The foundation of our character is joyous, persistently joyous, since neither the monotony of our existence, nor the tragedy of the Hamidian régime, nor the lamentable circumstances of our life has been able to utterly crush laughter out of life. There is no middle course in Turkey.
But I told you that it was from studying the customs of Western Europe that I was beginning to better understand the land I had left. If the joys of freedom have been denied to Turkish women, how many worries have they been spared. Are not women to be sincerely pitied who make “Society” the aim and object of their existence? No longer can they do what they feel they ought for fear of compromising a “social position.” Is not the gaiety of their lives worse even than the monotony of ours? Ofttimes they have to sacrifice a noble friendship to the higher demands of social exclusiveness. How strange and narrow and insincere it all seems to a Turkish woman.
I never made the acquaintance of the disease “snobbery” in my own land. Here, for the first time, I have an opportunity of studying its victims. There may be something wanting in my Turkish constitution to prevent my appreciating the rare delight of a visit from a great personage. Ambitious people I have often met—in what country do they not thrive? There are many in Turkey, and that is only natural when it is remembered the very limited number of ways for individuality to express itself. But snobs! How childish they are! Can they really believe I am a more desirable person to have at a tea-table since I have been noticed by an ex-Empress? Only by inflicting their society on people who obviously do not want them, and by “bluff”—another word which does not exist in the Turkish language—can they be invited at all. Not a single woman in the whole of Turkey would put so low an estimate on her own importance! So snobbery would never get a foothold with us.
You cannot know how this simple black veil, which covers our faces, can completely change the whole conditions of the life of a nation.
What is there in common between you and us?
“The heart,” you will say.
But is the heart the same in the East as in the West? And what a difference there is between our method of seeing things, even of great importance. Ambition with us does not seek the same ends; pride with us is wounded by such a different class of actions; and individuality in the East seeks other gratifications than it does in the West.
How would it be possible for “snobbery” to exist in a country where there is no society, and where the ideal of democracy is so admirably understood; where the poor do not envy the rich, the servant respects his master, and the humble do not crave for the position of Grand Vizier?
I said there were ambitious people in my country, yes; but they are still more fatalists. If a man has been unsuccessful, he blames his “written destiny,” which no earthly being can alter. Is not this resignation to the yoke of the tyrannical Sultan a proof of fatalism? What other nation would, for thirty-one years, have put up with such a régime?
It is only since I have seen other Governments and other peoples that I can fully realise the passionate fatalism of the Turks.