Ataturk and the National Assembly Secularize Turkey: 1923-38

Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk) had been urging Muslims to learn trades that had traditionally been reserved for non-Muslims -- shoemaking, tailoring, carpentry, tanning, blacksmithing and shoeing of horses. He wanted Turkey's citizens to change their educational institutions and leave behind the traditional religious schools that had dominated education. He wanted his fellow countrymen to open their minds to the most advanced learning, including science. Kemal's government began to reform education. Primary education was declared compulsory. From grade school to graduate school, education was to be free, secular, and co-educational, with the education of females equal to that of males.

Kemal had seen the religious schools in Turkey bogged down in the teaching of Arabic by people who did not themselves understand the language. People who want to learn Arabic, he said, should study that language in Syria, Arabia or wherever it is commonly spoken. This did not sit well with those who favored students speaking Arabic because it was Islam's holy language -- even though the students did not understand what they were saying.

Kemal was less interested in defending Islamic tradition than he was in economic development. "The economy," he said, "is everything. It is the totality of what we need to live, to be happy." [note]

A quote used by Andrew Mango in his book Ataturk, published by Overlook Press, p. 375.

Kemal had already proclaimed Islam to be the state religion. He wanted Islam to be a private creed, separate from government authority or economic influence, and a conflict was brewing over the caliphate. With the sultanate abolished, the caliphate had passed, monarchy style, to Mehmed's cousin, Abd al-Majid. Many Muslims continued to see the caliph as the head of state, in keeping with the tradition of Islam, while the relationship between the caliphate and the National Assembly remained unclear. Kemal did not want the caliphate as a rival influence, slowing down the advances he wanted in education.

When the National Assembly proclaimed Turkey a republic, Islamic conservatives saw it as a death knell for the caliphate. In March 1924, soon after the National Assembly opened for the new year, it abolished the old monarchical way of transferring power and authority, and parliament exiled from Turkey all members of the Ottoman (royal) dynasty -- the family that had ruled over Ottoman territory for 625 years. The republic's constitution, created in 1924, left all power with the National Assembly, which was the only legitimate representative of the sovereign will of the nation. And the National Assembly abolished the caliphate.

Destruction of the old Islamic order shocked the country and offended Sunni Muslims outside of Turkey. In Turkey, the government acquired more enemies. Many in Constantinople who had been attached to the splendor and glory of the Ottoman family were enemies of the government. So too were tens of thousands who had been civil servants in Constantinople who disliked the shift of the capital to Ankara and their loss of jobs. Newspapers in Constantinople joined in on the side of Islamic conservatism and attacked the government in Ankara.

Adding to the unrest was a breakdown in relations between the government and Turkey's Kurdish population. The Kurds were Muslims and had felt linked to the caliphate. With the caliphate gone their bond with the state was broken. The government was alienating the Kurds further by forcing upon them an identity with the Turkish nation. The public use of Kurdish and the teaching of Kurdish were prohibited. Kurdish tribal chiefs and other influential Kurds were resettled in western Turkey. And Kurdish resistance was met by governmental repression.

Here and there, religious Turks also rioted. Some newspapers, loyal to Islamic conservatism, denounced the National Assembly. Kemal and his political party, the People's Party, were determined to maintain law and order. The People's Party controlled the National Assembly, and in March, 1925, the National Assembly passed a "Law on the Maintenance of Order." Kemal and his People's Party were keeping rival political parties suppressed, the party seeing itself as struggling for survival in a difficult period of social change and hostile reaction.

In a further effort to secularize society, the National Assembly closed religious shrines and Dervish convents. And Kemal moved to abolish the hat called the fez. The Turks had been wearing western clothing for more than a century, but they had kept the fez as identity with Ottoman rule and for religious identity. To wear a Western hat had become a symbol of separation from Islam. Despite the repressions then taking place under Kemal's rule, he believed that persuasion and public opinion was where the strength of reforms would ultimately lay. He journeyed to the most conservative of Islamic communities, in Kastamonu, and presented the community's religiously conservative notables with western hats. He argued with them, explaining that the fez was of Venetian origin, introduced by Sultan Mahmud II to do away with the turban, and he spoke of the greater practicality of hats with a brim. He succeeded. The conservatives went about town in their new hats -- gifts from their esteemed president -- and this led others in town to accept Western hats. And the new fashion in hats spread rapidly through the rest of the country, accompanied by the government banning the fez in November, 1925.

In 1926, Kemal's government initiated judicial reforms. It replaced religious courts with Swiss and Italian penal law rather than Islamic law -- the Sharia. Previously, theologians had had a monopoly on the legal profession. Now, only those who had studied Western law could pass the bar examination. Also in 1926, the government replaced the Islamic calendar with the calendar used in the West.

In 1926, an attempt was made on Kemal's life, with the planned assassination accompanied by plans for a coup d'etat. Many were arrested, including former politicians. Four were hanged and others sent to prison.

Mustafa Kemal was reelected president on November 1, 1927. Then, in 1928, parliament moved in favor of improved literacy and comprehension at the expense of the use of Arabic. At the founding of the republic in 1923 less than nine percent of the population was deemed literate. The Arabic alphabet was replaced with Latin symbols, with some Turks learning for the first time the association between pronunciation and letter symbols. The Koran was translated into Turkish and the new alphabet, and Kemal spoke in favor of mosque sermons being delivered in a language that people understood -- Turkish rather than Arabic.

In 1929, the government felt secure enough to let the Law on the Maintenance of Order lapse. Kemal favored the creation of an opposition party -- a loyal opposition, such as exists in Britain and the United States -- but the attempt was too much an attempt at superimposition rather than a rise from opposing interests, and the attempt came to nothing.

In 1934, the National Assembly abolished the veil. The veil had been worn by married women of rank in pre-Islamic Arabia. With the spread of Islam its use spread among women in cities but not among nomads and farming people. It use was not explicity ordered in the Koran, but it became identified with Islam. In the Republic of Turkey under Kemal, the abolition of the veil was widely accepted and dismissed as a nuisance. And the headscarf was seen by Turkey’s government as a symbol of political Islam. Government regulation banned the headscarf from public buildings, including universities, its use to be preserved for religious services.

Women now had the vote, and they were now active as teachers, lawyers, doctors, office workers and as members of the National Assembly. In 1934, polygamy was abolished, and for the sake of equality, the titles bey, pasha and others were also abolished -- titles that had gone to the highest bidder. And Turks were ordered to choose a family name. Previously Turks had one name given at birth, usually associated with the faith, such as Muhammad, and another name adopted in later years associated with deed or an admired person, as was the name Kemal. Mustafa Kemal was now given a grand surname, Ataturk, which meant father of the Turks.

After months of illness, Kemal died on November 10, 1938 at the age of 57. He was remembered by his fellow citizens as the creator of modern Turkey. His body was taken to Ankara with widespread demonstrations of grief and mourning.

But to some rigidly traditional Muslims he was to be remembered as a traitor and an infidel.

Secularization