home | 1901-World War II | Russia and Central Asia, to 1936

Sultan Abdul Hamid II

Sultan Mehmed V

Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, national
hero who changed Turkey.

Mehmed VI, Islam's 100th caliph and the
empire's last sultan. Turkish nationalists disliked his acceptance of the peace treaty and submission to Allied authority.

Modernizers against the Ottoman Sultanate

From 1876 and into the twentieth century, the Ottoman Empire was ruled by Sultan Abdul Hamid II, who was also caliph to Sunni Muslims in the Middle East and North Africa - the caliph being the person who followed Muhammad the Prophet as Islam's leader and the servant of Islam's three holy cities: Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem. The sultan spoke of Allah as having entrusted him with the guardianship of the people. He ruled as an absolute monarchy, and his subjects responded to him as if he were their true sovereign and pious. Most of his subjects - including some who did not like him much - were eager to demonstrate their submission to him by kissing his hands. Children at the end of their school day stood at attention in ranks and three times shouted, "Long Live the Sultan." Some others called the Sultan the Great Assassin or described him as a blood-soaked tyrant.

Under Hamid's rule, hostility to the West and pan-Islamism increased. Some among Hamid's devoted subjects boasted of the superiority of Arab civilization over European civilization. Meanwhile, the Ottoman Empire had been growing more involved with European bankers. Trade with the West had been increasing, and more Western technology was being acquired. Since 1883, the Orient Express railway had been in operation between the empire's capital city, Constantinople, and Paris, and there was also a new rail line between Constantinople and Baghdad.

Hamid was interested in buying luxury items from the West, but he wished to prevent the importation of ideas hostile to him and his manner of rule. His regime confiscated Western newspapers and magazines. Hamid was an autocrat. Back in late 1876 he had discarded the constitution and had been ruling since with an increasingly centralized government. He had spies everywhere within his empire and spied on his subjects who were abroad. He carried a gun and was always on edge about being assassinated. Anyone opposing his regime in the slightest detail also had to fear assassination - by one of Hamid's agents. Some of Hamid's disgruntled subjects referred to him as "the hangman."

Some ethnic minorities opposed Hamid's rule. Among them were the Armenians and the Kurds, and Hamid had sent the Kurds (who were Muslims) against the Armenians (who were Christian), producing in 1894 the slaughter of more than 300,000 Armenians.

Subversion

The West was advancing in education, technology and military might while the Ottoman Empire was foundering. Threats against Hamid's regime were growing - repression failing the sultan. Turkish intellectuals opposed to Hamid II were drawing inspiration from the West. In institutions of higher learning people formed secret societies. In places such as Geneva, Cairo and Paris, exiled Turks formed anti-Hamid organizations devoted to Western political ideas. Military officers were also influenced by Western intellectuality, and they too formed a clique hostile to Hamid's rule. Not unlike what was being felt among progressives in China, they disliked the weakness and backwardness they saw in contrast to the advanced industrial societies. They also disliked the corruption they saw around the sultan - people buying positions, power and favors rather than earning these through their competence.

One of the dissidents was Ahmed Riza, soon to be leader of parliament in a new Turkey. Riza had been concerned with the plight of the peasantry and wanted to see modern agricultural methods in Turkey. But under Hamid, there were no such advancements, and after serving as Minister of Education, Riza went into exile to Paris. There, with other Turks, he adopted the scientific outlook of the French sociologist, Auguste Comte. Ahmed Riza and his colleagues were impressed by the lack of chauvinism toward the Turks among the positivists. The Turkish exiles studied revolution in detail, and they invited others from within the Ottoman Empire to join their movement, including the Armenians. They were growing hostile to colonialism, as were European progressives, and they were opposed to class privilege.

Riza and his colleagues put their calls for transformation of Ottoman society in terms that would appeal to the Muslim majority. They promoted themselves as good Muslims and found common elements between Islam and positivism on the subjects of property, family, and government. But in private, Riza at least, felt contempt for Islam's holy men, the Imams. To his sister, Fahire, he wrote that if he were a woman, he would embrace atheism and never become a Muslim, and he denounced men being allowed four wives and as many concubines as they wished.

Privately, Riza described the imams as ignorant and as misconstruing the Prophet's words regarding science. Privately he and his colleagues held that science was for the elite and religion was for the masses. Riza and his colleagues wanted a strong government in which they, the intellectual elite, played a dominant role and religious leaders played no role in government or in education. Publicly they spoke of an ideal Islamic government in which authority is collective and every citizen free.

The Coup

In 1906, army officers joined together in a rebel group called the Vatan (Fatherland). Student groups, Masonic lodges and Dervish orders had joined in the dissidence, and in 1907 they merged with the Vatan into what was called the Committee for Unity and Progress (CUP), which was linked also with the rebel movement in Paris.

The rebel army officers had a significant portion of the power of the army with them, and in 1908 they led a military coup against the sultan - the new regime proclaimed on July 6. The Turks were not as brutal toward their monarch as the British had been toward Charles I. Despite the rebels' dislike for Hamid, they left him on his throne. What the rebels wanted was the reproclamation of the Ottoman Empire's constitution (abandoned by Abdul Hamid in 1876) and the reopening of parliament (closed by Abdul Hamid in 1877).

The leader of the coup, Enver Pasha, still in his mid-twenties, identified the coup as under the leadership of the Committee for Unity and Progress. He proclaimed freedom and equality for all under a uniform set of laws, and he proclaimed safety for foreign investments in the empire. Troops sent against the coup refused to fight. The sultan gave up resistance. And Muslims, Christians, Jews rejoiced in the streets.

The new regime spoke of justice and brotherhood for all of the empire's people, whatever their religion or mother tongue. They foresaw the end of backward Asian habits of nepotism, corruption and the proliferation of sinecures. Investments would be made to strengthen the armed forces and the civil administration, and appropriate educational qualifications would be required of all military officers and civil servants.

Counter Revolution

Bulgarians decided to opt out of the Ottoman Empire and declared their independence. Bosnia and Herzegovina had been nominally a part of the Ottoman Empire, and a move by Constantinople to have Bosnia and Herzegovina represented in the new parliament incited a move by Austria to annex these provinces - a step in the direction of World War I. And on the island of Crete, an assembly voted for unity with Greece, much to the chagrin of the Muslim minority there, which had rioted in opposition to majority Christian domination of the island.

The new Turkish Parliament assembled December 17. Ahmen Riza was called from Paris to preside. And in parliament, much wrangling took place. Supporters of the new regime favored centralization of power while some who were less supportive of the new regime favored autonomy for ethnic minorities - Greek, Armenian, Bulgarian, Arab and Albanian.

The coup leaders believed in expertise and in schooling, and opposition to the new regime remained among military officers who, unlike the coup leaders, had not been trained in a military college. Opposition existed too among some who had strong attachments to religious tradition, which included respect for the person of the sultan and caliph. Muslim clerics felt threatened by the lack of religious devotion among supporters of the new regime, and an Islamist campaign began, with much of the press joining those opposed to the new regime. Opposition to the regime by these newspaper men overrode whatever pleasure they might have felt at no longer being subject to censorship. But people were seldom concerned about the tyranny of those with whom they agreed.

In April, 1909, mutiny broke out among conservative soldiers in the capital. Teachers and students from religious schools joined in and marched against parliament. Leaders and supporters of the new government were forced to go into hiding, and Sultan Hamid proclaimed his supremacy and the supremacy of Islamic law - the Sharia (Sheriat in Turkish). Troops loyal to the revolution and hostile toward the sultan were called in from Macedonia, and on April 24 these troops retook the capital city. The new regime resumed power and deposed Sultan Abdul Hamid, replacing him with his brother, Mehmed V.

Government, under the leadership of the Committee for Unity and Progress, began to pursue a strategy of equality among the empire's various ethnicities, regardless of religion. The government wanted unity among these peoples, and to this end it launched a program to make Turkish the common language. This program engendered resentment, especially among Arab Muslims, whose language was the holy language of Muhammad the Prophet.

The New Regime Loses Wars

In 1911, Italy warred against the Ottoman Empire for the possession of what was then a part of the Ottoman Empire: Libya. Italy won this war, which demonstrated the weakness of the Ottoman Empire. Bulgaria, Serbia and Greece wanted the Ottomans out of Europe, and they overcame their differences as to how Ottoman holdings in Europe were to be divided. Bulgaria and Serbia were demanding autonomy for Bulgarians and Serbs within the empire, and Greece was calling for the liberation of oppressed Christians - Greeks - living within the Ottoman Empire. Montenegro joined in the opposition against the Ottoman Empire, and in October, 1912, these four powers mobilized for war, for territory they believed was theirs. Germany backed the Ottoman Empire, and France backed Serbia.

In the war that followed, the Ottoman Empire suffered defeats. Enver Pasha and his former coup associates, who had left government, were unhappy over the losses. On December 3, Sultan Mehmed V and the cabinet leader, Muhtar Pasha - agreed to an armistice. Students unhappy with weakness against their country's enemies were demonstrating in the streets of the capital, in tune with Enver and his associates. The Muhtar government appeared to be on the verge of giving up the city Edirne, also known as Adrianople (100 miles west and a little north of Constantinople) when, in early January, Enver Pasha led others in another coup against the government. Ideals had given way to what was seen as the priority of national survival. Enver and his clique claimed absolute power and went with an army to defend control over Edirne.

Bulgaria, Greece and Serbia began fighting among themselves, and the warring ended with Enver's regime still in control of Edirne but exhausted from war. The Enver regime was forced to give up control of a portion of Albanian-populated land, which was to become Albania (holding less than half of the Balkan's Albanians). It lost control over Macedonia, and the city of Salonika (Salonica) was now under Greek control, after 482 years of Ottoman control of that city. The Ottoman Empire now extended into Europe only as far as Edirne.

World War I

Turkey was being lead by Enver and associates belonging to the Committee for Unity and Progress (CUP). Elections were held in the winter of 1913-14, but opposition parties did not participate, and the new parliament was docile to CUP.

War broke out among the Europeans in August 1914 - while tensions had been rising between the British and Enver's government. Enver believed that Turkey had suffered losses because of its poor position regarding European alliances, and he viewed the war as opportunity to take back Islamic lands that had been absorbed by one of the Allied powers - Russia. Enver dreamed of reinvigorating the Ottoman Empire. He feared that if Britain, France and Russia won against Germany and Austria-Hungary, they might deprive the empire of more of its territory. So Enver led Turkey into the war on the side of Germany, jeopardizing the Ottoman Empire beyond his imagination.

Turkey helped the Germans bombard Russia on the Black Sea, Russia declared war on Turkey on November 2. France and Britain declared war on Turkey on Nov 5, and Britain found this an opportune time to annex Cyprus and Egypt - lands that had been nominally a part of the Ottoman Empire but under British authority.

The Turks closed the straits between the Mediterranean and Black Seas, preventing Russia from exporting wheat by way of the Mediterranean Sea or receiving shipments of materials from its allies. To protect its oil wells in the Middle East, Britain moved a military force up the Persian Gulf to Iraq - part of the Ottoman Empire - where it began engaging Turkish forces. And in December, the Turks began an assault into Russia's Caucasus Mountains.

The Turks suffered a disastrous campaign in the Caucasus, and the massacres of Armenians began - the Armenians made scapegoats for the Caucasus disaster and the Armenians appearing to be siding with the enemy, the Russians. To the Turkish Muslim majority, the war appeared to be a war against the Christians - no matter that they were allied with Germany and Austria-Hungary. German generals were with the Turks, directing the war effort, but with crucial help from one of Turkey's better generals, Mustafa Kemal, the Turks drove the Allies from the Gallipoli Peninsula, successfully defending their capital.

Meanwhile the Turks were failing militarily in the empire's Islamic lands to the south. Enver had hoped that the Egyptians would rally behind the war effort on the side of Islamic unity. Sultan (and caliph) Mehmed had declared a holy war (jihad), but despite much Ottoman propaganda about Islamic unity the impact was minimal. The Arabs revolted against the Ottoman Empire in 1916. In January, 1917, the British drove the last of the Turkish forces from Egypt, opening the way for a British advance to Gaza. In March, the Turks pulled out of Baghdad, and the British moved in. In July, an Arab force with Lawrence of Arabia took control of Aqaba (on the gulf coast at the southern tip of Jordan).

In Turkey, corruption was on the rise among the newly rich, with people selling transportation permits and speculating in goods which the government was supposed to have requisitioned for the public. The public was growing demoralized and hostile toward the Enver government.

Enver was putting more hope in a German victory, but in the fall of 1918 the Germans were falling back on the Western Front in Europe, and under German generals the Turks were falling back on the Southern Front, as the British, in early October, seized Damascus and Beirut. The war appeared lost, and Enver and his associates stepped down from power around October 8, with Enver not staying to see what the Allies would do with him. The Sultan, Mehmed V, had died in July, and on October 30, the Ottoman Empire, under a new sultan, Mehmed VI, and a new cabinet, led by Izzert Pasha, agreed to an armistice. And the Allies believed that they were in a position to do what they pleased with the defeated Ottoman Empire.

The Struggle for National Independence

The Allies, feeling empowered by military victory, wanted an end to that unworthy entity - the Ottoman Empire - that had dared to join Germany in war. The British, French, Italians and Greeks maneuvered for advantage in the dissolution of the empire. The British occupied Constantinople and were maneuvering to hold on to authority in Palestine and Iraq. In late March, 1919, the Italians landed a force at Antalya, on the Mediterranean coast in southwestern Turkey, and Italian detachments moved 100 miles northeast to Konya and over 150 miles westward to the coastal town of Bodrum on the Aegean Sea. The French landed in the extreme southeast of Turkey, along the Mediterranean in the region of Cilicia. There they supported the Christian Armenians who were taking revenge upon the Muslim Turks, while educated Turks were mysteriously disappearing. The French were advocating the closure of all Turkish primary schools, the revival of old mosque schools, and colleges establishing instruction in French. And, of course, the French were maneuvering to take over Syria and Lebanon.

In Constantinople, the sultan, Mehmed VI, and government ministers submitted to Allied authority, while some Turks, inspired by President Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points, were opposed to what the Allies were doing and were still looking with hope to the United States. They were especially inspired by Wilson's 12th point, which read:

The Turkish portion of the present Ottoman Empire should be assured a secure sovereignty, but the other nationalities which are now under Turkish rule should be assured an undoubted security of life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development.

The greatest irritant was the move by Greeks to take over territory that was seen by these patriotic Turks as theirs. During the Great War, the British had promised the Greeks land in Turkey if they would enter the war on their side, and the Greeks had done so in 1917, looking forward to a Greater Greece after the war. The Ottoman Empire had ruled the Greeks for more than 300 years, and Turks tended to feel superior to the Greeks, while the Greeks wanted the area around Edirne, western Asia Minor and Pontus by the Black Sea - areas with sizeable Greek populations since ancient times. And Greeks looked forward to taking control of Constantinople, the former seat of Greek Orthodox Christianity.

At the Paris Peace Conference, the British advocated giving the city of Smyrna and its hinterland to the Greeks. The U.S. and French delegations agreed, seeing such a move as protecting the Christian (Greek) minority in this region against those they saw as the murderous Turks.

The Greeks landed near Smyrna in mid-May, 1919, and bloody fighting erupted between them and local Turks. The Greeks sent the Turkish majority fleeing, leaving the Greeks with an area predominately Greek. The Greeks were now joined with the French and Italians in occupying a portion of Asia Minor. Then on March 20, 1920, the official occupation of Turkey began with the arrival of British troops at Constantinople. British soldiers killed any Turks who resisted militarily, as one would expect of any military operation. But they also raided and closed Turkey's parliament and arrested and deported parliament deputies. The sultan and his ministers continued their submission to the Allies, and the Turkish government in Constantinople began persecuting those they perceived to be troublemakers, including those calling for the application of Wilson's Fourteen Points. They cooperated with Britain in the shipping of Parliament's deputies and others to a prison on the British controlled island of Malta.

Opposition to the moves of the Allies, and the Sultan and his government in Constantinople, began to form around the Turkish military leader, Mustafa Kemal. He had been a victor at Gallipoli during the Great War. Since 1905 he had been a critic of rule by the Sultans and of Islam. He had been a member of the military conspiracy that took power in 1908 but had been outside the inner circle and a thorn in the side of the Enver government during the war - Kemal not having favored entering the war on Germany's side or fighting and dying for German interests. Now he was the foremost defender of Turkish nationalism and foremost Turkish opponent of the Sultan's government in Constantinople. Kemal was not a man easily intimidated or ready to surrender to the authority of the Islamic caliph.

Kemal was an aggressive organizer, and patriotic Turks rallied around him. In unoccupied Turkey a National People's Congress was formed, which on April 23, 1920, elected their great hope, Mustafa Kemal, as president. The new regime was in the town of Ankara. In Constantinople, Sultan Mehmed followed British pressure and denounced the nationalist movement, and, with the Sultan, Muslim authority in the person of Sheik ul-Islam denounced it as contrary to Islam.

What mattered more than Sheik ul-Islam's pronouncements was the military strength that the upstart regime under Kemal was organizing. Turkey's military had been shattered by the war. Here and there outside the capital, units were still intact but under strength. Civilians had taken up arms to defend their homes from the Greeks, and, on May 16, 1920, Kemal began organizing all irregulars into a force under his command, and he had the prestige to succeed in this. Some other generals joined their units to Kemal's forces. Turks were willing to pay what was needed to supply what they saw as their military with adequate supplies, and soldiers under Kemal's command acquired a new hope and spirit. They believed in what they were fighting for.

On August 10, 1920, the Allies imposed upon the Sultan's regime the Treaty of Sèvres, which limited Turkey to a military force of 50,000, a force that was to be subject to "advice" from the Allied powers. The treaty gave Britain, France and Italy control over Turkey's financial affairs and granted to France and Italy their zones of control and influence. The treaty also granted autonomy to the Kurds. But the regime in Ankara refused to recognize the treaty.

The Greek army, meanwhile, had been spreading out from Smyrna, and the Allies saw the Greek forces as an instrument to enforce the Treaty of Sèvres. Kemal let the Greeks advance, giving the preservation of his troops priority over holding territory. He was still building up the strength of his forces, while the Greeks were spreading themselves thin and extending their supply lines.

The first check to the Greek advance was at the Battle of Sakarya, between August 24 and September 16, 1921. The morale of the Turkish nation soared at Kemal's victory, adding to Kemal's strength.

In August, 1922, with the Greeks as close as forty miles to Ankara, Kemal began a counter offensive that sent the Greeks reeling back. Within two weeks the Greeks had their backs against the Aegean Sea. The British were unwilling to make war against Kemal and the Turkish drive for national self-determination. The British had had enough of war in recent years. The issue of war against the Turks helped to drive from power the champion of the Greek cause, Lloyd-George. The Greek dream of a Greater Greece was shattered. The remnants of the Greek army had to be evacuated by sea, and much of the Greek population - who spoke Turkish - left with them, ending a Greek presence that stretched back thousands of years. These Greeks were leaving an under populated Turkey and moving to an overpopulated Greece, where many would suffer more perhaps than they would have if Greece had left Turkey alone after the Great War.

Facing the military power of a united Turkish nation, the British evacuated Sultan Mehmed VI, on October 7, taking him and his entourage by warship to Malta. The Sultan, in his sixties, and still the moral leader of Muslims, took with him his eighteen-year-old bride. The girl had been engaged to a navy captain. She was the daughter of the Sultan's gardener, and the Sultan had pressured the father into giving him the girl, against her will.

The Sultan had his eighteen-year-old wife, but the sultanate was over. On November 2, 1922, the National Assembly, in Ankara, declared the old sultanate abolished. Gone too were the leaders of the military coup of 1908 and the wartime leaders, Enver Pasha and his two colleagues. Enver had asked Kemal permission to return, which Kemal had denied, and Enver had died in August, in what is now Tajikistan, in a fight against a Bolshevik army. Enver's two colleagues, Talat and Cemal, had been killed in 1921 by Armenians seeking revenge for wartime atrocities, Talat in Berlin and Cemal in Tiflis.

In July 1923, at Lausanne, the British, French, Italians, Romanians, and Greeks signed an agreement with Kemal's government that recognized Turkey's independence and its permanent borders. Turkey agreed that the straits between the Mediterranean and Black Seas would be demilitarized, and they agreed to a temporary ban against an increase in custom duties. The British won from the Turks an agreement that non-Muslim children would have available to them instruction in their own language. And the Turks agreed that non-Muslims would receive an equitable share in benefits provided by Turkey's national and local governments for education, religion and charity.

Turkey was now, in the eyes of the Turks at least, a republic. The new Turkish republic was proclaimed on October 29, 1923, and the nation rejoiced. Mustafa Kemal had led the Turks from occupation by the hated Allies and the ashes of the old Ottoman Empire to a new nation.

Secularization

Mustafa Kemal had been urging Muslims to learn trades that had traditionally been reserved for non-Muslims - shoemakers, tailors, carpenters, tanners, blacksmiths and the 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 that 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]

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. 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, 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. Its origins were obscure and not explicitly Koranic, but it had become custom and identified with Islam. The abolition of the veil was widely accepted and dismissed as a nuisance. The headscarf was seen by Turkey’s government as a symbol of political Islam, and government regulation banned it 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.

By some Islamic fundamentalists Ataturk has been remembered as a traitor and an infidel.

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Copyright © 2001 by Frank E. Smitha. All rights reserved.

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