Microsoft Word 1 Arif thesis cover final doc

CHAPTER 4 – HALIDE EDIP AND YAKUP KADRI 
104 
father’s house in the Christian (Armenian and Greek) neighbourhood of Ihlamur, 
Halide, spent a lot of time with her maternal grandparents who lived in the Muslim 
quarter of the city. 
Mehmed Edip Bey had by the standards of the time very progressive ideas about 
bringing up children and about their education. He strongly believed in having his 
daughters properly educated. Halide was sent to a nursery for Christian children to 
start with and later in 1893 to the American College for Girls at Üsküdar. According 
to Hülya Adak, the Bible studies courses she had there had a profound impact on her 
literary work
10
. Her schooling there had been interrupted for a period in which 
Abdülhamid banned all Muslim children from attending missionary schools and 
during that interval Halide continued her education at home under the tuition of very 
prominent figures: Şükrü Efendi, known as 
Eb-ül-lisan/Dil babası
(Father of 
Language), taught her Arabic, Rıza Tevfik Philosophy and Turkish Literature and 
the famous Mathematician, Salih Zeki, Mathematics
11
. She graduated eventually in 
1901 and was the first Turkish woman to graduate from such a school. She also had 
music lessons from an Italian teacher and acquired a good command of English 
which she started to learn from an English nanny. Rather uncharacteristically for her 
social status she had also been exposed to some folk literature by a distant relative 
from the provinces who came to stay with them
12
: 
It was by a mere chance that I fell under the influence of a man of his 
type, but it was this chance that opened me to the folk-lore, the popular 
10
Adıvar 2005, vi 
11
Kudret II, 63 and Adıvar 2005, vi 
12
Adıvar 2005, 117 

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