Last week I wrote about Kadriye Huseyin, a more or less forgotten Ottoman-Egyptian female intellectual who worked to advance women’s status in the late Ottoman Empire. For my second post on Ottoman history, I want to continue exploring a similar theme and introduce you to another female intellectual from the late 19th-century: Fatma Aliye
Unlike Kadriye Huseyin, Fatma Aliye is very well-known today and recognized as a pioneer of the feminist movement that started to emerge in the late 19th century Ottoman world. She is also considered to be the first female novelist of the Ottoman Empire. In fact, she has generated so much attention in recent years that her portrait was put on the modern 50 Lira bill in Turkey, which is rather surprising since in the early modern Turkish Republic, she fell out of favor with the official historiography, for reasons I’ll talk about later in the essay.
Like Kadriye Huseyin, Fatma Aliye also came from a very elite background. She was born in 1862 into a prosperous and wealthy household. She was the daughter of Ahmed Cevdet Pasha, one of the most famous statesmen of the 19th-century Ottoman Empire. Not only was he a highly influential figure in Ottoman politics, but Ahmed Cevdet Pasha was also a brilliant scholar. He produced works on a wide range of topics, including Islamic jurisprudence and history, while also codifying Islamic law for the first time as a part of the Ottoman reform efforts that started to pick up steam from the mid-19th century onwards.
This elite background presented both advantages and disadvantages for Fatma Aliye. On the one hand, she grew up in an intellectual household, and once her early interest in learning was recognized, she was assigned private tutors, which meant that she had access to the best education available at the time.
On the other hand, growing up in her father’s mansion, Fatma Aliye’s life was regulated by the gender norms that reigned supreme in the late 19th-century Ottoman Empire, which she would repeatedly go back and question in her own work later in her career. When she wanted to study French at the age of 10, for instance, she had to do it on the sly because French was not considered a suitable subject for Muslim girls to learn. Luckily for her, when her father discovered what she was doing, he appointed a Lebanese tutor for her, and by the time she was 13, she was fluent in French in addition to Arabic and Persian.
Gender norms continued to shape her life as she grew older. When she was seventeen, her family decided to marry her to Faik Bey (later Pasha), an aide de camp at the Ottoman Palace, who was much older than her. Fatma Aliye was less than pleased with this turn of events but complied with her family’s wishes since she saw it as her duty.
As a couple, they were not compatible with each other at all. She was much more educated than him, while he opposed Fatma Aliye’s literary pursuits. Over the years and after a lot of trials and tribulations, however, they managed to establish a working relationship between them to the point that Faik Bey started helping Fatma Aliye copy her manuscripts.
The other influential (male) figure in Fatma Aliye’s life was Ahmed Mithad Efendi, one of the most well-known names in late 19th-century Ottoman literary history. In addition to being a highly accomplished novelist and journalist, Ahmed Mithad was also a family friend of Ahmed Cevdet Pasha’s household and once he recognized Fatma Aliye’s talents, he took her under his wing. Fatma Aliye’s first appearance in the Ottoman literary scene, a translation of Georges Ohnet’s novel Volonté, came out in serialized form in Ahmed Mithad’s popular journal Tercüman-ı Hakikat in 1889–1890. The translation did not bear Fatma Aliye’s name, however. It was signed only as “A Lady” since, as I pointed out last week, it was not deemed “respectable” for Muslim women to make their lives public at the time.
Before I go deeper into Fatma Aliye’s literary career, I want to take a step back and look at the changes/reforms that the Ottoman Empire has gone through in the 19th century that made her success possible in the first place.
From the late 18th century onwards, a number of crises, including internal tribulations and heavy military defeats against European powers, led the Ottomans to start on a path of reform. Although they primarily aimed at modernizing the military and the government, it did not take long for these reforms to spread and transform the Ottoman society.
One key field these reforms focused on was the education system. Beginning with Sultan Selim III and Mahmud II, the Ottomans started to establish a number of schools based on European models to train the personnel required for the rapidly expanding imperial and military bureaucracy. What initially began as an effort to train government and military elites, however, soon turned into a bigger project of educating the wider population. As a result, a new body of government schools based on modern educational principles began to open throughout the Empire from the 1830s onwards.
This led to several important changes. One was a rapid rise in literacy rates among the population, which in turn led to the establishment of a reading public and what can be labeled as Ottoman print capitalism. A number of journals and newspapers were founded, and Ottoman intellectuals started to produce works in new genres, such as novels and plays. Meanwhile, the graduates of these new schools began to get exposed to global ideas such as liberty, constitutionalism, and progress, and started writing about them in their own works.
Even more importantly for our purposes here, these schools were not only limited to boys but targeted girls as well, albeit to a lesser degree. In 1859, for instance, the first Ottoman schools for girls were opened, followed by schools for women teachers in 1870. Literacy rates for women increased, which led to the establishment of magazines that were specifically aimed at a female audience. In a sense, we can say that a female reading public started to come into being. It is also important to note that Ottoman women were not only consumers of these journals but were their producers, too. An increasing number of women, especially from elite backgrounds, wrote in these journals, discussing everything from gender roles in the domestic sphere to women’s status in society.
This was, then, the social and intellectual context in which Fatma Aliye operated, and she contributed to this lively literary world through both her novels and articles.
Between 1891 and 1910, Fatma Aliye published five novels under her own name, namely Muhadarat (1891–1892), Refet (1898), Udi (1897–98), Levayih-i Hayat (1889–1898), and Enin (1910). In these works, she examined the transformations of gender roles that Ottoman society was experiencing in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, especially within the framework of domestic life, which, as I’ve mentioned in my post on Kadriye Huseyin, gradually came to be based on the bourgeoisie ideal of the nuclear family rather than on the idea of large households.
Like many of her contemporaries, Fatma Aliye’s novels shed light on social themes such as family, gender relationships, marriage, domestic slavery, and poverty in late Ottoman society. What made her works unique, however, was the fact that she analyzed these issues from the perspective of women, granting them agency, which made her a pioneering voice in the late Ottoman literary world. Overall, I think we can say that her earlier experiences with gender relations in Ottoman society (think of her early life in her father’s household), as well as the restricting conditions of patriarchy (her relationship with his father and his husband, for instance, and even with Ahmed Mithad, who actually helped her a great deal in her literary career), very much informed her works.
Fatma Aliye also contributed frequently to the women’s journals that I had mentioned above, where she continued to advocate for improving women’s status in Ottoman society. It is important to note that, like Kadriye Huseyin, her advocacy stemmed from an Islamic reformist perspective, as she made frequent references to the history of Islamic civilization and law to demonstrate that Islam was not an impediment to women’s social progress.
And this was the main reason why, despite being a pioneer of feminist thought in the late Ottoman Empire, she fell into relative obscurity after the establishment of the modern Turkish Republic. Until the 1990s, the women’s movement in the late Ottoman Empire was pretty much ignored in academic circles. The official historiography credited the republic’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, as the sole figure who liberated Turkish women with his reforms. The fact that Fatma Aliye’s ideas for the advancement of women’s status were based on an Islamic perspective did not sit well with the secular political and cultural elites of the early Republic. As a result, she was largely ignored and forgotten. It was only in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when scholars began to take a deeper look into the women’s movement in the late Ottoman Empire, that Fatma Aliye regained her status as a pioneer of feminist thought.
Besides being an advocate of women’s status in Ottoman society, Fatma Aliye was famous for another reason. She also wrote against and responded to the Orientalist discourses on Islam and Muslim women that were prevalent in Europe at the time. And this is where I will pick up her narrative next week, talking about two important works she produced in this vein.
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