Desarrollo Agroturístico

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

Furthermore, Fatma Aliye believed cross-cultural exchanges could affectively combat European misgivings on the status of women in Muslim societies. In this regard, Aliye claimed an

intellectual and political space for Muslim women to engage in transregional debates concerning their identities. Fatma Aliye struggled with different historical actors and moments. She

interpreted Islamic traditions in a manner that emphasized the importance of women in both religious and sociopolitical milieus. Aliye, and her contemporaries’ works, point to a historical transregional debate on the Muslim woman question beginning in the late-nineteenth century. For Aliye, and other Muslim modernists, responding to the debate on Muslim women’s societal roles meant formulating a two-part response. At one level Aliye contended with Western misconceptions concerning Muslim women, while at another level she interpreted Islamic

80

traditions to construct ideas on modern Muslim womanhood. Fatma Aliye exemplified how Muslim women took on global audiences to control and construct their identities for themselves through interpreting religious traditions.

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

81

Chapter 2: “We exist, we have awoken, we shall rise”173_{: The Global Features of the}

Ottoman Women’s Movement and Kadınlar Dünyası

In 1913Ulviye Mevlan Civelek started the Ottoman women’s journal Kadınlar Dünyası. This journal was the only international journal among the forty Ottoman women’s periodicals published during the Constitutional Era. Kadınlar Dünyası introduced an explicitly feminist agenda that both aligned with and distinguished itself from the contemporary international women’s movement. The inaugural issue declared, “We Ottoman women would like to become part of this movement, which has been started for all women by our sisters, the women of this world; however, as we proceed down the path that this movement has carved out, we shall remain within the boundaries of our own traditions and customs.”174Kadınlar Dünyası and its contributors published articles with the objective of presenting an accurate understanding of Muslim womanhood to Western feminists, while simultaneously constructing an Ottoman Muslim womanhood that legitimized their demands for more social and political rights in the Ottoman Empire.

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

Ottoman women, would like to join these efforts within the traditions, rules, and norms of our own upbringing.”175 In this particular case the editors of Kadınlar Dünyası carved out a space for Islamic traditions and cultural practices to be considered in moving forward in the fight for

173 _{Editorial Board, “Eser-i Hayat-ı Azmimiz, [The Product of Our Determination of Life],” Kadınlar Dünyası, April}

12, 1913, 2-3.

174 _{Editorial Board, “Hukuk-u Nisvân [Women’s Rights],” Kadınlar Dünyası, April 4, 1913, 1.} 175 _{Editorial Board, “Hukuk-u Nisvan,” 2}

82

women’s rights, an objective that aligned with the intellectual legacy put in place by Fatma Aliye and other Muslim modernists. The authors made clear that there would not be a wholesale

adoption of Western feminist principles and in so doing they constructed Muslim womanhood in a manner that reconciled their faith with their feminist goals. I argue the authors of Kadınlar

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

Orientalism, as well as the emerging male Muslim nationalists of the Constitutional Era. I further contend these women highlighted their agency through reinterpreting Islamic texts and utilizing Islamic traditions to advance women’s rights. In Kadınlar Dünyası contributors analyzed Islamic traditions to challenge patriarchal practices by men who used Islam to justify gender inequality. Additionally, these authors were compelled to engage with Islamic traditions in order to dispel western visions of “Oriental” women. The editors of Kadınlar Dünyası knew there was little to gain from the adoption of Western feminist principles, which is why even as they aligned themselves with a global feminist movement they made it clear that “as we proceed down the path that this movement has carved out, we shall remain within the boundaries of our own traditions and manners.”176

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

83

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

Kadınlar Dünyası wrote, “Recently Ottoman womanhood proved that it has a soul and that it exists…It says: ‘We exist, we have awoken, we shall rise, now rise and show us the way’…. From now on, women are not going to live this way, and they cannot live this way. You can be absolutely sure of this.”178 _{Çakır pointed out how the editors of Kadınlar Dünyası supported the} Ottoman women’s movement, and their journal would play an important part in the movement. In addition to Ottoman women’s journals providing a lens into the history of the Ottoman women’s movement, historians argue that these periodicals facilitate a better understanding of the Constitutional Era. Echoing Çakır’s work, Serpil Atamaz-Hazar argues that Ottoman

women’s journals revealed a “dynamic, flexible, and complex milieu, in which women could and did act as agents of both social and political changes.”179 _{However, she argues that women’s} journals also signified the social transformation ushered in by the Revolution of 1908. Atamaz- Hazar critiqued the existing literature on the Constitutional Era as male-centered. She showed how the use of Ottoman women’s journals could establish a more complete understanding of the empire following the 1908 Revolution. By addressing some of the characteristics of Ottoman women’s journals she depicted how the revolutionary process influenced women’s activism and

177 _{Çakır also wrote an Encyclopedia entry on Kadınlar Dünyası and a historical biography on Ulviye Mevlan the}

founder and editor of Kadınlar Dünyası. See Serpil Çakir, “Kadınlar Dünyası,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE, ed. Kate Fleet et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2018).

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

179 _{Serpil Atamaz-Hazar, “Reconstructing the History of the Constitutional Era in Ottoman Turkey through}

84

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

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

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

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

180 _{Atamaz-Hazar, 92–105.}

181 _{Özge Özdemir, “‘Kadınlık Yalnız Meyve Değildir’: Kadınlar Dünyası Dergisi’nin Başyazılarında Kadın}

85

locality to analyze “personal contacts and social groups.”182 _{Devecin argues that the “the} development of feminist [Ottoman] ideologies must therefore be seen in the framework of interrelations with the West, and not only in the framework of the nationalizing process.”183 Hulya Yildiz echoed this argument declaring that Ottoman women’s journals “show that there was a close relationship, in some cases even collaboration between Ottoman feminists and their European sisters.”184 _{The problem with this approach is the risk of overlooking authentically} Ottoman Muslim feminist ideas and activism. The connections between Ottoman women and Europeans was a historical reality. However, this framework suggested by Devecin and the connections highlighted by Yildiz oversimplified the efforts of Ottoman Muslim feminists, implying that they had been directed by and in reaction to Western feminism. Ottoman women engaged with Western feminists through Kadınlar Dünyası. The first issue of the journal made an explicit connection to women’s rights developments in Europe and America. But the editors of Kadınlar Dünyası also made it clear that while there was a shared experience in women’s oppression, the solutions to that oppression required acknowledgement of individual cultures and traditions and the role each plays in identity formation.

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

182 _{Elife Bic[h]er-Deveciin, “The Movement of Feminist Ideas: The Case of Kadinlar Dunyasi,” in A Global Middle}

East: Mobility, Materiality and Culture in the Modern Age, 1880-1940, ed. Liat Kozma, Cyrus Schayegh, and Avner Wishnitzer (London: I.B. Tauris, 2015), 347–55.

183 _{Bic[h]er-Deveciin, 347–48}

184 _{Hülya Yıldız, “Rethinking the Political: Ottoman Women as Feminist Subjects,” Journal of Gender Studies 27,}

86

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

The first part of this chapter examines Ulveye Mevlan Civelek’s life, her motivations for starting the journal Kadınlar Dünyası, and information on the journal itself. In order to better situate Kadınlar Dünyası among other journals, the following section focuses on the culture of Ottoman women’s journals. After first introducing the foundation of the new journal, this chapter will situate Kadınlar Dünyası in two different contexts- domestic and international. The 1908 Revolution proved revolutionary not only for the empire, but especially for the women in it. The other context explored in this chapter is the evolving international women’s movement and the feminist Orientalism practiced through the movement’s problematic acceptance of Orientalist assumptions. Finally, I will explore the way Kadınlar Dünyası served as a vehicle to address the continued debate on the global Muslim women question, and analyze the ways that the journal itself constructed Muslim womanhood.