Halide Edib Adıvar

Halide Edib Adıvar (11 June 1884 – 9 January 1964) was a Turkish novelist, teacher, and nationalist and feminist intellectual, among the leading names of modern Turkish literature and of the Turkish national movement. ^{1 2}

She was best known for her novels criticising the low social status of Turkish women and what she observed as most women's lack of interest in changing their situation, and for her service in the Turkish War of Independence — which earned her the name "Corporal Halide" — followed by decades of writing and university teaching in Istanbul after a long European exile. ^{1 2}

Halide Edib was born in Constantinople (Istanbul) to an upper-class family; her father was a secretary of Sultan Abdul Hamid II, and his house was a centre of intellectual activity in which she participated even as a child. ^{1 2}

She was educated at home by private tutors in European and Ottoman literature, religion, philosophy, sociology, piano, English, French and Arabic, learned Greek from her neighbours and from brief attendance at a Greek school, attended the American College for Girls briefly in 1893, returned from 1899 and graduated in 1901; as a girl she had translated Jacob Abbott's Mother, for which the Sultan awarded her the Order of Charity (Şefkat Nişanı). ¹

After graduating she married the mathematician and astronomer Salih Zeki Bey, with whom she had two sons; in 1908 she began writing on education and the status of women for Tevfik Fikret's newspaper Tanin and the women's journal Demet, published her first novel, Seviye Talip, in 1909, was hired by the education ministry to reform girls' schools in Constantinople, taught pedagogy, ethics and history, resigned over a disagreement concerning mosque schools, and divorced Salih Zeki in 1910. ¹

Her house became an intellectual salon for those interested in new concepts of Turkishness; she became involved with the Turkish Hearths (Türk Ocağı) in 1911 and its first female member in 1912, and was a founder of the Elevation of Women (Taali-i Nisvan) organisation. ¹

She married again in 1917, to Dr Ali Adnan (later Adıvar), and the next year took a lectureship in literature at Istanbul University's Faculty of Letters, becoming increasingly active in the nationalist movement under the influence of Ziya Gökalp. ¹

In 1916–1917 she acted as Ottoman inspector for schools in Damascus, Beirut and the Collège Saint Joseph in Antoura (Aintoura), Mount Lebanon, whose students included hundreds of Armenian, Arab, Assyrian, Maronite, Kurdish and Turkish orphans. ¹

That phase of her life carries the gravest accusations made against her, set out under "Positions and criticism" below in the words of the witnesses and scholars the sources cite. ¹

After the Ottoman defeat and the Allied occupation of Constantinople, Edib gained a reputation in Istanbul as a "firebrand and a dangerous agitator" and addressed thousands at the Sultanahmet demonstrations protesting the Greek occupation of Smyrna. ^{1 2}

She left Constantinople for Anatolia with her husband to join the Turkish National Movement; at a meeting in the Geyve train station on 31 March 1920 she and the journalist Yunus Nadi Abalıoğlu agreed on the importance of informing international opinion about the War of Independence and founded a news agency under the name "Anadolu Ajansı". ¹

During the Greco-Turkish War she was granted the ranks of first corporal and then sergeant in the nationalist army — the "Corporal Halide" of Turkish memory — travelled to the fronts, worked in the headquarters of İsmet Pasha on the Western Front, and recorded the invading Greek army's scorched-earth policy and atrocities against Turkish civilians in her book The Turkish Ordeal. ^{1 2}

After her husband Adnan Adıvar helped establish the Progressive Republican Party, the family fell away from the ruling elite; when the party was abolished in 1926 and the couple were accused of treason, they escaped to Europe and lived in France and the United Kingdom from 1926 to 1939. ¹

She travelled widely, teaching and lecturing repeatedly in the United States and in India, and collected her impressions of India as a British colony in her book Inside India. ¹

She returned to Turkey in 1939, becoming professor of English literature at the Faculty of Letters in Istanbul; in 1950 she was elected to Parliament, resigning in 1954 — the only formal political position she ever held. ¹

The common themes of her novels were strong, independent female characters who reached their goals against strong opposition; she was also a fervent Turkish nationalist and a Pan-Turkist who promoted Turanism in several novels, among them Yeni Turan (New Turan, 1912), which calls for the unification of Turkic peoples in Central Asia and the Caucasus under an empire led by Turkey. ¹

Her works include Seviye Talip (1910), Handan (1912), Son Eseri (1919), Ateşten Gömlek (1922; in English The Daughter of Smyrna / The Shirt of Flame), Kalb Ağrısı (1924), Vurun Kahpeye (1926), The Clown and His Daughter (first published in English in 1935, in Turkish as Sinekli Bakkal in 1936) and the thriller Yolpalas Cinayeti (Murder in Yolpalas, 1936). ¹

She wrote her memoirs in English — The Memoirs of Halide Edib (1926) and The Turkish Ordeal (1928) — and Turkey Faces West (1930) and Inside India (1937); her Turkish memoir, Türk'ün Ateşle İmtihanı, was published in 1962 and translated as House with Wisteria. ¹

This section reports positions and accusations as their holders, witnesses and scholars state them; it is not the museum's verdict on Halide Edib or on her critics.

Antoura

The English article records that for six months she administered an orphanage at Antoura where children orphaned in the Armenian genocide were subjected to forced assimilation, and that in her memoirs she wrote that she was responsible for administering the orphanage but did not believe forced assimilation was ethical, her ultimate goal being to save the orphans' lives. ¹

Keith David Watenpaugh argues that, regardless of motive, what was done at the Antoura orphanage constitutes genocide under the 1948 Genocide Convention, and compares the treatment of non-Turkish orphans there to the American and Canadian schools for Native American children. ¹

Karnig Panian, a six-year-old genocide survivor at the orphanage in 1916 and author of Goodbye, Antoura, recounts that his name was changed to the number 551, that children who resisted Turkification were beaten and starved, and that speaking Armenian was punished by beating on the soles of the feet (falakha), carried out, he says, by the director Fevzi Bey in Halide Edib's presence. ¹

The article also cites the head priest of the Collège Saint Joseph, Emile Joppin, writing in 1947 that the Armenian orphans were "Islamicised, circumcised and given new Arab or Turkish names" preserving the initials of their baptismal names, and a 1918 American Red Cross report by Major Stephen Trowbridge that every vestige of the children's Armenian or Kurdish origin was to be done away with. ¹

Against this, Halide Edib wrote in the newspaper Vakit on 21 October 1918 an article condemning the massacres: "We slaughtered the innocent Armenian population … We tried to extinguish the Armenians through methods that belong to the medieval times"; and the German historian Hilmar Kaiser is quoted defending her: "And even if you're a Turkish nationalist, that doesn't make you a killer … she advocated assimilation of Armenians, but she very strongly opposed any kind of murder." ¹

Other scholars cited in the article, among them Selim Deringil and Shushan Khachatryan, question the accuracy of her own account of her inspectorship, with Deringil writing that she was personally involved in the project of Turkification and Islamization at Antoura; her biographer Hülya Adak holds that her position evolved over time and that in the 1920s she adopted the "defensive Republican narrative" and justified the events as "reciprocal killings". ¹

Nationalism and feminism

A U.S. High Commissioner referred to her as a "chauvinist" who was "trying to rehabilitate Turkey", while her expressions of sympathy with Armenians over the bloodshed enraged members of the Committee of Union and Progress, who called for her punishment; Talat Pasha refused it, saying: "She serves her country in the way she believes. Let her speak her mind; she is sincere" — as the article reports. ¹

Scholars describe her as a Pan-Turkist advocate of the unification of Turkic peoples, and her fiction as an unsparing criticism of the low status of Turkish women and of most women's lack of interest in changing it. ¹

Halide Edib died on 9 January 1964 in Istanbul and was laid to rest at the Merkezefendi Cemetery. ^{1 2}

From the 1970s the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association awarded a Halide Edip Adıvar scholarship; after her involvement in the Armenian genocide became widely known the Association attempted to rename it, but as of 2021 the name remains for want of the sponsoring donor's consent. ¹

• English Wikipedia article on Halide Edib Adıvar (revision 1367353072); Arabic Wikipedia article «خالدة أديب» (revision 76310352); Wikidata item Q234289 (which also carries an 1883 birth-year value; both encyclopedias give 1884). The Antoura material is deeply contested and is presented here attributed to its witnesses and scholars, not in the museum's voice. No source names a school of Islam for her; Wikidata records her religion as Islam only.