Obit: Professor Halet Çambel

From Hurryet Daily News:

One of the most important figures in the archaeology world, Istanbul University’s retired academic Professor Halet Çambel, has died aged 98. Turkish archaeologist and writer Çambel was found dead in her house on Jan. 12. 

After a ceremony to be held tomorrow at 10 a.m. at the Bosphorus University, Çambel will be buried next to the grave of her husband in the western province of Muğla. 

She played a key role in the understanding of Hittite hieroglyphics by discovering a tablet with the Phoenician alphabet, which allowed philologists to decipher the inscription. 

Women Excavate Metropolis

From Hurryiet Daily News:

After 22 years of male only excavation teams, women have recently joined ongoing excavation works in the ancient city of Metropolis in İzmir’s Torbalı town within the scope of a new project lead by the Turkish Labor Institution (İŞKUR).

Six women had been working on the project and had been nicknamed “Metropolis’ Angels”. According to Aybek excavation organizers and participants were really content with the participation of those women. 

New Turkish Governor - Esengül Civelek

The Daily News:

A female governor has been appointed for just the second time in the history of the Turkish Republic following a decision signed by President Abdullah Gül that was announced in the Official Gazette on Wednesday.

Esengül Civelek, who also happens to be the first female to be appointed as an undersecretary at the Education Ministry, is the new governor of the Marmara province of Yalova.

Porcelain Moon and Pomegranates

From Today's Zaman:

To the outsider at least, the status of women in Turkey is both ambiguous and controversial. Ataturk’s reforms of the 1920s gave Turkish women rights unimaginable for their Ottoman-era predecessors, with Turkish women able to vote in parliamentary elections in 1934 and stand for election in 1935. In the 1937 elections 18 of the 550 members elected were women. However, in the last elections in 2007, there were still only 50 women elected, less than 10 percent of the total. Many other reforms have taken place in the same period that have given women parity with men – equal pay, equal rights to education and equal rights to inheritance, amongst others. On the surface at least, despite the less than impressive growth in the numbers of female deputies in the Turkish Parliament, Turkish women have achieved equality with their men-folk. But, as Üstün Bilgen Reinart’s fascinating book reveals, inequalities between men and women persist. How many working women here, for example, still give up their careers to become mothers and housewives? Even when married women with children continue to work full-time, how many of their husbands men cook, clean or look after their children?

Turkey: Need to Recognise Women

Editorial from Hurriyet Daily News:

We are Turkey’s most feminine newspaper. A majority of the newspaper’s managers are women, a majority of Daily News reporters are women, and our publisher is a woman.

This is why yesterday we led the paper again with another story on the failure of Turkish society to fully embrace and integrate the potential and creativity of its women citizens. This latest report, the “Global Gender Gap Index,” prepared by the World Economic Forum, placed Turkey where we would have expected. Of 134 countries, Turkey was ranked 129.

We might quarrel with some of the assumptions in the methodology. If one were to set up a survey of lawyers, senior business executives, doctors and architects, Turkey might well come out ahead of several Scandinavian countries. But in the aggregate, we would still be scraping the bottom of the statistical cellar.For that we are outraged.

A particular focus on this survey was participation in political life. Only 10 percent of Turkey’s lawmakers and senior officials are female. That today is the 86th anniversary of the Republic, a state that gave women the right to vote before most in European states, only makes today’s reality bitter. We acknowledge as MP Özlem Türköne pointed out in yesterday’s article that the ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP, has done more than its predecessors. Thank you. But it is still not enough.

The exclusion of women from political life and other sectors is not only unjust but a waste of intellectual capital. To date, no political party has taken this issue seriously. The Association for Educating and Supporting Women Candidates, or Ka-Der, has been ignored by the major parties and even sued by one. In our own discussions, many of us have been wary of the suggestion that the only solution is quotas or “positive discrimination.”

Women in Modern Turkey

For young women in modern-day Turkey, donning the scarf is an act of youthful rebellion. Turkey is a secular country today, and women are not forced to wear the scarf, even in public. But for one young women, the scarf became a symbol - not of who she was but of who she was not.

"Like many young people at a time of religious revival across the Muslim world, [Hawa] Yilmaz is more observant than her parents. Her mother wears a scarf but cannot read the Koran in Arabic. They do not pray five times a day. The habits were typical for their generation - Turks whose families moved from the countryside during industrialization.

While her decision was in some ways a recognizable act of youthful rebellion, in Turkey her personal choices are part of a paradox at the heart of the country's modern identity.

Turkey is run by a party of observant Muslims, but its reigning ideology and law is strictly secular, dating from the authoritarian rule in the 1920s of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, a former army general who pushed Turkey toward the West and cut its roots with the Ottoman East.

For some young people today, freedom means the right to practice Islam, and self-expression means covering their hair.

Yilmaz's embrace of her religious identity has thrust her into politics. She campaigned to allow women to wear scarves on college campuses, a movement that prompted emotional, often agonized, debates across Turkey about where Islam fit into an open society. That question has paralyzed politics twice in the past year and a half and has drawn hundreds of thousands into the streets to protest what they said was a growing religiosity in society and in government - though just how observant Turks are remains in dispute.

The girls say that the scarf, contrary to popular belief, was not forced on them by their families. Nor are they paid to wear it. Some women wear it because their mothers did. For others, like Yilmaz, it was a carefully considered choice.

The head scarf debate ended abruptly in June, when Turkey's Constitutional Court ruled that the new law allowing women attending universities to wear scarves was unconstitutional, because it violated the nation's principles of secularism."

Source: The International Herald Tribune

Fatma Aliye

From Dawn:
"Turkey’s central bank has been criticised by secularists for choosing a previously obscure Ottoman writer as the first woman to adorn the country’s banknotes.

Critics say the choice of Fatma Aliye, believed to be Turkey’s first female novelist, represents a surrender to religious conservative forces and a snub to others who fought for women’s rights.

Aliye, who died in 1936 and was the daughter of a senior Ottoman bureaucrat and historian, is among several historical figures who will appear on the notes from January. The notes are being minted to mark the inauguration of a fresh currency to replace the existing New Turkish Lira.

A central bank-appointed committee also chose a mathematician, a composer, an architect and a 13th-century Sufi mystic in a departure from the established practice of notes carrying political figures.

But the committee has been accused of bowing to pressure from the ruling Islamist-leaning Justice and Development party (AKP) in choosing Aliye and overlooking Halide Edip Adivar, a writer and feminist icon who fought beside Ataturk.

Mustafa Ozyurek, an MP for the secularist Republican People’s party, described Aliye as a “dubious personality” of whom most Turks had never heard.

Aliye, born in 1862, will appear on the new 50-lira note."

Further Reading:
Fatima Aliye Hanim - Turkish Wikipedia (in Turkish)

"Biographical Dictionary of Women's Movements and Feminisms in Central, Eastern, and South Eastern Europe: 19th and 20th Centuries" by Francisca de Haan, Krasimira Daskalova, Anna Loutfi (Pub: Central European University Press, 2006)

"Women in the Middle East: Past and Present" by Nikki R. Keddie (Pub: Princeton University Press, 2006)

Two Women in Turkey

Prof. Frank White has written a wonderful article in the Turkish Daily News, about two amazing women he knew when he stayed in Turkey in the late 1960s.

"They were wealthy beyond measure, in generosity and kindness, in knowledge and experience of multitudes of intersecting cultures, and in courage that does not even know itself or call itself courage.

There are certain pairings that do not fall under any of the conventional human close relationships. Tiko and Madame Jeanet were such a twosome. Close-bonded though they were—though each also had some life separate and apart—there was a definite asymmetry in their relationship."

Continue reading the story of these two enchanting women .... "Two women's story in a changing Turkey" by Frank White.