Today in 1920s Turkey: 16 September 1925 (A Woman’s Place is Not the Dervish Lodge)
(Women’s Dervish Lodges, Karagöz, 16 September 1925, no. 1826, page 4.)
Türkçe
Kadın Tekkeleri de Varmış!
Karagöz: Hey gidi bacı hanımlar, sizler dünyaya şenlik, sevinç, saadet getirecek yerde tekke açıp hay huy ediyorsunuz ha! Ben sizin tekkelerinizi kapayayım da evinizin işiyle meşgul olun. Kışlık tarhanalarınızı hazırlayın bakalım!
English
Women’s Dervish Lodges Also (Apparently) Exist!
Karagöz: Oh sister ladies, rather than bringing cheerfulness, happiness, and well-being to the world you are opening up dervish lodges and making a ruckus! Why don’t I close down your lodges and you can busy yourself with your housework. Go on and prepare your dried soups (tarhana) for the winter!
Comments:
This illustration was published ninety-three years ago today in the popular satirical journal, Karagöz. The paper itself is named after the main character in Turkish shadow theater, Karagöz, who is often depicted in the cartoons of each issue. Such is the case with the present illustration where Karagöz is featured at its center. He is accompanied by his companion, a cigarette-smoking Hacivat (also a character from Turkish shadow theater) and a generic belt-clenching officer. The three men are rendered approaching a building together as several women exit its front doors. Karagöz appears visibly astonished at this scene and the signage above the door, which reads “Women’s Dervish Lodge” (Kadınlar Tekkesi) aids the reader in discerning the source of his surprise. Karagöz’s words below clarify further the ways in which his expectations have been frustrated as he reminisces about the proverbial “good old days” when women were luminous sources of joy and happiness… Apparently times have changed and women have abandoned these virtues in favor of supposedly bad pursuits like joining a dervish lodge.
Throughout most of September 1925 hundreds of dervish lodges and sheikh’s tombs across the country were shut down in preparation for the November 1925 law imposing a nationwide ban on the establishment and maintenance of these kinds of religious institutions. This cartoon depicts a scene in which Karagöz discovers (and reveals to the naïve reader) that, in fact, dervish lodges catering to both genders existed. This unexpected bit of information is communicated in the form of a fictional encounter between Karagöz and one such gender-novel organization.
One step forward one step backward: One of the many reasons the Turkish government wanted these particular religious bodies eradicated was because they supposedly harbored lazy vagrants and promoted regressive beliefs, superstitions and other unorthodox (i.e., non-Sunni) rituals and practices. Overall, according to the likes of Karagöz they were considered to be backwards and incompatible with the new state’s progressive agenda (access another example here. And yet while modernist rhetoric and actions support progressive ideals such as secularism on other fronts they fail. Women in cartoons of this period are still regularly treated as inferior. Sadly, this is a trend that penetrates Western and Eastern publications alike in the 1920s. In the Turkish satirical press often anecdotal stories of women’s experimentations with transgressing public, masculine spaces are narrated (by male authors/cartoonists) with varying degrees of judgment from scorn to mild amusement (for example). In a streak of timeless paternalism, Karagöz scolds the dervish women like children in our present example and demands they return to their domestic occupations where they belong. If these freshly “liberated” women don’t know what to do once safe and sound at home the wise and all-knowing Karagöz has a suggestion: cook.
(Entire page, Karagöz, 16 September 1925, no. 1826, page 4. Atatürk Library, Istanbul. )
This article has been updated and modified from its first iteration published right here on Steemit on 16 September 2016. For the original version see:
19. Today in 1920s Turkey: 16 September 1925 (A Woman’s Place is Not the Dervish Lodge)