"Never! Never!"

"The better class of Turks have never practiced polygamy. Public opinion in Turkey has been consistently against the harem--despite the fact that every Sultan kept one. There are fewer polygamous relationships in Turkey, today, than in any other European country. . .

"More veils are worn by the women of Paris, at present, than by the women of Constantinople and Angora. . . . There never were more than a minor proportion of Turkish women who wore veils. . . . The women of the Turkish countryside were never veiled, and the town women, like those of Paris, wore veils only so long as they considered them embellishments....The modern Turkish woman dresses and wears her hair exactly as she pleases...[and] marries when and whom she wants to.

"Equality of men and women is more racially ingrained with the Turks than with other Eastern peoples. . . . The Turks in many ways resemble the Nordic peoples. You will see that as you study them."

Many a U. S. brain reeled, last week, under the impact of the words just quoted, and recovered, groggily wondering if all its ideas about Turks and Turkey were completely false.

The speaker was Halide Edib Hanoum, which is to say, Madame Halide Edib. She has been called by Charles Richard Crane,* "the most brilliant woman in Asia." She is a novelist of tempestuous plots; a most prolific and persuasive publicist; and finally she is the only woman whose name springs instantly to mind when one sets out to enumerate the founders of the new and intensely nationalist Republic of Turkey.

Mme. Halide Edib lectured last week at Williams College, U. S. A., before what is called the Williamstown (Mass.) Institute of Politics (TIME, Aug. 8, 1927). She was the first woman ever invited to so lecture. She dwarfed the Conference.

President Harry Augustus Garfield of Williams College, chairman of the Conference, opened proceedings, last week, with an address which reached its climax in the statement: "Prohibition is an issue, which, like Banquo's Ghost, will not down!"

Among the 200 persons assembled in conference, last week, were educators (64), authors & editors (16), lawyers (13), Army & Navy officers (12), clergymen and missionaries (9), diplomatic & consular officials (5), and physicians (2).

Guest lecturers, besides Halide Edib, included:

Dr. C. C. Wu, the Plenipotentiary at Washington of the New Chinese Nationalist Government (see CHINA).

Count Carlo Sforza, a pre-Mussolini statesman who was once (1920) Italian Minister for Foreign Affairs, has entitled his Williamstown lecture: The Responsibilities for the World War: Personal Recollections. As everyone who knows Count Sforza knows, his tide of personal recollections is not difficult to take at the flood.

Dr. Louis Pierard, fiery Belgian Socialist & Laborite, was counted on to tousle his hair, characteristically, while describing Current Political Problems in Belgium.

Dr. Otto Hoetzsch, the reactionary German Nationalist, seemed a queer choice, because he was expected to expound Germany's Foreign and Domestic Policies. It so happens that the German Nationalists, as a party, represent the antithesis of the present foreign policy of Germany, and are quite out of touch with the Republic's most advanced and Socialist domestic policy.

Dr. Graham Wallas, absent-and keen-minded British political scientist, seemed certain to provide excitement by twisting, turning, gnawing and finally cracking open the hard, dry nut of his subject: Means of Social Direction.

Mme. Halide Edib, 43,* svelte, witty, smartly gowned, dwarfed the Conference--inevitably. She whose father was a favorite courtier of the detested "Bloody Sultan" Abdul Hamid, she whom "Abdul the Damned" ordered home from college by a special decree, she who has been called "The Woman Behind Mustafa Kemal Pasha," President of the Turkish Republic, cannot but dwarf mere and unromantic males.

With the flair of a born publicist Mme. Edib has chosen not to ignore but to vanquish the stories about herself and Kemal. She writes: "An American journalist representing The Chicago Tribune, a young and pleasant man named Williams, arrived in Angora and had an interview with Mustafa Kemal Pasha. I naturally interpreted for them. Before he left the room he took Mustafa Kemal Pasha's photograph. Next day he took mine at the farm. When the film was developed the pictures were superimposed so that I appeared behind Mustafa Kemal Pasha against a background of a single cypress. Williams showed it to me and said laughingly, 'The woman behind Kemal.' Strangely enough, although he promised not to publish the funny thing, it appeared in several American papers under the title, 'The Woman Behind Kemal.' "

The set lecture which Halide Edib delivered last week at Williamstown, drove straight and crisply at a point. She set out to explain and illuminate the mystery of how Turkish Nationalists were able to overthrow, almost in a proverbial twinkling, not only the civil power of the Sultanate but the religious authority of the Caliphate. The Sultan and the Caliph were corporeally united, of course, in the person of whichever Potentate chanced to be squatting on the broad, round Turkish Throne.

"Islam is not only a religion but a political and social system," said Mme. Edib, speaking with measured distinctness, as though to ignorant persons.

In that respect, she continued, Islam differs markedly from Christianity, which is neither a political nor a social system. Therefore it was relatively easier to free the State from the Church, in Christian countries, than in Mohammedan. The Christians had only to pry apart two things which Christ Himself declared to be distinct: Render therefore unto Caesar the things which be Caesar's, and unto God the things which be God's. (St. Luke XX:25.)

Mohammedans, on the other hand, were stumped for centuries, said Mme. Edib, by the apparently insuperable problem of even so much as discovering the crack between a Church and a State which Mohammed had conceived as one. For example, the civil law of Turkey was based, up to two years ago, not on the authority of any act of Parliament, not on the WILL of the people, but upon the infallible WORDS of God or Allah, spoken to Mohammed and by him recorded in the Koran.

Such a state of affairs was bound to become intolerable, and, said Mme. Edib, it had become intolerable and was generally recognized as stick by Turks* long before the recent Nationalist Revolution.

"The abolition of Islam as a State religion was not forced upon the Turkish people by the terrorist Government of one man!" cried Halide Edib. "Quite the contrary, the swift stride taken by Turkey to secularization was the logical result of a situation which had been maturing for at least a century."

The problem which remains, continued Halide Edib, and made her hearers jump--the problem which remains, now that the State is free of Islam, is to free Islam from the State.

In a word, the lecturer, who continues a Moslem, is incensed by Mustafa Kemal Pasha's recent attempts to "Westernize" if not stamp out the ancient practices and tenets of Islam. Upon this issue, and others, "The Woman Behind Kemal" has now broken with him utterly, is even an exile from Turkey. Cleverly and yet with deep emotion, she put the issue to her Christian audience, last week, in an epigram: "In Turkey, the things which are Caesar's have been rendered unto Caesar, but the things which are God's have not yet been rendered unto God!"

*U. S. Commissioner on Mandates in Turkey in 1919; U. S. Minister to China 1920-21.

*She was 25 when she divorced the great Turkish mathematician, Salih Zeki Bey, and 32 when she married her present husband, Dr. Adnan Bey, onetime Speaker of the Turkish National Assembly.

*"Other Mohammedans" have not yet displayed the acumen of Turks in this respect, according to the lecturer.