Halide Edib Adıvar

Turkish writer and social reformer

• Born: 1884
• Died: 1964

Adıvar, a leading Turkish nationalist as well as writer and social reformer, played a prominent role in the Young Turks Revolution of 1908-1909 and an even more critical part in the Nationalist Revolution, led by Atatürk between 1919 and 1924. As such she was one of the first Turkish women to take an active, indeed militant, interest in national politics. She was the first Turkish graduate of the American College for Girls in Istanbul, and she is credited with writing the first novel in Turkish.

Early Life

Halide Edib Adıvar (hah-lee-DAY ehd-EEB ahd-ih-VAHR) lived during a critical period in the history of modern Turkey from the twilight of the Ottoman Empire under Sultan Abdülhamid II until the aftermath of the first military coup in the early 1960’s. These eighty years brought momentous changes and upheavals to Turkish society; Adıvar participated actively in those changes, influencing the course of her country’s social and political evolution. She was born in the ancient, imperial capital of Istanbul, then the center of the Ottoman Empire. Her family lived in the neighborhood of Beshiktash, on a hill overlooking the Sea of Marmara, not far from the Yildiz Palace, which served as the residence of the Ottoman ruler. Adıvar’s father, Mehmed Edib Bey, enjoyed an important government office, the position of first secretary to the sultan’s privy purse, which made the family part of the inner circle of the ruling elite. Her mother, Bedrfem Hanim, died of tuberculosis when Adıvar was quite young, and her father remarried sometime before her fourth birthday.

Because of her father’s admiration for the English and for British ways of bringing up children, Adıvar’s early childhood was quite different from that normally accorded upper-class Turkish Muslim girls. She was dressed, reared, and even fed in the English manner and sent to a nearby kindergarten run by Greek Christians. A childhood illness ended her first experience with modern, Western-type education, and Adıvar was sent to live with her grandmother. In her grandmother’s more traditional household, the young girl was introduced to popular lore, folk medicine, and literature, as well as the milieu of conservative Turkish Muslim women. Later she would draw on this fund of popular beliefs and lore in her writings. A local Islamic teacher the imam of the nearby mosque-school taught her to read and write as well as instructing her in the Qur՚ān. All of this changed when Adıvar was eleven, for her father enrolled her for a year in the American College for Girls in Istanbul, where she studied English, eventually becoming remarkably fluent in the language. Until 1899, she continued her studies under an English governess as well as several well-known Turkish tutors, then reentered the American College for Girls, where she was the only Turkish student. In 1901, she was graduated and married her former tutor, a mathematician named Salih Dheki Bey, with whom she had two sons.

Life’s Work

The first decade of the twentieth century was a tumultuous era in Turkish history, and, during this time, Adıvar read widely not only in classical Ottoman literature but also in European classics such as those of William Shakespeare and Émile Zola. In 1908 came the Young Turks Revolution, which represented a turning point in the centuries-old Ottoman system of rule, because the autocratic power of the sultan was limited, the constitution of 1876 was restored, and a new political elite eventually came to power. It was during the events of 1908 that Adıvar became a political essayist and writer, publishing articles in the daily newspaper Tanin that pressed for social and educational reforms along Western lines. Among the things that she advocated were gradual educational changes and the emancipation of women. Her writings brought her instant literary fame as well as arousing the opprobrium of more reactionary elements in society.

Less than a year later, a counterrevolutionary attempt by those supporting the ancien régime occurred in Istanbul during the spring of 1909. Fearing repression, Adıvar traveled in disguise with her two young sons to Egypt and then went to England for several months. While in England, she experienced two things that she later regarded as instrumental in the formation of her own Turkish nationalism a stay in Cambridge, where she heard a debate on the matter of Irish home rule, and a visit to Parliament, which she says “inspired me almost with pious emotion.” In addition, she met with prominent woman suffragists, then campaigning for expanded political and legal rights.

In October of 1909, Adıvar returned to Turkey, since the counterrevolutionary movement had been suppressed. Caring for her son during his bout with typhoid, Adıvar composed her first novel during nighttime vigils. Seviye Talip , published in 1910, “exposed social shams and conventions,” and, while immensely popular, it also encountered severe criticism. At that time, Adıvar was invited to join the teaching staff of the Women Teachers’ Training College, where she collaborated with another leading educational reformer, Nakiye Elgün, in modernizing the institution’s curriculum and administration. The year 1910 also brought personal distress to Adıvar, as her husband married a second wife polygamy not yet being outlawed in Turkey and thus she divorced him. At this time, Adıvar became involved in a new cultural ideology, known as Turkism, and she wrote a second novel, Yeni Turan (1912; the new Turan), which was influenced by this movement.

Resigning her post at the Women Teachers’ Training College, Adıvar next accepted a position as inspector general of the Ewkaf (religious) schools, then in the process of being modernized. In addition, she was active in a new women’s association, The Women’s Club, which was involved in various community services. Both of these activities exposed her to popular social classes very different from her own background; later these experiences would furnish material for her novels as well as heighten her social consciousness.

Late in 1914, the Ottoman Empire entered World War I on the side of Germany and Austria, a decision that ultimately resulted in the empire’s demise. During the difficult war years, Adıvar pursued her work of educational reform, organizing orphanages and the Red Crescent (Turkish Red Cross) not only in Turkey but also in Syria. In 1917, she was married a second time to Adnan Adıvar, a doctor who was also a prominent member of the ruling Committee of Union and Progress. The Ottoman defeat by the Allies in 1918 brought political chaos to Turkey as well as foreign occupation and the Greek invasion of 1919. While the victorious powers met in Versailles throughout 1919 to decide Turkey’s fate, armed resistance to the Greek army erupted in Anatolia, as did mass protests against the partition of the country by the Allies. In these expressions of popular opposition to European imperialism, Adıvar played once again a leading role, even addressing a huge crowd in Istanbul’s great Sultan Ahmed Square on May 23, 1919. By then, public speaking was not new to Adıvar. A decade earlier she had given the commencement speech at the American College, the first time ever that a Turkish woman had formally addressed a mixed audience of men and women in public.

While an ardent nationalist, Adıvar was opposed to violence to achieve Turkish independence, and she even attempted to arrange for an American mandate in Turkey between 1919 and 1920 to avoid further clashes between the European forces and the Turkish army, then under the command of Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk). In 1920, she and her husband were forced to flee Istanbul to avoid arrest by the Allied powers. They took refuge in the Anatolian countryside and, after a journey full of hardships, reached Ankara, where the provisional Turkish government had been established to fight for the country’s independence. The difficulties of escape and the couple’s desperate flight across rural Anatolia formed the core of her 1923 novel, Ateştan gömlek (The Shirt of Flame , 1924), which was later made into a Turkish film by the same title. As was true earlier when she worked among the poor classes of Istanbul, her experiences among the peasantry made Adıvar painfully aware of the unfavorable conditions suffered by rural peoples.

Once in Ankara, where she and her family resided in a mud hut, Adıvar devoted her energies fully to the nationalist cause. She worked for the Agricultural School and for the Anatolian news agency and contributed articles to the daily newspaper. Her pivotal importance as a nationalist figure is attested by the fact that she was admitted to Atatürk’s circle of political intimates and also was condemned to death in absentia by the sultan’s government in Istanbul. During the Turkish-Greek wars, Adıvar was instrumental once again in organizing women, relief works, and the Turkish Red Crescent, even laboring as a nurse in a provincial hospital. While moving in the highest male-dominated nationalist organizations Adıvar was even made a sergeant major in the army she did not abandon her feminist concerns and goals.

With the nationalist victory in November of 1922, the Adıvars returned to Istanbul, because Adnan had been named as the representative of the ministry of foreign affairs to the former capital, Ankara now being the seat of government. The next few years witnessed deep divisions within the ranks of the nationalists. Because the Adıvars held firm to their liberal ideological stance, as opposed to the more radical position of the Turkish Republic’s first president, Atatürk, they were unjustly accused of plotting against the increasingly authoritarian president. Finally, Adıvar and her husband left Turkey in 1924 for Europe, where they spent the next fourteen years in exile.

During those years, the couple resided first in England and then in France for nearly a decade since Adnan was appointed to a teaching position at the École des Langues Orientales Vivantes in Paris. While in England between 1924 and 1928, Adıvar wrote her memoirs; she remains one of the few Middle Eastern women ever to write an autobiography, another genre borrowed from the West. Published in two volumes, her memoirs appeared in 1926 and 1928 under the titles of Memoirs of Halide Edib and The Turkish Ordeal . In 1929, she traveled to the United States to give a series of lectures at various American universities and returned for the 1931-1932 academic year to teach at Columbia University as a visiting professor. Adıvar later toured the Indian subcontinent to give lectures devoted to political and cultural/religious changes in the Turkish Republic, which greatly interested Muslims all over the world. At the same time, she continued to produce novels, composing her only work of fiction in English, The Clown and His Daughter, which appeared in 1935.

Atatürk’s death in 1938 meant that the Adıvars could return to Turkey for good the next year. There Adıvar was made the chair of the newly created Department of English at the University of Istanbul. Between 1950 and 1954, she served as a member of Parliament. Because of her husband’s death in 1955 and her increasingly delicate state of health, she retired from public life. Adıvar died on January 9, 1964, at the age of eighty, in a suburb of Istanbul and was greatly mourned by her countryfolk.

Significance

Although her style has often been criticized by the literary establishment, Adıvar remains one of the most widely read authors of her generation. Her creative output is staggering. In addition to twenty novels, she published short stories, essays, literary criticism, plays, memoirs, articles pressing for a wide range of social reforms, and translations from European languages into Turkish. Not content with the pen as an instrument for needed social changes, Adıvar lived passionately what she advocated in her writings. It is difficult to find among her feminist peers, whether in the Middle East or in Western Europe, a woman or man who matches Adıvar in terms of courage, vitality, and devotion to national as well as internationalist causes. She merits well the sobriquet Joan of Arc of Turkey.

Bibliography

Adıvar, Halide. Memoirs of Halide Edib. 1926. Reprint. Piscataway, N.J.: Gorgias Press, 2004. This is an absolutely indispensable as well as fascinating account of the author’s life from early childhood until the end of her educational mission in Syria in 1917. It represents a precious source of information for historians of this period in Turkish history.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Turkish Ordeal. 1928. Reprint. Westport, Conn.: Hyperion, 1981. This is the subsequent volume of Adıvar’s memoirs dealing with the nationalist era from 1918 to 1922. It provides insights not only into her own activities but also into those of an entire generation of Turkish nationalists.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Shirt of Flame. New York: Duffield, 1924. One of her novels that belongs to her second phase of writing devoted to the Turkish war of liberation. It draws on her personal experiences and was regarded as a pioneering work in the period.

Iz, Fahir. “Khālide Edīb.” In The Encyclopedia of Islam, edited by H. A. R. Gibb et al. New. ed. Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 1954-2002. Volume 4 includes the fullest English-language treatment of Adıvar’s life and work. It synthesizes much research in Turkish on Adıvar that is otherwise inaccessible to English-speaking audiences.

Kinross, Lord. Atatürk: A Biography of Mustafa Kemal. New York: William Morrow, 1965. Kinross’s biography of the founder of modern Turkey is the definitive work in English. Essential to an understanding of the nationalist and early Republican periods, the work also contains information regarding Adıvar’s contribution to the Turkish independence movement.

Lewis, Bernard. The Emergence of Modern Turkey. 3d ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. While Lewis only mentions Adıvar in passing, this is the essential background text for understanding the culture and society in which she lived and the historical changes she not only experienced but also helped to shape.

Mango, Andrew. Atatürk: The Biography of the Founder of Modern Turkey. Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 2000. Exhaustively researched, balanced, and comprehensive biography of Atatürk that includes discussion of Adıvar.