My father experienced his first religious doubts at the age of twelve, when he discovered Bergson and Comte in an Adana bookstore, and read that religion was part of a primitive and pre-scientific state of civilization he has been an atheist since his teens. His family was Alevi-part of Turkey’s Shia minority-and one of his earliest memories was waking up to hear his grandfather reciting the Koran in Arabic. My father grew up in Adana, not far from the Syrian border.
FEZ HAT RELIGION HOW TO
I felt grateful to Atatürk that my parents were so well educated, that they weren’t held back by superstition or religion, that they were true scientists, who taught me how to read when I was three and never doubted that I could become a writer. Instead, she went to boarding school, wrote a thesis on Balzac, and became a teacher. I grew up hearing that if it hadn’t been for Atatürk my grandmother would have been “a covered person” who would have been reliant on a man for her livelihood. Both were, and continue to be, passionate supporters of Atatürk. They met in Turkey’s top medical school, moved to America in the nineteen-seventies, and became researchers and professors. My parents were born into a secular country. Only my mother’s father was old enough to remember throwing his fez in the air on the Sultan’s birthday. The Ottoman Arabic script was replaced by a Latin alphabet, and the language itself was “cleansed” of Arabic and Persian elements.Īt the time, my grandparents were either very young or not yet born. A notorious 1925 “Hat Law” outlawed the fez and turban the only acceptable male headgear was a Western-style hat with a brim. He granted women the right to vote, to hold property, to become supreme-court justices, and to run for office. Having introduced a secular constitution and a Western-style civil and criminal legal code, Atatürk shut down the dervish lodges and religious schools, abolished polygamy, and introduced civil marriage and a national beauty contest. Although not banned in other countries, the fez gradually fell out of fashion and is rarely seen today.In 1924, a year after founding the Turkish Republic on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the country’s new leader, abolished the Ottoman Caliphate, which had been the last remaining Sunni Islamic Caliphate since 1517. The fez, considered a symbol of Islam, was banned outright in Turkey in 1925 by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who proclaimed Turkey to be a secular, rather than an Islamic, state ( see Atatürk). Fezzes designed for women often were richly embroidered with golden thread and decorated with pearls or other adornments.ĭuring the early 20th century, many leaders in the Near and Middle East strongly encouraged their followers to adopt modern clothing and customs in order to align their nations with Western countries.
The earliest versions of the fez were encircled at the base with a long turban, though this style was abandoned when the hat was adopted for use in Turkey. The brimless style of the fez allowed the wearer to easily touch his head to the floor during the daily prayers practiced by Muslims.
The hat’s tassel was usually made of silk or wool and was generally dark in color, either black or dark blue. It was constructed of felt, which was dyed red with the juice from berries that grew outside of the city. The fez originated in the city of Fez, Morocco, in the early 19th century. Similar in appearance to the tarboosh, a hat of ancient Greek origin, the fez was originally intended to be worn by Muslim men, though it was later adapted for women as well. A red, conical, flat-crowned felt hat topped with a tassel, the fez was once a common garment in eastern and southern Mediterranean countries.
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