Leading Articles in the Reviews. 



475 



WHY TURKEY DOES NOT PROGRESS. 



The Position of Women in Isi.am. 

 In the Correipondant of October loth there is a 

 most interesting study by M. G. Reynaud of the 

 position of Women in Islam. 



POLYOAMV AND SLAVERY. 



The writer begins by remarking that there was 

 once a lime when the diflferent races of Asia Minor 

 and the Balkans must have been in no way inferior 

 in any respect to the civihsed nations of the West. 

 Everywhere in Armenia, Mesopotamia, and Anatolia 

 we come across the ruins of wealthy cities and the 

 remains of important works of public utility attesting 

 the past prosperity of these regions since become 

 desolate, as well as the spirit of enterprise, the artistic 

 genius, and the vitality of the races who peopled 

 them. But in subjecting the Orientals to his laws, 

 Mahomet seems to have arrested their progress, a 

 result due to polygamy, with its inevitable corollary 

 of slavery, which is the leading principle of the civil 

 and religious law of the Koran. To a certain extent 

 Mahomet may have improved the material condition 

 of women, but at the same time he doomed them to 

 intellectual servitude. 



THE IMPERIAL HAREM. 



The writer, who was enabled to visit the mysterious 

 Vildiz Kiosk a few days after the fall of Abdul Hamid, 

 says that though tiie personnel of the harem was 

 dispersed, an examination of the cage in which the 

 birds were confined gave interesting indications of 

 the life they led. Shut up in a building resembling a 

 prison as much as anything else, they were there to 

 be sacrificed, body and soul, to the whims of one 

 man. The ex-Sultan possessed no fewer than four 

 thousand women, nearly all of whom were slaves. 

 Polygamy, which prohibits maternity to four thousand 

 women in the Imperial harem and which in Turkish 

 society allows several wives to one man, can only be 

 fatal to the Mussulmans. A rigorous observer of the 

 law of Mahomet, it never occurred to Abdul Humid 

 to modify this state of things. Instead he periodically 

 practised massacre among the Armenian population, 

 the most prolific of the Oriental races, to restore the 

 balance between the invading Christian and the 

 Mussulman elements. During the last century Turkey 

 lost several European provinces, and now we some- 

 times hear of the partition of the Empire among the 

 Great Powers. It is not, however, the Great Powers, 

 but the Christian races in the Ottoman Empire — the 

 Bulgarians, the Greeks, the Roumanians, the Serbs — 

 who are a menace to Turkey. Mussulman polygamy 

 and Christian monogamy make any fusion of the 

 races absolutely impossible, and it is among the 

 Christian races that the pofmlation is increasing 

 rapidly. 



NO HOME AND FAMILY LIIK. 



It is absurd for the Turks to pretend that polygamy 

 in their country is the exception and that monogamy 

 is lietoniing more and more the rule. 'I'hal ni.iy be 



true with regard to legal marriages, but silence is 

 maintained as to concubinage. The servitude 

 of women in Turkey is proved by their dress, by 

 the principle of the separation of the sexes in all 

 the circumstances of public and private life, by the 

 custom which does not leave to women the choice 

 of their husbands, and by the disposition of the laws,- 

 civil and religious, which rigorously subject women 

 to their fathers during the first phase of their life, and 

 to their husbands during the second phase. In the 

 " iiome " the husband and the wife occupy separate 

 apartments, and even meals are not taken together. 

 The writer one day ventured to ask quite an educated 

 .Mussulman whom he met daily at a restaurant why 

 it was he did not prefer the society of his wife at table, 

 and learnt from him that there could not possibly be 

 any interchange of ideas between him and his wife 

 as she was so illiterate. Thus, while tradition and 

 custom prevent real home and family life, the 

 ignorance of women creates an additional barrier. 



THE NOVELS OF ZOLA AND PIERRE LOTI. 



As a strict observer of the precepts of the Koran, 

 it is astonishing that the Mussulman should ever 

 entrust the early education of his daughters to 

 Christian women. Probably he thinks that the girls 

 when they leave school will be forced to submit to 

 the customs of the country. They will not enjoy any 

 freedom, and it does not matter what they may think. 

 French is said to be the foreign language most used 

 in Turkey, and, we are told, the novels of Zola are 

 largely read by the native women, but that Pierre 

 Loti's " Azyad^ " and " The Disenchanted " are 

 strictly proscribed. This is not surprising. Pierre 

 Loti does not show the Turkish husband in a favour- 

 able light, and Zola's books cannot give the Turkish 

 women a very attractive notion of home and family 

 life in Christian countries. 



WOMEN TO WORK OUT THEIR OWN SALVATION. 



In all their teaching Christianity and Islamism must 

 remain morally opposed. The monstrous example of 

 the Imperial harem is sufficient evidence of the 

 absence of moral rule in the Mussulman religion. In 

 the nineteenth century " Uncle Tom's Cabin " was the 

 beginning of the emancipation of the negroes of the 

 United States, and it may be that Pierre Loti's " The 

 Disenchanted, " may play a like role in the drama of 

 the emancipation of women in the Mussulman world. 

 In Western civilisation the Woman movement is 

 recognised as that slow and progressive evolution 

 which will transform by degrees the condition of 

 women ; in the East nothing less than a complete 

 revolution in the religious ideas, in the family and 

 social insiitutic ns, in the customs, and in the laws is 

 required to bring about such a transformation. But 

 the Mussulman holds to his religion, the corner-stone 

 of which is polygamy, and his mind is absolutely 

 closed to Western ideas. The customs of the harem 

 are as humiliating for the men as for the women. 

 The writer looks to the women for the remedy. 



