Fatma Aliye Topuz

Fatma Aliye Topuz (9 October 1862 – 13 July 1936) was an Ottoman Turkish writer, novelist, translator and women's-rights activist, accounted by the literary establishment the first female novelist of the Ottoman Empire and a pioneer of organised women's charity. ^{1 2}

She was the daughter of the historian and jurist Ahmed Cevdet Pasha. She began with a translation under the pseudonym "A Lady", was taken up as honorary daughter by the journalist Ahmet Mithat Efendi, co-authored the first novel in Turkish literature written by a woman, and wrote for thirteen years in the Women's Own Gazette on women's education and rights, framed within family life and an Islamic outlook. ^{2 3}

She was born in Istanbul to Ahmed Cevdet Pasha (1822–1895), the famous author of the History of Cevdet and head of the commission that produced the Mecelle civil code, and Adviye Rabia Hanım; her elder brother Ali Sedat was a philosopher and logician, and her sister Emine Semiye was one of the first Turkish feminists. ^{1 2}

She received no formal education, but learned Arabic and French at home, eavesdropping on her brother's private lessons, and through them taught herself theology, logic, philosophy and astronomy. ^{1 2}

Her childhood followed her father's postings: three years in Aleppo (1866–1868), seven months in Janina in 1875, and a spell in Damascus in 1878 that left a deep impression on her. ^{1 2}

In 1879, at seventeen, she married Kolağası Mehmet Faik Bey, a nephew of the hero Gazi Osman Pasha; the Turkish article recounts that she read novels in secret for the first ten years of the marriage because her husband disapproved, and that a decade passed before she published a book. They had four daughters, born in 1880, 1884, 1900 and 1901. ^{1 2}

Her literary life began in 1889 with a translation of Georges Ohnet's Volonté into Turkish as Meram, under the name "Bir Hanım" ("A Lady"); her byline then became "Mütercime-i Meram", "the Translator of Meram". When the lexicographer Şemseddin Sami insinuated the translation was fabricated or not hers, she answered that she had signed it as translator, not author, and the work was publicly recognised as a translation of Ohnet. ^{2 1}

Ahmet Mithat Efendi, seeing the translation, declared her his honorary daughter; she published articles on women's lives in his Tercüman-ı Hakikat, and in 1891 they co-authored Hayal ve Hakikat ("Dream and Truth") — the first novel written by a woman in Turkish literature, whose "woman" section was hers and whose "man" section was his, as the Arabic article describes. ^{2 3}

Her novel Muhazarat (1892) is considered the first novel by a female novelist anywhere in the Ottoman Empire; its heroine, the slave-girl Fazıla, chooses her master's discipline over acting on her own desires. ¹

Her later novels include Raf'et (1898), whose heroine is a poor girl earning her own living; Udi (1899), based on an Armenian woman oud player she had heard in Aleppo, translated into English by W. D. Halsey, which the novelist Reşat Nuri Güntekin credited with shaping his literary feeling and purity of language; Enin (1910); and her last novel, Levaih-i Hayat ("Scenes from Life"), a double marriage novel of one failed and one successful union. ^{1 2}

She wrote in the Hanımlara Mahsus Gazete (Women's Own Gazette) for thirteen years, from 1895 to 1908, and in Mehâsin and other journals, advocating women's rights without advocating what the Turkish article calls radical feminism or a break with family life and the Islamic outlook. ^{2 3}

Her Nisvan-ı İslam ("Women of Islam") is a dialogue with foreign women correcting the picture, drawn by foreign writers, of Muslim women as wronged slaves or drifting ghosts; it was translated into French by Olga Lebedeva as Les femmes muselmannes and also into Arabic. ^{1 2}

She debated polygamy with Mahmud Esad Efendi, defended women's right to divorce and to education, held that the root cause of Eastern women's backwardness was their lack of schooling, and argued that a woman should earn her own living to stand equal rather than live as a dependent. ²

The Turkish article notes her opposition to Qasim Amin's call, in his 1899 book, for women to cast off the veil; her other works include Namdaran-ı Zenan-ı İslamıyan ("Famous Women of Islam", 1895), Teracim-i Ahval-ı Felasife ("Biographies of the Philosophers", 1900), Tedkik-i Ecsam (1901), and Ahmed Cevdet Paşa ve Zamanı (1914), a biography of her father later excluded from the canon for contradicting the official history thesis. ^{2 1}

In 1897 she founded the Nisvan-ı Osmaniye İmdat Cemiyeti, the Ottoman Women's Aid Society, to help soldiers' families — one of the first women's organisations; Sultan Abdülhamid II awarded her the Order of Charity (Şefkat Nişanı) in 1899, and she became the first woman member of the Ottoman Red Crescent society. ^{2 1}

Her works were exhibited at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, whose library catalogue of women's writing also listed her, winning her wide recognition in literary circles. ^{3 1}

Her youngest daughter, Zübeyde İsmet, converted to Christianity in 1926 and became a Roman Catholic nun; Topuz travelled to France in search of her, and the English article records that the affair hurt her deeply and her writing declined; her husband died in 1928, she took the surname Topuz after the 1934 Surname Law, and she died at Beyoğlu, Istanbul, on 13 July 1936, in poor health and financial distress, and was buried in Feriköy Cemetery. ^{2 1}

Thirteen years after her death, the newspaper Hürriyet published an interview with her of unknown authorship on 10 July 1949. ¹

Her portrait has appeared on the reverse of the 50 Turkish lira banknote since 2009. The choice stirred a literary controversy, as the English article reports: critics argued women such as Halide Edib Adıvar or Afet İnan were more fitting given Topuz's framing of women's rights within sharia and her opposition to Atatürk's dress reforms, while supporters held she had been wronged in Turkish literary history. ^{1 3}

The English article qualifies the "first" she is known by: she was not literally the first woman in the empire to write a novel — Zafer Hanım had published Aşk-ı Vatan in 1877 — but she was the first woman novelist recognised by the literary establishment, and she filled a gap in the literature of an era of tangled opinions with her writing on women's issues in Western-influenced debate. ¹

This section reports what the sources record, without a verdict from the museum.

Wikidata records her religion as Islam, with no school; none of the sources used names a madhhab for her. That she wrote Nisvan-ı İslam and framed women's rights within an Islamic outlook is a position she argued in print, not a school attestation, so her record keeps the school unclassified. ^{4 1}

• English Wikipedia article on Fatma Aliye Topuz (revision 1371556950); Arabic Wikipedia article «فاطمة توبوز» (revision 76372992); Turkish Wikipedia article (revision 38220434); Urdu Wikipedia article (revision 11627312); Wikidata item Q1136761.
• The sources differ: her birth is 9 October 1862 in the English and Arabic articles and Wikidata (followed here) against 22 October 1862 in the Turkish article; Hayal ve Hakikat is dated 1891 in the Turkish and Arabic articles against 1894 in the English article and 1892 in its works lists; Nisvan-ı İslam is dated 1896 by the English article against an 1892 publication in the Turkish article and a passage of the Arabic one.