8 - Fatma Aliye’s Nisvan-ı İslam: Istanbul, Beirut, Cairo, Paris, 1891–6

Summary

In October 1891, the Istanbul-based Ottoman Turkish-language newspaper Tercüman-ı Hakikat began serial publication of a work presented as three conversations among women of the Ottoman elite and well-heeled French and English female tourists in Istanbul. Echoing a subgenre circulating in Europe and North America – travel books narrating ‘harem visits’ – Nisvan-ı İslam (‘Women of Islam’) was penned by Fatma Aliye (1862–1936). It was not a work of ‘travel literature’, but Fatma Aliye’s work did travel to new languages and other places: Arabic and Beirut, and then Cairo; French and Paris; Chicago but probably not in English. Our chapter maps the linguistic and geographical journeys of Nisvan-ı İslam in the 1890s (for its boundary-crossing was almost immediate). It was a work in which cultural translation was a central theme and organisational principle. How did its textuality re-sound and proliferate in other languages? And for whom?

Fatma Aliye began her writing career anonymously but became a celebrated Ottoman Turkish writer and advocate for women. Born into an elite family, she was the daughter of Adviye Rabia Hanım (dates unknown) and the renowned Ottoman statesman, legal scholar and historian Ahmet Cevdet Paşa (1822–95). From a young age, Fatma Aliye’s home-based education occurred in several venues, for her father was posted as provincial governor to Aleppo (c. 1866–8) and Damascus (c. 1878). She learned French, Arabic and Persian. At the age of seventeen, in 1879, she was married to military officer Mehmet Faik Bey (d. 1928), an aide-de-camp to Sultan Abdülhamid II (r. 1876–1909). They would have four daughters. Similar to the experience of her older contemporary ‘A’isha Taymur (1840–1902) in Egypt, Fatma Aliye may have had a husband who did not condone at least some literary pursuits: he is said to have disapproved of her reading novels in foreign languages (a practice frowned on by many). But she had an encouraging mentor in the novelist and newspaper publisher Ahmet Midhat Efendi (1844–1912), who supported her publicly and produced a biography of her incorporating extracts from her letters describing her childhood and young life, as well as co-authoring an early novel (Hayal ve Hakikat, 1891).