Twenty Years' Residence among the People of Turkey: Bulgarians, Greeks, Albanians, Turks, and Armenians

by Fanny Janet Sandison Blunt

I have not seen these ladies since, but a short time after my visit I was deeply grieved to hear that this seemingly well-adapted match was broken off in consequence of the young Bey having returned accompanied by a French ballet-dancer, whom he declared he did not intend to give up.

I have heard that, generally speaking, Paris is not the most profitable school for young Turks. Attracted by the immense amount of pleasure and amusement there afforded to strangers, they become negligent students, waste their time and money in profitless pursuits, keep company of the most doubtful kind, are led to contract some of the worst Parisian habits, and return to their country, having acquired little more than a superficial varnish of European manners. These they proudly display; but at heart they profoundly despise the nation whose virtues they failed to acquire, whilst they plunged freely into those vices which were more congenial to their habits and nature.

Those who are acquainted with Stamboul life may remember the sensation caused in 1873 by a band of young Turkish ruffians, who bore the name of Tussun, whose declared object was to initiate the youth of both sexes into those dark practices of the Asiatics still so prevalent among the upper classes. This abominable society was so strong that the police were, for a time, powerless against it. The chief of these vagabonds was stated to be the son of a member of the Sultan’s household, and the other young men were connected with some high Turkish families. It was only by the most active interference of the minister of justice that this fraternity was finally put down.

One of the great drawbacks the progress of education meets with among the Turks is the insurmountable repulsion Mohammedans feel to freeing this movement from the fetters of religion. The most enlightened of Turks will be found wanting in good-will and assistance when the question is that of promoting the current of liberal ideas at the cost of the religious dogmas which regulate all his social habits; and these retrograde notions cannot be openly repudiated even by those who profess no belief in the religion upon which they are supposed to be founded. These sceptical Turks, possessing no distinct conception of any philosophical school whose aim should be to replace prejudice and superstition by the propagation of free thought, based upon morality and scientific research, merely become reckless and unprincipled, but are of no more use than the bigoted party in helping forward an undenominational movement in education.

Until quite recent times the only public institutions for the education of the Turkish youth were those common to all Moslem countries, the Mahallé Mektebs, or primary schools, and the Medressés, or Mosque-Colleges. The Mektebs are to Turkey, though in a still more inefficient way, what the old National Schools were to England. They are the universal, and till recently the only existing, instruments of rudimentary education for the children of both sexes of all classes. Like the old-fashioned National Schools, religion is the main thing taught; only in the Turkish Mektebs religion is pretty nearly the one thing taught. The little Turkish boys and girls are sent to these schools at a very early age, and pay for their instruction the nominal fee of one piastre (2¼d.) a month. Great ceremony attends the child’s first entrance. Its hands are dyed with henna; its head decorated with jewels; and it is furnished with a new suit of clothes, and an expensive bag called Soupara, in which the Mus-haf, or copy of the Koran, is carried. The father of the child leads it to the Mekteb, where it recites the Moslem creed to the Hodja, kisses his hand, and joins the class. The other children, after the recital of prayers, lead the novice home, headed by the Hodja, who chants prayers all the way along, the children joining in the response of Amin! Amin! Refreshments and ten paras (a halfpenny) are offered to each child by the parents of the new scholar, on receipt of which they make a rush into the street and throng round the trays of the numerous hawkers who collect round the door on such occasions. This ceremony is repeated on the first examination, for which the Hodja receives £1 and a suit of linen. The teaching in these schools was, until recently, strictly limited to lessons from the Koran. The scholars, amounting in number sometimes to one or two hundred, are closely packed together in a school-room which is generally the dependence of the Mosque. Kneeling in rows, divided into tens by monitors who superintend their lessons, they learn partly from the book and partly by rote, all reading out the lesson at the same time, and swaying their bodies backwards and forwards. An old Hodja, with his assistant, sits cross-legged on a mat at one end of the room, before the chest which serves the double purpose of desk and bookcase. With the cane of discipline in one hand, a pipe in the other, and the Koran before him, the old pedagogue listens to and directs the proceedings of the pupils. Unruly children are subjected to the punishment of the cane and the Falakka, a kind of wooden hobble passed over the ankle of the culprit, who sometimes has to return home wearing this mark of disgrace. The Koran lessons, delivered in Arabic, are gibberish to the children, unless explained by the master; and the characters used in Koran writing are not well adapted for teaching ordinary Turkish handwriting.

It is easily seen what ample room for improvement there is in these establishments, where Moslems spend the best part of their childhood. Religion, taught in every-day language, simplified and adapted to the understanding of children, together with the rudiments of ordinary knowledge, would lay the foundation of a wiser and more profitable system of education than all these many years lost in poring over theological abstractions, comprehensible glimpses of which can only be conveyed to such young minds by the explanations of the Hodja, who is sure to dwell upon the most dogmatic and consequently the most intolerant points of Islam, and thus sows among the children ready-made ideas, the pernicious seed of that fanaticism which finds its early utterance in the words Kafir and Giaour (infidel), and prompts the little baby to measure himself with his gray-bearded Christian neighbor, and in the assurance of superior election raise his hand to cast the stone of ineradicable contempt.

The finished scholars from these institutions may become Hodjas themselves, acquiring, if they choose, a knowledge of writing. Such is the system of primary education which has existed in Turkey ever since the Conquest. Happily this century has seen some improvements, not so much in the Mektebs as in the introduction among them of Government (so to say, Board) Schools on improved principles.

No era of the Ottoman history presents a more dismal picture of ignorance and incapacity than the close of the last century. The country appeared to be crumbling to pieces; and the nation seemed lost in the two extremes of apathy and fanaticism. Sultan Mahmoud’s sagacious mind saw wherein the evil lay, and attempted to remedy it by establishing schools more after the European model, and by this means spreading among his people the liberal ideas that alone could civilize and regenerate them. The difficulties he encountered in his praiseworthy and untiring efforts to bring about this change were great and varied. Nevertheless, he succeeded in establishing a few schools in the capital, which have served as bases to those that were instituted by his son and successor Abdul-Medjid. These latter consisted first of Rushdiyés, or preparatory schools, where boys of all classes are admitted on leaving the Mektebs, and are gratuitously taught Turkish, elementary arithmetic, the history of their country, and geography.

Next to these establishments come the Idadiyés, or more advanced preparatory schools, where boys are also admitted gratuitously, and remain from three to five years; they are instructed in the studies adapted to the careers they are destined to follow in the finishing medical, military, marine, and artillery schools to which they gain admittance on leaving the Idadiyés.

Besides these schools the capital contains some others of equal importance, such as a school for forming professors for the Rushdiyés, a school teaching foreign languages to some of the employés of the Porte, a forest school, and one for mechanics.