CHAPTER VIII
A MISFIT EDUCATION
Territet, Jan. 1907.
I began to write to you the other day of the influence which Western culture has had on the lives of Turkish women.
If you only knew the disastrous consequences of that learning and the suffering for which it is responsible! From complete ignorance, we were plunged into the most advanced culture; there was no middle course, no preparatory school, and, indeed, what ought to have been accomplished in centuries we have done in three, and sometimes in two generations.
When our grandmothers could sign their names and read the Koran, they were known as “cultured women” compared with those who had never learnt to read and write; when a woman could dispense with the services of a “public letter-writer” she was looked upon as a learned woman in the town in which she lived, and her time was fully occupied writing the correspondence of her neighbours.
What I call the disastrous influence was the influence of the Second French Empire.
One day, when I have time, I shall look up the papers which give a description of the Empress Eugénie’s visit to the East. No doubt they will treat her journey as a simple exchange of courtesies between two Sovereigns. They may lay particular emphasis on the pageantry of her reception, but few women of that time were aware of the revolution that this visit had on the lives of the Turkish women.
The Empress of the French was incontestably beautiful—but she was a woman, and the first impression which engraved itself on the understanding of these poor Turkish captives, was, that their master, Abdul Aziz, was paying homage to a woman.
The extraordinary beauty and charm of the Empress was enhanced by the most magnificent reception ever offered to a Sovereign, and even to-day, one figure stands out from all that wonderful Oriental pageant—a slight, lovely woman before whom a Sultan bowed in all his majesty.