’s Association in Krushevo, Secret Women’s Association in Monastir, and the Women’s Biblical Association in Bansko (of the Protestant missionary Helen Stone).75 Female teachers of Ohrid in 1885 established a women’s society, Virgin Mary Assumption, better known as Sunday School. It aimed to provide material assistance and education to the poor, and especially women. It organized weekly literacy classes and lectures on emancipation. Kostadina Bojadjieva76 led the association from 1901 until the end of 1903. The agenda of the Ottoman Macedonian female intelligentsia was focused on women’s and national emancipation at the same time. In the fall of 1900, Virgin Mary Assumption joined the revolutionary national movement, Clandestine Macedonian-Adrianople Revolutionary Organization (CMARO).77 The organization was established in 1893 and it adopted Socialist ideas on the emancipation of women. This was the responsible body behind the organization of the Ilinden uprising (2 August 1903) for the liberation of “Macedonia” from the Ottoman Empire. At the congress of the CMARO in Salonika at the beginning of 1903, a decision was made to undertake a “nationwide and strategic” uprising. The chosen day was 2 August 1903, the feast day of St. Elias, also known as Ilinden.78 The first three weeks of the insurrection was a period of triumph. The Ottoman army seemed incapable of carrying out a campaign. Except in Monastir, Ohrid, and Kastoria, the insurgents were supreme almost everywhere. Yet, from 25 August onward, Nasır Pasha took over the command and began to apply a systematic plan of campaign; the insurgents were acting purely on the defensive.79 As one of the most significant activities of the Virgin Mary Assumption, Kostadina Bojadjieva and other female teachers of the society from Ohrid opened a clandestine hospital during the uprising. The hospital was situated in an old archbishopric building in Ohrid’s Varos district, in the house of Metodi Patchev. The Ottoman authorities soon uncovered the hospital and imprisoned the women for actions against the state. Yet, the authorities could not find supporting evidence against them and they were released after brief imprisonment, though they had to endure brutal beatings.80 For

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the next three months, until the British Relief Fund (or British Charity Mission),81 headed by HN Brailsford, took over, the teachers continued to work at the hospital with the agreement of the Kaymakam of Ohrid, Mehdi Bey, who provided the hospital with a daily ration of milk.82 This hospital, which primarily targeted wounded women and children, can be considered the first significant activity of Macedonian women’s organizations in the aftermath of the uprising. Later in early 1904, the hospital in Ohrid was directed by Jane Brailsford, wife of the mission’s head.83 Actually, the hindrances of the Ottoman authorities did not allow the British charity mission to develop wider medical service in the area of uprising.84 They had to apply numerous times throughout November and December 1903 to local and central governmental offices to get permission to open hospitals.85 In the end, three small hospitals were in service in Kostur, Ohrid, and Monastir.86 Only the insistent protests of the British Embassy in Istanbul prevented the closing of the hospitals. The second wave of activities organized by women after the Ilinden was related to efforts to make the events known to the international public. Additionally, Bulgarian women’s societies in Sofia undertook significant amnesty campaigns for imprisoned women and vigorously appealed to both the Ottoman government and to foreign consular authorities. Ekaterina Peneva Karavelova led one such campaign.87 She took charge of the “Ladies’ Committee in Sofia” and agitated for the release of Macedonian women who had been imprisoned after the Ilinden Uprising. At international forums she protested against the indifference of the Great Powers to Bulgarian national interests and to the fate of the tens of thousands of refugees who could not easily be absorbed by a small and underdeveloped Bulgaria. In its report to the government in November 1903, the Commissariat of Bulgaria (Bulgaristan Komiseri) noted that three women visited the consulates of Britain and Belgium in Sofia. They handed in a written declaration (beyanname) to the consuls requesting that they intervene to put an end to the massacres and atrocities targeting the Bulgarians of the Ottoman Empire.88 The Commissariat noted the name of Karavelova as one of the three women representing the women of Sofia (Sofya nisvanı namına). In order to acquire a copy of the declaration, the commissary visited the Consul of Britain. Yet, the consul claimed that he immediately sent the document to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in London and neglected to keep a copy for the Consulate.89 This was definitely a diplomatic maneuver, a tactful strategy for politely refusing the Ottoman official. In addition, the consul also emphasized that “the document did not carry any importance whatsoever” (mezkur varakanın bir gûna ehemmiyeti haiz olmadığı). The consul laughed while saying that “this time women as well

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got involved in politics” (bu defa kadınların da politikaya karıştıkları). Actually their visit was directly related to strictly “political” issues from the rejection of state authority, to the struggle for independence and armed rebellion. These Bulgarian women were actually “involved with politics” in the orthodox sense of the word. However, the openly political nature of women’s involvement made the British Consul laugh! In return, the Ottoman official wishfully believed that these women were nonactors, since the Consul declared their application insignificant. The Ladies’ Committee in Sofia, usually referred in the Ottoman documents as the Philanthropic Association of the Bulgarian Women (Bulgar nisvanından mürekkeb cemiyet-i hayriye), continued its efforts for the release of women prisoners in collaboration with a number of other women’s organizations in Sofia. In December 1904, the Commissariat of Bulgaria informed the Sublime Porte that women’s organizations in Sofia were preparing a petition addressed to the Consulates of the Great Powers in the city for the release of Selavfa Chakarova, who had been convicted by the court of Salonika after the uprising.90 The number of those arrested during and after the insurrection is disputed. Brailsford gives the number of persons imprisoned as 1,500.91 The New York Times reported for the vilâyet of Salonika 900 prisoners were imprisoned, for Üsküb 500, for Monastir 850, and for Adrianople 550, a total of 2,800.92 Most of the arrested women were school teachers, as the Ottoman authorities often imprisoned Bulgarian priests and educators on charges of national insurgence and defiance of Ottoman authority. Apparently, both the Commissariat and the government were concerned about the activities of these women’s organizations and were eager to inhibit their actions so that the matter would not become internationalized. Another significant activity of the Ladies’ Committee was to organize fundraising performances and other philanthropic initiatives for the victims of the uprising. In November 1904, one such special event (müsamere) was organized by the Committee to collect contributions.93 The Ottoman officials were especially interested in the event, since the Bulgarian prince94 and his mother participated in the evening and donated 100 francs to the society. Thanks to the sum gathered during the event, it was declared in the local press in May 1905 that a committee was formed from among the members of several women’s organizations under the name of the Macedonia Philanthropic Association in Sofia (Sofya’daki Makedonya cemiyyet-i hayriyesi) with the aim of establishing a poorhouse (dâr’ül-aceze) in the vilâyet of Monastir.95 Not long after that project, the Ladies’ Committee in Sofia opened an orphanage in Monastir in 1908 in collaboration with other Macedonian women’s organizations. The institution would take care of the orphaned

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children who lost their parents during past years of unrest and turbulence in the area.96 The efforts of the Bulgarian and Macedonian women after the Ilinden uprising of 1903 were remarkable in terms of responding to the needs of the afflicted persons, but especially women and children in the aftermath of the Ottoman authorities’ brutal suppression of the unrest. The initiation of a hospital right in the middle of the crisis, efforts to secure the release of arrested women, and projects for opening a poorhouse and an orphanage were all designed to address the physical and social wounds incurred during the uprising. In that respect, once again, their initiatives were not only humanitarian and philanthropic, but also social and political.

THE 1909 ADANA MASSACRES AND RELIEF EFFORTS FOR ARMENIAN ORPHANS The day after the counter-revolutionary attempt against the newly established Ottoman constitutional government of the Young Turks on 13 April 1909 (termed the 31 March Incident in contemporaneous historical chronicles), bloody events in the form of massacres of Armenians occurred in southern Anatolia in Adana. The pogrom started on 14 April in the larger area of the Adana province, specifically in Hacın, Hamidiye, Tarsus, Misis, Erzin, and Dörtyol, and quickly spread to the whole district, lasting for three days. After the area became relatively calm, especially after the appearance of the European naval forces in the nearby port of Alexandretta, a second massacre broke out on 24 April (Sunday), this time in the Armenian quarter of Adana, right after the arrival of Ottoman troops sent to quell the unrest. In this second massacre, which lasted for three days, killings occurred within the city of Adana. This phase also included the burning of the Armenian section of the city, together with many foreign mission premises, including schools and orphanages. Even though the actual number of those killed during the massacres was highly contested, it seems probable that it was between approximately twenty and thirty thousand. Most of them were Armenians, but some Assyrians, Chaldeans, and Greeks were also killed. Cemal Pasha, who was appointed by the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) as the governor of the province after the massacres, later wrote in his memoirs that seventeen thousand Armenians were massacred during the incident. Hagop Babikian, a member of the investigative commission sent by the Ottoman Parliament, estimated the total loss as twenty-one thousand.97

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According to the report of the Government Inquiry Commission, the number of homeless and starving widows and orphans of all ages was thirty thousand in the province of Adana and 6,797 in Aleppo. Although an English newspaper reported the total number as 70,500, in his report to the Istanbul Patriarchate, the Catholicos, Archbishop of Cilicia, provided instead the figure of 89,825.98 It is an impossible task to determine the actual numbers of orphans and widows when the death toll is a disputed matter. Yet, the number of orphans who were taken care of in the orphanages was close to 3,500. In certain sources the number of half-orphans taken care of by their own mothers was estimated to be around 3,00099 and 4,000.100 After the massacres of 1909, the future of the orphans became a national priority for the Patriarchate, the Armenian Parliament, and intellectuals. The community thought that the relief for orphans was much more important than any other need.101 In a speech delivered in the aftermath of Cilician massacres to raise funds for the education of orphaned children, the writer and social activist, Zabel Asadur, also known as Sibyl, called the community to concentrate on educating orphans rather than simply providing humanitarian aid.102 In the realm of orphan relief, two ideals were pronounced. One was not to move the orphans away from their patrie, and the other was not to give any orphan to a foreign institution. The Armenian community feared that they were to lose two generations at once. Not only were the adults killed, but their children were also to be assimilated. In one of her interviews, an old Armenian lady told Zabel Esayan, the famous feminist novelist, the following: There remains nobody between me and my grandchildren. . . Two generations were destroyed, they were all killed. There is no one left except for old women and very small children. And now, they fixed their eyes on them.”103

The Armenian relief workers and intellectuals were particularly concerned, since the governor, Cemal, was willing to directly assume responsibility for these orphans, claiming that they were Ottomans first and foremost. In line with that assumption, he planned to build an Ottoman Orphanage (Dârü’l-Eytâm-ı Osmânî) for the Adana orphans. The use of the term “Ottoman” to qualify the institution was a deliberate reference to the constitutional regime and the Ottomanist ideology. According to the French vice-consul, this was to be an “essentially Turkish establishment,” in which the language of instruction would be Turkish and the question of religion would not be taken into consideration, which basically meant that orphans of all confessions would be accepted and no religious education would be provided.104 Cemal frequently referred to the ideal of “Ottomanism,” of uniting

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all the peoples of the Empire. Yet, the opening of a “state orphanage” for Armenian orphans and the governor’s educational approach in matters of language and religion increased fears of conversion and assimilation among the Armenian community.105 Zabel Esayan was among the most prominent Armenians who opposed the establishment of the Ottoman Orphanage and who got involved in disputes with the governor.106 She was sent to Cilicia in June 1909 as a member of the Armenian Patriarchate Orphanage Committee (APOC), to relieve the suffering of the victims of the massacres in general, and the orphans in particular. The committee first went to Mersin, where a delegation from the prelacy had rounded the orphans up one by one and dispatched them to shelters set up in the Armenian school and church. Later in Adana, the APOC had invited all those who were sheltering orphans to apply for enrollment in the institution. Esayan and her counterparts, Satenik Ohancanyan107 and Arşaguhi Teotig, were to register the orphans who had lost their parents. In her book, describing her observations of massacre-stricken Adana, Teotig specifically notes that they “open[ed] schools so that they [Armenian girls] will love their language and their race.”108 The Governorship of Adana managed to open three orphanages, in Adana, Hacın, and Dörtyol, sometime in the fall of 1909. These institutions sheltered around 450 orphans.109 In order to resist the influences of the missionary establishments and the orphanages of the Ottoman local administration, the Patriarchate and organizations founded under its umbrella worked to open orphanages and other educational institutions for the Armenian orphans of the area. From August to October 1909, the APOC opened six orphanages in Adana, Maraş, Hacın, Aintab, Hasanbeyli, and Dörtyol, housing approximately 1,500 orphans.110 Armenian women’s organizations also directed their attention to the issue, especially in order to help orphan girls. One such association was the Tıbrotsaser Hayuhyats/Dignants Ingerutyun (School-loving Armenian/Women’s Association, Ermeni Maarifperver Kadınlar Cemiyeti). Founded in 1879, the association aimed at training female teachers in its teacher training college in Istanbul to be sent to the girls’ schools in the Anatolian and Balkan provinces. Although the activities of the association were interrupted by the order of the government after the 1894–96 massacres, it was reopened following the proclamation of the constitution. According to the testimony of one of its members, Hayganuş Mark, the association was chaired by Zabel Asadur (Sybil) after its reinitiation in 1908.111 At a speech in Istanbul to raise money to finance schools in Cilicia, Sibyl argued that the association was dedicated to working for female education in the provinces. The training schools of the Tıbrotsaser were going to raise provincial Armenian girls so that they had a respectable position,

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especially as future teachers. The schools would train future generations of women, who would in return serve their sisters, their younger generations.112 In their petition to the sultan to ask for permission to organize a fundraising event, the administrators of the Tıbrotsaser underlined that they opened almost twenty schools in various regions of Anatolia for the education and instruction of poor and orphan “Ottoman girls with no discrimination of religion and sect.”113 However, they argued, due to the “lamentable events in Adana,” the number of orphans had multiplied and the resources of the association were insufficient to meet the demands of educating these girls. The association felt it necessary to refer to the Ottomanist ideals and the goal of mixed education for different communities of the Empire in order to be in tune with the Young Turk rule. Still, the mentioning of Adana massacres makes it clear that the primary target of the association was the orphaned Armenian girls. Another association, which had also directed its attention to the orphans of Cilicia, was Hay Dignants Ingerutiun (Armenian Women’s Association). The organization was chaired by Madame Nigoğosyan, and its members included Hayganuş Mark, Makruhi Gülbenk, Zaruhi Bahri, Madame Garmir, and Şuşan Boşnakyan.114 One of the most important activities of the association was to assume the responsibility of a girls’ orphanage, which was opened in Şişli specifically for Adana orphans. Hay Dignants Ingerutiun was also in coordination with Vorpakhınam Marmin (Committee for the Relief of Orphans [of Adana]).115 The latter was founded in 1909 in order to collect dispersed Armenian orphans and put them into orphanages in the area, together with transferring some of them to Istanbul.116 The women involved in the activities of this committee included Zaruhi Kalemkâryan, Zaruhi Bahri, and Hulyane Sarkisyan. The information on the orphanage in Şişli is scarce and incomplete. However, Ottoman archival documentation verifies that in January 1910, the orphanage was already functioning and Hay Dignants Ingerutiun was in search for finances to cover the costs of operation.117 The association applied to the Municipality of Istanbul in order to secure the necessary authorization for opening a charity sale in the Armenian Church in Balıkpazarı, Beyoğlu (Surp Asdvadzadin) and also for organizing a lottery, which would involve the printing of three thousand tickets.118 Discussing the matter with the Police Department of Istanbul and the General Directorate of Police (Emniyet-i Umumiye Vekaleti), the municipality approved the requests of the association. However, at the same time, the institution had to face many obstacles created by the local or central authorities when it attempted to transfer a number of Armenian orphans from Cilicia to the capital in late 1909.119 At

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first, the Ministry of Justice and Sects, with the order of the Ministry of the Interior, refused to give travel permits to the orphans, claiming that they would suffer a lot during the long journey and that the Patriarchate should work to take care of them in the region. When the obstructions were overcome and the orphans finally arrived in Istanbul in January 1910, the Ministry of the Interior argued that these “Ottoman orphans” should not be handed over to the Armenian institutions. Instead, they should be sheltered in state institutions. In other words, while one branch of the government gave permission for Armenian organizations to collect money for the benefit of an Armenian orphanage, another authority denied these organizations the right to educate and instruct Armenian orphans on their own premises. The educational efforts of the provincial government and the Armenian organizations were similar. Soon, they found themselves in competition and clashed. While the Young Turk rule tended to define the orphans of Adana as Ottoman citizens, the Armenian women’s organizations and intellectuals stressed the importance of preserving these children’s Armenian identity for the future generations. For this reason, the groups regarded each other as adversaries and nationalists at the same time. Within this picture, Armenian women and their associations definitely assumed leading roles in determining the fates of orphans. They acted as significant historical agents in the aftermath of the massacres of 1909 primarily through the philanthropic work that they undertook.

CONCLUSION Elizabeth B. Frierson rightly criticizes the fact that by the early 1980s, feminist scholars still saw 1908 and 1914–23 as pivotal years when women began to be more active in public life and politics in the Ottoman Empire. She, instead, argues that change in women’s social status had already started in the 1890s, “in the middle of wars and refugee flows into the empire.”120 Although the criticism is directed to an older generation of literature, the prioritizing of the post-1908 and World War I years as the glorious periods of women’s enlarged involvement in the public sphere seems to remain intact, as many researchers still focus on these periods.121 Another serious problem relates to the invisibility of non-Muslim Ottoman women in the few existing studies on “Ottoman women.”122 Probably due both to the dimension of continuity, namely, transformation of the Ottoman Empire into the Republic of Turkey, and the language limitations of the researchers created by the multilingual structure of the Empire, the activities of non-Muslim Ottoman women remain significantly understudied. The concern here is defi-

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nitely not limited to a simple quantitative representation. More significantly, lack of sound knowledge on the activities of different women’s societies and agency jeopardizes the integrity of the historical accounts and distorts our understanding of the role of women in the late Ottoman society. This essay has attempted to delineate a number of distinct ways through which Ottoman women from various ethnoreligious communities engaged in the social and political issues of their society and acted as agents of social change. The analysis of a selection of different women’s organizations proves that taking into consideration the multiethnic and multilingual nature of the Empire, and thus that of the adjective “Ottoman,” clearly manifests the political and feminist potential of philanthropic women’s associations in the late Ottoman society. Aiming to recover both the role of Ottoman women as a general category and the non-Muslim women as an underrepresented category within it, this chapter aims to suggest that women’s organizations of the late nineteenth century played crucial roles in changing, challenging, negotiating, and redefining their society and they took active parts in various dimensions of Ottoman social, political, and cultural history. They were involved in the large and reciprocally connected realms of philanthropy, education, and health, which in return were closely entwined with communal, national, religious, and feminist politics of their times. In this seemingly sanitary and hygienic female environment of humanitarianism and charity-mindedness, everything was, in fact, complicated, dirty, and political. As the British consul noted, during these times, “women as well got involved in politics.”

NOTES 1. For a detailed overview of Ottoman Turkish/Muslim women’s organizations from 1908 to 1923, see Fatma Müge Göçek, “From Empire to Nation: Images of Women and War in Ottoman Political Cartoons, 1908-1923,” in Borderlines: Genders and Identities in War and Peace, 1870-1930, ed. Billie Melman (New York: Routledge, 1998), 47–72. 2. For a significant criticism of militarized and nationalistic women’s involvement in politics, see Cynthia Enloe, Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). For a criticism of the late Ottoman and early Republican case, see Ayşe Gül Altınay, The Myth of the Military-Nation: Militarism, Gender, and Education in Turkey (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004). 3. Deniz Kandiyoti, “End of Empire: Islam, Nationalism, and Women in Turkey,” in Women, Islam and the State, ed. Deniz Kandiyoti (Hampshire: Macmillan, 1991), 22–47, 29.

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4. Guity Nashat and Judith E. Tucker, Women in the Middle East and North Africa: Restoring Women to History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 92. 5. Beth Baron, “Women’s Voluntary Social Welfare Organizations in Egypt,” in Gender, Religion and Change in the Middle East: Two Hundred Years of History, ed. Inger Marie Okkenhaug and Ingvild Flaskerud (New York: Berg, 2005), 85–102. 6. Ibid., 85. 7. Howard Markel, Quarantine!: East European Jewish Immigrants and the New York City Epidemics (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 16–22. 8. Ibid., 22. 9. Selim Deringil, “Jewish Immigration to the Ottoman Empire at the Time of the First Zionist Congresses: A Comment,” in The Last Ottoman Century and Beyond: The Jews of Turkey and the Balkans 1808-1945, ed. Minna Rozen (Tel Aviv: Diaspora Research Institute, Tel Aviv University, 2002), vol. 2, 142–149. In July 1892, the Municipality of Istanbul collected the passports of the Jewish refugees to be investigated by the office of citizenship (tabiiyyet kalemi). BOA, DH. MKT., 1970/4, 15/Z/1309 (10.07.1892). 10. BOA. DH. MKT., 1878/121, 13/Ra/1309 (17.10.1891). 11. Herman J. Schulteis, Report on European Immigration (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1893), 44. 12. In October 1891, it was openly declared by the Ministry of Interior that the entry of Jewish refugees was prohibited and the cruise lines were ordered to be cautious not to take them on board. BOA. DH. MKT., 1879/105, 15/Ra/1309 (19.10.1891). It was further ordered that their landing from the ships be hindered. BOA. DH. MKT., 1882/90, 22/Ra/1309 (26.10.1891). 13. BOA, DH. MKT., 1976/22, 27/Z /1309 (22.07.1892). For a similar discussion, see BOA, DH. MKT., 1980/31, 06/M /1310 (30.07.1892). 14. “General,” The Levant Herald and Eastern Express, 17 July 1893, 357. 15. In 1891 the Ministry of Interior warned the government that although the asylum in Hasköy, where Jewish refugees from Russia and Romania had been settled, was incredibly crowded, and in an unsanitary condition. BOA. DH. MKT., 1894/90, 26/R /1309 (28.11.1891). 16. In mid 1892, the Chief Rabbinate of Istanbul was working for the settlement of the Jewish refugees to the synagogue in Kuruçuşme. BOA. DH. MKT., 1975/69, 29/Z /1309 (24.07.1892). 17. Arbeiter Zeitung, New York, 19 February 1892, 1–2. In June 1892, the Municipality of Istanbul was still reporting a series of arrivals and worsening of hygiene conditions. Deringil, “Jewish Immigration,” 144; BOA, Y.MTV., 64/12, 03/Z/1309 (28.06.1892). 18. They were in such miserable condition that the Chief Rabbinite asked for some financial support from the government for the reparation and renovation of the barracks in mid 1892. BOA. DH. MKT., 1980/123, 07/M /1310 (31.07.1892). 19. In early 1892, the government decided to facilitate the transfer of Jewish refugees to these provinces. BOA, DH. MKT., 1927/59, 01/Ş /1309 (29.02.1892). However, until June, the government and the provinces could not complete

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21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33.

34. 35.

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the deliberations on the sources of the income needed to undertake this task. BOA, DH. MKT., 1959/65, 14/Za/1309 (09.06.1892). In the latter part of 1892, the government considered sending them also to Kosova, Monastir, and Janina, yet completely prohibiting the passage to Palestine. BOA, DH. MKT., 1985/10, 15/M/1310 (08.08.1892). Markel, Quarantine, 22. In the first months of 1893, the provincial authorities of Salonika and Aydın asked for funds to cover the expenses of the transfer of refugees. BOA, DH. MKT., 2045/76, 06/B/1310 (24 .01.1893); BOA, İ.DH., 1301/1310-B-28, 25/B/1310 (12 February .02.1893); BOA, DH. MKT., 14/28, 10/L/1310 (27.04.1893). “Rolo del rabino,” El Tiempo, 23 March 1891, 4. I sincerely thank Julia Phillips Cohen for providing me references from the Ottoman Ladino press. “Los Judios rusos en Konstantinopla [Russian Jews in Constantinople],” El Tiempo, 7 January 1892, 2. “Una Fiesta en Salonika en favor de los emigrados rusos [A Fest in Salonika for the Benefit of Russian Immigrants],” La Buena Esperansa, 29 September 1892, 4. “Una sosiedad interesante [An Interesting Society],” El Tiempo, 10 March 1892, 2–3. Alliance Israélite Universelle was a French Jewish educational organization founded in 1860 in Paris with the purpose of “emancipating and protecting Eastern Jewry.” Pamela Dorn Sezgin, “Jewish Women in the Ottoman Empire,” in Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewry: From the Golden Age of Spain to Modern Times, ed. Zion Zohar (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 216–238. BOA, HR.TO., 465/51, 25/9/1879; BOA, İ.HR., 280/17302, 07/Z /1296 (21.11.1879). Société de Bienfaisance des Dames Israélites de Péra, Statuts (Constantinople: Imprimerie de Castro, 1893). Ibid., 11. Ibid., 3. Ibid., 12. Art. 2- Elle [la société] se compose: 1. des Dames adhérents qui payent une cotisation minima de près 60 par an, et qui sont seules membres actifs. 2. de tous ceux, Dames ou Messieurs, qui veulent bien lui accorder leur concours tant à Constantinople qu’à l’étranger, à titre de donateurs et dont les noms seront inscrits sur un registre d’honneur spécialement consacré à cet usage. Kurt Grunwald, Türkenhirsch: A Study of Baron Maurice de Hirsch, Entrepreneur and Philanthropist (New York: Daniey Davey & Co., Inc., 1966). For a detailed analysis of philanthropy and the Hamidian regime, see Nadir Özbek, “Philanthropic Activity, Ottoman Patriotism, and The Hamidian Regime, 1876–1909,” IJMES 37, no. 1 (2005): 59–81. BOA, Y.MTV., 68/86, 19/Ra/1310 (10.10.1892). Özbek, “Philanthropic Activity,” 66.

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36. BOA, DH.MKT., 2061/34, 22/Ş /1310 (11.03.1893). 37. Ibid. “. . . Milel-i gayr-ı müslime tarafından mekteb ve kilise ve fukara namlarına para toplamak bahanesiyle ötede beride teşkil edib.” 38. Narcisse Leven, Cinquante ans d’histoire: L’Alliance israélite universelle 1860-1910 (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1920), vol. 2, 430. The Alliance, for its part, in addition to distributing aid to the families in Izmir, ordered the school directors to enroll all refugee children of the appropriate age in the schools of Alliance and to provide them with food and clothing throughout the wintertime. In Salonika, a workshop was opened to teach certain manual trades to a number of young boys. 39. BOA, Y.EE.KP., 8/785, 29/B/1316 (13.12.1898). 40. Deringil, “Jewish Immigration,” 145. 41. BOA, DH.MKT., 1890/25, 14/R/1309 (16.11.1891). 42. When Madame Tedeschi, the director of the society, applied to the Municipality of Istanbul in order to organize a ball at the Pera Palas Hotel in January 1908, the request was investigated with scrutiny, but in the end the requested authorization was provided. BOA, ZB., 391/115, 10/Ke/1323 (23.12.1907); BOA, ZB., 321/102, 25/Ke/1323 (07.01.1908). 43. Gülhan Balsoy, The Politics of Reproduction in Ottoman Society, 1838–1900 (London: Pickering & Chatto Publishers, 2013). 44. Yeşim Işıl Ülman, “Besim Ömer Akalin (1862-1940): Ange Gardien des Femmes et des Enfants;—L’acclimatation d’un Savoir Veni d’Ailleurs,” in Médecins et ingénieurs ottomans à l’âge des nationalismes, ed. Méropi Anastassiadou (Paris-Istanbul: Maisonneuve & Larose et IFEA, 2003), 101–121. 45. Nuran Yıldırım, “Viladethane,” İstanbul Ansiklopedisi (İstanbul: İletişim, 1994), vol. 7, 388–389. 46. Nuran Yıldırım, “İstanbul’un İlk Doğumevi Viladethane,” Hastane Hospital News 7 (2000): 26–27; Ayten Altınbaş and Oğuz Ceylan, “Vilâdethâne,” Tombak 17 (1997): 26–32. 47. Altınbaş and Ceylan, “Vilâdethâne,” 28: “O zaman nezd-i Şahane’de Viladethane’nin bir ‘piçhane’ gibi telakki edilmiş olmasıdır. Hep bu telakki tesiri altında menfi cevap gelmekte idi. Her şey burada düğümlenip kalıyordu.” 48. All over Europe, maternity hospitals usually served women with illegitimate pregnancies. Rachel G. Fuchs, Poor and Pregnant in Paris: Strategies for Survival in the Nineteenth Century (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 220. 49. David Ransel, Mothers of Misery: Child Abandonment in Russia (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1988), 37. 50. BOA, DH.MKT., 549/2, 4/Ca/1326 (04.06.1908). 51. Méropi Anastassiadou, “Médecine hygiéniste et pédagogie sociale à Istanbul à la fin du XIXe siècle: Le cas du docteur Spyridon Zavitziano,” in Médecins et ingénieurs ottomans à l’âge des nationalismes, ed. Méropi Anastassiadou (Paris-Istanbul: Maisonneuve & Larose et IFEA, 2003), 63–99. 52. BOA, Y.MTV., 26/26, 22/B/1304 (16.04.1887). The official seal of the association bears this date (see Figure 5.1). 53. “Havadis-i Dahiliyye,” Mürüvvet, no. 6, 3 April 1888 (21/B/1305), 115.

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54. The original name of the association, as indicated in its official seal, is the following: Αδελφότης του Αγίου Ελευθερίου, των Κυριών του εν Πέρα Αγ. Κωνσταντίνου και Ελένης. I thank Vangelis Kechriotis for transcribing and translating the official seal of the society. (See Figure 5.1.) 55. Elefhteria means “freedom” in Greek. But also it is customary to say kali lefteria to pregnant women, which means “[wish you a] quick and easy freedom [from pregnancy].” The name Agios Eleftherios probably comes from this connotation. 56. BOA, DH.MKT., 1155/22, 5/Şb/1322 (18.02.1907). Although the police department mentioned this number in its report of February 1907, the Sublime Porte later gave the much larger number of 200 in April 1908. BOA, DH.MKT., 1155/22, 2/Ra/1326 (04.04.1908). 57. BOA, DH.MKT., 1155/22, 5/Şb/1322 (18.02.1907). 58. Ibid., “. . . kargir olarak üç kat ve altı oda bir mutfak ve bahçe ve taraçaya şamil . . .” 59. BOA, ZB, 389/167, 18/Ke/1322 (31.12.1906). 60. Ibid. “. . . öyle bir tedavihanenin küşadına ve mezuniyet-i resmiye istihsal edilmiş olduğuna dair malumat-ı resmiyye olunmamakla . . .” 61. BOA, DH.MKT., 1155/22, 2/Ra/1326 (04.04.1908): “. . . bu gibi ianat-ı hayriye ile mezkur tedavihane mesarif-i ibtidaiyye ve daimesinin temini mümkün olamamağla . . .” 62. Ibid., “. . . bu gibi aceze-yi nisvan için müteaddid hastahaneler mevcud ve devair-i belediyede birer tabib-i müvellid mütehaddim bulunmasına binaen böyle bir tedavihaneye esasen ihtiyaç olmadığı. . .” 63. BOA, ZB, 389/167, 18/Ke/1322 (31.12.1906). 64. BOA, ZB, 321/94, 19/Ke/1322 (01.01.1907). This document from early 1907 gives information on the printing of the tickets of the theater organized by the Agios Eleftherios. 65. BOA, ZB, 634/88, 14/Ks/1323 (27.01.1908). 66. Ibid. 67. BOA, ZB, 322/8, 27/Ks/1323 (09.02.1908). 68. The hospital was founded in 1869 and provided services to pregnant women having difficulties with delivery. Nuran Yıldırım, İstanbul Darülaceze Müessesesi Tarihi (İstanbul: Darülaceze Vakfı, 1997), 7. 69. The clinic was opened in April 1907, on the birthday of the prophet. BOA, DH.MKT., 1148/37, 07/M/1325 (20.02.1907). Still, in mid 1907 the clinic had neither a permanent midwife or a doctor and the administration warned the applicants to inform the institution at least ten days prior to lying in. BOA, DH.MKT., 1171/8, 2/R/1325 (04.06.1907). 70. This institution, officially named Darulfünun-ı Osmani Tıp Fakültesi Serîriyyat-ı Nisaiye ve Viladiyesi (Ottoman University, Faculty of Medicine, Clinic of Gynecology and Maternity), was opened in 1905. Osman Nuri Ergin, Türkiye Maarif Tarihi, vol. 2 (İstanbul: Eser Kültür Yayınları, 1977), 543. 71. For example, in August 1910 the municipality sent a doctor to Dolapdere to examine a poor pregnant woman, Roza, who was in emergency condition. BOA, DH.EUM.MH., 241/45, 11/Ş /1328 (16.08.1910).

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72. BOA, DH.MKT., 1155/22, 5/Şb/1322 (18.02.1907). These were Mavraki Efendi, Mösyö Lamirdi, and Mösyö Karavil. 73. BOA, ZB, 634/88, 14/Ks/1323 (27.01.1908): “. . . hamile kadınlar ile küçük çocuklar ihtiyacına. . .” 74. BOA, ZB, 322/8, 27/Ks/1323 (09.02.1908): “. . . hamile kadınlarla tevellüd edecekleri çocuklarına. . .” 75. Francisca de Haan, Krasimira Daskalova, Anna Loutfi, eds., Biographical Dictionary of Women’s Movements and Feminisms in Central, Eastern, and South Eastern Europe: 19th and 20th Centuries (Budapest; New York: Central European University Press, 2006), 66. 76. Kostadina Bojadjieva Nasteva-Rusinska (1880–1932) completed her primary education in Ohrid and her secondary education in Bulgaria. She was teaching at a primary school for boys and girls in Ohrid from around the turn of the century. Haan, Daskalova, and Loutfi, Biographical Dictionary, 66–69. 77. Charles Jelavich and Barbara Jelavich, The Establishment of the Balkan National States, 1804-1920 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1977), 211–212. 78. Dimitur Kosev, “The Ilinden-Preobrazenie Uprising 1903,” Bulgarian Historical Review 64 (1978): 14–30; Nikolaj Todorov, “La lutte de libération des Bulgares en Macédoine et dans la région d’Andrinople 1903,” Bulgarian Historical Review 64 (1978): 30–39. 79. Henry Brailsford, Macedonia: Its Races and Their Future (London: Methuen, 1906), 148–155. 80. Haan, Daskalova, and Loutfi, Biographical Dictionary, 67. 81. Two members of the British Relief Fund, Edith Durham and Henry Brailsford, published their memoirs in 1905 and 1906, when their field service was completed. Both books concentrated on the regions of Macedonia that had been active in the Ilinden Uprising, and that met with harsh reprisals from the Ottoman forces. Edith M. Durham, The Burden of the Balkans (London: E. Arnold, 1905); Brailsford, Macedonia. 82. Haan, Daskalova, and Loutfi, Biographical Dictionary, 67. 83. Angela V. John, War, Journalism and the Shaping of the Twentieth Century the Life and Times of Henry W. Nevinson (London; New York: I.B. Tauris, 2006), 100. 84. Oswald Ashton Wentworth Dilke and Margaret S. Dilke, Recollections of the National Liberation Struggles in Macedonia: At the End of the 19th and the Beginning of the 20th Centuries (New Delhi, India: Mosaic Publications, 1984), 70. 85. Detailed information was given to the Sublime Porte in December 1903 on the hospital that the British relief officials wanted to open in Kostur. BOA, Y.A..HUS., 462/115, 20/N /1321 (09.12.1903). A couple of weeks later, similar requests were made to open a hospital in Ohrid. BOA, Y.A..HUS., 463/70, 11/L/1321 (30.12.1903). 86. The hospital in Monastir had 21 beds, the hospital of Kostur, 35 beds and that of Ohrid, 25 beds. Dilke, 92. 87. Ekaterina Peneva Karavelova (1860–1947) established a women’s cultural organization Maika (mother) in Sofia in 1899, serving as its chairwoman for thirty

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88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94.

95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100.

101.

102. 103. 104.

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years. Believing that women’s independence and equality required giving them opportunities to earn a living, she strongly supported women’s professional and vocational education and led Maika campaigns to open a vocational girls’ school, “Maria Louisa.” She was also among the founders in 1901 of the Bulgarian Women’s Union. Haan, Daskalova, and Loutfi, Biographical Dictionary, 230–232. BOA, Y.PRK.MK., 16/85, 12/Ş/1321 (12.11.1903): “. . . memalik-i şahanedeki Bulgarlar hakkında reva görülen mezâlim ve taadiyâta bir nihayet verilmesi. . .” Ibid., “. . . beyannamenin suretini hıfz etmediği. . .” BOA, Y.PRK.MK., 20/77, 22/L/1322 (29.12.1904): “. . . Sofya’daki düvel-i muazzama konsolosluklarına hitaben bir istida tehiyye etmekte oldukları. . .” Brailsford, Macedonia, 165. “Memorandum from Bulgaria to Powers,” The New York Times, 17 August 1903, 1. BOA, Y.PRK.MK., 20/61, 21/N/1322 (29.11.1904). Prince Ferdinand, or Ferdinand I (26 February 1861–10 September 1948), born Prince Ferdinand Maximilian Karl Leopold Maria of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, was the Prince Regnant and later Tsar of Bulgaria (1908). Ferdinand was proclaimed Prince Regnant of autonomous Bulgaria on 7 July 1887, replacing the first prince, Alexander of Battenberg. BOA, TFR.I.MN., 65/6422, 02/R/1323 (06.06.1905). The news was published in Mir, a Bulgarian newspaper in Sofia. BOA, Y.PRK.MK., 22/103, 18/Ca/1326 (17.06.1908). İttihad, 6 July 1909; Tasvir-i Efkâr, 8 July 1909. Duckett Z. Ferriman, Turkish Atrocities: The Young Turks and the Truth About the Holocaust at Adana in Asia Minor, During April, 1909 (London: n.p., 1913), 91–92. Ibid., 100. Ferriman claims that there were 3,036 orphans and 1,869 widows. Raymond H. Kevorkian, “La Cilicie (1909-1921). Des massacres d’Adana au mandat Français,” Revue d’Histoire Arménienne Contemporaine: Annales de la Bibliothèque Nubar de l’Union Générale Arménienne de Bienfaisance 3 (1999): 5-141, 103. For a detailed discussion on the Armenian orphans of Adana in 1909, see Nazan Maksudyan, “New ‘Rules of Conduct’ for State, American Missionaries, and Armenians: 1909 Adana Massacres and the Ottoman Orphanage (Dârü’lEytâm-ı Osmânî),” in L’ivresse de la Liberté: La Révolution de 1908 dans l’Empire Ottoman, ed. François Georgeon (Paris: CNRS, 2012), 137–171; Nazan Maksudyan, “Cemal Bey’in Adana Valiliği ve Osmanlıcılık İdeali” [Cemal Bey’s Adana Governorship and the Ideal of Ottomanism], Toplumsal Tarih 158 (2008): 22–28. Victoria Rowe, A History of Armenian Women’s Writing, 1880-1922 (Amersham: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2003), 35. Zabel Esayan, “GiligioVorpanotsnerı” [Orphanages of Cilicia], Arakadz 13, 17 August 1911, 196–197. “M. Ronflard, Gérant du Vice-Consulat, à Monsieur Pichon, Mersine, le 7 Mai 1910.,” AMAE Quai d’Orsay, Correspondance politique et commerciale/ Nouvelle Série, Turquie, 1897-1914, vol. 83.

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105. In his memoirs, Cemal verifies that he supported the use of Turkish as the official language, but he claims that has nothing to do with Turkification. Cemal Paşa, Hatıralar, ed. Behçet Cemal (Istanbul: Selek Yayınları, 1959), 344. 106. The role of Esayan during and in the aftermath of the events has been a substantially investigated issue, thanks particularly to her own writings. Some of the significant works on her involvement include: Marc Nichanian, Writers of Disaster: Armenian Literature in the Twentieth Century (Princeton; London: Gomidas Institute, 2002); Krikor Beledian, “L’expérience de la catastrophe dans la littérature arménienne,” Revue d’histoire arméienne contemporaine 1 (1995): 127– 197; Rowe, Armenian Women’s Writing; Léon Ketcheyan, “Zabel Essayan (18781943): Sa Vie et Son Temps: Traduction Annotée de l’Autobiographie et de la Correspondance” (Ph.D. dissertation, Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, 2002). 107. Ohancanyan was one of the founders of the Istanbul Women’s Red Cross Society (Bolso Ganants Garmir Khach), which was probably founded shortly after the Young Turk Revolution, when Ohandjanian came from Tbilisi to Istanbul. After the Adana massacres, she joined the relief committee and went to the area with a group of women. Sona Zeitlian, Hay Knoç Dere Hay Heghapokhakan Sharzman Meç [Armenian Women’s Role in the Armenian Revolutionary Movement] (Los Angeles: Hrazian Sarkis Zeitlian Publizations, 1992), 147–149. 108. Rowe, Armenian Women’s Writing, 81; Arşaguhi Teotig, Amis mı i Giligya [A Month in Cilicia] (Istanbul: V[ahram] H[ıraçya] Der Nersesyan, 1910), 77. 109. Ferriman, Turkish Atrocities, 90–100. In 1911, all three were united under the roof of the Ottoman Orphanage, Dârü’l-Eytâm-ı Osmânî. 110. Raymond H. Kevorkian, “La Cilicie (1909-1921). Des massacres d’Adana au mandat Français,” Revue d’Histoire Arménienne Contemporaine 3 (1999): 5–141, 103. Another Armenian orphanage was opened in Dörtyol in 1912 by the L’Union Général Arménienne de Bienfaisance of Nubar Pasha with 85 orphans. This was the first enterprise of the Union. It also supported the local schools and orphanages of the Patriarchate. For further information, see Un siècle d’histoire de L’Union Général Arménienne de Bienfaisance (Cairo; Paris; New York: CHIRAT, 2006), vol. 1: 1906-1940, 26–29; BOA, DH.MUİ., 99/41, 21/ Ca/1328 (31.05.1910). 111. Hayganuş Mark, “Hayatımın Dalgaları,” in Bir Adalet Feryadı: Osmanlı’dan Türkiye’ye Beş Ermeni Feminist Yazar, 1862-1933, ed. Lerna Ekmekçioğlu and Melissa Bilal (Istanbul: Aras Yayıncılık, 2006), 264–316, 298. 112. Rowe, Armenian Women’s Writing, 83. 113. BOA, İ.MBH., 1/1328-M-026, 21/M /1328 (02.02.1910): “. . . bila-tefrik-i cins ve mezheb bilcümle fakir ve yetim osmanlı kız çocukları. . .” 114. Mark, “Hayatımın Dalgaları,” 299. 115. Ibid., 300. 116. Ferriman argues that forty-three orphans were brought to Istanbul, p. 99. 117. BOA, DH.EUM.THR., 23/41, 19/M /1328 (31.01.1910). The document clearly notes the orphanage in Şişli, which was under the rule of Armenian Wom-

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121.

122.

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en’s Association: “. . . Şişli’de Kadınlar Cemiyetinin taht-ı idaresinde bulunan eytamhane. . .” Ibid. BOA, DH.MUİ., 53/42, 13/M/1328 (25.01.1910). Elizabeth B. Frierson, “Women in Late Ottoman Intellectual Society,” in Late Ottoman Society: The Intellectual Legacy, ed. Elisabeth Özdalga (London; New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005), 135–161, 136. For instance see, Nicole A.N.M. van Os, “Nurturing Soldiers and Girls: Osmanlı Kadınları Cemiyet-i Hayriyesi,” in Papers of VIIIth International Congress on the Economic and Social History of Turkey, ed. Nurcan Abacı (Morrisville: Lulu Press, 2006), 213–218; Ayfer Karakaya-Stump, “Debating Progress in a ‘Serious Newspaper for Muslim Women’: The Periodical ‘Kadın’ of the Post-Revolutionary Salonica, 1908-1909,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 30, no. 2 (2003): 155–181; Pelin Başçı, “Love, Marriage, and Motherhood: Changing Expectations of Women in Late Ottoman Istanbul,” Turkish Studies 4, no. 3 (2003): 145–177; Nicole A.N.M. van Os, “Taking Care of Soldiers’ Families: The Ottoman State and the Muinsiz Aile Maaşı,” in Arming the State: Military Conscription in the Middle East and Central Asia, 1775-1925, ed. Erik J. Zürcher (London; New York: I.B. Tauris, 1999), 95–110. Lerna Ekmekçioğlu previously touched upon this grave problem in her article on historiography of Ottoman women’s movements and print cultures. “Osmanlı ve Türkiye Kadın Hareketi Hakkındaki Tarihyazımında Türk ve/veya Müslüman Olmayan Kadınlar: Bir Yokluğun Anatomisi,” in Bir Adalet Feryadı, Ekmekçioğlu and Bilal, 327–340.

Part III

‫ﱬﱫ‬ Discourses and Narratives of Gender in the Urban Context

Chapter 6

Early Republican Turkish Orientalism? The Erotic Picture of an Algerian Woman and the Notion of Beauty between the “West” and the “Orient” Nora Lafi

‫ﱬﱫ‬ In Istanbul, in February 1924, the Resimli Gazete (Picture Newspaper) published on its front page an article about the fascination of European men with North African women, illustrated with the picture of a semi-naked young Algerian woman.1 It is obvious that the article is of a highly ambiguous nature, as it is itself a manifestation of the very voyeurism it describes with false distancing. It is also very representative of a trend that developed in the late-nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire and in early republican Turkey that could be labeled Turkish orientalism. Developing in the last third of the nineteenth century with the influence of modernist ideas more or less inspired by European experiences, the Turks began to see the “Orient,” including eastern Ottoman and former Ottoman provinces, with different eyes.2 As several former Ottoman provinces had already been colonized by European powers, this distancing was highly ambiguous, and not only from an aesthetic point of view. In the early twentieth century, with the development of Turkish nationalism on one hand and the deepening of the European grip on the Arab world on the other hand, the ambiguities only grew. In 1924 Istanbul, the publication of such an article is indeed also a manifestation of the process of definition of the new post-Ottoman Turkish identity between Europe and the former Empire. In this process, which in139

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cluded many other dimensions, like the alphabet, architecture,3 literature, dress codes, and political ideas and references, the identity and appearance of women were crucial: they participated in the fashioning of a new collective identity.4 Imagining the new Turkish woman was a way to position the country in the mirror of Europe and indeed, images of women published in the popular press reflect this quest of making the Turkish woman a kind of modern Parisian. But they also reflect a strong dialectic of the Parisian against the Exotic, with the clear positioning of the auto-defined new Turkish identity on the side of the first, and of former fellow Ottoman women of North Africa on the latter. In the issue of the Resimli Gazete where the picture of the Algerian woman was published, other pages indeed show young Turkish women dressed and made up as modern Parisians. But the text underneath the picture invites to nuance interpretations tending to assimilate orientalism in Turkey with mere manifestations of a kind of reversed occidentalism. This may be the case a few years later, but in 1924, as the reflection on beauty published by Resimli Gazete illustrates, orientalism was also a kind of defense against judgments on the exotic character of Turkey (and in that case of Turkish women) possibly still existing in European discourses. The object of the present chapter is to place such interpretations into the broader context of the circulation of images of North African women during the colonial era and to confront it with the question of the new Turkish orientalism in the context of international and Istanbul-centered debates about female beauty and national identity. Historians have illustrated since the 1980s how the circulation of images developed during the early modern era and how such a development was part of the construction of a new sphere of definition of identities.5 The invention of photography and the impressive growth of the distribution of popular press at the end of the nineteenth century strengthened this trend and made images available everywhere and at a cheap price.6 Photography brought a new relationship with reality, and between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, the dissemination of images in general, and of women in particular, experienced immense growth. Such images were sometimes normative, with the diffusion of visual models (the Parisian, the good wife, the modern woman) and sometimes licentious (but the licentious can definitely be normative too), with the spread of erotic and pornographic representations.7 As for mainstream normative images, Adrian Bingham has illustrated with the example of interwar Britain how the image of women as constructed in popular press was part of the very construction of a national narrative of modernity.8 But, in the context of colonial empires, and of the development of a new phase in the history of orientalism, photographic images of women, as transmitted through popu-

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Figure 6.1. The front page of Resimli Gazete, 2 February 1924.

lar press or postcards, were also part of the construction of colonial stereotypes.9 The camera, as the authors of a study about Namibia stated, was also a tool of colonization.10 The circulation of colonial French pictures of North African women is particularly telling in this regard.11

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The image of women of colonized areas, specifically North Africa, has in recent years been the object of many studies, which have underlined how pictures have been the vector of the development, in the context of the regions that were seen as belonging to the “Orient,” of a very strong form of orientalism.12 As many studies have also shown, in other colonial contexts, from Australia to Malaysia or from the Philippines to Latin America, parallel phenomena also occurred.13 But with the “Orient,” a specific relationship developed, based on stereotypes anchored in the sphere of the orientalist ideology whose link with French colonial ideology and practices was ontological. The representation of nude Algerian women was part of this sphere.14 Orientalist paintings had indeed already developed an orientalist vision of Arab women, in which much of the stereotypes photography later adopted were already present.15 But the new technique, and its huge print diffusion, brought new developments, and a strong sensation of irruption into the intimacy of the women represented. Photography introduced a new relationship with reality, and positioned the viewer into a new voyeurist situation. As for representations of North African women, what strikes is the dialectic of the veiled and the unveiled, both representative modes constituting the two faces of a single stereotype. This dimension has been studied by Meyda Yeğenoğlu, with reference to authors like Fanon, Derrida, Bhabha, Spivak, and Marx.16 This author has underlined how photography, perhaps like belly dance,17 not only was part of the construction of colonial racial and gender stereotypes, but also the instrument of an always deeper diffusion of such stereotypes into societies, with an effect of mirror in the very construction of the national identities of colonizing countries. Julia Clancy-Smith also studied this aspect: “The Arab woman, as represented either visually or discursively, functioned as an inverted image, or negative trope, for confirming the European settler’s distinct cultural identity, while denying the political existence of the other.”18 In 1924 Istanbul these mechanics were also at stake, the new Turkish visual identity being partly built according to the logic of an inverted image of the “Orient,” but in a different way than in colonizing countries like France, the Netherlands, Italy, or Great Britain. Voyeurism and orientalism were definitely part of the new Turkish context, but also had more complex dimensions, like the difficult positioning of Turkey between the “exotic orient” and the “West.” In 1924, Turkey was also at a crucial point of its history. After World War I, foreign occupation, and the dismembering of the Empire, the perspective of becoming a colony like many other former Ottoman provinces had been one of the coagulating factors of the emergence of a new kind of Turkish nationalism. A few years later, after the successful fight against the risk of colonization and then victory in the war against Greece,

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Turkey had entered a new phase of its history, with the consolidation of the Kemalist republic.19 Issues like culture, language, dress codes, architecture, religion, and visual aesthetics were instrumental in the definition of the identity of the new country.20 The publication of the image of a semi-naked young Algerian women in the early republican Turkish press thus requires an analysis that involves not only the process of definition of the image of the new Turkish woman, but also the relationship with European ethniccolonial categories and stereotypes and even of the way in which the new Turkey distanced itself from its imperial past. Erotic pictures were certainly not a novelty in the Turkish panorama. Shirine Hamadeh has illustrated how in imperial times miniatures were already the vector of the (then limited) diffusion of images of women in which the erotic dimension was not absent.21 There was in Turkish art since Ottoman times a whole tradition of miniatures representing women in seductive dresses and poses. In the early twentieth century, imported pictures and postcards also circulated. Turkish art collectors, like Khalil Bey, who commissioned L’Origine du Monde from Courbet, were also very active on the international market of erotic representations.22 But the image Resimli Gazete published pertains to a more complex dimension: it is neither a directly licentious publication (the image is presented as part of a reflection on beauty standards) nor the mere diffusion of imported salacious European erotic representations. It is rather the sign of a highly ambiguous positioning at the time of the very definition of the new Turkish national identity. Debates about Ottoman and Turkish orientalism have illustrated how, from the 1880s onward, Turkey began to see its own provinces in the Middle East and North Africa with a new perspective, in which a true process of distancing was at work through phenomena pertaining to a form of orientalism. Paradoxically, North Africa has been seen from Istanbul as “far in the West.” But the Ottoman and former Ottoman provinces of Tunisia, Algeria, and Tripolitania began to be the object of a categorization insisting on the picturesque and, in the end, on the otherness. The distancing was also a process of racial distinction. Fellow Ottomans, and ex-fellow Ottomans, were rejected into the very dimension colonial powers had built about them and Turks used such dimensions in order to reinforce their sensation of belonging to a distinct civilization and race, closer to Europe. In this process, the image of women was crucial, and a tool for constructing otherness.23 The case of images of Algerian women published in Istanbul allows one to further reflect on such stakes, as the image of the “oriental” woman was instrumental in the construction of orientalist representations. They do not only pertain to a dimension of voyeurism, but also to a more complex process in which the visual and rhetoric dialectic of the Parisian-style modern woman as opposed to the exotic woman was central.

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The Turkish press contributed to the collective positioning of the Turks on the part of the Parisian stereotype in pushing back former fellow Ottoman women into the picturesque dimension. In the 1924 issue of Resimli Gazete, this dialectic is very clear. But the context is even more complex than this opposition between Parisian and colonized (or “Western” and “Oriental”) suggests. This publication might indeed be one of the first manifestations of occidentalism, a trend that was to develop in Turkey in the next years. The article underneath the picture is indeed a reflection on the category of North-African women and echoes ongoing debates in Turkey at that time on feminine beauty and modernity, in the context of the birth, on the international scene, of beauty contests. Showing a semi-naked very seductive Algerian woman is not only an expression of Turkish orientalism, through voyeurism, and not only an early occidentalist attempt to use the colonial mirror in order to build the image of the Turkish woman, but also a kind of answer to objections made against Turkish women in international beauty contests for their still being too oriental. The main message in the article underneath the picture is that even very “oriental” beauties, like Algerians, do have success in Paris, the most trend-setting city in the world, and that this fact should be an argument favoring the insertion of non-exclusivelyEuropean criteria into the definition of beauty: “It would be of course very astonishing that an Algerian girl, in spite of her race, in spite of being a Muslim, an Arab and in spite of being dressed in a traditional way could participate in an international beauty contest. . . . But the Parisian trend shows that now Europeans do like this kind of beauty.” Such debates recall those on Indian beauty in revolutionary Mexico.24 But all this takes also place in the context of the emergence in Turkey of racial theories about the new nation25 and in the context of the first international photographic beauty contests. In such contests, as Liz Conor reveals for the year 1922, Turkish participants were often rejected for being too oriental.26 The aim of participation was to prove to the world that Turkey was now part of the “civilized world” and the idea that countries unable to win international beauty contests were not civilized was not a pure Turkish fantasy: “Beauties represented not only their nation-states, but also those states’ aesthetic sensibilities and racial distinction. Nation vied not just to produce the finest beauty. . . . The Sun captioned the image of a Turkish beauty with ‘she did not win a competition because Turkey has not reached the stage of civilization yet.’”27 The article in Resimli Gazete is a kind of response to such objections: a use of the colonial erotic stereotype in order to defend Turkish women, arguing that even more exotic women than the Turks, like Algerians, can be liked in the West, and particularly in Paris.28 It is a kind of half-measure between orientalism and occidentalism, as later developments between the

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end of the 1920s and the 1930s will illustrate. During this period indeed, the Parisian stereotype for women prevailed in Turkey as part of the construction of the new Kemalist State and society.29 On the other hand, Turkish women actually became winners in international beauty contests. The first Miss Turkey contest was organized in 1929 by the Cumhuriyet newspaper, as part of an official propaganda campaign for the values of the new nation.30 During the early 1930s, Turkish women began participating in international contests. Such events were, and in some contexts still are, moments of fashioning of national identities.31 As for Turkish women, their image was part of the rhetoric of distancing from the Ottoman past. Even their curriculum was an ideological statement. As Alev Çınar recalls, Keriman Halis, the first Turkish woman to be elected Miss Universe in 1932, was the granddaughter of the last Sheikh al-Islam of the Ottoman Empire. The family passed from “tradition” to “modernity” in two generations.32 The image given by Turkish beauties was that of a process almost pertaining to racial improvement, a strong tendency insisting on the belonging of Turks to the White race.33 So in the end, the photography of the Algerian woman as published a few years earlier looks like an intermediary step. There was already an established orientalist vision of North African ex-Ottoman women, but still their “oriental” beauty could become a sensible argument against those who claimed that Parisian racial whiteness was the only canon. This was actually a half measure that did not resist the attempts of the next decade toward the promotion of a new Turkish woman. This is why this forgotten moment in the definition of the Turkish national identity is important. Between the dialectic of the West and the Orient, there has been, at least on an aesthetic point of view and in spite of all ambiguities, a short-lived space for the modern promotion of oriental characters. This is why contemporary research by historians and semiologists on such issues is extremely important. Moreover, the work of artists questioning the relationship between representations and gendered identities is also very valuable. Contemporary female artists indeed understood the strength of all these images, and the work of Lalla Essaydi on stereotypes in the representation of oriental women, for example, illustrates how the bodies of North African women have been the object of strong ideological projections for centuries.34

NOTES 1. Resimli Gazete 1, no. 22, 2 Şubat 1340 (2 February 1924). 2. On this paradigm, see Ussama Makdisi, “Ottoman Orientalism,” The American Historical Review 107, no. 3 (2002): 768–796; Christoph Herzog and Raoul Mo-

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3. 4. 5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

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tika, “Orientalism alla Turca: Late 19th / Early 20th Century Ottoman Voyages into the Muslim ‘Outback’,” Die Welt des Islams 40, no. 2 (2000): 139–195. See Edhem Eldem, “Ottoman and Turkish Orientalism,” Architectural Design 80, no. 1 (2010): 26–31. For a reflection on the way gender studies can confront orientalism, see Reina Lewis, Gendering Orientalism (London: Routledge, 1996). See for example studies on the role of pedlars in the dissemination of a new visual culture: Roger Chartier and Hans Jürgen Lüsebring, eds., Colportage et lecture populaire (Paris: IMEC, 1996). Anne McCauley, “En dehors de l’art: la découverte de la photographie populaire,” Etudes photographiques 16 (2005): 50–73. See also Christian Delporte, “Presse et culture de masse en France (1880-1914),” Revue historique 299, no. 1 (1998): 93–121; Jean-Francois Tétu, “L’illustration de la presse au XIXe siècle,” Semen: Revue sémio-linguistique des textes et discours 25 (2008). See Lisa Sigel, “Filth in the Wrong People’s Hand: Postcards and the Expansion of Pornography in Britain and the Atlantic World (1880-1914),” Journal of Social History 33, no. 4 (2000): 859–885. Also Lynda Klich, “Little Women: The Female Nude in the Golden Age of Picture Postcards,” Visual Resources 17, no. 4 (2001): 435–448. Adrian Bingham, Gender, Modernity and the Popular Press in Interwar Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). On the photographic construction of stereotypes of the exotic, see Melinda Bogdan, “Voyages imaginaires: les mondes exotiques dans la photographie (18501920),” Ethnologie française 36, no. 2 (2006): 311–320. Wolfram Hartmann, Jeremy Silvester, and Patricia Hayes, eds., The Colonizing Camera: Photographs in the Making of Namibian History (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 1998). On similar perspectives, see also Paul Landau and Deborah Kaspin, eds., Images and Empires (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). For a reflection on such issues, see Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem, 2nd ed. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987); Irvin Schick, The Erotic Margin: Sexuality and Spatiality in Alteritist Discourse (London: Verso, 1999). Christelle Taraud, Mauresques. Femmes orientales dans la photographie coloniale (18601910) (Paris: Albin Michel, 2003). See also Leila Sebbar and Jean-Michel Belorgey, Femmes d’Afrique du Nord. Cartes postales 1885-1930 (Paris: Bleu Autour, 2002); Mary Vogl, Picturing the Maghreb: Literature, Photography, (Re)Presentation (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003). In the British colonial context, see Phillipa Levine, “State of Undress: Nakedness and the Colonial Imagination,” Victorian Studies 50, no. 2 (2008): 189–219. Regarding the Filipina: Jeanne F. Illo, “Fair Skin and Sexy Body: Imprints of Colonialism and Capitalism in the Filipina,” Australian Feminist Studies 24, no. 11 (1996): 219–225. Raymong Corbey, “Alterity: the Colonial Nude,” Critique of Anthropology 8, no. 3 (1988): 75–92. See also Elisabeth Ezra, The Colonial Unconscious: Race and Culture

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16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21. 22. 23.

24.

25.

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in Interwar France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000); Dana Hale, Races on Display: French Representations of Colonized Peoples (1886-1940) (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008). On nudity in French culture, see Patricia Tilburg, “‘The Triumph of the Flesh’: Women, Physical Culture and the Nude in French Music Hall, 1904-2914,” Radical History Review 98 (2007): 63–80. Lynne Thornton, Women as Portrayed in Orientalist Painting (Paris: ACR, 1994). See also Malika Mehdid, “A Western Invention of Arab Womenhood: The Oriental Female,” in Women in the Middle-East: Perceptions, Realities and Struggle for Liberation, ed. Haleh Afshar (New York: Macmillan, 1993). Meyda Yeğenoğlu, Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 39. See also Rana Kabbani, Imperial Fictions: Europe’s Myths of Orient (London: Saqi, 1986). See Arzu Öztürkmen, “Modern Dance ‘Alla Turca’: Transforming Ottoman Dance in Early Republican Turkey,” Dance Research Journal 35, no. 1 (2003): 38–60. Julia Clancy-Smith, “Islam, Gender and Identities in the Making of French Algeria (1830-1962),” in Domesticating the Empire: Race, Gender and Family Life in French and Dutch Colonialism, ed, Julia Clancy-Smith and Frances Gouda (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998), 154–173, 156. See also Anne Maxwell, Colonial Photography and Exhibitions: Representations of the ‘Native’ and the Making of European Identities (Leicester: Liverpool University Press, 1999). On this context, see Ayşe Kadioğlu, “The Paradox of Turkish Nationalism and the Construction of Official Identity,” Middle-Eastern Studies 32, no. 2 (1996): 177–193. Zeynep Kezer, “An Imaginable Community: The Material Culture of Nationbuilding in Early Republican Turkey,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27, no. 3 (2009), 508–530. Shirine Hamadey, The City’s Pleasures. Istanbul in the Eighteenth Century (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008). Thierry Savatier, L’Origine du monde. Histoire d’un tableau de Gustave Courbet (Paris: Balladier, 2006). On this dimension: Jenny B. White, “State Feminism, Modernism and the Turkish Republican Woman,” NWSA Journal 15, no. 3 (2003): 145–159. See also Ayşe Durakbasa and Aynur Ilyasoglu, “Formation of Gender Identities in Republican Turkey and Women’s Narratives as Transmitters of ‘Herstory’ of Modernization,” Journal of Social History 35, no. 1 (2005): 195–203. Rick Lopez, “The India Bonita Contest of 1921 and the Ethnicization of Mexican National Culture,” Hispanic American Review 82, no. 2 (2002): 291–328; Apen Ruiz, “La India Bonita: National Beauty in Revolutionary Mexico,” Cultural Dynamics 14, no. 3 (2002): 283–301. Ayca Alemdaroğlu, “Politics of the Body and Eugenic Discourse in Early Republican Turkey,” Body & Society 11, no. 3 (2005): 61–76; Nazan Maksudyan, “The Turkish Review of Anthropology and the Racist Face of Turkish Nationalism,” Cultural Dynamics 17, no. 3 (2005): 291–322.

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26. See also Holly Ada 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): 107–122. 27. Liz Conor, The Spectacular Modern Woman: Feminine Visibility in the 1920s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 171. 28. For a reflection on similar stakes in other contexts: Charlotte Weber, “Unveiling Scheherazade: Feminist Orientalism in the International Alliance of Women, 1911-1950,” Feminist Studies 27, no. 1 (2001): 125–157. 29. On the construction of the Kemalist national narrative, see Hülya Adak, “National Myths and Self-Na(rra)tions: Mustafa Kemal’s Nutuk and Halide Edid’s Memoirs and the Turkish Ordeal,” The South-Atlantic Quaterly 102, no. 2/3 (2003): 509–527. On the fantasy of the West in Turkish national identity, see in the same issue Meltem Ahiska, “Occidentalism: the Historical Fantasy of the Modern,” The South-Atlantic Quarterly 102, no. 2/3 (2003): 351–379. 30. Ahmad Feroz, The Making of Modern Turkey (London: Routledge, 1993), 87–88. 31. Natasha Barnes, “Face of the Nation: Race, Nationalisms and Identities in Jamaican Beauty Pageants,” The Massachusetts Review 35, no. 3/4 (1994): 471–492. See also Huma Ahmed-Ghosh, “Writing the Nation on the Beauty Queen’s Body: Implications for a ‘Hindu’ Nation,” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 4, no. 1 (2003): 205–227; Sarah Banet-Weiser, The Most Beautiful Girl in the World: Beauty Pageant and National Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Angela Latham, “Packaging Woman: The Concurrent Rise of Beauty Pageants, Public Bathing and Other Performances of Female Nudity,” The Journal of Popular Culture 29, no. 3 (1995): 149–167. 32. Alev Cinar, Modernity, Islam and Secularism in Turkey: Bodies, Places and Time (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 71. On the role of beauty contests in the official ideology of Early Republican Turkey, see also Ayşe Zarakol, After Defeat: How the East Learned to Live with the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 148. As for the relationship between Turkey and Europe, the fact that Günseli Başar was elected Miss Europe in 1952 is to be noted (Feroz, Making of Modern Turkey, 87). 33. For contemporary echoes of such theories, see Sedef Arat-Koç, “(Some) Turkish Transnationalism(s) in an Age of Capitalist Globalization and Empire: ‘White Turks’ Discourse, the New Geopolitics and Implications for Feminist Transnationalism,” Journal of Middle-East Women’s Studies 3, no. 1 (2007): 35–57. 34. On this artist, see Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 3 October 2010, 63. On this subject, see also Maura Reilly and Linda Nochlin, eds., Global Feminism: New Directions in Contemporary Art (London: Merrell Publishing (with the Brooklyn Museum), 2007); Paulette Dellios, “Reframing the Gaze: European Orientalist Art in the Eyes of Turkish Women Artists,” Studia Universitatis Petru Maior-Philologia 9 (2010): 619–631.

Chapter 7

The Urban Experience in Women’s Memoirs Mediha Kayra’s World War I Notebook Christoph Herzog

‫ﱬﱫ‬ The historian Margeret Strobel, in her essay on “Gender, Sex, and Empire,” remarked that “[f]or substantial time periods, we know little of what indigenous women were doing, much less thinking; the documentary records, be they colonial or indigenous, have left more data about political and economic activity than about the daily domestic lives of individuals. And it is here, in the domestic realm, that much of women’s activity has taken place. . . .”1 This statement was made almost two decades ago in reference to the female populace of the European colonial empires but it is also true for what we know today about women in the late Ottoman Empire. In the end, historians depend on sources. As sources for Ottoman women’s history are comparatively scarce, a lot of ingenuity has been invested during the last decades in making indigenous sources like church records, documents, and the architecture of pious deeds, court records, fatawa, textbooks, popular culture, and oral tradition speak about women’s historical experiences.2 This has resulted in a considerable increase in historians’ knowledge about women in the Ottoman domains. Yet despite all this success, the picture lacks details. Even the cadi registers that seem to come closest to rendering women’s voices have been stated “to fail to satisfy the historian’s craving for detail, narrative expansiveness and voice.”3 In the eighteenth and especially the nineteenth centuries the genre of the Western travelogue about “adventures in the East” unfolded. Most of 149

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it was written by men who did not normally have access to the women’s side of the strongly gendered Ottoman private space, but some of it was by women travelers who sometimes did have such access. However, this type of source attracted particularly harsh criticism, and not just for its factual unreliability. Even if the abovementioned scarcity of sources did not allow for completely doing away with it, the critique of orientalism, i.e., of an fundamentally flawed epistemic Othering of the “Oriental” by Western observers, has contributed to largely discrediting the whole genre of travelogues as potential historical source material. On the other hand, the discussion of whether women travelers shared the complicity of the male Orientalist imperial discourse or whether they reached a different and sometimes more adequate understanding of the “Orient” and “Oriental women” has remained inconclusive.4 This leaves us to consider the genre of indigenous autobiographical sources. Autobiographical narratives as a type of source material have often been classified as “soft” as opposed to the supposedly “hard” evidence presented by administrative textual material preserved in archives. While this is not the place to take up the discussion of the problems and pitfalls associated with the uncritical use of archival source material, some considerations of autobiographical texts as sources for late Ottoman history are in order here. Employing a rather narrow definition of what constitutes a “true autobiography”—a comprehensive narrative retrospective making sense of one’s life as an individual—this genre has been assumed to reflect the discovery of the self and the unfolding of individuality within the development of Western modernity. It has been questioned whether this master narrative is more than a Western mythology. In any case, this paradigm has some severe drawbacks in that it tends to establish a canon of autobiographies while ignoring other self-narratives as historical sources. As a result, the historical experience expressed by the authors of that canon is privileged as the single path to modernity at the expense of other voices.5 It is evident that this concept of selective reading is not particularly helpful when dealing with non-European and/or gendered perspectives on history. One answer to this problem has been to redefine the genre of autobiographical material and to include practically every text that, in one way or another, refers to the person of the writer including not only autobiographies and memoirs in the classical sense but also documents like last wills, testaments, or protocols of interrogation. For this type of sources the term “ego documents” has come into use.6 While this approach promises both broadening considerably the scope of potential source material and avoiding Eurocentric teleologies, one may argue that, on the cost side, the new category of “ego documents”

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seems to be a bit of an umbrella term that is in need of being broken down and subcategorized in order to be analytically useful. Among ego documents covering the last few decades of the Ottoman Empire—which are the focus of our interest here—the Turkish hatırat literature forms such a heuristically useful subcategory. It is a literary genre known in Turkish by that word or some closely related terms (hatıra, anı). While being roughly the equivalent of “memoirs” (which is the translation I will use here), it is informed by the example of both contemporary European autobiographies and memoirs but merges them into a genre of its own right. It dates from the last decades of the nineteenth century when Ottoman literature underwent a process of rapid change adopting European literary forms and genres. There is a common understanding as to what the category comprises. The simplest definition would describe it as a text in which someone narrates personal memories. It should be stressed that the genre of hatırat ignores the classical distinction made between autobiography and memoirs but includes as a subgenre the (published) diary (günlük). It comprises also travel memoirs.7 On the other hand, the genre clearly excludes nonvoluntary testimonies of self like protocols of interrogation. Texts of the hatırat genre often contain the term hatırat (or one of its derivatives) in their titles. Almost regularly, even when the words hatırat, etc., are missing from the books’ titles, the publishing houses classify them into numbered series or subseries titled with one of these terms.8 Some of these books are published by the authors themselves; some of them are based on older text edited from manuscripts, translated from published Ottoman books, or collected from serialized articles in periodicals. Interestingly, the editing work seems to be undertaken more by aficionados than by professional academic historians. Although the size of the Turkish book market may be rather limited in absolute numbers, the Ottoman renaissance in the Turkish public during the past decade or two has resulted in the publication of a quite considerable number of these memoirs. It should be remarked that, with the emergence of a Republican nostalgia, the majority of memoirs are by no means limited to the late Ottoman period. On the contrary, with the passing of the time and of the generation who, through their parents and grandparents, had at least indirect access to the Ottoman past, the balance is increasingly tipped in favor of coverage limited to Republican times. Many of the memoirs, published in one of the countless small publishing houses, have a circulation of between 500 and 2,000 and are limited to a single edition but some of the more prominent authors published in bigger publishing companies may easily reach a considerably higher circulation, typically by issuing a new small edition each time the book is out of print.

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It comes as no surprise to find that the vast majority of these books are written by men. Nonetheless, there is a nonnegligible number of highly important memoirs written by women. One might even claim that for historians—if they are not exclusively interested in political history—women’s memoirs, as a rule, are more interesting than those written by males, not so much because they are comparatively rarer but because women were able to depict a more complete picture of their life world than Ottoman men were able to do. As Fanny Davis put it succinctly in her classical study, The Ottoman Lady, “The Ottoman did not write about his women. To do so would have been in the worst possible taste on his part.”9 Thus, most memoirs written by Ottoman men mention women of their households in a rather perfunctory way, if at all—a practice of writing that did not abruptly vanish with the Ottoman Empire but continued into the Turkish Republic. Ottoman women, on the other hand, did write about their men. Yet, in contrast to novels (containing sometimes autobiographic elements), poetry, and political and other essays written by women like Fatma Aliye, Nigâr Hanım, and Halide Edib, women’s memoirs entered the Turkish print market only in Republican times.10 On the other hand, the question of marginality of women’s voices in historiography cannot be restricted to the question of gender but has to consider also other axes that determine social status and identity like class and race, ethnicity and age.11 In this respect, the genre of the hatırat naturally privileges the voices of educated Muslim women belonging to the upper and middle classes of the Imperial center. The passage from Empire to Republic brought not only a political but also a cultural revolution. With it, the collective memory of the Ottoman Empire became settled into a different political and cultural context, reformulated in a new language and written in a new alphabet. Therefore, the memoirs written in Republican times dealing with their authors’ memory of the Ottoman time and space need careful contextualization. Despite all efforts, they will almost necessarily suffer from an unrecoverable distortion of perspective. The rare autobiographical writings by women dating from the period before the end of the Empire, therefore, carry with them the promise of being particularly valuable historical sources. Finally, it should be acknowledged that not only the authors but also the editors of memoirs act in the presence of social pressure and censorship, especially when the memoirs they are editing and publishing are written by a family member or ancestor. This can be illustrated with the fate of the diary of the famous Ottoman writer Nigâr Hanım, who died in 1918. In 1959 her son Salih Keramet Nigâr (1885–1987) published a small selection of her diary under the title Hayatımın Hikayesi (the story of my life) and donated

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the manuscript to the Aşiyan Müzesi in Istanbul. But it turned out that he had annihilated several of its probably nineteen volumes, obviously because he disapproved of their contents. However, according to Taha Toros, Nigâr Hanım had herself already destroyed those parts of her diary that were particularly critical of the Unionists after they had deposed Sultan Abdülhamid II following the abortive attempt at counter-revolution in April 1909.12 Even today, this social pressure seems not to have completely subsided. A considerable part of Edadil Açba’s preface to her edition of Leyla Açba’s memoirs consists of an “open letter to the authors who write about the various members of our family,” in which she refutes factual errors and offensive allegations concerning several female members of the Ottoman Imperial harem and concludes by demanding that authors exercise special diligence when writing about members of her family.13 Another recent example are the memoirs of Pakize Mislimelek Hanım, who was married in 1898 to Sultan Abdülhamid’s second son, Şehzade Mehmed Abdülkadir. Her memories, penned in exile in Lebanon during the 1950s, were edited in 2011 by Nemika Deryal Marşanoğlu, who—according to the preface of the book—decided to publish them without several passages dealing with intimate (mahrem) memories and without the last part of the memoirs covering the years from 1953 to 1955, in which year Mislimelek Hanım died in Tripoli.14 In 2005 an unspectacular looking booklet of not more than 150 pages printed on medium quality paper was published in Istanbul by the publishing house of the newspaper Dünya Gazetesi. The booklet is entitled: Hoşçakal Trabzon (Goodbye, Trabzon). Its subtitle, “Anatolia During the Time of the First World War as Reflected in a Girl’s Diary” is slightly misleading because the text is not a diary in the strict sense of the term but rather a memoir covering the time from summer 1914 to June 1917, written before 1919 by the author Mediha Kayra in her mid teens. However, the book was categorized by the publishing house on the back of the title page as being number 23 in its memoirs series.15 We owe the publication of this document to Mediha Kayra’s youngest brother, Cahit Kayra (b. 1917). He transcribed the text from the Arabic alphabet and made alterations to adapt the wording to modern standard Turkish. Therefore his rendering may be considered a translation. Editor and translator Cahit Kayra provided an introduction (“Önsöz,” pp. 9–11), a conclusion (“Sonsöz,” pp. 111–113), an annotation consisting of 98 notes (pp. 116–119) and an appendix containing photographs of family members, graphs of family trees, a letter by Mediha’s grandmother to her son (Mediha’s paternal uncle Naci Bey), and some documents on war events that seemed rather randomly chosen.

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In February 2013 Cahit Kayra published a revised and enlarged second edition of the memoirs, this time through the publishing house Tarihçi Kitabevi, where he already had published some of his own books. The new edition had a slightly altered title: Hoşça Kal Trabzon. Merhaba İstanbul.16 In comparison to the first edition the second contained the same material with two immensely valuable additions: some information of Mediha Kayra’s life after 1919 largely based on Cahit Kayra’s own recollections and some documents in his possession (pp. 147–170),17 as well as the complete and legible facsimile of the original manuscript (pp. 195–349)—of which the first edition had only provided photographs of the first and the last two pages. Cahit Kayra18 graduated in 1938 from the Mülkiye and became a financial inspector (maliye müfettişi). In 1948 he was sent for training to London where he stayed a year. He became a leading bureaucrat in the Turkish department of finances. After his retirement in 1972 he became a member of the executive board of the Turkish İş Bank and entered politics. In 1973 he became a member of Parliament for Ankara and in 1974 was appointed minister of energy and natural resources (Enerji ve Tabii Kaynaklar Bakanı) in the coalition cabinet of Bülent Ecevit’s CHP and Necmettin Erbakan’s MSP. He is the author of more than thirty publications from 1953 to 2008 on topics ranging from economic and financial issues to short stories and historical investigations. He has also published his own memoirs. Mediha Kayra was born in 1902 in Trabzon and died 2003 in Kadıköy, Istanbul, when she was 101 years old. Her father was the merchant (tüccar) Ali Lütfi Dihkanzade (1869–1931).19 His family originated from Azerbaijan. Her mother, Kadriye Salihoğlu, originated from Akhaltsikhe (türk. Ahıska) in southwest Georgia. The families had emigrated to Trabzon following the wars with Russia in 1878 and 1828. In 1916 Mediha’s family emigrated to Istanbul. They rented a sailing vessel which for 35 Lira in gold—and an additional 20 gold Lira which the sailors extorted from their passengers by threatening to return even before having reached Tirebolu—which was barely able to carry the three families of more than twenty people.20 They departed on 18 February 1916 from Trabzon21 and sailed to Samsun, where they continued over land to Merzifon. After having stayed there for a while they traveled via Çorum and Yozgat to Ankara and from there they continued by train to Istanbul where they arrived on 31 October 1916. The time in Trabzon starting in the summer of 1914, this voyage and the first year in Istanbul, are described in Mediha Kayra’s memoir. Having already attended elementary school in Trabzon, she continued her education in the Mahfiruz Sultan Rüşdiye in Kadıköy and finally became enrolled in the teachers’ academy İttihad–i Osmani Darülmuallimatı in Bakırköy, from which she graduated in 1923. After that she worked

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as a teacher in various positions until her retirement in 1969.22 She never married. Instead, after the death of her father and uncle and the loss of the family’s fortune in the Great Depression of 1929, she became the family’s sole breadwinner. Her brother Cahit characterizes her as follows. They sent Mediha with five years to the local school (sıbyan mektebi) and made her a hafıza (who knows the whole Qur’an by heart). When Mediha came to Istanbul she was a young girl who wore the çarşaf, (women’s black outdoor overgarment) did the prayer five times a day, on religious holidays recited the Qurʾan and blamed the women with uncovered faces in the streets of Istanbul. But at school she was always the best. Her maternal uncle Hasan Naci Yamaç (1881–1937),23 who was member of parliament for Trabzon, enrolled her as an internal ( yatılı olarak) to the teachers’ academy İttihad–i Osmani. Mediha finishes this school too as the best of her cohort. . . . The war ends. The Republic of Turkey is founded. . . . The Feyziâtî secondary schools are founded. Mediha is 22 years old and starts her career as the director of the girls’ part of the Fayziati liseleri. In Turkey begins the era of Mustafa Kemal’s revolutions. Mediha leaves the çarşaf. She cuts her hair, takes piano lessons and starts to learn French and classical Western music. The Great Depression of 1929. . . Mediha’s paternal uncle Zihni Efendi, her father Ali Lütfi, her maternal uncle Naci lose their fortunes during the crisis. Not only their fortunes but also their lives. The husband of her elder sister Sadiye,24 the pharmacist Ruhi Bey who had worked in Egypt, dies there and Sadiye returns to Turkey with four little children and re-affiliates to the family. At home there is a grandmother, an aunt, a young girl named Cemile who lives with them [probably taking care of them (C.H.)], her siblings Cahit and Sadiye and the latter’s children. Of the other siblings Hamit,25 who had been unemployed, went to Ankara in search of employment. Macit attends the Mülkiye as an internal ( yatılı). Cahit attends secondary school. Sadiye’s children are still very young. Mediha shoulders the burden of the whole family; both small and big ones live off her income. Mediha is the head of the family. Everyone needs her, everyone is nurtured by her.26

Mediha, as explicitly acknowledged by her brother, was a strong women, “a different person of a strength that the other members of the numerous Dihkan family were unable to attain. . . . She spent her life that promised great success for keeping alive her next of kin and relatives.”27 One might speculate that had she been not a woman her career could have made a difference despite her being occupied with financing her relatives. The reader wants to know more of her by her own writing. But there is no more than the memoir she wrote when she was about sixteen years

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of age. A second volume she wrote about the time of the Turkish war of independence was obviously lost in the fire of the wooden buildings of the Feyziati secondary schools in Çağaloğlu in 1930.28 The text provides an ego document of the hatırat genre that bears considerable historical interest as it was written before Republican times, in all probability during adolescence, reviewing a time not more distant than three or four years, and was written by a young woman who did not belong to the elite circles of the Imperial center but originated from a provincial middle-class family and told her story of migration and displacement. The manuscript is a notebook, perhaps an exercise book, written in fluent rık’a-style handwriting. The last page is concluded with the date Cumartesi, 21 Kanun–i evvel 1334, corresponding to Saturday, 21 December 1918.29 As mentioned above, the text is clearly not a diary but a memoir originally entitled “Harb–i umumi içerisinde bir ailenin sergüzeşt–i hayati” (The Adventures of a Family During the World War), translated by Cahit Kayra as “Cihan savaşı icinde bir ailenin yaşam serüveni.”30 A contemplation about the timing of the booklet’s first publication is in order here. The boom of memoirs in the Turkish book market during the last decade or two has often been observed. However, in December 2004 Fethiye Çetin’s book Anneannem, about her grandmother’s lost Armenian identity, was published. It made a huge impression and—together with the memoirs of the İzmir-located medical doctor İrfan Palalı, Tehçir Çocukları (2005), which were written in the form of a novel—was considered the trigger for the breaking of a wall of silence. Cahit Kaya’s book was published in August 2005. It might be regarded as a kind of response, not necessarily in the sense of a direct reaction to Fethiye Çetin’s book—in reminding its readers that Ottoman Muslim civilians, too, suffered dislocation and hardship during that war—but rather as a contribution to the wave of remembering the now distant past of World War I, which has reached the utmost end of what Jan Assman has termed “communicative memory.” One cornerstone of this recent revival of late Ottoman memory is the fact that it gave a boost to what Fatma Müge Göçek has called the “postnationalist critical narrative on reading genocide.”31 This narrative does not only involve the Armenian tragedy but also the acknowledgment of ethnic difference at the historical roots of the Republic of Turkey in general. Although this postnationalist discourse might not be endorsed by Cahit Kayra, it is reflected in his afterword when he observes that Mediha does not write of the Greeks and Armenians present in Trabzon except on two occasions when she mentions Greek girls in Trabzon using the general confusion created by the attack of Russian warships to steal apples and the famous last words said by the Ottoman governor (vali) and the member of parliament, Naci Yamaç, when

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evacuating Trabzon in face of the approaching Russian army to the Greek metropolitan: “We leave the land (memleket) temporarily in your hands. But we will return within some months.”32 It is interesting to note that Mediha comments on the theft of apples committed by the infidel girls by writing that it “aroused a feeling of revenge” in them (intikam damarımızı büsbütün kızıştırıyordu)33—which is the only occasion where feelings of open ethnic hatred become tangible in the text. There are actually some more mentions of local non-Muslims that escaped the editor’s notice: in the context of the imminent outbreak of war at the end of the summer of 1914 she briefly mentions that the “Kabayanidi and other Christians who were living [in the village] Soğuk Su had been organizing cock fights and told from the results that in this war the Ottomans would emerge victorious”34 without giving further details. On another occasion, referring to a date when she was still in Trabzon, Mediha Kayra writes: “The 29th of Kanun–i sani 1330, a Monday, brought up the washerwoman Popi Abla, whom we made wash our laundry.”35 It is only her name that indicates this woman’s being Greek. On yet another occasion, not long before the family’s flight, she mentions that her uncle was drained of money because he had paid back a considerable amount he had owed to a certain “Kostoropol.”36 No further explanation is given and again we can only conclude by his name that the money lender must have been Greek. There is yet another revealing passage: when on board of the sailing vessel after having left Tirebolu, they continue their way along the coastline the sight of which, with its “emerald green creeks” and wooded mountains, is described as beautiful. Then they pass a township or a village called Ebiye, “which I didn’t like because its inhabitants were mostly Greek (ahalisinin eskserisi Urum olduğundan hiç de hoşuma gitmedi).”37 When they land in Giresun there is no hotel room because of the multitude of Muslim refugees. They approach the police, which leads them to an empty Armenian house for the night. No comment is made by the author. One can assume that she knew about the forced deportation of the Armenians but it is rather improbable that she had heard about the horrifying circumstances. Finally, when describing their stay in Merzifon, she complains about their being hosted for another time in a Christian quarter: “Because the quarter where we resided was the Armenian quarter we were deprived of the Muslim call to prayer. In our immediate neighborhood there was a huge Greek Church whose bells caused us headaches every Sunday. Look at the bad luck: wherever we arrive we stay either in the Armenian or the Greek quarter and most of the time have a church in our neighborhood. Since we have left Trabzon we have never heard the ezan.”38 Judging from Mediha’s memoirs, one gets the impression that the Ottoman intercommunal relations between Muslims and Christians, at least in

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Trabzon at the eve of the war, were characterized both by distance and cultural demarcation, a situation that was certainly aggravated by the trauma of war. Interestingly, any mention of Christians is missing from the memoirs once the family reaches Istanbul. Contrary to what may be expected, and regardless of her young age, Mediha, in her notes, is highly politicized and keeps following the political and military news about the war. Her memoirs open with the following words: “In the year 1330 we went to our summerhouse in Soğuksu. There were rumors that there would be a World War. But we didn’t attach any importance to these words because we were interested in something else. Yes! We waited for the return of Captain Rauf and his colleagues who were to bring our dreadnoughts Sultan Osman and Reşadiye from England. But alas! All our hopes were frustrated. Not only ours. Our dreadnoughts that were so impatiently awaited by all Ottomans, all Muslims, were confiscated by the English government and not given back to us.”39 Her notebook presents its author as informed and emotionally deeply involved in many of the ongoing political issues. It is very probable that these were discussed in the family and one can assume that her uncle Naci Bey, being an active politician, had a big share in it. It seems plausible that Mediha’s emotional interest arose when politics and war became part of her life world with the repeated bombardments of Trabzon by Russian war vessels and her family’s resulting displacement. But one can also assume that the state schools she was attending in Trabzon and Istanbul must have played a major role in indoctrinating the children with patriotic fervor. Yet it is far from clear whether her political concerns did occupy her then (as she seems to indicate) or whether they were more of an accommodation to what she might have believed to be an requirement of the literary genre of memoirs, i.e., a concept of political memoirs written by males. As has been argued, such an accommodation need not to be the result of a conscious adaptation of the memory to currently felt requirements but may well be the outcome of a sincerely felt belief in how things had been.40 From a spatial perspective, her memoirs may be divided into three main parts: Trabzon and its hinterland, the long voyage from Trabzon to Istanbul along the Black Sea coast, and through Anatolia and finally Istanbul, or rather what were then the city’s suburbs on the Asiatic side of the Bosphorus. On top of that geographical base layer. another layer may be cast that contains all of Mediha’s movements within the larger geographic contexts: e.g., while in Trabzon, she goes to school, to the hamam, or flees to one of the villages near the town when Trabzon is bombarded by Russian warships. During the voyage to Istanbul she walks about in townships like Giresun or

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Merzifon where her family is staying for some days or weeks, and once in Istanbul she goes to school or crosses the Bosphorus to visit Istanbul. But wherever she goes, she almost never moves around on her own; she is always accompanied by at least one member of her family. The network of her extended family forms the third spatial layer of the text. It has the dimension of a social space in which all her own movements but also the movements of her family members are embedded. This social space finds its expression also in the emotional concern Mediha expresses throughout the text for family members and family affairs: the marriage of her uncle, the health of her grandmother, of her father, and of her aunts, the birth of her youngest brother. The social space is extended beyond those who are physically present by the telegraph. The family sends or receives numerous telegrams providing communication with family members being temporarily or permanently absent. Although it is not closed, the social space emerging from the text of her memoirs remains largely limited to the extended network of her family, except when her school friend Nuriye spends some time with her in the summer retreat. The social space in which Mediha moves may therefore be imagined like a web (with her family members being the nodes) that is cast over the first and second layers of space. While memory tends to have its own temporal logic that may differ from chronology, its claim of factuality—a part of Leujeune’s famous autobiographic pact—depends on its corresponding to the measurable calendar chronology. Although Mediha’s memoirs are here mostly plausible, they present their readers occasionally with chronological mismatches, especially between dates and corresponding weekdays. As there are several occurrences of weekdays in the text without the accompanying date, one is lead to believe that weekdays were important for Mediha’s personal memory for structuring events in time. The first exact date mentioned in the memoirs is the day of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, which is given correctly as Sunday, 28 June in the original, i.e., according to the Gregorian calendar.41 The next date she gives is the arrival in Trabzon of her maternal uncle Hasan Naci, who came from Istanbul: Thursday, 6 August. This again has to be according to the Gregorian calendar, because if it was according to the Ottoman Maliye calendar, it would have to be Wednesday, 19 August 1914. At that time Mediha was not in Trabzon but spending the summer in the nearby village Soğuksu, where her uncle arrived on Thursday, 11 August. This, again, has to be a Gregorian date. The next few dates she presents refer to certain declarations of war, all of them given correctly and according to the Gregorian calendar. The same is true for her description of the solar eclipse of 21 August 1914. But after that she switches to the Ottoman Maliye calendar, and—with one or two exceptions42—all dates given

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later in the book refer to that calendar system.43 The festivities in Trabzon at the occasion of the unilateral abolishment of the Ottoman capitulations on 7 September cannot have been held on 27 August (27 Ağustos). The latter date, therefore, must be read according to the Maliye calendar, making it correspond to 9 September 1914 of the Gregorian calendar.44 According to Mediha Kayra, the first Russian bombardment of Trabzon happened on Monday, 3 Teşrin–i sani, which would correspond to 16 November 1914.45 However, she claims that news of the Russian declaration of war against the Ottoman Empire reached Trabzon on the day after 2 Teşrin–i sani, which would correspond to 15 November 1914.46 As Russia actually declared war on Turkey on 2 November 1914, corresponding to Monday, 20 Tişrin–i evvel (Maliye calendar) and news came to Trabzon by telegraph, this appears rather implausible. Perhaps, here again, we may assume that she actually referred to the Georgian calendar. The memoirs describe the “big bombardment of Trabzon” by Russian warships on 29 Kanun–i sani, corresponding to 11 February 1915.47 As a consequence of this daunting experience, her father ordered his family to retreat to a village (probably meaning Soğuksu) near Trabzon, where they seem to have remained until August 1915. As “in September the schools were opening and we had to go back down,”48 they seem to have returned to Trabzon only sometime at the end of August 1915. Interestingly she is exclusively describing the summertime during Ramazan in this village; spring and early summer of 1915 are missing from her record. It is therefore possible that they actually moved back and forth between Trabzon and the village several times after February 1915. It is also possible that she mixed up the times of Ramazan that they spent at their summer resort in the respective years of 1915 and 1916. After all, she was then between twelve and thirteen years of age. In any case, spring and early summer 1915, up to Ramazan (began 13 July 1915) are completely missing from the memoirs. The fall of 1915 she seems to have spent in Trabzon. She wrote that she learned of the Ottoman victory in the Dardanelles Campaign in the third week of Kanun–i sani, which would correspond to the end of January 1916.49 In the winter of 1916 Russian forces moved quickly forward in Anatolia, capturing Erzurum and Muş on 16 February, Bitlis on 3 March, and Rize on 8 March.50 According to Mediha Kayra’s memoirs, after the fall of Erzurum the governor of Trabzon ordered the town to be evacuated within twenty-four hours. The vivid description of her father’s difficulties in finding a boat is certainly not exaggerated. According to Ottoman documentation, about sixty thousand Muslims of the province of Trabzon fled from Russian occupation.51 Mediha remembers the precise date of the moment of her family’s departure: “On Friday, 5 Şubat 1331 [= 18 February 1916] at the time of the afternoon prayer.”52

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Dates during the voyage to Istanbul, which lasted more than eight months, are scarce and frequently broken (only the plausible ones are presented here): Wednesday, 1 March 1916: departure from Giresun;53 Thursday, 16 March 1916: departure from Ünye;54 during April, travel from Samsun to Merzifon,55 where they stayed for almost half a year.56 On Saturday, 21 October they moved on. The date of the family’s arrival in Ankara is given by Mediha as “Thursday, 13 Teşrin–i evvel,”57 which corresponds to 26 October [1916]. As the day was not a Thursday but a Tuesday, either the date or the day of the week must be erroneous. A few days later they boarded the Anatolian railway and arrived at Haydarpaşa terminal near Istanbul in the afternoon of 31 October 1916. For two days they stayed with her maternal uncle before they moved to the house of a relative in Bostancı on the Asiatic side of the Bosphorus, at that time a village. On 1 Teşrin–i sani 1332 (14 November 1916) her brother started school in Istanbul as a boarding student in the Galata sultanisi. From then on, he came only once a week on Thursdays to see his family. Naturally, he was therefore a bit unhappy in the beginning, Mediha remarked. Sometime in late fall or in the winter of 1916–17 their house in Bostancı was burglarized while they were visiting relatives in nearby Kadıköy, whereupon the moved to a flat in Kadıköy. She herself started attending a newly opened school in Kadıköy on 12 February 1917. A month later, on 11 March 1917, her brother Cahit (the editor of the memoirs) was born.58 On Friday, 8 June 1917 the family moved back to Bostancı; on 11 June her maternal aunt went to the hospital in Haydarpaşa for a small operation, and returned on 18 June. On Wednesday, 20 June 1917 Mediha Kayra received her school report which turned out to be excellent. With it, she moved from the fourth to the fifth class at school. While this is the last entry of the memoirs, the last date that is given at the bottom of her notebook’s last written page is one and a half years later: Saturday, 21 December 1918, which is probably the day she concluded the record of the first volume her memoirs, then being sixteen years old. As it is today, at the time of Mediha’s youth Istanbul was the metropolis and its attractions were known all over the country. After her arrival at the Haydarpaşa terminal, Mediha and those members of her family who had never been to Istanbul were naturally eager to see the city. The bridge of Galata spanning the Golden Horn, especially, seems to have been famous. We have to remember that in those days the Asian side of the Bosphorus where Mediha’s family lived was not considered to be part of Istanbul proper although in many respects it already formed a part of it. Judging from the memoirs, Istanbul—with the exceptions of the bridge of Galata

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and the Kapalı Carşı—made only a limited impression on Mediha and her brother Hamit, who she reports to have remarked: “I cannot see something special with Istanbul.” The late season and its heavy weather with rain and storms made the city look rather inhospitable when Mediha and her family arrived. On her first trip to the city she expressed her dislike of the passage by steamship. However, she enjoyed going by tramway, which she described as “moving like a fish.”59 Apart from these attractions, no general positive “urban experience” is reflected in her memoirs except for a visit to an exhibition of the Red Crescent that was shown in a part of the building of the school that her brother Hamit was attending. Although Mediha does not explicitly mention whether she had difficulties in accommodating herself to her new life in a big city like Istanbul, the text gives several indications that she in fact must have experienced such problems. She repeatedly expresses her indignation about the shamelessness of the unveiled faces of women.60 The experience of burglary in winter 1916–17 was certainly unpleasant. Because of the war, food was expensive and scarce; yet she praises the government for its provision of supplies. This probably reflects the influence that her maternal uncle, Hasan Naci, a Unionist member of Parliament since 1914, had on her political ideas.61 Apart from politics, Mediha’s attention was more directed toward nature than toward the city, but in a way that reflects a thoroughly urban perspective. Thus, in Samsun, while still on the way to Istanbul, the family was informed of the occupation of Trabzon by Russian forces, which caused Mediha to dedicate the most emotional passage of her memoirs to the loss of her hometown: Ah, the fall of Trabzon. . .ah. . . . My heart is in pain. Ah, what a bitter day. My God. It means the this holy fatherland (mukaddes anavatan), these blessed soil where we were born and raised will be trampled under the boots of the enemy. From the minarets, instead of the Muhammedan call to prayer (ezan–i muhammadi) that used to fill our souls with awe and to refresh our belief, the bells of the enemy will ring. We had hoped that this would never happen. But now our ears have heard that the enemy has entered the town, that our beloved barracks that resembled that red flag and our Sultani school had been set on fire by our soldiers. I tried to close my ears to avoid hearing but I did not manage. Suddenly all power left me and I became completely debilitated. I leaned against something and started to think. Now the sweet minutes I had spent in Trabzon came to life before my inner eyes. When I remembered those nights, my heart seemed not to fit in my breast anymore and became like exploding. I wanted to cry but was not able to. My heart felt like dead. My mouth refused to say anything but “ah.” Staring to nowhere I sat motionless for one or two hours. Now my fatherland was growing before my eyes, and only now I understood

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its value. I remembered its countless woods, its emerald green creeks, its shady forests, its shadowy pine groves, its melancholic waterfalls. Really my homeland (memleket) was beautiful.62

It seems striking that—apart from a few symbolic places like the barracks and the school—it is the beauty of nature she is associating with her hometown. Although in 1890 the population of the town Trabzon was estimated to be only thirty-five thousand (of whom nearly twenty thousand were Muslims)63 the town can safely be regarded to have formed an urban space. It is not clear whether her remembering Trabzon as the embodiment of the beauty of nature was in reaction to her experience of the larger and more distinctively urban space of Istanbul or whether it was an expression of adherence to literary convention of style—or for that matter to a discursive formation that identified romantic longings and the memory of a lost home with beautiful nature. Interestingly, the most emotional and positive description in the Istanbul portion of her memoirs is dedicated to the experience of two mild spring nights in the garden of her uncle’s house in Bostancı. “The garden did not resemble the garden that I had seen in fall. The trees that during fall had been consisting of dead-dry branches were now adorned with fresh and green leaves and flowers in many colors. The place before the house was decorated with flowerbeds framed with grass and full of various flowers, the vines had grown, the graveled paths had been raked, the weeds round the house had been pulled out—in short, the garden had become beautiful.”64 Shortly after that, she, her brother, her sister, and her aunt visited the garden another time. They sat on the balcony after sunset. “The scenery was extremely beautiful. The newly risen moon illuminated the nature, the lights of the princes islands opposite of us—especially those of the naval academy on Heybeli Ada—were reflected in the water. The quiet sea whispered with its small waves touching the beach. The nightingales sang. A mild spring-wind stroked gently our hair. The phonograph in the house with its sometimes sweet and sometimes sad and mournful sound added to this beauty of the nature.”65 This enjoyment of the famous spring and summer nights in the garden of one of the legendary waterside residences along the shores of the Bosphorus has been a constant theme in literature as in memoirs and it certainly constitutes an “urban experience” specific to Istanbul. As Cahit Kayra underlines, Mediha certainly was extraordinary among the girls of her generation in many respects, e.g., in the interest she took in politics. On the other hand, in many other respects she probably was not.

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However, that does not diminish the historical value of her memoirs, on the contrary. They do not offer a grand literary scheme of the self, perhaps because she was too young or because she had not read enough novels. We do not know what or if she read in her leisure time. We do not learn about any tensions in the family, nor is this something to be expected. But what we do learn is something about the comparative ease with which a Muslim girl could move in the urban space during the last years of the Empire as well as a treasure of details about the history of everyday life. The history of Ottoman women is kind of jigsaw puzzle that needs a lot of consideration and the memoirs of Mediha form an interesting part in it.

APPENDIX: COMPARATIVE TABLE OF CONTENTS FOR THE LATINIZED TEXT AND THE FACSIMILE As neither the text nor the facsimile of the memoirs provide page references to each other, the following comparative table of contents was created. It references the subtitles of the memoirs as provided by their editor, Cahit Kayra. The first two pages’ numbers refer to the latinized and simplified version of the text in the first and second editions; the third indicates the page number of the facsimile in the second edition. Page numbers of subtitles that were inserted into the latinized version by the editor without having an equivalent in the original manuscript are in square brackets.

Subtitle Savaşın Arifisinde Kapitülasyonların Kaldırılması Dayıbeyimin Mebusluğu ve İstanbul’a Gidişi 1330, Rusya’nın Türkiye’ye Savaş İlanı Trabzon’un İlk Bombardımanı Kentten Köylere Kaçış Yine Bombardıman Büyük Bombardıman Yine Köyde Gerçek Köy Yaşamı Yine Bombardıman Trabzon’a Dönüş Fena Haberler Çanakkale’nin Kurtulması

1

Kayra 13 15 16 16 17 19 20 22 27 30 32 33 37 37

2

Kayra 21 24 25 25 26 28 30 33 39 43 45 46 50 51

Kayra2, facsimile [197] 200 201 201 202 [204] [207] 210 [218] 224 227 [228] [234] 235

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Karanlık Günler, Uğursuz Haberler Göç Hazırlıkları Erzurum Düştü! Karadan mı, Denizden mi? Portakal Adlı Bir İnek Kayık Tutuldu Otuz Beş Sarı Altın Lira Denizde Çavuşlu Köyü Tirebolu Tehlike Karada Yine Deniz ve Müthiş Dalgalar Giresun Motorda Ünye’de Sis ve Büyükannenmin Kıblenüması Samsun Trabzon’un Düşüşü Gidiyoruz Ama Yine Geleceğiz Merzifon Yollarında Merzifon Merzofon’dan Ayrılış Hazırlıkları Sündüs Nine ve Sarınca Köyü Hoşça Kal Merzifon Çorum, Alaca, Sungurlu Yağlı Köyü Kızılırmak Kılıçlar Asi Yozgat Ankara Tren ve İstanbul Yolu İstanbul Ömer Cahit’in Doğumu Günlük Yaşam Hilaliahmer Sergisini Ziyaret Bostancı’da Bahar Mahfirûz Sultan Okulu Sınıfın Birincisi

38 40 42 44 51 52 34 57 58 60 61 63 66 68 70 71 73 74 78 79 80 82 86 87 89 89 91 92 93 94 95 97 99 104 105 105 106 108 110

165

52 54 57 58 68 69 71 75 76 79 80 83 87 89 91 93 95 96 101 103 103 106 111 112 114 115 117 118 119 120 121 123 125 132 133 134 135 137 139

237 [239] [243] [245] [257] [258] [262] [265] [267] [271] [272] [276] [281] [284] [287] [289] [291] [293] [298] [301] [302] [307] [313] [314] [317] [318] [321] [323] [324] [325] [327] [328] [331] 340 [341] 342 [343] [346] [349]

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NOTES 1. Margaret Strobel, “Gender, Sex, and Empire,” in Islamic and European Expansion: The Forging of a Global Order, ed. Michael Adas (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 345. 2. E.g., the volume edited by Amira El-Azhary Sonbol, Beyond the Exotic: Women’s Histories in Islamic Societies (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2005). 3. Madeleine Zilfi, “Thoughts on Women and Slavery in the Ottoman Era and Historical Sources,” in Beyond the Exotic, ed. Amira El-Azhary Sonbol (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2005), 135. 4. Cf. Thomas J. Prasch, “Orientalism’s Other, Other Orientalisms: Women in the Scheme of Empire,” Journal of Women’s History 7, no. 4 (1995): 177–179. 5. Cf. Gabriele Jancke and Claudia Ulbrich, “Vom Individuum zur Person. Neue Konzepte im Spannungsfeld von Autobiographietheorie und Selbstzeugnisforschung,” Querelles. Jahrbuch für Frauen– und Geschlechterforschung 10 (2005): 7–27. This introductory text emerged from the context of a research cluster in Germany on “Testimonies of the self in trans-cultural perspective” (DFG Forschergruppe 530: Selbstzeugnisse in transkultureller Perspektive, Berlin, 2004–11). For details of its research, see http://www.cms.fu–berlin.de/dfg–fg/fg530/index.html, accessed 1 August 2013. 6. See Winfried Schulze, “Ego-Dokumente. Annäherung an den Menschen in der Geschichte? Vorüberlegungen für die Tagung ‘Ego–Dokumente’,” in Ego–Dokumente. Annäherung an den Menschen in der Geschichte, ed. Winfried Schulze (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1996), 11–30. 7. For the latter, see, e.g., Şerafeddin Mağmumi, Anadolu ve Suriye’de seyahat hatıraları (Cairo: 1327/1909). The term overlaps with the term seyahatname (travelogue) which, however, could also denote a purely geographical description of a region without any personal travel narrative; see Christoph Herzog and Raoul Motika, “Orientalism ‘alla turca’: Late 19th / Early 20th Century Ottoman Voyages into the Muslim ‘Outback’,” Welt des Islams 40, no. 2 (2000): 162–164. For a cross between a diary and a travel memoir, see Osmanzâde Hüseyin Vassaf’s Hatırat–ı Hicaziyye, available in modern print as Hicaz Hatıratı, ed. Cemil Çiftçi (Istanbul: Kurtuba, 2011). Both the author and his editor have classified the work as hatırat. 8. To give a random example for illustration: the fourth edition of the memoirs of Leyla Açba, a member of the Imperial harem, has been printed as vol., no. 19 of the Hatırat Kitaplığı (memoirs series) of the Istanbul-based publishing house Timaş Yayınları: Leyla Açba, Bir Çerkes Prensesinin Harem Hatıraları, 4th ed. (Istanbul: Timaş, 2010). 9. Fanny Davis, The Ottoman Lady: A Social History from 1718 to 1918 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), xi. 10. There were certainly exceptions, e.g., the harem memoirs of Leyla Saz, that were first serialized in the paper Vakıt in Istanbul in 1921. See Börte Sagaster,

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11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

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Im Harem von Istanbul. Osmanisch–türkische Frauenkultur im 19. Jahrhundert (Rissen, Hamburg: E.B.-Verlag, 1989). Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 215–244. Nazan Bekiroğlu, Şâir Nigâr Hanım (Istanbul: İletişim, 1998), 17–21. Açba, Bir Çerkes Prensesinin Harem Hatıraları, 16–21. Nemika Deryal Marşanoğlu, ed., Haremden Sürgüne. Bir Osmanlı Prensesi (Istanbul: İnkılâp, 2011), 9–10. Mediha Kayra, Hoşça Kal Trabzon. Bir Kız Çocuğun Günlüğünden Birinci Dünya Savaşı’nda Anadolu. Günümüz Türkçesine çeviren: Cahit Kayra (Istanbul: Dünya, 2005). The book was printed in August; the subtitle given above is missing from the title page inside the book. This remained unaltered in the second edition. Henceforth, the first edition will be referred to as Kayra1, the second as Kayra2. The editor’s introduction in Kayra2 is on pp. 13–17; the conclusion of the first edition appears on pp. 141–144. Some additional photographs are included in these pages. See his biography at http://www.mmd.org.tr/memberdetail.aspx?memberid= 142, accessed 25 May 2010. Kayra1, 116, n. 8; Kayra2, 198, n. 8. Kayra1, 54, 60, 68; Kayra2, 71f, 79, 89. Kayra1, 55; Kayra2, 73. More details about her life after 1919 are available in Kayra2, 147–170. Kayra1, 116, n. 5; Kayra2, 191, n. 5. Lived 1897–1989; see Kayra1, 24 and 116, n. 16; Kayra2, 191, n. 16. Lived 1903–1965; see Kayra1, 116, n. 6; Kayra2, 191, n. 6. Kayra1, 10f; Kayra2, 14f. Kayra1, 10; Kayra2, 14. Kayra1, 11; Kayra2, 15. The corresponding date “Aralık 1916” given in Kayra1, 119, n. 98 / Kayra2, 194, n. 98 is obviously erroneous. Cf. Kayra1, 13, 123; Kayra2, 21, facs. 197. Fatma Müge Göçek, “Reading Genocide. Turkish Historiography on the Armenians: Deportations and Massacres 1915,” in Middle East Historiographies: Narrating the Twentieth Century, ed. Israel Gershoni, Amy Singer, Y. Hakan Erdem (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006), 121–123. See Kayra1, 53, 79, 113; Kayra2, 71, 103, 143, facs. 261, 302. Kayra1, 53; Kayra2, 71, facs. 261. Kayra1, 16; Kayra2, 24, facs. 200. Kayra1, 22; Kayra2, 33, facs. 210. Either the day of the week or the date seems to be erroneous here. Kayra1, 44, Kayra2, 59, facs. 246. Kayra1, 61; Kayra2, 80, facs. 272. Kayra1, 83, Kayra2, 108, facs. 308f.

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39. Kayra1, 13, Kayra2, 21, facs. 197. 40. Cf. Harald Welzer, Das kommunikative Gedächtnis. Eine Theorie der Erinnerung, 2nd ed. (München: CH Beck, 2008). 41. Kayra1, 13, Kayra2, 21, facs. 197. 42. The day of the Romanian declaration of war against Austria on 27 August 1916; see Kayra1, 103; Kayra2, 130, facs. 337. For the other exception, see below. 43. After 15 February 1917 the difference of thirteen days between the Maliye and the Gregorian calendar was abolished by a change to the Maliye calendar, which was adapted to the Gregorian but kept its counting of the years starting with the hijra. 44. Kayra1, 15; Kayra2, 24, facs. 200. 45. Goloğlu, Trabzon Tarihi (2nd ed. Trabzon: Serander, 2013), 217 gives 17 November 1914 as the date of the first Russian bombardment of Trabzon. 46. Kayra1, 16, Kayra2, 25f, facs. 201f. 47. Kayra1, 22–27, Kayra2, 33–38, facs. 210–218. 48. Kayra1, 33, Kayra2, 46, facs. 229. 49. Kayra1, 37; Kayra2, 51, facs. 235. 50. Stanford Shaw, The Ottoman Empire in World War I, vol. 2 (Ankara: TTK, 2008): 984–985. 51. Ibid, 999. 52. Kayra1, 55; Kayra2, 73, facs. 264. 53. Kayra1, 70; Kayra2, 92, facs. 287. 54. Kayra1, 73, Kayra2, 95, facs. 291. In the latinized version the year 1333 is given, in the facsimile it is 1332. 55. There are several precise dates of their journey given for April 1916 but they are all problematic; see Kayra1, 78–83; Kayra2, 101–197, facs. 298–308. 56. Kayra1, 89; Kayra2, 114, facs. 317 gives precisely a duration of five months and twenty days for their residence in Merzifon. In that case they would have arrived there on 1 May 1916 (= 18 Nisan 1332). 57. Kayra1, 95; Kayra2, 121; facs. 327. 58. For the preceding four dates the days of the week given in the text do not match their corresponding dates; see Kayra1, 99, 102 104; Kayra2, 125, 130, 132, facs. 332, 337, 340. E.g., 11 March 1917 was not a Saturday as indicated in the memoirs but a Sunday. 59. Kayra1, 99–101; Kayra2, 125–129, facs. 331–335. 60. Kayra1, 99, 101; Kayra2, 125,129, facs. 331, 335. 61. This is also proposed by Cahit Kayra; Kayra1, 118, n. 89; Kayra2, 194, n. 89. 62. Kayra1, 78; Kayra2, 101, facs. 298ff. 63. Vital Cuinet, La Turquie d’Asie, vol. 1 (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1890), 43. 64. Kayra1, 107f; Kayra2, 135, facs. 344. 65. Kayra1, 107; Kayra2, 135, facs. 344f.

Contributors

‫ﱬﱫ‬

Sevgi Adak is a Ph.D. researcher at Leiden University, School of Middle Eastern Studies, and a research fellow at the International Institute for Social History, Amsterdam. Adak’s latest publication is a book chapter she coauthored, “Is ‘Dialogue among Civilizations’ a True Remedy for ‘Clash of Civilizations’? Rethinking Civilizationist Categories with Reference to Turkey-EU Relations,” published in Mojtaba Mahdavi and W. Andy Knight, eds., Dialogue and ‘Dignity of Difference’: Building Capacity for Otherness (London: Ashgate, 2012). Her academic interests include modern Turkish history, state-society relations in the Middle East, women’s history, and contemporary feminisms in the Middle East. On Barak is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Middle Eastern & African History at Tel Aviv University. He is the author of several articles and two books, Names Without Faces: From Polemics to Flirtation in an Islamic ChatRoom (Uppsala University Press, 2006), and On Time: Technology and Temporality in Modern Egypt (California University Press, 2013). Barak was a Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University Society of Fellows from 2009 to 2012 and is currently a member of the Young Scholars Forum, The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. He is also the recipient of the European Commission’s Marie Curie Career Reintegration Grant for 2013–2017 and an Israel Science Foundation Grant for 2013–2016. Ulrike Freitag is Director of Zentrum Moderner Orient Berlin and Professor of Middle Eastern/Islamic Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. Recent publications include the forthcoming edited volumes (with Claudia Schröder, Nora Lafi, Fatmeh Masjedi, and Nelida Fuccaro), Urban Violence in the Middle East, Oxford, New York: Berghahn, 2014; (with Nora Lafi), Urban Governance Under the Ottomans: Between Cosmopolitanism and Conflict, London: Routledge 2014; (with Israel Gershoni), “Arab Encounters with Fascist Pro149

150

Contributors

paganda 1933-1945,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 37, no. 3, 2011; (with Malte Fuhrmann, Nora Lafi, Florian Riedler), The City in the Ottoman Empire: Migration and the Making of Urban Modernity, London: Routledge, 2011. Christoph Herzog is a Professor of Turcology at the University of Bamberg, Germany. He studied Middle Eastern and modern European history in Freiburg, Germany, and in Istanbul. His research focuses on late Ottoman history. In 2012 he published the book Osmanische Herrschaft und Modernisierung im Irak. Die Provinz Bagdad 1817-1917, on the provincial administration of late Ottoman Iraq. Nora Lafi is a researcher with the Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) in Berlin (BMBF). She is a specialist of the history of the Ottoman Empire and specifically of Arab towns of North Africa and the Middle East. She chairs, with Ulrike Freitag, the research field “Cities Compared: Cosmopolitanism in the Mediterranean and Beyond,” part of the EUME program at Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin. Her current research program is on urban violence in Aleppo, Cairo, and Tunis. Among her main latest publications, she coedited Urban Governance under the Ottomans: Between Cosmopolitanism and Conflict, London: Routledge 2014, and The City in the Ottoman Empire Migration and the Making of Urban Modernity, London: Routledge, 2011. Nazan Maksudyan is Assistant Professor of History in the Sociology Department in Istanbul Kemerburgaz University. She held Wissenschaftskolleg (2009–2010) and Alexander von Humboldt (2010–2012) postdoc positions in Berlin at the Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO). Her publications include Orphans and Destitute Children in Late Ottoman Empire (Syracuse, Syracuse University Press, 2014); “Orphans, Cities, and the State: Vocational Orphanages (Islahhanes) and ‘Reform’ in the Late Ottoman Urban Space,” IJMES 43, no. 3 (2011); and “Foster-Daughter or Servant, Charity or Abuse: Beslemes in the Late Ottoman Empire,” Journal of Historical Sociology 21, no. 4 (2008). Her research is focused on the history of children and youth in the Ottoman lands. Vahé Tachjian was born in Lebanon, and earned his Ph.D. in History and Civilization at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. He is now the chief editor of Houshamadyan, a web project based in Berlin to reconstruct Ottoman Armenian town and village life. Among his main publications are: La France en Cilicie et en Haute-Mésopotamie. Aux confins de la Turquie, de la Syrie et de l’Irak, Paris, 2004; Les Arméniens, 1917-1939. La quête d’un refuge, Paris, 2007 (coeditor); Les Arméniens de Cilicie: habitat, mémoire et identité, Beirut, 2012 (coeditor).

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Index

‫ﱬﱫ‬ al-Qays, 7, 72–78, 80 and cross-dressing, 75 and dance, 7, 72–75, 77, 83n22 and music, 73–75, 77–78 as rebellion, 79–81 American Red Cross, 94–95 Ankara, 37, 45–47, 56, 154–155, 161, 165 Armenian, 8, 86–107, 109, 122–126, 134, 156–157 Armenianization, 90, 98 community, 8, 86, 88–92, 95–98, 100, 102, 105, 123–124 feminists (see under feminist) leadership, 88–89, 91, 94, 102 orphans, 90, 98, 122, 124–126, 133 women (see under women) Armenian General Benevolent Union (AGBU), 94 Asadur, Zabel (Sibyl), 123–124 Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal, 42–43, 46, 62n44, 148n29, 155 Azmat al-khadam, 29 Azmat al-zawag, 23, 29

Abū Zinnāda, ʿAbd al-Wahhāb, 74, 82–84 Abdülhamid II, 114, 153 Hamidian era/regime, 109, 113, 129n33 Adana, 44, 88, 95, 97, 103–104, 107, 123–124, 133 massacres of 1909, 107, 109, 122– 126, 133n100, 133n101, 134n107 Afyon, 44, 50 agency, 6, 22, 44, 80, 127 women’s political, 1, 4–6, 9, 36–37, 54–55, 57, 107–108, 121–122, 127 Agios Eleftherios (Sisterhood of Saint Eleftherios), 114–115, 117–118, 131 Aharonian, Avedis, 97 Anatolia, 56, 101, 122, 124–125, 153, 158, 160–161 Āl Saʿūd, 75 Aleppo, 2, 10, 88, 90, 92–93, 95, 97– 98, 100, 104–106, 123 al-Fad≥lī, ʿAbbās b. Muh≥ammad Saʿīd, 82 al-Ghazāla, 72–73 Ali Reza (Alī Rid≥ā), Marianne, 77, 84 al-Jakar, 77 al-Kandara, 77 Alliance Israélite Universelle, 111, 129–130 al-Nafs al-Bari’a (journal) (The Healthy Spirit), 26–28, 34

Babikian, Hagop, 122 Bā Ghaffār, Hind, 73–74, 82 Bā Qādir, Abū Bakr, 82 Bakhtin, Michael M., 73, 80 Baron, Beth, 32n16, 33n18, 57n1, 108, 128n5

189

190

Baron de Hirsch, 111–113 Bartevian, Suren, 95 Bedouin, 72, 74, 77, 79, 83 Beirut, 2, 82, 88, 113 Beyn-el İnas Fukaraperver Uhuvveti (Women’s Sisterhood Society for the Protection of the Poor), 115 Beyoğlu’nda Musevi Kadınlar Cemiyet-i Hayriyesi (Société de Bienfaisance des Dames Israélites de Péra), 111 Boddy, Janice, 79–80 Boghos Nubar Pasha, 96 Brailsfrod, HN, 120–121, 139n79 British Relief Fund (British Charity Mission), 120, 132 Bursa, 2, 44, 50, 61–63, 67 Cairo, 15, 23, 32, 88 carnival, 7, 71, 73, 77, 79–81 catastrophe (Armenian Genocide), 87, 89–92, 98–99, 102 Cemal Pasha, 122–123, 133n101, 134n105 Çetin, Fethiye, 100, 106n38, 106n39, 156 de Certau, Michel, 8, 12n33 charity, 11n13, 118, 125, 127 charitable activities/works/ donations, 108, 112–113, 117 charitable societies/organizations, 107, 111, 113, 120 charitable women, 109, 112 children, 4, 74, 87, 90, 107–109, 111, 118, 120, 122, 155 abandoned, 114–115 childrearing, 9, 19, 25– 26, 28–29, 34n46, 35n61, 90, 97–98, 158 of forced impregnation, 90–92, 96, 98–99, 102 Christian(s), 79, 157–158 and Muslims, 9, 38, 157 Cilicia, 94, 103n3, 123–125, 133n103, 134n108

Index

city and emancipation of women (see women) mobility in, 1, 4–5, 8–9, 79 port city (ies), 2, 10n8, 71 as the site of modern citizen making, 6, 47–48 and urban belonging, 6–9, 12n34 walled city (ies), 71–72, 79 Civil Code of 1926 (Turkey), 36, 41 Clandestine Macedonian-Adrianople Revolutionary Organization (CMARO), 119 coffeehouses, 23–24, 27, 33n31, 50 and time, 23–24, 27 collective memory, 89, 103, 152 Cologne, 80–81 colonial condition/context, 16, 140, 142, 146n13 Egypt, 4, 15–16 gaze, 8, 12n29, 144 and gendered master-slave relations, 22 photography (see under photography) rule, 24, 140, 143, 149 stereotypes, 141–144 colonization, 112, 139, 141–142 Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), 87, 122 conversion, 8, 102, 124 converted (Muslim) Armenians, 87, 101–102, 104n20, 106n39 Çorum, 44, 154, 165 Damascus, 2, 10n9, 88, 90, 95, 98, 105n29 Dârü’l-Eytâm-ı Osmânî (Ottoman Orphanage), 123–124, 133n101, 134n109 Der Zor, 86, 103n1 Deutsch, Sarah, 6, 12n22 Diyarbakır (Diyarbekir), 45, 55, 67n106, 88

Index

Djagadamard (newspaper), 90, 104n8, 104n9 education childrearing (see children) for girls, 67n111, 78–79, 108, 112, 124–125, 133n87, 155 moral, 86, 90 effendiyya, 16, 22, 30 Esayan (Yessayian), Zabel, 96, 105n24, 123–124, 133n103, 134n106 Eskişehir, 9, 40–41, 61n29 ethnicity, 5, 9, 87, 152 Europe, 2–3, 7, 16, 27, 139–140, 143–144 European, 8, 18–19, 38, 43–44, 51–53, 75, 119, 122, 139–140, 142–143, 149–151 ezan (Muslim call to prayer), 9, 157, 162 family cohesion and protection, 89, 91–92 as metaphor for togetherness, 22–23 feminism first-wave, 47 postcolonial, 65n69 feminist agenda(s), 108, 118–119 Armenian, 94, 104n20, 123 Egyptian, 25 geographers, 2, 5, 7, 11n18, 12n20 politics, 108–109, 127 scholarship/writing, 2, 5, 80, 126 theory, 10n5, 85n54 Turkish, 65n69 flâneur(euse), 6, 10n2, 12n24 Frierson, Elizabeth B., 126, 135n120 gender bias, 102 and class, 5, 25, 31 complementarity, 80 regime, 4, 36, 51, 79 roles, 1, 7, 22, 40, 50, 65n70, 73, 80, 145

191

segregation, 78–79 and social change, 36, 46, 51, 108, 127 and spatiality, 3–5, 81 stereotypes, 142 studies, 1–3, 9, 146n4 and time, 3, 16, 18 and urban space, 1–2, 6–8, 19, 37, 44, 81, 150 genocide. See catastrophe genocidal rape, 87, 89–90, 99 geography, sexual, 6–7 Gluckman, Max, 79–80, 84n50 h≥ajj, 71, 76–78 Hat Law of 1925 (Turkey), 39, 41 Hai Gin (journal), 94, 104n20, 105n30 Hay Dignants Ingerutiun (Armenian Women’s Association), 125 Hijaz, 71, 74–78, 81 Īd al-Banāt, 77 Ilinden uprising, 107, 119–120, 122, 132n78, 132n81 Iran, 39, 58n2, 60n20, 108 İsmet Pasha (İnönü), 41, 61n33 Istanbul, 2, 8, 39, 45, 56, 58n10, 59n16, 62n42, 86, 88, 95, 97, 107, 110–112, 117, 120, 124–126, 139, 142–143, 153–155, 158–159, 161–165 Izmir, 42, 49, 52, 56, 88, 95, 98, 113, 156 Jeddah, 7, 71, 73–79, 81 Jews Ashkenazim of Istanbul, 111 benevolent associations, 107, 109, 111, 113–114 refugees from Russia, 109–113, 128 jinn and ‘afarit, 26 and azmat al-khadam, 26, 28 and sleep, 28

192

Kandiyoti, Deniz, 64n67, 65n70, 108, 127n3 Kastamonu, 43–44 Katakura, Motoko, 77, 84n34 Kaya, Şükrü, 46 Kemalist, 37, 42, 44, 47–48, 52, 57, 100, 143, 145 reforms, 36–37, 48, 57, 62n43, 66n95 regime, 4, 36, 39, 43, 46, 51 Kuttāb, 79, 84n45 Ladies’ Committee in Sofia (Philanthropic Association of the Bulgarian Women), 107, 120–121 Latife Hanım, 42, 62n36 Lebanon, 87, 103n6, 153 Levi, Primo, 89, 102 Madrasa Nas≥īfiyya, 78, 84n41 Mahmood, Saba, 33n22, 80–81, 85n54 Mah≥ram (mahrem), 79, 153 Marash (Maraş), 44, 94, 124 Mark, Haiganush, 94, 104n20 marriage, 77, 159 forced, 98 mixed, 8, 86, 98 and time, 21, 23–24, 28 mawlid, 78 Mecca, 7, 71, 73, 75, 77, 79, 83n18, 83n21, 84n39 Mediterranean, 2–3, 79 memoirs (hatırat), 8, 40, 91, 106n39, 122, 132n81, 134n105, 148n29, 149–164, 166n8 Mersin, 44, 54, 124 Merzifon, 154, 157, 159, 161, 165, 168n56 Middle East, 3, 37, 39, 51, 89, 91, 143 migration, 15, 75, 112, 156 militarism, 108, 127n2 Military Medicine School (Askeri Tıbbıye), 114 modern clothing, 41–44, 48, 52–57, 67n111

Index

modernist, 58n9, 139 modernity, 15, 140, 144–145, 150 modernization, 37, 39–40, 42, 53, 56–57, 62n43 postmodern theory, 1, 5 public sphere, 37, 47–49, 55, 57 state, 81, 118 and temporality, 4, 16–17 women, 140, 143 Monastir, 119–121, 129n19, 132n86 mothers, 43, 74, 93–94, 99–100 and childrearing (see under children) grandmothers, 100–101, 153, 155– 156, 159 Mother’s Day, 24 single, unwed, 7, 114, 116 and timekeeping, 25 and wives, 25, 60n25, 65n68, 65n70 Mount ‘Arafāt, 7, 71 Muğla, 41, 44, 46, 48, 61n31, 61n47 Muslim(s), 88, 91, 94, 96, 98, 100, 156–158, 160, 163 and Christians (see under Christian) non-Muslim(s), 5–6, 8, 113, 126–127 religious practices, 25, 71, 77 women (see under women) Nas≥īf, Muh≥ammad, 78 Nasr, Ahmad A., 77, 82n1 narrative, 137, 140, 149, 150, 156 national community, 87–88, 90, 96–98, 101–102 dress, 38, 41–42, 50 excommunication, 97–98, 103 health, 26–27, 111 identity, 5, 23, 92, 111, 140–143, 145 morals, 91–92 narrative, 140, 148n29 politics, 23, 28, 41, 52, 119–121 public sphere, 37, 48 reconstruction, 89, 96 nationalism, 8, 61n27, 108, 113, 139, 142

Index

nationalist(s), 8, 17, 22, 108–109, 126 ideology, 100–101 movement, 107–108, 119–121 postnationalist discourse, 156 tensions, 6 occidentalism, 140, 144, 148n29 Odessa, 110 Odian, Yervant, 86, 90, 103n1, 104n10 Ohancanyan, Satenik, 124 Ordu, 44, 56, 61n29 orientalism, 66n93, 139–140, 142–144, 145n2, 150 Orientalist discourse, 52, 142, 150 Orientalist representations of women, 51–53, 142–143, 145 the “Orient,” 52, 142, 144, 150 orphans, 89–90, 99, 107, 109, 113, 122–126, 133n101 orphanages, 90, 99, 108, 121–126, 134n110, 134n117 Ottoman Empire, 3, 52, 75, 81, 87, 89, 109–110, 113, 119–120, 126, 139, 145, 149, 151, 160 Ottoman, 51, 120–121, 123, 127, 152, 157–158 authorities/state, 38, 107, 110–114, 117–122, 124 army, 102, 119, 122 citizens, 110–111, 126, 143 city(ies), 9, 79 clothing laws, 38, 42 Ottomanism, 109, 123, 125 past/times, 38, 42–43, 48, 51, 76, 89, 101, 143, 145, 151, 156 post-, 9, 36, 86, 91, 139 private space, 150, 153 provinces, 139, 142–143, 149 public sphere, 36, 109 society, 5, 58n10, 109, 127 urban studies/history (see urban) women, 6, 38, 52–53, 58n7, 59n11, 79, 107–109, 111, 114, 119, 126–127, 135n122, 140, 144–145, 152, 164

193

Pahlavi regime, 39, 60n20 the People’s Houses (Halkevi), 45–46, 48–51, 54, 56, 63n49, 64n65, 67n105 Péra, 107, 111, 115 philanthropy, 5, 108–109, 111, 118, 127, 129n33 philanthropic activities, 7, 109, 112, 114, 121–122, 126 women’s organizations, 5–6, 108, 111, 113, 121, 127 photography, 140 and beauty contests, 144–145, 148n26, 148n32 and colonial stereotypes, 142, 145 and erotic representations, 139– 140, 143–144 piçhane (bastard home), 114, 130n47 political, 31, 38–39, 43, 48, 57, 80, 97, 100–101, 107–108, 113, 142, 149 agency of women (see agency: women’s political) apolitical, 108–109 change, 5, 24, 152 history, 109, 152 issues, 5, 118, 158, 121, 127 memoirs, 152, 158 parties, 101 rights of women (see under women) unconscious, 17 politics of looking, 6, 7 press, 16, 18–19, 22, 24–25, 41–42, 45, 88, 91, 105n30, 109, 111, 121, 129n21, 140–141, 143–144 private sphere, 1–2, 4, 7, 19, 22, 30, 47, 60n25, 65n68, 81, 150 Prophet (Muh≥ammad), 78, 131n69 prostitution, 8, 86, 107, 118 public sphere, 1, 4–9, 19, 22–23, 30, 31, 36–39, 42, 44, 47–57, 65n70, 81, 108, 126 Qays b. al-Mulawwah≥, 74

194

Index

quarter (of a town), 8, 72–77, 83n17, 107, 112, 122, 157 Red Crescent, 55, 64n65, 162 Republican People’s Party of Turkey (RPP), 37, 46, 48 ritual, 23, 76, 80–81 Rize, 41, 44, 63n48, 160 Russian Empire, 107, 109–113, 154 famine of 1891–92, 110 military, 156–158, 160, 162 Salonika, 2, 4, 111, 113, 119, 121, 129n20, 129n23, 130n38 Saudi Arabia, 71, 75 secular(ization), 36, 39, 41, 47–48, 51, 57 sexual, 30, 76, 91, 100 asexual, 40, 65n70 heterosexual, 75 sexuality, 5, 61n25 violence, 7–8, 87 Sharaf al-Dīn, S≥adīqa, 78 shaykh al-h≥āra, 75–76 Sīdī ʿalawī, 78 Sīdī ʿaydaruūs, 78 Sinop, 44–45, 50, 63n50 sleep, 9, 21, 25–27 and mental health, 28–29 Snouck Hurgronje, Christiaan, 78, 84n35 Société de Bienfaisance des Dames Israélites de Péra (Beyoğlu’nda Musevi Kadınlar Cemiyet-i Hayriyesi), 111, 113, 129n27 Sofia, 120–121, 132n87, 133n90, 133n95 square (of a town), 74, 77 Sublime Porte, 111, 113, 121 Sufism, 81 Surname Law of 1934 (Turkey), 62n43 synchronicity, 21, 30 and desire, 30 technological, 21–22 Syria, 86–87, 94, 99, 113

T≥ āʾif, 77 Teotig, Arşaguhi, 124 theatre, 49, 74, 117, 131n64 Thompson, EP, 17, 32n11 Tıbrotsaser Hayuhyats/Dignants Ingerutyun (School-loving Armenian/Women’s Association), 124–125 time and allowances for housewives, 19 and class, 27 clock-oriented, 17–18 and colonial relations, 15, 22, 24 domestic, 18, 26 and education, 25 and marriage, 23–25 and motherhood, 24 monetized, 16, 19, 23–25, 27, 28 in the press, 25–26 task-oriented, 17–18 timekeeping and class, 30–31 and desire, 22, 24, 30–31 and embodiment, 29 and health, 26–27 and the “biological clock,” 29 and the nation, 27 as remedy to superstition, 26 Trabzon, 8–9, 40–41, 44, 46, 48–50, 53–54, 153–160, 162–165 Tucker, Judith E., 108, 128n4 Turkey, 36–37, 40, 42, 49, 51–52, 57, 76, 88, 100–101, 126, 139–145, 155–156, 160 Turks, 89–91, 97, 99, 139, 143–145 ulema (religious scholars), 38, 75 urban history, 1–3, 9, 71 social change, 3–4, 6, 15 space, 2–7, 9, 36–37, 49–50, 72, 81, 163–164 urban-rural dichotomy, 3, 9, 28, 40, 74

Index

urbanity and madness, 15 Vilâdethane (maternity clinic), 114, 118, 130n45, 130n46 veiling, 36–39, 42–43, 47, 49, 52–53, 56 anti-veiling campaigns, 4, 36–38, 40, 42–57 çarşaf, 37–51, 53–57, 58n4 ferace, 38, 58n7, 59n10, 64n66 peçe, 37–51, 53–57, 59n11, 61n29, 62n36 peştamal, 9, 40–41, 43–44, 47, 49, 61n29 unveiling, 37, 39–40, 42, 44, 46–47, 52, 54, 56 Virgin Mary Assumption, 119 Vorpakhınam Marmin (Committee for the Relief of Orphans [of Adana]), 125 Wādī Fāti≥ ma, 77 Wahhābiyya, 75 Weiberfastnacht, 80 Wilson, Elizabeth, 1, 3–4, 10n3 Wolff, Janet, 6, 12n24 women agency (see under agency) Arab, 8, 58n10, 142, 144 Armenian, 8, 86–89, 91–92, 94–95, 97–98, 100–102, 104n20, 109, 124–126 Bulgarian, 107, 109, 120–122, 133n87

195

emancipation of, 9, 42, 47–48, 64n67, 65n68, 65n70, 119 Greek, 107, 109, 114–116, 118, 156–157 Muslim, 8–9, 38, 127n1, 144, 152, 164 non-Muslim Ottoman, 5–6,126–127 organizations, 5–6, 108, 111, 113, 121, 127 and public health, 26–27, 38, 95, 108, 111, 116, 118, 127 rights, 43–45, 56, 62n44, 66n82, 109 survivors of the Armenian genocide, 86, 88–89, 94–95, 97–98, 102, 103n6, 104n12 Turkish, 7, 40, 43–44, 49, 51–53, 55– 56, 62n36, 66n98, 140, 143–145 Women’s Sisterhood Society for the Protection of the Poor (Beyn-el İnas Fukaraperver Uhuvveti), 115 World War I, 8, 38, 88, 92, 126, 142, 149, 153, 156 Young Turks, 109, 122, 125–126 Yozgat, 44, 154, 165 zār, 79, 84n47 Ze’evi, Dror, 75, 83n23 Zentrum Moderner Orient, 3, 81 Zeytun, 92–94 Zionism, 113 Zulu, 79