Halide Edip Adıvar (Ottoman Turkish: خالده اديب [hɑːliˈde eˈdib], sometimes spelled Halidé Edib in English; 11 June 1884 – 9 January 1964) was a Turkish novelist, teacher, and a nationalist and feminist intellectual. She was best known for her novels criticizing the low social status of Turkish women and what she observed as a lack of interest of most women in changing their situation. She was a Pan-Turkist and several of her novels advocated for the Turanism movement.
During World War I, Halide Edib Adıvar served as the inspector of schools in Beirut, Damascus, and Aleppo. In this role, she oversaw for six months an orphanage in Antoura (in modern-day Lebanon) where children orphaned in the Armenian genocide were subjected to forced assimilation. In her memoirs, Adıvar indicates that she was responsible for administering the orphanage but did not believe that the practice of forced assimilation was ethical, and she states that her ultimate goal was to save the lives of the Armenian orphans. According to researcher Keith David Watenpaugh, regardless of the motives, what was done at the Antoura orphanage constitutes genocide, based on the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide.
Halide Edib was born in Constantinople (Istanbul), Ottoman Empire to an upper-class family. Her father was a secretary of the Ottoman sultan, Abdul Hamid II. Halide Edib was educated at home by private tutors from whom she learned European and Ottoman literature, religion, philosophy, sociology, piano playing, English, French, and Arabic. She learned Greek from her neighbors and from briefly attending a Greek school in Constantinople. She attended the American College for Girls briefly in 1893. In 1897, she translated Mother by Jacob Abbott, for which the sultan awarded her the Order of Charity (Şefkat Nişanı). She attended the American College again from 1899 to 1901, when she graduated. Her father's house was a center of intellectual activity in Constantinople and even as a child Halide Edib participated in the intellectual life of the city.
After graduating, she married the mathematician and astronomer Salih Zeki Bey, with whom she had two sons. She continued her intellectual activities, however, and in 1908 began writing articles on education and on the status of women for Tevfik Fikret's newspaper Tanin and the women's journal Demet. She published her first novel, Seviye Talip, in 1909. Because of her articles on education, the education ministry hired her to reform girls' schools in Constantinople. She worked with Nakiye Hanım on curriculum and pedagogy changes and also taught pedagogy, ethics, and history in various schools. She resigned over a disagreement with the ministry concerning mosque schools.
She received a divorce from Salih Zeki in 1910. Her house became an intellectual salon, especially for those interested in new concepts of Turkishness. She became involved with the Turkish Hearths (Türk Ocağı) in 1911 and became the first female member in 1912. She was also a founder of the Elevation of Women (Taali-i Nisvan) organization. Among the people with whom she associated during this period was the Armenian priest and composer Komitas, whose music she highly valued and regarded as Anatolian rather than Armenian.
She married again in 1917 to Dr. Ali Adnan (later Adıvar) and the next year took a job as a lecturer in literature at Istanbul University's Faculty of Letters. It was during this time that she became increasingly active in Turkey's nationalist movement, influenced by the ideas of Ziya Gökalp.
In 1916–1917, she acted as Ottoman inspector for schools in Damascus, Beirut and the Collège Saint Joseph in Aintoura (or Antoura), Mount Lebanon. The students at these schools included hundreds of Armenian, Arab, Assyrian, Maronite, Kurdish, and Turkish orphans. In the course of the Armenian genocide and under the direction of Halide Edib Adıvar and Djemal Pasha, about 1,000 Armenian and 200 Kurdish children were "Turkified" at the Collège Saint Joseph. The children at the Aintoura orphanage were taken from existing orphanages, not saved from the streets by Djemal Pasha as Halide Edip later asserted. Most of the Armenian orphans at Aintoura returned to their Armenian identities after the Ottoman withdrawal.
Halide Edip's own account of her inspectorship—the accuracy of which has been questioned by modern scholars Selim Deringil and Shushan Khachatryan—and a few other accounts emphasize her humanitarian efforts and claim that she did not impose a strict policy of Islamization of the orphans. She claims that she was opposed to the policy of Turkification and initially refused to take part in the Aintoura orphanage but ultimately accepted "as a duty towards humanity". Deringil writes that Halide Edip "was personally involved in the project of Turkification and Islamization at Antoura". Robert Fisk wrote that Halide Edip "helped to run this orphanage of terror in which Armenian children were systematically deprived of their Armenian identity and given new Turkish names, forced to become Muslims and beaten savagely if they were heard to speak Armenian".
Karnig Panian, author of Goodbye, Antoura, was a six-year-old Armenian genocide survivor at the orphanage in 1916. Panian's name was changed to the number 551. He witnessed children that resisted Turkification being punished with beatings and starvation:
At every sunset in the presence of over 1,000 orphans, when the Turkish flag was lowered, 'Long Live General Pasha!' was recited. That was the first part of the ceremony. Then it was time for punishment for the wrongdoers of the day. They beat us with the falakha [a rod used to beat the soles of the feet], and the top-rank punishment was for speaking Armenian.According to Panian, these punishments were carried out by the director Fevzi Bey, in Halide Edip's presence.
Emile Joppin, the head priest at the Saint Joseph College in Antoura, wrote in a 1947 school magazine:
The Armenian orphans were Islamicised, circumcised and given new Arab or Turkish names. Their new names always kept the initials of the names in which they were baptised. Thus Haroutioun Nadjarian was given the name Hamed Nazih, Boghos Merdanian became Bekir Mohamed, to Sarkis Safarian was given the name Safouad Sulieman.
In a 1918 report, American Red Cross officer Major Stephen Trowbridge, met with surviving orphans and reported:
Every vestige, and as far as possible every memory, of the children's Armenian or Kurdish origin was to be done away with. Turkish names were assigned and the children were compelled to undergo the rites prescribed by Islamic law and tradition ... Not a word of Armenian or Kurdish was allowed. The teachers and overseers were carefully trained to impress Turkish ideas and customs upon the lives of the children and to catechize them regularly on ... the prestige of the Turkish race.
Professor of Human Rights Studies Keith David Watenpaugh compared the treatment of non-Turkish orphans by Halide Edip and Djemal Pasha to the American and Canadian schools for Native American children that were forcibly assimilated and often abused. He wrote that Edip showed a strong hatred of Armenians in her writings, portraying them as "a mythical and existential enemy of the Ottomans" and even made claims of blood libel and child cannibalism similar to those in anti-Semitism. She also claimed a conspiracy to turn Turkish children into Armenians, "thus also turning the accusations leveled against her for her work at Antoura back toward the Armenians themselves". Watenpaugh writes of her:
Modernizing Turkey and defending its Muslim elite against Western criticism are key elements of Halide Edip's life's work, but her reluctance to protect Armenian children or even voice empathy for them as victims of genocide shows a basic lack of human compassion. For Halide Edip questions of social distinction and religion placed limits upon the asserted universal nature of humanity; for her, genocide had not been too high a price to pay for Turkish progress, modernity, and nationalism.