Istanbul
No one should be persecuted. What is remarkable is how, contrary to all
other accounts, he does not mention Dönme beliefs and race, or the role
they had played in the revolution of 1908 , the CUP, and the economy. On
the heated question of whether Dönme were Jews or Muslims, foreigners
or Turks, he says, primarily referring to the Yakubi, that they were just
another “backward” Sufi order (tarikat), a unique sect within the Muslim
community that was on the verge of dissolution. Using the term tarikat
allows him to place the Dönme, or at least the Yakubi, within the Muslim
community as a unique Sufi group. Moreover, he asserts that they are few
in number. Unlike the figure of ten to fifteen thousand Dönme spoken
of in the press, the only numbers Yalman mentions are the two hundred
original families that followed Shabbatai Tzevi into conversion, the forty-
three Yakubi families, and the original thirteen people that followed the
anti-Yakubi split.
Yalman tried to calm the public by asserting that Dönme separateness
was a thing of the past, and that members of the group had for genera-
tions been serving the nation and allying with its causes. His efforts to
do so strike the reader as those of a person attempting to prevent his
own future from being clouded by his background. “Those who are truly
Turkish and Muslim must be distinguished in public opinion” and “saved
from... the burden of the social stain... that is only fitting for those
who are not,” he writes in the Vatan series. His strategy was to promote
nationality as a conscious political identity, using the metaphor of the
melting pot to represent the process by which diverse individuals were to
be recreated in “preexisting cultural and social molds,” modeled on Turks
and Muslims.^61 Non-Turkish and non-Muslim elements would, however,
be incorporated into Turkish society. Dropping distinct religious identi-
ties, and emancipated from backward tradition, minorities would adopt
the secular national identity and be rewarded by being treated as equals
in the new nation.^62 They would convert to Turkishness. But what if they
did not want to change? What if they resisted cultural conversion?
İbrahim Alâettin Gövsa: Beliefs and Customs
Rather Than Race or Social Group
§ Allowed entry into the Office of the Principal at the Makriköy [Bakırköy]
Girls’ Boarding School in Istanbul in the winter of 1924 , we would find a
serious man whose pale white skin makes his thick black eyebrows seem