Paradoxes of a Cold War Sufi woman: Samiha Ayverdi between Islam, nationalism, and modernity

Widely recognized by nationalists, Islamists and conservatives as the heroine of the Turkish Right in the twentieth century, Sâmiha Ayverdi influenced the renaissance of right-wing politics in Turkey as an impor-tant leader of the Rifaî order, a prolific author, an unyielding anti-com-munist, and finally as an institution-builder for right-wing causes. This article focuses on the apparent paradoxes in Ayverdi’s long career, such as her modernist interpretation of Islam, her relationship with her sufi master, preference for memoirs, and her unabashed elitism. Such char-acteristics defy clichés associated with the stereotypical conservative/na-tionalist/Islamist intellectual in Cold War Turkey. Our in-depth study of Ayverdi’s works thus reveals the complexity of right-wing identities, and the fact that our protagonist is an outspoken woman intellectual also adds an important twist to the story.Keywords:

Ayverdi, Sufism, Muslim women, Turkish nationalism, Kemal-ism, Turkish literature, narratives of the self, minorities—Turkey.

In 1937, the thirty-two-year-old Sâmiha Ayverdi completed her first novel,

k Bu

(So This Is Love). Already a passionate disciple of Kenan Rifaî,

young Sâmiha laid the manuscript of her first book in

lker Aytürk, Political Science and Public Administration, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey, ayturk@bilk-ent.edu.tr.Laurent Mignon, St Antony’s College, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom, laurent.mignon@orinst.ox.ac.uk.

Authors’ Note:

We presented earlier versions of this article before engaging audiences at the Universities of Chicago, Oxford, Stanford and Tel Aviv. Particularly, we would like to thank Ay

e Saktanber, Ali Yaycıo

lu, and Refet Gürkaynak for insightful comments and suggestions. All remaining errors are ours.1 There is as yet no scholarly biography of Kenan Rifaî [Büyükaksoy] (1867-1950), but collections of

New Perspectives on Turkey

, no. 49 (2013): 57-89.

N E W P E R S P E C T I V E S O N T U R K E Y

the hands of the famed sheikh and told him: “My master, here is your newborn son.” With this barely disguised allusion to an—intellectual—insemination, which itself was an extraordinary instance of challenging what has traditionally been considered Islamically-appropriate interac-tion between a man and a woman,

she read the manuscript out to the old man and published it only after receiving his blessing. This was a ritual that she would repeat over and over until Rifaî passed away in 1950. On one occasion, her master objected to the genre of her writing; he said he did not approve of plays. Ayverdi’s response was to tear that manuscript into pieces and discard the remains immediately.

Such was Ayverdi’s fidelity to her sheikh that she dedicated her entire life to hon-oring, and sometimes defending, the memory of Rifaî after his passing.Sâmiha Ayverdi (1905-1993) was a nonconformist intellectual and celebrity in conservative, nationalist, and Islamist circles of 20th century Turkey. Born into an established family and being a high-ranking mem-ber of the Rifaî order

in Turkey, Ayverdi spread her influence over a cir-cle of like-minded intellectuals, writers, and artists through a number of family-sponsored societies and organizations. She was also the author of some forty works, ranging from Islamic propagandist pamphlets and historical novels to highly autobiographical collections of essays on Ot-toman-Turkish history. Undeservedly understudied in English-speaking academia, Ayverdi had always been a revered, if rather controversial, figure of the Turkish Right, but she rose to even greater prominence posthumously during the 2000s. In 2004, the Turkish Ministry of Na-tional Education included her most widely read novel,

brahim Efendi Kona

(The Mansion of

brahim Efendi) in the official canon of 100 books to be read by all middle and high school students.

To mark the one-hundredth anniversary of Ayverdi’s birth, a prestigious high school

conversations with him or anecdotes have been published by his followers; see Sâmiha Ayverdi, Safiye Erol, Nezihe Araz and Sofi Huri,

Ken’an Rifaî ve Yirminci Asrın I

ında Müslümanlık

, 4

ed. (

stanbul: Kubbealtı, 2003); Cemalnur Sargut,

Kenan Rifaî

le A

ka Yolculuk

(

stanbul: Sufi Kitap Yayınları, 2011).2 Historical accounts depicting the relationship between a male sheikh and a woman disciple are very rare. One other example is the dream-book of an early 17th century woman, Asiye Hatun of Skopje, who recorded her dreams and sent them to her sheikh for interpretation and guidance. Ironically, her dreams centered on the sheikh with unmistakable sexual overtones; see, Cemal Kafadar, “Mütereddit Bir Mutasavvıf: Üsküplü Asiye Hatun’un Rüya Defteri, 1641-1643,”

Topkapı Sarayı Yıllı

, 5 (1992), 168-222.3 Özcan Ergiydiren,

Hayâli Cihan De

er: Sâmiha Ayverdi ile Hâtıralar

(

stanbul: Kubbealtı, 2009), 370.4 Rifais are followers of the 12

century mystic Ahmad ar-Rifai. From its original base in Lower Iraq, Rifaiyya spread into Anatolia in the 15

century and from there to the Balkans, where it still maintains a presence in Albania, Bosnia and Kosovo. See, C. E. Bosworth, “Rifa’iyya,”

Encyclopedia of Islam

, 2

ed. (2010).5 “100 Temel Eser,” http://www.meb.gov.tr/duyurular/duyurular/100temeleser/100temeleser.htm, T.C. Millî E

itim Bakanlı

ı, August 22, 2004, accessed June 9, 2012.

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stanbul was renamed after her in 2005, and the Turkish public tel-evision channel, TRT, funded and aired a documentary on Ayverdi’s life and the mystical message of her works.

A micro-level, in-depth study of an individual only makes a far-reaching contribution beyond the narrow confines of the immediate historical context if that figure stood at the interface of a number of debates of interest to scholars from a wide range of disciplines. This is exactly what we found in Sâmiha Ayverdi’s case, and, in this article, we aim to approach and problematize several strands of scholarship, includ-ing those on Islam and gender, Islamism and conservatism, narratives of the self by Muslim women, and Muslim anti-Semitism and anti-Chris-tian polemics. This early, and probably first, case of a Turkish Islamic-leaning activist woman and her circle went surprisingly unnoticed in the growing body of academic literature, which invariably describes Islamist women’s visibility and activism as a post-1980 phenomenon.

In a coun-try where female activism was historically associated with the western-ized and westernizing Kemalist women,

Ayverdi’s intellectual position

6 The documentary is available on www.youtube.com in two parts.7 Binnaz Toprak, “Religion and Turkish Women,” in Nermin Abadan-Unat, Deniz Kandiyoti and Mübec-cel B. Kıray, eds.,

Women in Turkish Society

(Leiden: Brill, 1981), 281-92; Nükhet Sirman, “Feminism in Turkey: A Short History,”

New Perspectives on Turkey

3 (1989), 1-34; Feride Acar, “Women and Islam in Turkey,” in

Women in Modern Turkish Society

, 46-65; Ye

im Arat, “Feminism and Islam: Consideration on the Journal

Kadın ve Aile

,” in

Women in Modern Turkish Society

, 66-78; Nilüfer Göle,

The Forbidden Modern: Civilization and Veiling

(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). It was Ay

e Saktanber who first turned the spotlight on this academic problem and discussed the root causes and context of neglect in her

Living Islam: Women, Religion and the Politicization of Culture in Turkey

(London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2002), 44-8.8 Until the 1980s, the dominant paradigm in the study of Turkish women was one of euphoric celebration of emancipation in the early republic. Turkish women were indeed granted legal and political equality in a path-breaking series of reforms during the 1920s and 1930s, leading all observers to assume that those women who still maintained a traditional, Islamic way of life were but historical anomalies, des-tined to disappear with the progress of modernization. For this pre-1980 literature, see, A. Afet

nan,

The Emancipation of the Turkish Women

(Amsterdam: UNESCO, 1962); Afet

nan,

Atatürk ve Türk Kadın Haklarının Kazanılması

(

stanbul: Milli E

itim Bakanlı

ı, 1968); Afet

nan,

Tarih Boyunca Türk Kadınının Hak ve Görevleri

(

stanbul: Milli E

itim Bakanlı

ı,1975); Perihan Onay,

Türkiye’nin Sosyal Kalkınmasında Kadının Rolü

(Ankara:

İş

Bankası Yayınları, n.d.); Tezer Ta

kıran,

Cumhuriyetin 50. Yılında Türk Kadın Hakları

(Ankara: Ba

bakanlık, 1973); Necla Arat,

Kadın Sorunu

(

stanbul:

stanbul Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi, 1980); Emel Do

ramacı,

Atatürk and the Turkish Women Today

(Ankara: Atatürk Ara

tırma Merkezi, 1991). This was followed by a period of disillusionment with the rhetoric of emancipation and some scholars started to underline the fact that Kemalist reforms were mainly an urban, bourgeois phenomenon that left the rural majority of women untouched. See, Nermin Abadan-Unat, “Social Change and Turkish Women,” in

Women in Turkish Society

, 5-31; Abadan-Unat,

Women in the Developing World: Evidence from Turkey

(Denver: University of Denver, 1986). Finally, in the post-1983 atmosphere, the Kemalist period received rather unfavorable attention, being cited as an example of state feminism which precluded the true liberation of women. Some important examples of this approach are, Deniz Kandiyoti, “Emancipated but Unliberated? Reflections on the Turkish Case,”

Feminist Studies

13 (1987), 317-38;

irin Tekeli, ed.

Women in Modern Turkish Society

(London: Zed Books, 1995); Göle,

The Forbid-den Modern

; Yaprak Zihnio

lu,

Kadınsız

nkılap

(

stanbul: Metis, 2003).

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is perplexing. Her life and works occupy the intersection of tradition and renewal, conservatism and the emancipation of women, Ottoman elitism and Turkish nationalism, mysticism and bourgeois life, fiction and autobiography.This article aims to explore apparent paradoxes in Ayverdi’s self-por-traiture. How could a woman impose herself as an authority on a tradi-tionally male-dominated, conservative Muslim audience and play a leading role in a Muslim mystical brotherhood, while she was a living example of a westernized and unveiled Turkish woman? Why are most of her works based on autobiographical material, exposing her daily life in her house-hold, while Islam orders a strict separation of the private and the public spheres for women? How could Ayverdi claim to speak from inside Turk-ish conservatism, with its populist and egalitarian challenges to the elitism of the Kemalist establishment, while constructing an elitism of her own? Although she belongs to the Sufi tradition and celebrates the Ottoman imperial model, why did Ayverdi choose to ignore Sufi teachings and the multicultural fabric of the Ottoman society, and advocate anti-Semitic, anti-Armenian and, generally speaking, anti-Western views?We need to clarify at this point that, while we want to highlight Ay-verdi’s peculiarities, we do not, in any way, wish to perpetuate Oriental-ist myths about docile Muslim women languishing in the harem. For centuries Ottoman women had been active in the Sufi field as patrons and disciples, and certainly more so during the later years of the empire. During the republican period too, religious orders (

tarikat

) may have counted thousands of women among their members. Furthermore, con-tours of Ayverdi’s life fit into the framework of Middle Eastern middle classes:

her story of “being modern” and preserving tradition simultane-ously was and is being replicated by countless other middle and upper-middle class women in the Middle East.

That said, what sets Ayverdi apart from many other Muslim women of her time was that she exer-cised spiritual and religious authority over a mixed group of men and women disciples for nearly half a century.

9 Keith Watenpaugh, “Being Middle Class and Being Arab: Sectarian Dilemmas and Middle-Class Mo-dernity in the Arab Middle East, 1908-1936,” in A. Ricardo Lopez and Barbara Weinstein, eds.,

The Making of the Middle Class: Toward a Transnational History

(Durham: Duke University Press, 2012); Watenpaugh,

Being Modern in the Middle East: Revolution, Nationalism, Colonialism, and the Arab Mid-dle Class

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). 10 Beth Baron,

Egypt as a Woman: Nationalism, Gender, and Politics

(Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2005); Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, “Patriotic Womanhood: The Culture of Feminism in Modern Iran, 1900-1941,”

British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies

32 (2005), 29-46; Monica M. Ringer, “Rethinking Religion: Progress and Morality in the Early Twentieth-Century Iranian Women’s Press,”

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East

24 (2004), 47-54.

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The peculiarities of Ayverdi and her circle challenge one of the most salient truisms of modern Turkish intellectual history. As Nazım

rem has argued, “the dominant trend in the historiography of the Kemalist revolution [...] characterized the politics of the era as a zero-sum game between secular-modernist Kemalists [...] and religiously oriented an-ti-modernists.”

The most sophisticated example of this trend can be found in the work of

erif Mardin, who sees in Kemalism a revolution above all against the “values” of the Ottoman ancien régime.

Mardin would not approve, however, of the assumption of a clean break between the Kemalist and non-Kemalist value systems which has been carried to crude extremes to paint in broad strokes caricatures of Kemalist politi-cians and intellectuals versus caricatures of right-wing, Islamist, conserv-ative figures, imposing predetermined, imaginary templates of thought and behavior on all. Legions of Kemalist and non-Kemalist academics, authors, journalists, and public intellectuals embraced those stereotypes and kept them alive, hiding from view the seething heterogeneity within both camps. We argue that, despite her reputation for being a typical right-winger of the Cold War years, Ayverdi was a hybrid character who belonged to and lived in both worlds at the same time. Ayverdi’s case in-vites us to reevaluate dominant figures of the early republican and Cold War Turkey in search of heterogeneity and hybridity.In responding to these questions, we attempt to uncover the multi-plicity and complexity of Islamic identities in Turkey as well as reassess the concept of conservatism in a society which underwent tremendous change throughout the 20th century. The fact that we are dealing with an outspoken woman intellectual introduces an important twist to the discussion of both Islamism and conservatism.

Introducing the heroine

Sâmiha Ayverdi was born in

stanbul in 1905 into a well-connected, well-to-do family of Ottoman bureaucrats.

Her father and paternal grandfather served in the Ottoman army as middle-ranking officers,

11 Nazım

rem, “Turkish Conservative Modernism: Birth of a Nationalist Quest for Cultural Renewal,”

International Journal of Middle East Studies

34 (2002), 87.12

erif A. Mardin, “Ideology and Religion in the Turkish Revolution,”

International Journal of Middle East Studies

2 (1971), 202.13 The only academic study on Sâmiha Ayverdi in western languages is Nazlı Kaner’s

Sâmiha Ayverdi

(

1905-93

)

und die osmanische Gesellschaft

(Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 1998). All other works in Turkish have been written by followers or sympathizers and are mostly published by the family-founded and led Kubbealtı Foundation; see Kazım Yeti

Sâmiha Ayverdi: Hayatı ve Eserleri

(Ankara: Kültür Bakanlı

ı, 1993); Altan Deliorman,

ıklı Hayatlar

(

stanbul: Kubbealtı, 2004); Aysel Yüksel and Zeynep Uluant,

Sâmiha Ayverdi

(

stanbul: Kültür Bakanlı

ı, 2005); Hicran Göze,

Mâveradan Gelen Ses

(

stanbul: Kub-bealtı, 2005); Ergiydiren,

Hayâli Cihan De

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while her mother was descended from a family of more established civil bureaucrats. The family home was located in

ehzadeba

ı in the heart of

stanbul’s Old City. Memories of the Muslim neighborhoods within the ancient city walls and the daily life she witnessed in the mansions of the upper class

stanbulites in her youth would become recurring themes in her novels. She graduated from a girls-only high school, but her fa-ther saw to it that she received private instruction at home and learned French. She married very young, at the age of 16, and gave birth to a daughter. Her biographers and her own memoirs are inexplicably silent about this marriage, which fell apart, ending in divorce by the time she was 21.Ayverdi returned to her family home with her daughter and never married again. The personal disaster in her life overlapped, on the one hand, with the traumatic downfall of the Ottoman Empire, and, on the other, with the birth pangs of republican Kemalism, for which she and her family had mixed feelings. It must be around this time that she fell genuinely under the influence of Kenan Rifaî, who acted as a spiritual anchor at a time of personal and political catastrophe. The sheikh had long-established, close contacts within her extended family: Sâmiha’s niece and close friend Semiha Cemal had been a devoted follower, and her maternal uncle Dr. Server Hilmi Bey was one of the designated

ha-life

s (successors) to Rifaî. As if to respect a family tradition, Sâmiha’s mother, elder brother, and Sâmiha herself all joined the Rifaî order and remained faithful to their master even after the Turkish republican re-gime outlawed all Sufi orders and banned the performance of rituals at dervish lodges.The large number of women disciples in the circle of Rifaî fed ru-mors that the handsome, middle-aged sheikh abused religion for female company.

Members of the circle, however, disregarded gossipmongers and continued to hold regular meetings of mystical union. Throughout the 1940s, they attracted the attention of the

stanbul literati, who tried to gain access to the sheikh through Ayverdi, his most famous disci-ple.

The end of the ultra-secular single-party regime in Turkey after World War II and the coming to power of the center-right Democrats in the 1950 general elections must have encouraged the Rifaî order and

14 Elderly sheikhs taking advantage of young women were familiar characters in the early republican Turkish novels. Yakup Kadri Karaosmano

lu’s

Nur Baba

stands as the outstanding example of that genre. On the other hand, the plot of and characters in a 1952 novel by Refik Halid Karay, one of the best-selling authors of the time, seem to be describing Kenan Rifaî and his circle; see Karay’s

Kadınlar Tekkesi

, 2

ed. (

stanbul:

nkılap, 1999).15 For many such encounters, see Sâmiha Ayverdi,

Mülâkatlar

(

stanbul: Kubbealtı, 2005).

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Ayverdi to seek further visibility. Eventually, the circle came out of the shadows with the publication in 1951 of

Ken’an Rifâî ve Yirminci Asrın I

ında Müslümanlık

(Kenan Rifaî and Islam in the Twentieth Cen-tury), co-authored by Ayverdi and three other women from the circle, Safiye Erol, Nezihe Araz and Sofi Huri.

The book was meant to eu-logize the Sufi master, who passed away only a year before the book was released, and to introduce his idiosyncratic interpretation of Islam to Turkish readers. While the book attracted the attention of leading Orientalists in Europe, it was also immediately hailed in the Turkish press as a great example of female devotional literature in which many observers from conservative right to secular left found “the right path” to a “modern” understanding of Islam.

If Ayverdi had previously been known to Turkish readers as a novelist, this book established her reputa-tion as one of the intellectual leaders of the Turkish right.From this point on, we see Ayverdi at the forefront of conservative and Islamist activism. With indispensable support from her brother, Ekrem Hakkı Ayverdi,

a businessman who made a small fortune from building contracts, she set about rehabilitating the Ottoman past in a hostile, republican milieu. From 1950 onwards, she participated in the activities of the

stanbul Fetih Cemiyeti

(The

stanbul Conquest Soci-ety) to commemorate the 500

anniversary of the Ottoman conquest of

stanbul. Since the beginning of the republican era in 1923, this was the first Ottoman-related project on a mass scale, involving panel meetings, symposia, individual lectures, and the publication of

stanbul and Ot-toman-related books, pamphlets, and journals. Sâmiha’s brother Ekrem Hakkı was elected the chairman of the society in 1953. The two then founded

Yahya Kemal Enstitüsü

(The Yahya Kemal Institute) in 1958 with the aim of publishing a critical edition of the poet’s complete works and

stanbul Enstitüsü

(The

stanbul Institute) to support research on the city and particularly its architecture. The choice of

stanbul as one cent-er of their activities and the poet Yahya Kemal, whose neoclassicist verse celebrated the former Ottoman capital, as another signaled a personal dedication to reviving Ottoman culture, which the early republic had attempted to rub out. Ayverdi also worked behind the scenes—possibly with the help of her close friend, the Democrat Minister of Education, Tevfik

leri—to restart the Mevlevi

eb-i Arûs

ceremony in Konya in

16 Ayverdi et al.,

Ken’an Rifâî

.17 Deliorman,

ıklı Hayatlar

, 181-4.18

smet Binark,

Ekrem Hakkı Ayverdi Bibliyografyası

(

stanbul: Kubbealtı, 1999); Aydın Yüksel,

Ekrem Hakkı Ayverdi

(Ankara: Kültür Bakanlı

ı, 1993);

Ekrem Hakkı Ayverdi Hâtıra Kitabı

(

stanbul: Fetih Ce-miyeti Yayınları, 1995).

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1953 after a hiatus of two decades.

Her penchant for founding private societies and institutions to promote conservative and Islamist causes would bear its most important fruit in 1970 with the establishment of the

Kubbealtı Cemiyeti

(The Kubbealtı Society), which later evolved into a foundation and an academy.

As its leading spirit, Ayverdi intended the Kubbealtı to become a rallying point for all right-wing intellectu-als in Turkey where they could dig in and combat the rising leftist tide. Although she did not herself join the

Aydınlar Oca

(The Intellectu-als’ Hearth), another society with parallel aims, her brother became a founder and supporter.

The polarized atmosphere and street violence in Turkey in the 1970s convinced her to become more involved in politics, which she did by penning and sending reports to prime ministers, ministers of education, and even chiefs of the general staff.

In her letters and reports, Ayverdi drew attention to the Soviet Union as the root cause of all of Turkey’s current problems and recommended a state policy to educate a future generation of teachers, professors, and intellectuals in nationalist and Islamic ideals as the only way to counterweigh communist propaganda and to win the hearts and minds of Turkish youth. When street fight-ing spiraled out of control towards the end of the 1970s, and civil war broke out between left-wing and right-wing militants, she encouraged her close associates to join the ultra-nationalist

Milliyetçi Hareket Par-tisi

(MHP or Nationalist Action Party).

One of them, Agah Oktay Güner, became Minister of Culture on the MHP ticket during the coa-lition government of 1977-78, to the chagrin of the MHP grassroots, who considered him a dubious upstart.Parallel to those activities, from the 1950s onward, Ayverdi also maintained a private salon where right-wing academics, intellectuals and

stanbul’s surviving underground Sufis intermingled with lesser-known figures from her Rifaî circle. The usual theme of those gatherings was

tasavvuf

, the mystical interpretation of Islam, seen from the particular angle of Kenan Rifaî’s teachings. The guests were often treated to a live performance of Turkish classical music and sometimes Sufi rituals and prayers.

This rather private network of devotees came to include West-

19 Ergiydiren,

Hayâli Cihan De

, 114-19.20 More information about the institutes and the academy can be found on their websites, www.istan-bulfetihcemiyeti.org.tr and www.kubbealti.org.tr. 21 Sema Basmacı, “Aydınlar Oca

ı ve Türk-

slâm Sentezi: 1980’lerden 200’li Yıllara Devreden Milliyetçi-Muhafazakar Bakiye” (Unpublished MA Thesis, Hacettepe University, Ankara, 2009). 22 Deliorman,

ıklı Hayatlar

, 203, 217.23 Ergiydiren,

Hayâli Cihan De

, 346-66.24 Ibid., 116-19, 181-206; Deliorman,

ıklı Hayatlar

, 96.

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