MODERN TURKEY

Evening Post, Volume CXVI, Issue 102, 27 October 1933, Page 11

MODERN TURKEY

KEMAL PASHA'S REFORMS

CULTURE OF THE WEST

'' Tno opening of a new university in Constantinople is tlio most sensational reform of Xenial Pasha since he tore the veil from Turkish women a decade ago," states a writer in the "Manchester Guardian." The whole of Western culture is welcomed—its science, economics, and sociology its history, and its literature. Women will study at tho new university alongside men, for tho Ghazi has always been, in favour of their higher education, _ and this will complete their emancipation. "Up till now education in the New Turkey was so wretchedly inadequate that I was tempted to wonder if all their boasted reforms were not skindeep—whether, once their Ghazi gone, the Turk would not sink back into his old indolence. "I often went into the harems as interpreter for a woman doctor, and though I had heard a good deal about the romance of tho seraglios and tho beauty of Turkish women, what I felt was repulsion. It was uncanny to see women, the same flesh and blood as oneself, even the same colour, kept in that sort of idle imbecility, like halfwild beasts in cages. Somctiines they were laughing and chattering like cockatoos, sometimes they were shy and" furtive, but often heavy and langourous with the unnatural look of sick animals. A great many of them were, in fact, consumptive and diseased. "When I commented on the restrictions imposed on Turkish women- as compared with the freedom enjoyed by our own, my Turkish messenger and guardian remarked: 'That is different; Englishwomen are half-men. You don't know ours. We can't trust ours out of our sight, and we can't trust each other, not where women are concerned.' HOUSES LIKE FORTRESSES. "Is that why your houses are like fortresses?" I asked. 'No windows on to the street, doors studded" with huge nails and barred with iron, high walls onp can't see over, domed roofs one couldn't climb on to. When''l came first I thought there were no houses in your town, only mosques. Is that all to keep your women safe?' " 'Of course,' he answered. "Undoubtedly tho peasant women of Old Turkey, who did agricultural work side by side with their men, were of a more vigorous type than those I; saw, but in where the Turks were once tho ruling race, one sees nothing of them. When the land was liberated in 1912 tho Turks were not turned out of their' estates, but they found it impossible to get them worked. They could not dig themselves; of course that would be dishonouring— moreover they lack the cheap labour that every Balkan peasant has in wife and daughters, and the Christians were no longer their serfs and bondsmen. They sold their estates for a song and crowded into towns like Uskub and Monastir. "It is the will o£ Allah that the glory has passed from the Osmanli race. They prefer to live where the muezzin still calls to prayer, where women are kept safe benihd veils and locked doors, and where .there is no pressure on them to learn new things or think new thoughts. Their bearing is dignified and decorous, their manner courteous and grave. They are part of tho paralysis that was over the whole Turkish world for close on four centuries of empire. "Who can tell how much of this paralysis was due to tho harem? Something of tho animal outlook of the mother transmitted itself to the son, something of tho indolened induced by her life, her contentment with ignorance, her lack of ambition. The emancipation of women will even in the West have effects on the futuro that are unknown and. unguessed at. How much moro unpredictable will bo its influence on Turkey?"