Memoirs

Halide Edib

2 ideas

1. Divorcing a husband who took second wife

   Halide Edib grew up in a household where her father married a second wife, and she absorbed the grief that polygamy caused the women in it. When her own husband, the mathematician Salih Zeki, took another wife, she refused to share the marriage and divorced him in 1910. She presents polygamy as a harm built into the arrangement itself, one that wounds even when the husband is kind, rather than a matter of individual cruelty.

2. Humanitarian work inside a wartime imperial project

   During the war Halide Edib ran schools and orphanages in Syria and Lebanon under Djemal Pasha's governorship. She describes the work as education and relief. Critics tie the same institutions to the forced Turkification of Armenian and Arab orphans. Her account shows how a reformer's sincere motives can serve, and then be used to excuse, the aims of the state that funds the work.

Save and mark ideas in the app