Rebekah McKnight and Dr. Cindy Brewer, Germanic and Slavic Languages

Elisabeth Franke was a female German missionary in Turkey in the early 20th century. Her unique experience as a woman, a Christian, and a humanitarian offers a valuable perspective on religious and racial prejudice between Christian missionaries and Muslims at the time. Studying Franke’s text, Hinter dem Schleier: Ein Schrei der Not aus der mohammedanischen Frauenwelt (Behind the Veil: A cry of need from the world of Muslim women) enabled me to better understand and explain the incongruousness between typical Christian prejudice towards Islamic peoples and her particular interest in the liberation of Muslim women in Turkey.

Hinter dem Schleier has four main parts: 1) a foreword by Jeanne Wafferzug, 2) Elisabeth Franke’s skit, “Verschlossene Türen” (“Closed Doors”), 3) “Der Kelch deiner Schwester” (“The Cup of Your Sister”), an essay by A. van Sommer, 4) two shorter essays about the Deutsche-Frauen-Missions-Bund (DFMB, or German Women’s Missionary Organization) in Turkey, presumably by Franke. Besides writing the majority of the work, Franke also served as editor and translated “Der Kelch deiner Schwester” into German, so her attitudes prevail throughout the booklet. Franke and many other missionaries produced a vast collection of literature in the forms of dramas, novels, and social commentaries. Often these missionaries intended for their writings to not only build the faith and satisfy the curiosity of people back home, but also to inspire them to reach toward their pocketbooks in sympathy. With its heart wrenching account of the oppression of Muslim women Hinter dem Schleier is no exception to this rule.

As part of my study of Hinter dem Schleier, I transcribed the text to prepare it for publication on the Sophie Digital Library of Works by German-Speaking Women, a multi-university project that seeks to make print works by female German authors available to scholars worldwide. My transcription work consisted of taking photocopies of the text that my mentor, Dr. Cindy Brewer, obtained from the Basler Mission in Switzerland and typing it up so that it could be accessed in a digital format. Learning to decipher the Gothic alphabet proved the most challenging part of this task. Gothic letters have all the curlicues of cursive, but are printed in a much smaller font size than normal handwriting would be. This makes it very difficult to distinguish between certain letters. For example, lowercase “s” looks almost identical to lowercase “f,” and the lowercase “y” is easily confused with “n,” especially since the letter “y” rarely appears in German vocabulary. Uppercase “I” and “J” are exactly the same letter in Gothic type, and the only way to determine which one to use is by noticing if it is followed by a consonant or vowel. Knowing how to differentiate between all these letters can make a big difference in the text; for example, before realizing my mistake, I kept transcribing one character’s name as “Jmir” instead of the more traditional name, “Imir.”

In addition to transcribing Hinter dem Schleier, my project includes writing an introduction that covers the main themes developed in the text that will accompany it on the Sophie website. I have finished compiling my notes and have started to draft this introduction, which I will revise with the help of Dr. Brewer. Several themes I have found in Hinter dem Schleier that I plan to emphasize include the maltreatment of Muslim women in Turkey, the concept that God’s Son, not their own sons, can save these women, and the idea that Christian women have a responsibility to help their Muslim sisters.

Franke’s positive depiction of Muslim women initially surprised me. I expected to find more frequent and blatant instances of racial and religious prejudice toward all Muslims in her book. But overall Franke focuses on the Muslim woman’s worth in the eyes of God, with a few mild portrayals of Muslim women as ignorant, superficial, or violent as a result of their deplorable circumstances. Throughout the booklet, Franke and the other authors reiterate that these Muslim women are sisters and equals to the Christian women who constitute the readers.

Franke does exhibit heated prejudice towards Muslim men and the doctrines of Islam. For example, in the skit “Verschlossene Türe” she describes the husband Ali Effendi as a violent man who severely beats one of his wives for refusing to give up her Christian faith, and one-by-one banishes his other wives to a rundown outbuilding as they grow too old to please him. Later, in Der Kelch deiner Schwester, she quotes that “Der Gott des Christentums ist ein Gott der Liebe, der Gott des Islam ein Tyrann,” (“The God of Christianity is a God of love, the God of Islam is a tyrant”). However, instead of lambasting Muslim men and Islamic doctrine in general, I found that Franke made each negative illustration highlight another case of Muslim women being rejected and abused. This realization helped me understand Franke’s apparent inconsistency: though she did demonstrate some prejudice against Turkish Muslims, she primarily used this prejudice as a tool to champion the cause of women.

Studying and transcribing Franke’s Hinter dem Schleier has been very beneficial to me. Throughout the process my German reading comprehension and grammar usage have improved phenomenally. When I first started transcribing I could barely understand every third word, but when I went back to study the themes in the text I was able to breeze through it quite easily. I have also gained a greater love for German literature and some transcription skills that will be very useful to me as I continue to transcribe a few more texts for the Sophie website on a volunteer basis.

References

• Franke, Elisabet. Hinter dem Schleier: Ein Schrei der Not aus der mohammedanischen Frauenwelt. Missionsbibliothek: Zürich, 1908.
• Brewer, Cindy. “Proselyting among the Primitive: Race, Religion, and Colonial Ambition as Represented in German Language Missionary Literature (1890-1922).” Unpublished article. Brigham Young University, 2007.
• This website can be found at sophie.byu.edu. Hinter dem Schleier is not yet published online at the time of writing.