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Birth of the Republic of Turkey
*Note to the reader: The story of the important early years of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk is available at http://www.semp.us/publications/biot_reader.php?BiotID=617. Mustafa Kemal (1881-1938) was a junior officer in the Ottoman army when the “Young Turks” (i.e., the “Committee of Union and Progress,” or CUP) began to encounter serious difficulties after putting down the Islamist counter-revolution in Constantinople in 1909. First, they lost to Italy their fight to retain Libya in the Ottoman Empire in 1911. Then, in spring 1912, the Balkan peoples—particularly Serbia and Bulgaria, and then Greece, “for the first and last time in their history…smothered their differences to unite against the Turks.” (1) The coup de grace to the Ottoman Empire in Europe came when the King of Montenegro declared war against it on October 8, 1912. Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece joined in a few days later.
The First Balkan War (1912-1913) ensued in which the Ottomans lost all Rumeli (the Ottoman Turk name for the southern Balkan regions of the Ottoman Empire), including Macedonia, Mustafa Kemal’s beloved birthplace and childhood home and headquarters of the Young Turks, which went to the Greeks. Mustafa Kemal’s mother Zubeyde and sister Makbule fled Salonika (Macedonia) eastward to Constantinople with thousands of other Muslim refugees who “massed together in the courtyards of the mosques, ragged and destitute and dying in the cruel winter weather.” (2)
The Ottoman government was ready to cede Adrianople (Edirne) and most of Thrace to the conquerors, which would have left the European component of the Ottoman Empire reduced to only Constantinople and a narrow strip of hinterland. Young Turks Enver and Talat intervened, however, by assassinating Minister of War Nazim Pasha, who bore much of the responsibility for the Ottoman army’s defeat. Through this murderous act, the Young Turks believed they had saved the Ottoman Empire “from an ignominious surrender.” (3) The Treaty of London ended the First Balkan War on May 30, 1913. The Ottoman government had to cede Adrianople after all. The June 1913 assassination of Grand vizier Mahmud Shevket, in Constantinople, who represented the Ottoman government in London, resulted in a Young Turk military dictatorship of the Ottoman Empire. (3) The Young Turks hanged leaders of the opposition and established a Triumvirate, consisting of Enver, Jemal and Talat. “The Young Turk Revolution, designed to defeat an autocracy, was thus to end in a party oligarchy almost as despotic as the Sultan’s rule had been,” noted Ataturk biographer Lord Kinross (3) The Second Balkan War, which began on June 16, 1913, only days after the signing of the Treaty of London, resulted from the newly independent Balkan states quarreling over the spoils of the First Balkan War. The Ottoman army, sensing the opportunity, marched westwards and retook Adrianople and a large part of Eastern Thrace. Thus ended the second Balkan War. Mustafa Kemal, barely 32-years-old, watched from the sidelines. Minister of War Enver sent Mustafa Kemal north to Sophia, Bulgaria, as a military attaché where he first experienced the intellectual stimulation and comforts of a civilized European city.
Minister of War Enver, unhappy with the performance of the Ottoman army during the Balkan Wars, turned its training and leadership over to the Germans, led by General Liman von Sanders. (4) Enver invested in him a “high degree of executive authority over Turkish troops,” to which Mustafa Kemal bitterly objected, to no avail. (4)
Then, catastrophically, on June 28, 1914, a young student armed and briefed by a secret Serbian terrorist organization assassinated the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the Austrian Heir Apparent, and his wife while they traveled in an open-topped car in Sarajevo (Bosnia). One month later, Austria declared war on Serbia. When the German Kaiser supported Austria, the First World War officially began. Enver secretly concluded a secret alliance between Turkey and Germany against Russia on August 2, 1914. From Sophia, Bulgaria, Mustafa Kemal argued against the Ottoman Empire’s entry into the war on the German side. If war spread, the Ottoman Empire he believed should enter the war against Germany. Ottoman War Minister Enver posted Mustafa Kemal, now a lieutenant colonel entitled to a divisional command, to the Gallipoli peninsula at the head of the 19th division, to defend the peninsula and Constantinople from British attack. The British, led by First Lord of the Admiralty William Churchill, had decided on January 8, 1915, to “bombard and take the Gallipoli peninsula with Constantinople as its objective.” (5)
Mustafa Kemal and other Turkish and German commanders successfully defeated the disastrous Allied enterprise in Gallipoli. Churchill resigned under pressure over the failure of the Gallipoli campaign, which haunted him the rest of his life. Gallipoli became the foundation of Mustafa Kemal’s career, because he had helped save Constantinople. In September 1915, Mustafa developed malaria and took sick leave beginning in December 1915.
Meanwhile, the CUP leadership, fearing Armenian subversion, summarily deported all (Christian) Armenians from Anatolia and even Thrace, with the exception of the communities in Constantinople and Izmir (Smyrna). “It was a brutal act of ethnic cleansing, for which CUP leaders gave the simple justification, ‘It was them or us.’ The deportations strained Ottoman communications and deprived Anatolia of almost all its craftsmen,” notes Mango. (6-7)
Meanwhile, the Russians, aiming to protect the Caucasus, defeated the Ottoman 3rd Army in eastern Anatolia (Erzurum) on February 16, 1916. When Mustafa regained his health, Enver dispatched him to command the 16th corps in eastern Anatolia, southwest of Lake Van, to oppose the Russian army. Mustafa arrived in eastern Anatolia on March 27, 1916, via Aleppo, as a Brigadier-General. On April 16, 1916, he established his corps headquarters in the small town of Silvan, northeast of Diyarbakir on the Tigris River. Mango notes, “The fighting in the east…brought together most of the officers who were to lead the Turkish nationalist forces in the [subsequent] War of Independence.” (8) The horrendous Anatolian winter of 1916-1917 shut down engagements between the Russian and Ottoman armies. The Russian Revolution then intervened to collapse the tsar’s armies in 1917. When the Bolsheviks staged their coup d’état in October 1917, the new Russian leadership asked for an armistice with the Ottoman Empire on December 3, 1917. On March 3, 1918, Talat signed the peace Treaty of Brest Litovsk with Bolshevik Russia. On January 4, 1918, Mustafa Kemal fell ill with an infection in his left kidney, leaving for treatment in Vienna when his condition did not improve after two months in Constantinople. He was well enough to leave Austria on July 27, 1918, but did not reach Constantinople until August 1918 because of an attack of Spanish flu in Vienna. He then returned to the southern edges of Anatolia to command the front. On October 30, 1918, the Allies and the Ottoman state signed an armistice on board HMS Agamemnon, anchored in Mudros harbor on the island of Lemnos, just south of the Dardanelles. The Ottoman government had sought an immediate end to hostilities with the Allies, according to Mango, because of the collapse of Bulgaria in mid-September 1918. “For nearly three years, the Bulgarians had held off the Allied expeditionary force centered on Salonika. But their front was finally broken by French, British, Serbian and Greek troops commanded by the French general Franchet d’Esperey. The Bulgarians sued for an armistice, leaving Constantinople exposed to an Allied advance.” (9) The signing of the armistice caused the collapse of the Young Turks’ regime. Enver, Talat, Jemal, and four other CUP leaders fled aboard a German ship, which took them to the Crimea on their way to Berlin. The new Ottoman Sultan Vahdettin supported the Allies’ plan to partition the Ottoman state despite the Allies defeating the Ottoman army only in Palestine and Mesopotamia (but not elsewhere). Mustafa Kemal, still fighting in southern Anatolia, was acutely aware that the Ottoman army remained strong, even as the sultan was capitulating to the enemy. The sultan meanwhile was hoping that by pursuing the armistice, the Allies would halt the advance of their armies into Turkish territory. They did not. For example, the British occupied Mosul, Iraq, on November 8, 1918. Germany and Austria continued fighting the Allies as the latter signed the armistice with the Ottoman state.
In January 1918, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George demanded internationalization of the Dardanelles and Bosporus straits and the award of Arabia, Armenia, Mesopotamia, Syria and Palestine to various Allied countries. He said he would not deprive the Turks of Thrace and Asia Minor (Anatolia), a message that made Turks very happy (“the British are not aiming at the destruction of the Turkish nation!”). (10) Lloyd George was anxious to settle with the Turks so that the Allies could focus on defeating the Germans. On November 3, 1918, Mustafa Kemal still fighting in the southern rim of Anatolia sent a telegram to the Ottoman government asking for a clarification of the armistice terms. “In particular, what were the borders of Cilicia—an antique geographical term which did not correspond to any administrative unit—from which Ottoman troops were to be withdrawn” from Anatolia under the terms of the armistice. (11) The British were keen on occupying Iskenderun on the Mediterranean coast of Cilicia to supply British troops in Aleppo! Mustafa Kemal proposed to form a new division from young recruits under his command, strengthen the gendarmerie, move military stores north of the Taurus range, and open fire on the British if they attempted to land in Iskenderum. The government in Constantinople ordered him to desist, which he did, saying he had wanted to hold Iskenderum to avoid his troops in northern Syria being cut off. The Ottoman troops were safely evacuated and Mustafa Kemal handed in his resignation and returned to Constantinople to be placed at the disposal of the war ministry. Mustafa Kemal’s behavior in November 1918 was the first time he tried to halt the empire’s drift to disaster, but without success. Before he decamped for Constantinople, he urged a notable from Antep (Gaziantep) in southern Anatolia to set up a resistance organization, to which he promised to supply arms. (12) Mustafa Kemal found Constantinople crawling with Greeks, Armenians, Levantines, British, French and Italians, who clearly controlled the capital. He hooked up with other nationalist military officers. Indeed, he would soon become their leader. When the British sought to punish CUP “war criminals” (the sultan agreed), Mustafa Kemal argued “that crimes had been committed against the Turks, as well as by them.” (13) When the Italians sought assurance from Turkish nationalists to not obstruct their efforts to win over a particular Arab leader, Mustafa Kemal and his comrades responded, “The maintenance of Turkish domination over the Arabs has been one of the causes of our decline. Let them settle matters with you as they please, and as you please.” (14) Greece under the leadership of Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos (1864-1936), who helped catalyze the Balkan states against the Turks in the First Balkan War and who was credited with bringing Greece to the side of the Allies during World War I, set its sights on winning Anatolia. Meanwhile, Damat Ferit, appointed grand vizier by his brother-in-law Sultan Vahdettin, suggested that order in the realm could be restored by disarming the population and strengthening the gendarmerie. The war ministry then dispatched Mustafa Kemal out of Constantinople, where he was causing nationalist-type problems, by making him “inspector of the 9th Army in Erzurum” in eastern Anatolia. (15) “The purpose of the mission was defined in terms acceptable to the Allies…Mustafa Kemal was to re-establish order, see to the collection and safe storage of weapons, investigate reports that the army had colluded in the establishment of ‘councils’ (or ‘soviets’) and, if true, put an end to the practice…In effect he was being named the government’s commissioner for the whole of Anatolia from Ankara eastwards. The inspector of the 2nd Army…complained from Konya that he saw no reason why Mustafa Kemal should be given such exceptional powers. The grand vizier replied that the sultan had taken the decision to test the ability of Mustafa Kemal with whom he had a special relationship.” Mustafa Kemal viewed his appointment as a type of exile, feeling that he had failed in his quest to acquire power while in Constantinople. Mustafa Kemal left for Anatolia on May 16, 1919, the day after Prime Minister Lloyd George and the Allies gave permission to proceed to Greek troops to occupy Izmir (Smyrna) in western Anatolia. The Ottoman government was stunned. Mustafa Kemal boarded the Bandirma, “an old and barely seaworthy tramp steamer,” which took him and his staff to Samsun, a city on the southern coast of the Black Sea. From Samsun, he traveled through the Pontic Mountains into the interior of Anatolia where he would remain for many years, building the state of Turkey. The 19th of May is a national holiday in Turkey, which marks the beginning of the War of Independence, i.e., the day (May 19, 1919) that Mustafa Kemal initiated his campaign to unite under his leadership the disparate elements of Turkish resistance. (16) “His aim was to encourage, organize and lead the Muslim inhabitants of [Anatolia], whom he and his companions saw as the Turkish nation. The army was to be the backbone of resistance, but it needed the cooperation of civil officials; popular support was also essential. Difficulties were involved in mobilizing all three components,” notes Mango. (16) Peasants, who accounted for the majority of the Muslim population, would do their best to avoid conscription, but fought well when forced into the army...Civilian support could be elicited most easily where there was an immediate threat, not just of foreign occupation, which could be seen as transient, but of permanent dispassion at the hands of ethnic rivals. This was the case in eastern Anatolia, which the Europeans called Armenia.” (17) Armed resistance by the nationalists began on May 28, 1919, when Greek troops landed in a town north of Izmir and were met by fire from a regular Ottoman unit that was still holding out against the Allies. Elsewhere in western Anatolia, commanders cooperated with local bands of outlaws to harass the advancing Greek troops.
On June 18, 1919, Mustafa Kemal said, “While the government in [Constantinople] was powerless, the entire population of Anatolia had united in the defense of national independence, that all army commanders, without exception, were similarly determined, and that ‘almost all’ civil administrators had also been enrolled in the cause.” (18) He and his fellow nationalists were attempting to save the core Turkish lands by enforcing the boundaries set by the armistice of October 30, 1918. Mustafa Kemal founded a group called the Eastern Anatolia Society for the Defence of Rights of which all Muslims were members ipso facto. An early version of “Turkey’s” declaration of independence noted “any Allied act of occupation and intervention as support for Greek and Armenian separatism…would be met with the united resistance of all Muslims. Moreover, should the Ottoman government ‘abandon or neglect’ the eastern provinces, a provisional administration would be formed to defend the area and govern it in accordance with existing Ottoman laws.” (19) To carry out their objectives, the embryonic Turkish nationalist group in Anatolia needed arms and money to fund their resistance to the Allies and their own government in Constantinople. As early as June 1919, the group discussed the possibility of a tactical alliance with the Bolsheviks, who suggested their willingness to help. Mustafa Kemal traversed Anatolia giving speeches to the populace. He accused the Allies of breaking the terms of the armistice of October 30, 1918, by occupying the country; defended the historical record of his people; and set out his aim of securing a fully independent state within the 1918 armistice lines that “encompass the portions of our fatherland inhabited by Turks and Kurds. To the south live our Arabic-speaking co-religionists. But the portions within the lines are an indivisible part of the Ottoman community.” (20) Independence was not enough, however. Mustafa Kemal believed that Turks needed to reform their domestic condition and prove by their actions that they “were capable of becoming an active member of the community of civilized nations.” (20) Turks began to refer to their new country as “Turkey,” a moniker used previously for a long time by foreigners. (21) On March 10, 1920, the British, increasingly anxious about the Turkish nationalists operating successfully from Ankara, Anatolia, secured Allied approval to take action against Turkish nationalists sowing unrest in Constantinople. “Mustafa Kemal was ready for the British move,” writes Mango. “First he sent a telegram to all military units and nationalist organizations, urging that the safety of non-Muslims—who could easily have become the target of Turkish indignation—should be assured; a second telegram asked that misleading declarations from the capital should be disregarded…Most important of all was a proclamation to the nation in which he declared that the forcible occupation of [Constantinople] had put an end to the 700-year-old Ottoman state. ‘ Today the Turkish nation is called to defend its capacity for civilization, its right to life and independence—its entire future,’” he declared. (22) Meanwhile, in Constantinople, the sultan and his grand vizier disavowed the nationalists, as the Allies told them to do, and even had a religious figure issue a fatwa, declaring that the nationalist forces were infidels and that believers should feel free to kill them. From Anatolia, the nationalists issued a contrary fatwa, which declared that the caliph/sultan was the prisoner of infidels, that it was the duty of the faithful to save him and his dominions, and that any fatwas issued at the behest of enemy states were invalid. The sultan replied that the nationalists were “Bolsheviks or at least ‘Godless Unionists,’” i.e., the residue of the exiled CUP. Mustafa Kemal responded by ramping up religious ceremonies within the nationalist government framework to demonstrate the faith of the nationalists.
By 1920, the Grand National Assembly of elected representatives was in full swing in Ankara. Indeed, on April 29, 1920, it voted “a draconian law of high treason, prescribing the death penalty for anyone who challenged its legitimacy. On 1 May, [Constantinople] responded by sentencing to death Mustafa Kemal and a number of his supporters.” (23) Undeterred, Mustafa Kemal continued to forge the secular political structure of newborn Turkey. The Allies became increasingly irate at the brilliant organizing of the nationalists in Anatolia and between April 19 and 26, 1920, proceeded with the partitioning of Turkey. Egged on by British Prime Minister Lloyd George, Greek Prime Minister Venizelos dispatched the Greek army on June 21, 1920 into the interior of Anatolia and eastern Thrace. Bursa, Anatolia, fell on July 8, 1920. The Greek army continued eastward as Mustafa Kemal and the nationalists and the Anatolian people observed with horror. On August 10, 1920, in Sevres, a suburb of Paris, Ottoman government officials representing Sultan Vahdettin signed the Treaty of Sevres, which put an official end to the Ottoman Empire in all but name. The Ottoman government officials, including the sultan, who accepted the Sevres treaty were traitors, said the nationalist government in Ankara. Under the treaty, the sultan retained Constantinople, but under Allied control, “and the rest of Anatolia, apart from large zones of influence granted under a separate document to France in the south-east, and to Italy in the south. Foreigners would retain the privileged status which they had enjoyed under the capitulations. No patriotic Turk could be expected to accept such a dispensation,” notes Mango. (24) Meanwhile, the Greeks advanced farther into the interior of Anatolia while occupying the most productive areas of western Anatolia. Mustafa Kemal turned his attention to defeating the Greeks and pre-empting the Armenians, while trying to keep the old CUP leadership, which had taken up an ideology that combined “Islamic militancy with scraps of socialist ideology,” from returning to Anatolia to make trouble. (25) Mustafa Kemal had his hands full as he fought the Bolsheviks and the British who were both trying to subvert Turkish society by conquering it from within. Fortunately, the Greek Prime Minister Venizelos was defeated in general elections in the aftermath of the sudden death of young King Alexander of Greece, bitten by a monkey in the gardens of his palace on the outskirts of Athens. The nationalist army was finally able to beat back the Greeks, albeit not before the latter had almost reached Ankara. The nationalist army also successfully defeated the Armenians from Kars to the east of Erzurum. On January 21, 1921, the Grand National Assembly in Ankara passed the Law of Fundamental Organization, which declared, “Sovereignty belong[s] unconditionally to the nation, and administration would be based on popular self-rule. The country was for the first time named officially as the State of Turkey, ruled by the Government of the Turkish Grand National Assembly. [Emphasis added] The Assembly enjoyed full legislative and executive powers. It could also declare war, make peace and conclude treaties—decisions which required a royal decree under the Ottoman constitution. Provinces were to enjoy autonomy under elected councils. However, the central government would name provincial governors and regional inspectors-general to maintain its authority throughout the country.” (26) In January 1921, Mustafa Kemal declared that the Turkish sultanate and the Ottoman Islamic caliphate were accepted by the nationalist government in principle. He said that he was not advocating a republic. The Grand National Assembly voted Mustafa Kemal president of the State of Turkey, a position that was not subject to term limits. In October 1921, Mustafa Kemal made his move to abolish the monarchy/sultanate. He sent his close colleague Refet to apprise the sultan in Constantinople. Refet carefully conveyed his pious feelings for the exalted office of the caliph but said nothing about the sultanate. Refet had a four-hour audience with Sultan Vahdettin, asking that the sovereign should dismiss the phantom government in the capital and recognize the Ankara government. “He also explained that feeling in Ankara favored the abolition of the monarchy, and the retention of the separate office of the caliph.” (27) The Grand National Assembly, founded as a people’s government, was sole heir to the Ottoman Empire within Turkey’s frontiers and therefore the institution of the monarchy had lapsed, he declared. The caliphate, by contrast, was legitimate and would be freed from foreign domination, he concluded. (27) The sultan was not happy. During further discussion of the caliphate in the Grand National Assembly, Mustafa Kemal provided a long account of the history of Islam. “He pointed out that there had been impotent Arab caliphs under the rule of Seljuk Turks in Baghdad from the eleventh century to the Mongol invasion two hundred years later, and then under the Mamluks in Egypt until the Ottoman conquest in the sixteenth century. The functions of caliph, as successor to the Prophet, and of the temporal ruler, or sultan, could therefore be separated. Now temporal rule in Turkey had passed to the assembly, which had the power to designate—and protect—a caliph.” He opined, On the one hand, the people of Turkey will become daily stronger as a modern and civilized state, and realize increasingly their humanity and identity, without being exposed to the danger of individual treachery, and, on the other, the institution of the caliphate will be exalted as the central link of the spirit, the conscience and the faith of the Islamic world… (28) Refet returned to Ankara and related the results of his talk with the sultan. The Grand National Assembly opted to debate the matter of the continued existence of the monarchy, but Mustafa Kemal cut off debate saying, “Sovereignty and kingship are never decided by academic debate. They are seized by force. The Ottoman dynasty appropriated by force the government of the Turks, and reigned over them for six centuries. Now the Turkish nation has effectively gained possession of its sovereignty.” (28) On November 2, 1922, the Grand National Assembly passed a resolution declaring that the sultan’s government had ended on March 16, 1920, when the Allies occupied Constantinople; that the government of the Grand National Assembly was the only legitimate authority in the country; and that the caliphate was vested in the Ottoman dynasty, but that the Assembly had the right to choose the caliph. (28) Sultan Vahdettin was not mentioned in the decision to abolish the monarchy or to create a separate caliphate. Refet closed down all the Ottoman ministries and announced that Constantinople would henceforth be administered as a province of the Ankara government. On November 17, 1922, Vahdettin, signing himself as “Caliph of the Mussulmans,” requested that the British transfer him as soon as possible out of Constantinople because he considered that his life was in danger. He traveled to Malta, then Mecca as the guest of Husayn, the Hashemite king of Hejaz, and finally settled in San Remo in northwestern Italy with his three wives, where he died on May 15, 1926. Refet later thanked the British for relieving him of the burden of the sultan’s presence in Constantinople. (29) Who was to be the new caliph in the absence of Vahdettin? The Grand General Assembly confirmed the decision unanimously to elect Vahdettin’s cousin Abdulmecit, heir apparent before abolition of the sultanate. Political opponents of Mustafa Kemal took the opportunity to produce a pamphlet that argued the caliph should become the head of the Turkish state, the post held by Mustafa Kemal as president of the Grand National Assembly. (30) An Allied powers peace conference in Lausanne, Switzerland, opened on November 21, 1922. The Grand National Assembly in Ankara, not the sultan in Constantinople, sent representatives to negotiate. Mustafa Kemal wanted Turkish independence within the boundaries set by the armistice of October 30, 1918 and the loose ends established by the Lausanne peace conference. The Allies, says Mango, “could not believe that Orientals were capable of providing civilized government. Mustafa Kemal was determined to prove them wrong.” (31) It was no easy task. Muslim Turks lacked the most basic technical skills. Famous as cavalrymen, they had to rely on Armenian farriers to shoe their horses…Mustafa Kemal told the story of a sultan who was hard put to find a single tradesman in the army which he led to Belgrade. Yet when one was found, the sultan was sad: even one tradesman, he feared, could dilute the martial spirit of his soldiers. It was this attitude, said Mustafa Kemal, that made the nation dependent on outsiders for everything “From needles to thread, from nails to pegs.” “The simplest tread is the most honourable,” Mustafa Kemal told his simple audience. “Shoemakers, tailors, carpenters, tanners, blacksmiths, farriers—these are trades most worthy of respect in our social and military life.” They were all trades reserved by tradition for non-Muslims. (31) Mustafa Kemal spoke of the general ignorance of the Turks, which had to be remedied. Ignorance was the disease which had brought the nation to the brink of disaster. The country could not live in isolation, it had to become a progressive member of the civilized world. This was only possible through the acquisition of scientific knowledge. [Emphasis added] “We will acquire knowledge and science wherever they are to be found and we will stuff them into the head of every individual in the country. No limits, no conditions can be attached to knowledge and science” [said Mustafa Kemal]. The speech contained a warning of the cultural revolution to come. “If social life is permeated with irrational, useless and harmful doctrines and traditions, it becomes paralyzed.” (32) Mustafa Kemal repudiated pan-Islamists and pan-Turanists, saying “independence within the new national boundaries was the proper aim of Turkish foreign policy.” (33) Mustafa Kemal once said that a local muftu (Turkish for mufti, a Muslim scholar and interpreter of Sharia law, who can deliver a fatwa) complained loudly that religious students were being conscripted into the Turkish army. Mustafa replied that the muftu had gathered deserters in his school. (34) Mustafa Kemal also declared that Turkey would put up statues to its heroes. “The Islamic ban on human representation was no longer relevant; it had been directed against the worship of idols: the assumption that educated people were capable of worshipping pieces of stone today was an insult to Islam,” he said. (34) What did Mustafa Kemal think about traditional religious schools known as madrassahs (medreses in Turkish)? They were unnecessary and even harmful. “Mustafa Kemal…referred to his visit to a medrese during the [Turkish] War of Independence. He found the local muftu teaching Arabic, but neither he nor his students had a useful knowledge of the language. ‘I do not know Arabic,’ Mustafa Kemal said, ‘but as I had served in Arab lands, I knew more of the language than the muftu…Let us send people to Syria or Arabia to learn Arabic, but let us not waste time in all our medreses, where people who neither know nor can teach are uselessly occupied.” (35) He continued, If religious text-books were written in Turkish there would be no need to learn Arabic. In fact, to do research on religion one needed to know French, English and German. “We should realize that these [foreigners] have studied our religion better than we have.” Everybody has a religion, even the person who denies having one. “But this general rule is true of all religions and it enjoins on everyone the pursuit of knowledge: religious education should become part of a general curriculum, which would be followed by men and women together. This was in fact the practice in many European states which had an established religion. (34) [Emphasis added] Mustafa Kemal found it politic to appeal to Islam, which was after all the religion of army chaplains. However, he warned that the “evils which had sapped the nation’s strength had all be wrought in the name of religion.” (36) [Emphasis added]
The outcome of the Treaty of Peace with Turkey signed at Lausanne, July 24, 1923, included withdrawal of Allied forces from Constantinople and the straits within six weeks of ratification of the treaty by the Grand National Assembly in Ankara. (37) On October 9, 1923, Ankara became Turkey’s official capital, while Constantinople remained the seat of the caliph. On October 29, 1923, Mustafa Kemal and Prime Minister Ismet drafted a short amendment to the 1921 constitution, which declared the Turkish state was a republic and that the Grand National Assembly elected the president from among its members. The president appointed the prime minister and the latter chose ministers from among the members of the assembly, which the president then asked to approve the cabinet. In addition, the amendment noted Islam was to be official religion and Turkish the official language. (38) The amendment passed the Grand National Assembly. On January 22, 1924, the caliph asked Prime Minister Ismet to send him the funds it had promised on April 15, 1923, to cover expenses that he could not meet from his treasury. Mustafa Kemal knew that the caliph had been in touch with foreign representatives and had lent an ear to complaints of reserve officers. The caliph surrounded himself with pomp and ceremony in his palaces. Mustafa Kemal sent a telegram to Abdulmecit that told the caliph he should realize that “his function had no religious or political justification. The suggestion that officials of the republic should contact him was a challenge to the republican government. His budget should be lower than that of the president; he had no right to a personal treasury; his staff should be reduced, and his assets registered to prevent unauthorized sale.” (39) “The telegram ended with a reminder that a century after the revolution, France refused to admit exiled members of the royal family, and that the Turkish republic should not be sacrificed to meaningless civility in its relations with a dynasty which still hoped for the return of the sultanate.” (39) In February 1924, Mustafa Kemal noted that “the republic relied on two forces: the determination of the nation and the courage of the army. His only reference to politics was a cryptic sentence: ‘we have taken up positions to remove obstacles which lay in the way of the nation’s safety and happiness.’” (40) During army maneuvers, he decided with Prime Minister Ismet and other ministers of the state to “go ahead with the abolition of the caliphate. Two other measures would be taken at the same time: a unified education system would be set up and the ministry which dealt with the application of Muslim canon law and the administration of pious foundations would be abolished.” (41) A unified education system meant closing down the medreses, the religious schools that trained students in Arabic, the scriptures and traditions and canon law. He planned to replace them with secular, Turkish-language schools that would “put an end to the transmission of the Islamic religious and cultural heritage.” Replacing the pious foundations was the secular government, which would “rule on faith and morals and employ the clergy. The Islamic establishment had always been subject to the sultans, but enjoyed a certain autonomy and applied its own rules, such as in Saudi Arabia today. “Now religion, religious endowments and education were all to be nationalized and subjected to secular criteria. The change was bound to shock.” (41) Ismet wrote in his memoires: We encountered the greatest resistance when we abolished the caliphate. Abolishing the sultanate had been easier, as the survival of the caliphate had satisfied the partisans of the sultanate. But the two-headed system could not go on for ever. It nourished the expectation that the sovereign would return under the guise of caliph…and gave hope to the [Ottoman dynasty]. This is why the abolition of the caliphate…had deeper effects and was to become the main source of conflict. (41) On March1, 1924, President Mustafa Kemal told the Turkish Parliament that the religion of Islam would be elevated by ceasing to be a political instrument, as had been the case in the past. He said nothing about the caliphate. The members of Parliament got the hint and formally approved three bills. “The first abolished the ministry of canon law and pious foundations” and subordinated the clergy to a department of religious affairs of Parliament. “The second instituted a single system of public education. The third deposed the caliph, abolished the institution of the caliphate, and exiled from Turkey all members of the Ottoman dynasty…The bill was approved after a brief discussion of the title of the new department. Islam remained the official religion of the republic, but it was placed under direct government control. The foundations of secularism were thus laid with hardly a murmur of dissent in a compliant Parliament.” (42) [Emphasis added] The Ottoman princes were given ten days to pack up and leave. The caliph and two of his four wives, however, were immediately escorted by the police chief out of town to a train headed to Bulgaria. As he crossed into Bulgaria, Caliph Abdulmecit declared the decision to depose him was null and void, but discovered that no one really cared. Swiss authorities then held up his entry because of Swiss law that barred polygamous immigrants. Eventually the caliph died in Paris in August 1944 and was buried in Medina, Saudi Arabia. “Requests by Abdulmecit’s descendants to have his remains transferred to Turkey were turned down repeatedly.” (43) On April 8, 1924, Mustafa Kemal closed down the religious courts, which applied Muslim canon law in matters of personal status, including marriage, divorce, and inheritance. He also lifted the ban on alcohol. Islam remained the official religion and the Sharia in principal was still valid. However, Mustafa Kemal said in 1926 that the Sharia laws were “superfluous formulations, incompatible with the modern character of the new Turkish state and of the republican regime.” The Parliament dutifully endorsed the changes demanded by Mustafa Kemal. (44) Mustafa Kemal kept a low profile in the weeks following the abolition of the caliphate. “The destruction of the old order had shocked the country, but incidents of open rebellion were few,” writes Mango. Some opponents railed against the “godless government,” but “popular reaction was ineffective without educated leadership and the small educated class was divided.” (45) In August 1924, Mustafa Kemal toured the country, making strong speeches about his views of the future of Turkey. In one speech, he talked about foreign Muslims: There were, he said, more than 300 million Muslims in the world, and these millions were all subject to the will and the contempt of others. Why? Because the education they had received had not given them the human qualities needed to break their chains; their education was not national. This showed how necessary it was to refrain from stuffing young minds with “rusty, numbing, fanciful superfluities.” To make his point plain, Mustafa Kemal then referred to a previous speaker, a hoca who had expounded a passage in the Muslim scriptures comparing the olive, which had one stone, with the fig, with its multitude of pips. The olive, said the hoca, symbolized unity, the fig plurality. But another hoca, whom Mustafa Kemal had questioned on the meaning of the verse, said that he needed half an hour to explain it. What was the point of tiring young minds with such conundrums? Tell them the plain truth. The implication was clear: the old, religious knowledge was useless in the new age. As for Muslim subjects of foreign powers, they had only themselves to blame for their subjection. (46) [Emphasis added] Mustafa Kemal was long interested in history. As the Republic of Turkey celebrated its tenth anniversary in 1933, the writing of the history of Turkey was underway. It emphasized that Turks were justified by history to own Anatolia. Of course, the “territory of Turkey was littered with monuments left by Hittites, Phrygians, Lydians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Armenians. Did this mean that the Turks, who were latecomers to the land, had no ‘historic right’ to it? The main Turkish monuments were either mosques or fortifications. Did that mean that the Turks’ contribution to civilization was restricted and that they were incapable of anything else?” (47) The simplest way to deal with the conundrum was to say that the “Turks had a historic right to their land, had created great civilizations, and were capable of contributing to the one, universal, modern civilization,” opines Mango. They “lived in it and formed the overwhelming majority of its population, and they were as capable of acquiring and contributing to the sum of human knowledge as any other community which is given the chance.” (48) One important aspect of the Outline of Turkish History was the notion that “religion is an important social and psychological phenomenon, subject to evolution [and that] Islam was an incident in Turkish history and the multinational nature of the Ottoman empire an aberration.” (48) [Emphasis added] Other initiatives undertaken by Mustafa Kemal was to simplify Ottoman Turkish and make adoption of surnames compulsory for all Turkish citizens (in November 1934, Mustafa Kemal chose as his surname Ataturk, literally Father Turk, or father of the Turks). He had no biological children of his own (he did adopt several orphan girls) and had experienced a short but unhappy marriage, so the appellation fit him. On February 2, 1935, he opened the great basilica of St. Sophia, a mosque since the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453, as a public museum. In May 1935, a new law made Sunday a day of rest instead of Friday, the Muslim day of congregational prayer. (49)
Kemal Ataturk’s long heavy alcohol habit caused cirrhosis of his liver, and he fell into several hepatic comas before finally dying in his bedroom on November 10, 1938. “Arrangements were made for Ataturk to lie in state in the throne room of Dolmabahce palace. This went against Muslim custom which enjoins burial within twenty-four hours of death.” (50) Ismet was elected the second president of the Republic of Turkey. Every year at 9:05 a.m. on November 10, the entire country of Turkey stops to observe the moment of Ataturk’s death. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk salvaged Anatolia for the Turks from the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire, abolished the Turkish monarchy and the Ottoman Islamic caliphate, forged a secular republic based on the will of the people, and led a knowledge-based cultural revolution in Turkey in the first third of the twentieth century. Notes:
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