Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (May 19, 1881-November 10, 1938) has been both admired and reviled passionately. However, nobody can deny that he was one of the greatest reformers of the 20th century. He and his colleagues had had a long and bitter confrontation with European powers but, simultaneously, they admired the transformations the scientific and industrial revolutions and the Enlightenment had wrought: between the 1789 French Revolution and the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution the old order had disintegrated and, instead, faith and optimism about the future had been generated. The Muslim world too was fermenting with change but intellectuals and activists were divided sharply between those who looked backward and yearned for the past and those gearing up for a new future divested of reactionary sentimentalism.
Ataturk belonged to the latter group, who was convinced that Turkey must be part of the rational, universal civilisation. He embarked upon ambitious social engineering to create an egalitarian and progressive Turkey. Islam was to continue playing its role in religious matters. However, prayers were to be offered in Turkish and not Arabic and, therefore, the Quran and other religious texts were translated into Turkish. The assumption was that understanding Islamic beliefs was important. The European calendar was adopted for all official and commercial purposes while Islamic festivals and holy occasions continued to be observed as public holidays calculated annually according to the Islamic lunar calendar. The Turkish flag continued to be the same as during Ottoman times: a rising crescent and white star against a red background.
The Treaty of Sevres split Turkish society into those who clung to the sultan/caliph and those who joined Ataturk in resisting that treaty. This applied even to the religious establishment. Sections of the ulema (clergy) supported the revolutionary regime and, once the Kemalists won the struggle, the progressive ulema became state functionaries, drawing a salary for performing various religious tasks. The Presidency of Religious Affairs (PRA) was put in charge of the religious establishment. It organised worship and other spiritual rites in accordance with Sunni-Hanafi principles. The ulema were strictly forbidden to make political statements. The Friday khutba (sermon) was formulated to emphasise social and civic responsibility and the welfare of the people. The Prophet’s (PBUH) injunction in the last sermon that Muslims should take inspiration from the Quran and his praxis was henceforth to be cultivated as a matter of personal ethics and morality while the state and state laws were to represent the forward march of humankind. The Kemalists abolished all titles and hierarchical symbols representing feudal values, real and fictional genealogies and other such reactionary ties. The people were to take up Turkish surnames free from pretensions of racial and ethnic superiority. On the whole, the national project was secular, liberal and progressive. The historian Feroz Ahmad (not Feroz Ahmed the Pakistani sociologist) assesses the Kemalist ideology in the following words:
“Kemal did not want to rule Turkish society by means of traditions, social convictions and symbols, as Franco would do in Spain and to a lesser extent Mussolini in Italy. He preferred to create a new ideology and symbols that would permit Turkey to progress rapidly into the 20th century. Not being a conservative, he feared neither secular modernism nor liberal democracy, though he viewed the latter as a brake to his own radicalism…Though he did not introduce them fully in his own lifetime, Kemal accepted the rationale of liberal institutions — parties, trade unions, a free press and free speech. The assumption of his regime was that these institutions would be introduced as soon as Turkish society had achieved the requisite stage of development” — The Making of Modern Turkey, 1993, page 56.
The Turkish script was changed from Persian to Latin or Roman as we say in South Asia. The reliance on Arabic and Persian vocabulary was reduced and Turkish words were introduced. No doubt, such a change of script hit the then existing literary class but, during the Ottoman period, only nine percent of the people were literate. Within a decade of the reform it climbed to 33 percent as education for both males and females was given prime importance. A dress code was introduced that banned the hijab in universities and state offices. Equally, the fez was banned in favour of the European hat. The Swiss Civil Code, the Italian Penal Code and a commercial code based largely on the German and Italian systems were incorporated into the Turkish legal system.
With regard to the question of citizenship and minorities, the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne recognised only Greeks, Armenians and Jews as bona fide Turkish religious minorities. The non-Muslim population constituted only one percent of modern Turkey. The rest, 99 percent, were Muslims. Although official statistics on the composition of Muslims was not instituted by state estimates (which holds even now), it suggested that 80 to 85 percent of the Muslim population was Sunni and the rest belonged to the Alevi sect. In ethnic terms, some 20 percent of the Turkish population comprised ethnic Kurds. Alevis were to be found both among Turks and Kurds. The Alevis subscribed in a broad sense to the Shia tradition but did not practice mourning or flagellation ceremonies of mainstream Shias. On the contrary, they employed music a lot in their religious rituals. Although Ataturk and all his close associates were Sunnis, the Kemalist state opened employment opportunities to the Alevis on an equal basis. One should point out that Turkish Alevis are a very different sect from the Syrian Alavi sect to which Bashar al-Assad belongs.
On the other hand, while during the liberation war Turks and Kurds fought side by side and Ataturk’s closest associate and successor, Ismet Inonu, was of Kurdish extraction, Kurdish resentment grew against the assimilationist policies of the state aiming to foster a Turkish identity on all citizens. Thus the Kurdish language was banned and everyone had to learn Turkish at school. On the other hand, no discrimination was practiced against the Kurds if they joined in the national project. In many ways the Turkish model reflected the French approach based on the equal rights of all citizens irrespective of religion, sect or ethnicity but which required the non-French speaking population of the republic to learn the French language and adopt a French identity.
(To be continued)
The writer is a visiting professor, LUMS, Pakistan, professor emeritus of Political Science, Stockholm University, and honorary senior fellow, Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore. Latest publications: Winner of the Best Non-Fiction Book award at the Karachi Literature Festival: The Punjab Bloodied, Partitioned and Cleansed, Oxford, 2012; and Pakistan: The Garrison State, Origins, Evolution, Consequences (1947-2011), Oxford, 2013. He can be reached at:[email protected]