Discussions on the women’s issue during the First Kurultai of the Crimean Tatars

During the First Kurultai many important changes took place in the Crimean Tatar society, particularly concerning the women’s issue. This topic worried many people, because the equalization of Crimean women’s rights with men was a revolutionary decision not only for Muslim, but also for the majority of European nations. Nevertheless, at that time there were many opponents of this change, as not all decisions made by the Kurultai were correlated with the norms of religion and local traditions. Crimean Tatar society was split, and the agenda was filled with acute issues that lay in the religious and social planes: whether a woman can attend a mosque, whether a girl can receive a full education, whether a woman has the right to freedom of movement, how a Muslim woman should dress, what conditions men should observe in case of polygamy. Such topical issues were touched upon during the 18th and 19th sessions of the Kurultai, where Noman Chelebidzhikhan, Asan Sabri Aivazov, Shefika Gasprinskaya and many others expressed their opinions. In the preparation of the article we used transcripts of the meetings of the Kurultai, memoirs of famous figures of that period, newspapers.