THE NO-HAT BRIGADE.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19759, 9 April 1926, Page 6

THE NO-HAT BRIGADE.

PIONEER WORK IN TURKEY. Angora's passion for turning the old Turk into the new European evidently reveals one characteristic of true love—its course does not run smooth. Real trouble is arising for the innovators, and it seems, quite literally, to have reached a head in the question of the hat versus the fez. Turks who have stood without open protest all manner of Westernising processes, from the blessing of surnames to the banning of seraglios, firmly and forcibly decline to throw their old caps over the mill at the bidding of their new masters, says the Manchester Guardian, Real rioters have demonstrated to the cry of “Down with hats! We don’t want hats!” It sound a rather harmless objection, but, as in every other picturesque symbol of revolt, there is more in it than meets the eye, and a special court, which has been established, like the infamous Cheka of the Bolsheviks, to suppress the activities of any counter-revolutionaries, has actually hanged “the clerical author of a pamphlet against hats." On the face of it this must be not far short of the strangest offence for which a frightened tyranny has ever sentenced a human being to death ; the mad hatters of Angora can scarcely be nrprised if European neighbours regard them as history's maddest example of their kind. But the opposition to the hat is, of course, merely the convenient symbol of the opposition to old Turkey and its old faith to the newer conceptions of its masters. The fez stands for Allah and Islam and the hat stands for—well, possibly Angora has stored up somewhere a sort of Platonic idea of what the hat stands for, but the conception is sufficiently complicated and (judging by the regulations of the last year or two) contradictory to elude the diagnosis of the outsider. The only thing that can he said with certainty. is that the hat stands for something which gravely offends a considerable number of those Turkish subjects who are now expected to wear it.