Evening Star Newspaper, May 26, 1929, Page 34

THE SUNDAY STAR, WASHINGTON, D. C, MAY 26, 1929—PART 2. Nation Is Being Reborn (Continued From First Page.) | banks, railways and other private en Em—me e e | feppTiseK AYe s OTgANISINgcourEes Hiny th ing territories formerly belonging to the | new script for their employes, who go dead Ottoman Empire. Present Tur- | to their lessons willingly. One of key has no covetousness for lands out- | reasons probably lies in the fact that side her new fronters, | the new script has been made A case almost unique in history, | simple as possible: that the rules go Turkey has gladly and voluntarily given | erning the new spelling and the new up all traditions and pretentions that | grammar are infinitely caster than the might have been invoked to give her the | old ones. Spelling, “for instance, is moral and spiritual leadership of cer-| purely phonetic and almost all the tain fellow nations. Turkey, as every-| letters are familiar Western European body knows, was once the leading Mos- | Ietters—already known to the Latin, lem power, and much of her strength|Jewish and = Armenian clemen! in Jay in the support she had among the | Turkey. and to many among the Turks Moslem peoples. who considered the | themselves. Sultan of Constantinople as their spir-| Proof of the success of the change itual head, the Caliph. A Caliph's|is given by the fact that Mustaph emissary was revered from Chinese Tur- | Kemal at first estimated it would take kestan to Egypt, from India to Syria The new Turks, in abandoning all this spiritual patrimony. have shown that they did not care for or belicve in the solidarity of the Moslem nations. They have driven away from Constanti- uople the last Sultan-Caliph. they have secularized their own theology and their ritual, they have dismissed all the old traditions of customs and family life, from turban and fez-wearing to wom- en’s veil and—what is more important— | women's political and social inequality. ‘When Mustapha Kemal sanctioned the execution of a dozen old Turks for refusing to change their beloved fez and | turbans for western hats some months | ago, the thing seemed. rightly enough, not only cruel, but—what is worse— childish. It is impossible, however, to deny | that war on Islamic tradition and its| established forms recently has taken | such a serious and important form that | #h it may be found the new, real revolu- | tion: I allude to the order which quietly | discarded Arabic writing. There we have, in symbol and in em- | blem, the epitome of all the Turkish | movement which—in the proportion ex- | 7 isting between Turkey and Northern Furope—may be considered as analog- ous to the reformer's onslaught on the Papist “images.” Moslem women are leading anti- Tslamic movements. Was it not at the Tnstitute of Politice in Williamstown. Mage., last Summer that I met one of the freest of their representatives. the Portia-like Alide Hanum. who was le furing there on things Turkish? Not only have the harem and the veil gone quite out of use: not only is monogamy becoming normal; but—a fact which is even more important, if not so pictur- esque—many more Turks at present are going to Paris, Rome and Vienna than | to Mecca, the old seat of the holy pil- grimage. All of that constitutes the birth pangs of a real Islamic revolution. It may be expected. indeed, that the example set by the Turks probably will be fol- lowed, partially at least, by neighboring Moslem peoples. Are we going to wit- | ness the spectacle of one of the great | religions of the world, with more than 200,000,000 “believe! beginning 10 | dose the allegiance of the faithful? ‘While witnessing now the suicide of | Turkey as an Islamic and, even more, 2 a pan-Islamic power, I cannot help remembering how in the supreme coun- cils which followed the war, I con- stantly disagreed with Lloyd George and Lord Curzon. Fear of the caliphate question and of its repercussions in In- dia and Egypt was at the root of all the diplomatic errors the British states- men committed in their Oriental policy. In vain did I tell them that Turkey was not to be so seriously feared, and that we were adopting the wrong course in throwing the Greeks against the ‘Turks. And now young Turkey comes along and herself destroys all the bogeys which for years have frightened official England: The caliphate, the monas- teries, the theory of the jihad (holy war)—in a word, all that constituted the weapons for Turkish leadership in the Moslem world. 0Old Forms Condemned. ‘The last blow came at the end of 1928—the official anathema against the old forms of the Turkish language. They constituted the last visible link with the Arab and Moslem ascendancy, and now they have been condemned to_disappearance. The transformation seems unbeliev- able to those who—like myself, a young diplomat in Constantinople at the be- ginning of the new Turkish regime— remember how the founders of the party now in power imprisoned Al- banians who dared to write and print their own language in Latin characters, This simple fact was considered a proof of “Itallan intrigues” in Albania. It seemed not only blasphemy, but treu«l son. And now we hear that in the famous palace of Dolma Baghtche on the Bos- phorus, no less a head-master than Mustapha Kemal himself gave the first solemn lesson in the new Latin alpha- bet he had ordered to a crowd of ‘Turkish members of Parliament, gen- erals, officials and professors. After that first lesson on the Bos- | phorus, Mustapha Kemal went to all the main cities of Turkey and unre- lentingly repeated his demonstrations, his lessons. His progress through Ana- | tolia was marked less by bunting than | by blackboards. And on those black- | boards the Turkish President demon- strated to the populace the advantages | of the Roman alphabet over the old | Arabic characters, ‘What is much more important than | Kemal's propaganda is that the reform seems generally liked and thai there has been no such resistance as was manifested on the abolition of the fez and turban. With the exception of the schoolmasters, many of whom are too old to make the change from an Arabic to a Latin script. the masses of the population seem to take gladly to the new way. Not only the official government, but —You can now pur- chase a pair of accu- rately - fitted glasses without a large outlay. Everything is guaran- teed, and you will find some of the best values in the city here. Bifocals to See Both Far and Near -4 1. $4.75 Up! -Our Optometrists are registered optometric eye specialists—and you _are assured accurately - fitted glasses at the lowest prices Oculist Prescriptions Filled at a Saving! Use Your Charge Account Kann's - § | from Lenir 15 vears for the change to become ger erally accepted. but now, after only a few months, this estimate has fallen o a couple of vears. Of course, it is expected that the reform will bring sharp decreases in illiteracy _throughout the countty: at present” 90 per cent of Turkey's resi- dents are deemed illiterate. It is also | hoped that Turkish literature will gain | a new impetus, for it will be held back no longer by a mental prison of Arabic | and Persian molds. which are_really foreign to the more realistic Turkish spirit All that may well happen | Seeks Moral Independence. | But the historic importance of the re- orm, and that which makes it a real | revolution, is that the Turkish nation is trying to find again that moral inde- | pendence and autonomy which—modest | as it may have been—was lost when it | accepted and adopted the Persian and | Arabian cultures under the Seljuk and | Osmanli Sultans | We are really confronted by the spec- tacle of a people deliberately turning ir hacks upon centuries of their mor- | 1 and literary history The great_question the place of the d Will the Turkish people turn to W materialism or to Western spiritus Whence will the Turkey of tomorrow | draw her inspiration? T venture to say that ft will not be ic Moscow. But. I am not least that it will be from What will take sure in ths | Christian _Jerusalem An analogous spectacle. an analogous | revolution is to be witnessed at the op- posite side of Asia in China. T do not | allude to the political revolution that any observer is able to see and follow. What T want to point out here is some- thing of the nature of that which I have related for Turkey. When I landed at Shanghai in 1927 for a new trip to China. where I pre- viously had spent five vears at the be- ginning of the revolution against the Manchu Empire, a simple spectacle truck me much more vividly than the trenches and the barbed wire around the Settlement and the beheaded bodies at the corners in the Chinese town. All that was the habitual and obligatory setting of the play—the play of the rev- | olution. T knew all that beforehand. What struck me so vividly was to see even the humblest of the Chinese—the coolies. the rickisha men—buying cer- | tain small newspapers, glancing at | them and hiding them as something precious in the depths of their lurid Tobes A few years before not a Chinese would have spent a sapek for political news. The wonder grew to greater propor- tions when I learned later that not only was there an efflorescence of small pop- ular newspapers, but that, thousands of | popular books printed in Peking were invading all corners of China—books written at last in a simple, colloquial language, easily understood by all. The classical ‘language exclusively used in books up to that time was not under- stood by the people. It was like giving Latin masterpieces to Italians with no knowledge of Latin. Since language is the main instri ment for the exchange of ideas, it is there, and there only. that we may look for a deep change in the intellectual life of the Chinese. It may be a revo- lution in the ideas and beliefs of China, infinitely more important than the revolution of 1911. In 1911 and in the following years China witnessed only a change of' government, the overthrow of a dynasty. But through this recent intellectual reform the social and re- ligious iife of the Chinese may be af- fected. A few facts show that the old moral and mental structure is falling to pieces. | For instance, during the recent mili- | tary movements when the Southern ! troops entered the district of Kweichi, | in Kiangsi Province, it was decided to | confiscate all the property of the dis- | trict, which for many centuries had | constituted the sacred patrimony of the Taoist Pontiff. This meant virtuallv| the end of Taoism. one of the three | great religions of China. Nobody pro- | tested, and probably few cared, except | the Taoist monks and priests. | It is these literary movements and | these events that one should follow | closely in China if one hopes to under- stand the situation better than is pos sible through accounts of political de- | cisions in_Nanking and diplomatic pondering in Peking It is like watching a mirror reflect certain living forces springing up out | of a dead, putrid marsh. | But I am afraid that diplomats and | newspaper correspondents would _dis- dain a task so deprived of dramatic | flavor. That is more or less the way things happened in the first years of | the Westernization of Japan. We ‘\Vrsv. i erners then had no end of smiling at a spectacle we fancied funny. i Must we really draw the conclusion | that historical expericnces do not teach | anything and that each generation is | doomed to go through the same errors | as the preceding ones? 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