Thinkers Timeline

Halide Edib Adıvar was a Turkish novelist, feminist political leader, soldier, and public intellectual. She is widely regarded as the founding mother of the modern Turkish novel and one of Turkey's most important twentieth-century writers. She was born in Istanbul in 1884 to an upper-class Ottoman family. Her father was a secretary to Sultan Abdülhamid II. The family was associated with the Dönmeh, a community of seventeenth-century Jewish converts to Islam who maintained some Sabbatean traditions privately. She was educated at home by tutors in Ottoman and European literature, religion, philosophy, sociology, piano, English, French, and Arabic, and briefly attended the American College for Girls in Istanbul. She began writing journalism and fiction in her early twenties. She divorced her first husband in 1910 when he took a second wife, an unusual act of defiance against polygamy in late Ottoman society. She married the politician and physician Adnan Adıvar in 1917. During the Turkish War of Independence (1919-1923) she became one of the movement's most powerful voices: she addressed the famous Sultanahmet rally in 1919 against Greek occupation, then went to Anatolia to join Mustafa Kemal's nationalist forces. She served as a corporal and later as a sergeant-major, working as a press officer and translator. She wrote about the war in The Turkish Ordeal. Her relationship with Mustafa Kemal soured after independence. As his single-party regime tightened, she and her husband went into exile in Britain and France in 1926. She did not return to Turkey for fourteen years. She wrote extensively in English during exile, including her two-volume Memoirs (1926, 1928). She returned to Turkey in 1939, served as the first woman professor at Istanbul University from 1940 to 1950, and was elected to the National Assembly from 1950 to 1954. She died in Istanbul on 9 January 1964.