Dying Beliefs

"Pork is a good food. One of the best. Religion may forbid it, but that idea will die with the older generation. While pork has been avoided with horror for generations as 'unclean,' it is now being eaten by our younger generation."

Such were words spoken last week in Constantinople by the great Tewfik Rushdi Bey, perhaps the most wholesomely feared and respected Near Eastern statesman. As he talked, the slender, expressive hands of Tewfik Rushdi Bey seemed to articulate his meaning almost more effectively than his precise, somewhat mincing words. As always, the eyes of the Turkish Foreign Minister seemed abnormally large and penetrating by reason of the thick, magnifying lenses of his glasses.

Since no issue immediately affecting Turkey loomed last week, Tewfik Rushdi Bey consented to chat informatively about the progress of Dictator Mustafa Kemal Pasha's regime. Said he:

"We have no enemies. . . . We really want peace. . . . Hard work and not too much talk is the program of Turkey as she arrives at what may be called the halfway point of our present development. . . ."

The present eating of pork by Mohammedans, he continued, is but one example of the voluntary acceptance of new customs by the people, once they had been jolted from old ruts of thought by such laws as that compelling the substitution of the hat for the fez (TIME, Feb. 21).

"The time will come, later, when any Turk can wear any hat he chooses or none!" said Tewfik Rushdi Bey with emphasis "But the fez was a symbol and had to be abolished because it represented a psychological state that was wrong."