I pointed out that the büründshük, however, was the promise that the Turkish woman would soon be able to look into the world—that seclusion would before long be an unpleasant memory. To that my hostess and her other guests agreed.
"The war has been a good thing for the Turkish woman," I ventured to remark.
"It has been," admitted Halideh Hannym. "As an example, the university has been opened to women. Three years ago nobody would have thought that possible. To-day it is un fait accompli. The world does move—even here."
Halideh Hannym did not mention that she was largely responsible for the opening of the Constantinople University to women. Modesty is one of her jewels. Nor would she admit that her novels and her trenchant articles in the Tanin had much to do with the progress made in the emancipation of the Turkish woman.
"If Turkey is to be regenerated, her women must do it," said Halideh Hannym, when we had come to speak of the necessity of better government in the Ottoman Empire.
That one sentence comprises at once the field of endeavor and the motive of the woman. She believes that there is much good in her race, but that its old-time position of conqueror and ruler over subject races had been fraught with all the dangers of ease and idleness.
"We must work—work—work," she said. "The race that lies fallow for too long a time gives the weeds too much chance. Our weaknesses and shortcomings are deep-rooted now. But I believe that the plowing which the race had during the present war will again make it a fertile field for the seeds of progress."
Not long before that Sultan Mahmed Réchad Khan V. had told me the same thing.
"We of the Orient are known to you Westerners as fatalists," remarked the old monarch in the course of the audience. "The fatalist is accepted to be a person who lets things drift along. This means that any fatalist may be no more than a lazy and shiftless individual. In our case that is not true. Our belief in the Fates—Kismet and Kadar—is to blame for what backwardness there is in the Ottoman Empire. But it will be different in the future. It is all very well to trust in God, but we must work."
I told Halideh Hannym that probably his Majesty had read some of her writings. My reason for doing this was largely the fact that as yet this gospel of work was little known in Turkey.