Religious and Moral Education cluded religiosity, faithfulness, cleanliness, effort, ascetic discipline, sound
management, contentment, knowledge, patience, order, self-knowledge,
self-control and restraint, obedience and respect, a sense of justice, socia-
bility, benevolence, kindness and gentleness, sincerity, love and brother-
hood, and duty.^63 These virtues are comparable to those extolled in Şemsi
Efendi’s Rules of Behavior for Students. Students were to be clean, hard-
working, punctual, disciplined, organized, good-tempered, well-behaved,
helpful, polite, brotherly, nonviolent, dutiful, and respectful of teach-
ers, elders, and parents, control their tongues and be quiet, look out for
others, never lie, steal, cheat, be hypocritical, or engage in double-dealing,
and always be purposeful.^64 Already in 1877 , teachers were also given a
very long list of rules to follow, one of which demanded that they be good
role models to the students in manners and morals.^65
The Schools’ Influence: Literature
In the 1880 s, educated Dönme who made up the avant-garde in the
Salonika literary scene produced Gonca-i Edeb (The Rosebud of Litera-
ture), a journal dedicated to internationalism, science, French literature,
Sufi spirituality, religion, and ethics, reflecting their worldview, which at-
tracted a wide and diverse audience of readers, mainly from among those
also engaged in disseminating the new forms of culture.^66 Teachers and
students from the Terraki and Feyziye schools and Dönme civil servants
and intellectuals contributed to this extraordinary literary journal, pub-
lished in Ottoman Turkish, which, like the curriculum in the Terakki and
Feyziye, combined science and religion and displays a mastery of French
and Ottoman language and literature.^67
The name and contents of Gonca-i Edeb both express the interplay be-
tween what was outward and what was inward for the Dönme in turn-of-
the-twentieth-century Salonika. Edeb is a classical Islamic term referring
to education, learning, and proper morals and manners, as well as a genre
of literature (Edebiyat), and the first piece in the first issue, by Fazlı Necip,
was entitled “Edeb veya [or] Edebiyat.”^68 By choosing this term, the cre-
ators of the journal were referring to over a millennium of Islamic cultural
practice in Arabic, and by writing in Ottoman Turkish, to several cen-
turies of Ottoman cultural practice, not yet rejected. Numerous pieces
were written in the qasida or ghazal form, including a ghazal by a gen-
darme commander,^69 and a poem in the style of the sixteenth-century