212 Kökoğlu
challenge a social bias and to defend her contractual rights are noteworthy. 71
In the novel, Shukri Bey divorces her first, but they are reunited later.
There is no becoming-woman in the above two types of women as submis-
sive (Gul-raaneh) and dominant (Reshideh with Shukri Bey). When Reshideh,
as a widowed woman after Shukri Bey’s death in the war, makes a second
courageous move and proposes to poor Camruddin, also widowed with an
amputated arm, we see the third type of oriental woman – egalitarian and a
rightful becoming-woman. In her proposal to Camruddin, Reshideh follows
in fact the example of the lady Khadijah who was also wealthy and widowed
when she had proposed to young Mohammad, whose good character and
honesty she had admired:
[...] Efendim, it is in my mind that if I wed again, I shall not choose a gal-
lant youth like Shukri Bey, whose memory is with me always in my heart,
but some poor stricken hero of my country, whom my beauty may per-
haps console a little and my wealth relieve, while he can guide my chil-
dren and be my protector. Efendim, I am making a proposal to you; are
you listening? It is a proposal that I would not make to any other man.72Reshideh’s proposal is at the same time an oral marriage contract with some
important conditions in it. Reshideh is a strong and dominant woman; she is
rich and may even be superior to Camruddin in many other aspects. But she
still prefers Camruddin as the head of the family not as the model of despotic
patriarchy but as the model of a foreman in a socialist state.73 Being confident
that Camruddin will never violate the contract, she puts the lioness in herself
to sleep in a voluntary submissiveness of becoming-woman as her own choice.
But she still does not forget to include gallantry as the forbidden act in the
contract. She also promises material support, but Camruddin will never need
nor accept that. Reshideh’s becoming is not a masochistic submission like that
71 Lawrence, writing right after the publication of Picthall’s novel, affirms Reshideh’s pun-
ishment of Shukri Bey in the following lines in Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922): “If a
woman’s husband gets on her nerves, she should fly at him. If she thinks him too sweet
and smarmy with other people, she should let him have it to his nose, straight out. She
should lead him a dog’s life, and never swallow her bile”. (p. 283).
72 Pickthall, Early Hours, 261–2.
73 Fremantle claims “Despotism of the Oriental kind is a form of State Socialism”, and she
argues that when two or more Orientals come together for a certain purpose one of them
has to be appointed as the leader as the first thing (Fremantle, Loyal Enemy, 35). See Be-
diuzzaman Said Nursi, Asar-i Bediiyye (Istanbul: Envar Neşriyat, 2010) for the similarities
between Islam and socialism and his preference of German Socialism to Capitalism.