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• Born: 12 March 1881
• Birthplace: Salonika (Thessaloniki), Ottoman Empire (modern Greece)
• Died: 10 November 1938 (cirrhosis of the liver)
• Best Known As: The father of modern Turkey

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was the military and political leader who transformed what was left of the Ottoman Empire into modern Turkey. Born with the given name Mustafa (Mustapha), he was as a young student given the name Kemal (meaning "perfection") for his excellence in mathematics. He became a soldier and excelled at that discipline as well. In the Turkish defense of the Dardanelles in 1915 his military acumen and heroics made him a national icon. He was promoted to general at the age of 35 and given command of the army near the Black Sea port of Samsun. He defied the Sultan's orders to quash opposition and instead built an army of his own to fight for independence from European control. The Sultan ordered his arrest, but to no avail. Between 1919 and 1923 Kemal successfully fought off foreign armies as well as opposition forces from Turkey. On 29 October 1923 the national parliament declared the existence of the Republic of Turkey with Kemal as president. His fifteen years in office were turbulent -- he attempted political and social reforms and emulated the liberal democracies of the West, but as the party leader in a one-party state, he has also been called a dictator. Nonetheless, he is considered to have almost single-handedly saved and modernized Turkey, and in 1934 he was officially dubbed Atatürk, "father of the Turks."

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(b. Salonica, 12 Mar. 1880; d. 10 Nov. 1938) Turkish; President 1923 – 38 The son of a minor Ottoman official, Atatürk attended the War College at Instanbul, from which he graduated in 1905. He helped to found the Fatherland and Freedom Society in 1906 which merged with the Committee of Union and Progress in the following year and spawned the Young Turks Revolution of 1908. Mustafa Kemal gradually became disenchanted with their policies. He conducted a brilliant defence of Gallipoli during the Great War and fought the Allies on various other fronts.

Allied intentions to dismember the Ottoman Empire and divide up its Turkish core, formalized in the Treaty of Sèvres of 1920, had been opposed from 1919 onwards by Mustafa Kemal and his Turkish nationalist associates in Anatolia. At Erzurum and Sivas the basic Kemalist programme as formulated and issued from Ankara as the National Pact. The pact renounced the empire, but demanded complete independence for all Turkish-speaking territories. It was endorsed by the legal Ottoman parliament and then by the new National Assembly meeting at Ankara, in 1920. The Assembly also deposed the Sultan, promulgated a republican constitution, and proclaimed Mustafa Kemal President. These objectives were secured by the Turkish war of independence against Greece, France, Italy, and Soviet Russia, 1920 – 22.

Atatürk ("Father Turk" — the name he adopted in 1935) now embarked on an ambitious and radical programme to turn Turkey from a Muslim polity into a modern state. The Republic was proclaimed in 1923, with Ankara as its capital, Kemal as executive President, and a single political party. An elected Parliament was added by the 1924 constitution. The dominance of Islam in public life was ended when the Caliphate was abolished in 1924; religious orders were disbanded; religious property was seized; religious instruction was curtailed and a secular educational system established; the Islamic legal system was replaced by a European one; and, in 1928, Islam itself was disestablished. The fez and the veil were forbidden, the Latin alphabet was substituted for the Arabic, and, in 1934, women were enfranchised. Ataturk revitalized the economy, created mixed state-private banks, protected domestic industry and, on étatiste Kemalist principles, responsibility for investment and preventing foreign capital entering Turkey was assumed by the state. Atatürk's reforms provoked Kurdish revolts which were ruthlessly suppressed. The Kurdish language was proscribed and Kurdish ethnic identity denied; in the new dispensation, Kurds became "mountain Turks".

Atatürk, Gen Mustafa Kemal (1881-1938), revered father of modern Turkey. He began his career as an Ottoman army cadet, entering the Harbiye military college in Istanbul in 1899 and graduating in 1905. Already disenchanted with the repression of Abd al-Hamid II, he was posted to Damascus as a captain in a cavalry regiment, and became a member of the reformist Vatan ‘Fatherland’ secret society. He served in Tripolitania during the Italo-Turkish war and in the two Balkan wars, by now on the fringes at least of the Committee of Union and Progress which had ended the Hamidian despotism and brought about the ‘Young Turk’ revolution, though Kemal himself was a firm believer in the separation of the military from politics.

Initially opposed to Turkey's entry into WW I, once Turkey was committed Kemal threw himself into the war wholeheartedly, with a chance to display the talents for leadership and military planning for which he was already notable. He distinguished himself in the defence of Gallipoli and then was sent as a corps commander to the eastern Anatolian front. Here he first came into contact with Ismet (later Inönü), who was to become his right-hand man and eventually his successor as president of the Republic. When the Russian army of the Caucasus crumbled at the onset of the Russian Revolution, Kemal and Ismet were both transferred to Palestine. With the loss of Baghdad to the British, Kemal became increasingly fearful that the war was lost for Turkey and was grieved that his soldiers had such inadequate weapons and supplies; he also resented the transfer of the supreme command in the east from Turkish generals to the Germans Falkenhayn and then Liman von Sanders.

Personally undefeated as a field commander, Kemal ended the war at Aleppo, with Turkey now bereft of its Arab provinces as well as virtually all of the Balkans. He felt a personal mission to fight for the integrity of the Turkish heartland, Anatolia. The Mudros armistice terms seemed to herald the imminent partition of Asiatic Turkey by the western Allies and Greece. Posted in 1919 as inspector general of the Turkish army in northern Anatolia, he speedily began to act independently and to arouse nationalist feeling there, not difficult when a Greek army had landed at Smyrna (now Izmir) in May 1919. The first Great National Assembly at Ankara in central Anatolia, now a rival body to the sultan's government in the capital Istanbul, assembled in spring 1920 and later elected him president in 1921. Kemal, now sentenced to death in absentia by the sultan's government, embarked on the most testing and decisive phase of his military career, the war for the integrity of the Turkish homeland, at a time when foreign powers had troops in the south and west of Anatolia, the sultan's government was hostile, and the Armenians had set up a state of their own in eastern Anatolia.

In 1921 the Greek army advanced eastwards from Izmir but was held on the Sakarya river before Ankara, Kemal having by now been made C-in-C, and in 1922 the Greeks were disastrously defeated and had to evacuate western Anatolia. The peace settlement of Lausanne (July 1923) gave Kemal a Turkey in Asia free of foreign troops and with essential control of the Straits, and provided for exchanges of populations. Exasperation at the feeble and defeatist role of the sultan in Istanbul led Kemal to work for the abolition of the sultanate in 1922, the proclamation of a republic in 1923, and the abolition of the caliphate in 1924; thus the rule of the Ottoman Turks ended for ever. Kemal's later career as ‘Gazi’ (Warrior Hero), a title awarded to him by a grateful Assembly in 1921, and as ‘Atatürk’ (Father of the Turkish Nation), assumed by him in 1934, was a pacific one, concerned with establishing for Turkey a dirigiste economy, a neutralist foreign policy, and westernizing social and educational measures, involving a reduction of Islamic influence in daily life, to which Atatürk attributed much of the backwardness of his country.

Bibliography

• Kinross, Lord, Atatürk: The Rebirth of a Nation (London, 1964).
• Mango, Andrew, Atatürk (London, 1999)

— C. E. Bosworth

Ghazi Mustapha Kemal Atatürk (1881-1938) was a Turkish nationalist and political leader who was instrumental in the fall of the Ottoman sultanate and in the creation of modern Turkey.

Mustapha Kemal devoted his life to freeing Turkey from foreign domination. Under his benevolent dictatorship as president of the republic, he instituted lasting reforms that earned him the name Atatürk (the father of the Turks).

Mustapha was born in Salonika (now Greece, but then part of Turkish Macedonia), the son of a lower-middle-class Turkish customs official. He received a military education, and a teacher dubbed him Kemal (perfection) because of the youth's demand for quality performance. Kemal graduated from the military academy in Monastir in 1899 and then attended the war and staff colleges in Istanbul.

Military Career

In 1905, on the day Kemal was commissioned a lieutenant at the General Staff Academy in Istanbul, he was arrested for political agitation. Banishment to Syria failed to dampen his revolutionary ardor. He organized some officers of the 5th Army Corps in Damascus into a secret society, Vatan (fatherland). Kemal established branches during a secret visit to Salonika, where the organization became Fatherland and Liberty, then the Ottoman Society of Liberty, and subsequently part of the Committee of Union and Progress. Despite this political activity and narrow escape from a second arrest, Kemal was not active in the 1908 coup or in the Young Turk movement which toppled Abdul Hamid.

In 1911 Kemal secretly went to Libya to organize Senussi resistance against the invading Italians. A major in the Second Balkan War, he served as chief of staff to the army on Gallipoli. When World War I broke out, Col. Mustapha Kemal was serving in Bulgaria as the Ottoman military attaché. During the war he commanded armies on everyone of the several Ottoman fronts. He gained national recognition during the defense of Gallipoli. Promoted to pasha and given command of the 2d Army Corps, he led his troops and 3d Army forces in the Caucasus campaigns of 1916 and then was sent to the Hejaz. Correctly predicting the reverses to be expected in the Iraq campaign, he resigned but returned to service in 1918. Kemal was in command of the 7th Army withstanding the assault on Aleppo at war's end.

Reunification of Turkey

Peace was restored by the Mudros armistice of Oct. 30, 1918. The following May, 4 days after the Greeks landed troops in Turkey, Kemal was appointed inspector general of the 3d Army in Anatolia. From here he launched an antiforeign movement that was to unify the Turkish elements in the empire against partition. At two conferences, at Erzerum on July 23 and at Sivas on September 11, he organized the Committee for the Defense of Eastern Asia Minor.

The Ferid Pasha government fell under this pressure, and new elections returned a Nationalist parliament. Its program, however, was sufficiently independent to prompt British occupation of the capital ostensibly to protect the Sultan. On March 20, 1920, the Ottoman parliament was dissolved. Some deputies fled to Ankara, where Kemal's committee convoked the first session of a new Grand National Assembly on April 23. It undertook both legislative and executive functions, with Kemal as president. Two governments were now functioning: the Sultan's in occupied Istanbul and Kemal's in Anatolia. This anomalous condition continued until the Allies forced the Sultan's assent to the Treaty of S'res on August 10, which established foreign control over large parts of the Turkish Empire. Thereupon the last vestige of the Sultan's power disappeared in Anatolia.

Opposition to foreign occupation was the keystone of Turkish nationalism, but dissension among the Allies was to be of major benefit to the Kemalists. Kemal's first success was peace with Russia in December. This border settlement was followed by a friendship treaty in March 1921. The Italians and the French, apparently anticipating an eventual Nationalist victory, were enticed into exchanging territorial claims for economic concessions. The result was that by mid-1921 only the Greeks and British occupied Turkish territory.

Greek troops moved through Anatolia in 1921 with considerable success to enforce the rule of the Sultan. As generalissimo of Turkish forces, Kemal had unlimited power during this campaign, and he was supplied by Russia, Italy, and France. The Greeks were stopped at Sakarya in September 1921 and driven out in a big campaign the following year. The Nationalists made Kemal a marshal and designated him Ghazi (victorious). The British concluded an armistice with the Turks at Mundanya on Oct. 11, 1922.

An international gathering at Lausanne in November 1920 set about revising the Treaty of S'res. The concurrent invitations issued the Nationalists and the Sultan's government precipitated the Grand National Assembly's dissolution of the sultanate of Mehmed VI on Nov. 1, 1922. On Oct. 29, 1923, Mustapha Kemal was elected president of the newly proclaimed Turkish Republic.

The interim period had been filled with the difficult task of negotiating the new treaty. The final document, signed July 24, 1923, established the compact, homogeneous entity known today as Turkey, freed of the onerous capitulations the Allies had expected to reimpose.

Turkish Republic

It had been Kemal's image as a national military hero which had assured the Nationalists a following in 1919. It was Kemal's determined leadership which assured the victory of 1923. It was to be Kemal's dictatorial guidance which subsequently defined the new Turkey.

Throughout the 1920s reform followed reform as the Turks undertook a shift from an Eastern to a Western orientation. President Kemal and his colleagues were Western-educated; the constitution of April 20, 1924, established in the republic a democratic state with elected representatives and all the typical popular guarantees. Yet Turkey remained a dictatorship throughout Kemal's time; he was a paternalistic ruler, convinced that he knew the nation's needs and how to satisfy them. Although democratic institutions were in existence, it was not the legislature which dominated but the Peoples' (in 1923 Republican Peoples') party, an outgrowth of the 1919 national group founded at Erzerum-Sivas. Kemal was party president. Policy was made in party caucus and then enacted as legislation by the Assembly. The party also selected and placed candidates, and there was no opposition slate. Kemal was reelected president of Turkey in 1927, 1931, and 1935 by the Assembly.

Kemal's Reforms

The haphazard reforms of the late 1920s were systematized by President Kemal in 1931 under six topics termed collectively "Kemalism": (1) republicanism, marked by the ending of the sultanate, the new republican constitution, and adoption of Western law codes in 1926; (2) secularism, eliminating the all-pervasive aspects of Islam from daily life, including polygamy, the Moslem calendar, and dervish religious orders; (3) populism, ending special privileges characterized formerly by religious exemptions, minority distinctions, and capitulations; the ancient Turkish peasant's democratic past was rediscovered and reemphasized, education fostered, the language purified, and the script romanized; (4) nationalism, concentrating on building Turkish pride through rewritten patriotic histories, emphasis on vernacular studies, and adoption of family names; (5) statism, introducing a form of state enterprise freed from outside manipulation and the foreign concessions of the past; it provided for the development of tariff-protected industries and increased government concern over agricultural output; (6) reformism, the continual revitalization of the movement to avoid its leadership's turning conservative and stagnating.

These Kemalist principles became the party platform in the 1935 elections and were added to the constitution in 1937. Kemal was an active president. Noted for his oratorical skill while in military school, he now utilized this asset to considerable advantage, moving readily about the country, eagerly explaining new laws. In one famous speech the President spoke over a period of 6 days.

Kemalist Turkey's foreign relations involved territorial settlements on Mosul and Alexandretta, an active role in the League of Nations after admission in 1932, and neighborly alliances in the Balkan Entente (1934) and the Saadabad Pact (1937). The most notable achievement was the Montreux Convention of 1936, by which Turkey regained control of the Straits.

Despite his posts as chief of state and party leader, Kemal was not a glory-grabber. He abhorred shallow ceremony and scorned pomp. In public life he was an in-corruptible dynamo, but his riotous private life confounded many. Cirrhosis killed Atatürk on Nov. 10, 1938, his death accelerated by wild living and too much drinking.

Further Reading

Harold Armstrong, Grey Wolf (1932; published as Gray Wolf: The Life of Kemal Ataturk, 1961), and Lord Kinross, Ataturk (1965), are the two major works on Kemal's life. A good, thorough coverage of the period is in Donald Everett Webster, The Turkey of Atatürk: Social Process in the Turkish Reformation (1939).

For more information on Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, visit Britannica.com.

(kĕmäl' ätätürk') , 1881–1938, Turkish leader, founder of modern Turkey. He took the name in 1934 in place of his earlier name, Mustafa Kemal, when he ordered all Turks to adopt a surname; it is made up of the Turkish words Ata and Türk [father of the Turks].

Military Career

Born at Thessaloníki, he secretly applied to a military academy, where his excellence at mathematics won him the surname Kemal [the perfect]. As an officer he joined the Young Turks, a liberal movement that sought to establish a constitutional government for the Ottoman Empire, although he disagreed with its pro-German policy, because he considered Turkish interests to be paramount. In 1908 he took part in the successful Young Turk revolution as chief of staff of Enver Pasha, whom he later opposed over the German issue.

He served in Libya (1911–12) and in the Second Balkan War (1913). In World War I his efficient work in the Dardanelles, on the Armenian front, and in Palestine, though it merely helped to postpone disaster, won him the title pasha. After the Ottomans capitulated to the Allies, Sultan Muhammad VI sent Kemal to E Anatolia, hoping to limit his influence.

Arriving in May, 1919, Kemal organized the Turkish Nationalist party and began to form an army. When the Turks were aroused by the Greek landing at Smyrna (now Izmir) he convened nationalist congresses at Erzurum (July, 1919) and Sivas (Sept.). Outlawed by the sultan, who was in the hands of the Allies in Constantinople, he set up a rival government at Ankara. The signing of the Treaty of Sèvres by the Constantinople government made the split with Ankara final.

With the tacit consent of Soviet Russia, Kemal retook Kars and Ardahan from Armenia (1920). Then, taking advantage of disagreements among the Allies, he expelled the Greeks from Anatolia in a brilliant campaign (1921–22). For his victory he received the official name Ghazi [victorious]. On Nov. 1, 1922, Kemal proclaimed the abolition of the sultanate, and Sultan Muhammad VI fled to a British warship. The Treaty of Lausanne (1923; see Lausanne, Treaty of) was a triumph for the nationalist cause; an independent and sovereign Turkey was recognized by the European powers.

President of Turkey

In 1923 Kemal was elected president of the new Turkish republic. He was reelected in 1927, 1931, and 1935—always by a unanimous parliament. With enormous energy he set out on a program of internal reform and “Westernization”; 15 years of his rule changed Turkey in the essential as well as the most minute aspects of its life (see Turkey). Although a dictator, Kemal tolerated limited opposition; but he was ruthless toward those he considered extremists. Regarding Islam as a conservative force, he abolished (1924) the caliphate (thereby disestablishing Islam as the state religion) and crippled religious opposition to reform.

Abroad, he pursued a policy of conciliation and neutrality. He established friendly relations with Turkey's neighbors, particularly the Soviet Union, helped to bring about the Balkan Entente, and freed Turkey from foreign influence, though it meant refusing capital investment for industrialization of the country. On his death he was succeeded as president by Ismet Inönü. In 1953 his remains were transferred to a new mausoleum in Ankara. He remains the object of cultlike devotion by many Turks.

Bibliography

See biographies by H. E. Wortham (1931), H. Froembgen (tr. 1937), Lord Kinross (1966), V. D. Volkan and N. Itzkowitz (1984), and F. Tachau (1987); N. Itzkowitz, Ottoman Empire and Islamic Tradition (1980); G. Renda and C. M. Kortpeter, ed., The Transformation of Turkish Culture: The Atatürk Legacy (1986).

1881 - 1938

Turkish soldier and nationalist leader; founder and first president of the Republic of Turkey, 1923 - 1938.

Born in Salonika, the eldest of the two surviving children of a lower-middle-class family, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was given the name Mustafa at his birth. His father, Ali Riza Efendi, had been a minor officer in the Ottoman customs before trying his luck in trade. Although he died when his son was only seven, Ali Riza Efendi had a great influence on him through his adherence to secular values and his decision to send Mustafa to a secular elementary school. Like all Ottoman women in her situation, the mother, Zübeyde Hamm, had to be supported by relatives after her husband's death. It is during the years of refuge in the extended family that Mustafa seems to have developed the lifelong characteristics of both the ambitious, captivating loner and the resolute, charismatic leader.

It was his decision to pursue a military career. He was an outstanding student from the time he entered military middle school in Salonika (1893), where he was given his second name, Kemal, until the staff college from which he was graduated (1904) with the rank of captain. He also developed a strong interest in politics as well as literary and rhetorical pursuits during his school years. The command of late Ottoman Turkish with touches of pedantry that his writings disclose are the result of Mustafa Kemal's extensive readings in history and literature. Throughout his military and political career, his speeches and improvised harangues were marked by the eloquence and persuasiveness that he cultivated as early as his high-school years. His interest in politics developed somewhat later, when he attended the War Academy, and at a time when the negative aspects of Sultan Abdülhamit II's absolutism had become more offensive.

Mustafa Kemal served with the Fifth Army in Damascus (1905 - 1907), where he joined the revolutionary secret society Fatherland and Freedom. This society was soon subsumed in yet another secret society based in Salonika, the Ottoman Freedom Society, which subsequently took the name Committee for Union and Progress (CUP) after its merger with the Young Turk group that was active in Paris (1907). When Mustafa Kemal was transferred to the Third Army in his native city (late 1907), he joined the CUP, and for a long time thereafter he remained a frustrated member with minor influence in that society.

During the period between the Young Turk Revolution (23 July 1908) and the end of World War I, Mustafa Kemal emerged as an outstanding soldier with remarkable organizational skills, tenacious ambition, and a quarrelsome demeanor toward superiors with whom he disagreed. He distinguished himself in Libya, where he fought the Italians in the regions of Derna and Tobruk (1911 - 1912), but his political career was obstructed by the CUP leaders, who disliked his vocal criticism. After an unsuccessful bid for election to the Chamber of Deputies (1912), he was sent off as a military attaché to Sofia (1913 - 1914). He became a hero during World War I, thanks to his successes against the armies of the Triple Entente countries (France, Great Britain, Russia), which he checked twice in the Gallipoli Peninsula (1915). Promoted to brigadier general at the age of thirty-five, he was transferred to the eastern front, where he retook Bitlis and Muş from the Russians (1916). As the commander of the Seventh Army in Syria, he was in charge of the front north of Aleppo when the Mudros Armistice was signed (30 October 1918).

At the end of World War I, Mustafa Kemal organized a movement in Anatolia that consisted of both a constitutionalist rebellion against the sultan and resistance against the designs by Triple Entente countries to partition the Ottoman Empire. Mainly because of the support of local military authorities and of the notables whose provinces were threatened by partition, he managed to convene the Sivas Congress
(4 - 11 September 1919), which forced the sultan to return to the parliamentarian rule the latter had suspended in November 1918. When the new Chamber of Deputies adopted the document known as the National Pact (28 January 1920), rejecting the dismemberment of the lands under Ottoman sovereignty at the conclusion of the armistice, the Triple Entente powers occupied Istanbul (16 March 1920). Subsequently, Mustafa Kemal called for the meeting of an extraordinary parliament in Ankara, thereby marking the beginning of the Turkish Revolution.

As the president of the Grand National Assembly (GNA), which opened on 23 April 1920, Mustafa Kemal successfully conducted a diplomatic and military campaign to defeat the stipulations of the Treaty of Sèvres imposed on the Ottoman government by the Triple Entente (10 August 1920). After he had succeeded in checking the Greek advance on Ankara in the battle of the Sakarya (August - September 1921), he was promoted to the rank of marshal and given the title ghazi (victorious) by the GNA. Under his command, the Turkish national forces launched an offensive (August 1922) that completed the liberation of practically all the territory considered Turkish homeland by the National Pact and forced the Allies to call for a new peace conference. The question of Turkish representation at the Lausanne Conference was given a radical solution by the GNA, which dissolved the
Ottoman state after Mustafa Kemal's proposal to abolish the sultanate took effect on 1 November 1922.

The Treaty of Lausanne recognized an independent and fully sovereign Turkey (24 July 1923). Having gained complete control of the GNA through his newly founded People's Party, Mustafa Kemal embarked on a series of revolutionary changes. First he proclaimed the Republic of Turkey on 29 October 1923. The following year he instituted measures that set the republic on a secular path, including abolishing the caliphate and the ministry of shariʿa and waqf, unifying education under state authority (3 March 1924), and abolishing the religious courts (8 April 1924). These developments prompted the growth of political opposition, which came out into the open with the founding of the Progressive Republican Party (November 1924). Seizing as a pretext the rebellion by Shaykh Saʿid (February 1925), Mustafa Kemal's republican regime quickly put an end to all political opposition in the country by passing the Law on the Maintenance of Public Order (4 March 1925). In 1926, a plot to assassinate its leader gave the regime the opportunity to suppress the remnants of the CUP, whose leaders had posed a threat to Mustafa Kemal's power since the period of national resistance in Anatolia. By the time Mustafa Kemal read his famous speech in the GNA (October 1927), in which he gave his personal account of the recent history of Turkey, the country had entered the period of a de facto single-party regime, which, with the exception of the brief free party period (August - November 1930), lasted until after World War II.

In this political setting, Mustafa Kemal realized his far-reaching social-engineering program. Secularization was completed by the adoption of the Civil Code (4 April 1926) and the amendment of Article 2 and Article 26 of the Turkish constitution (10 April 1928), which, respectively, referred to Islam as the official religion and entrusted the GNA with enforcing the shariʿa. Latin characters were adopted in 1928, thus putting an end to a long debate on the reform of the Turkish alphabet. Citizenship rights were extended to women in 1934 with a constitutional amendment that introduced universal suffrage. A new law, passed the same year, required all citizens to have a patronym in Turkish. The revolution also employed such symbolic measures as replacing the fez with Western-style hats (1925), obliging religious authorities to wear their particular garments only when officiating (1934), and banning the use of such honorific titles as pasha, bey, and effendi (1934).

In accord with the law on Turkish patronyms, Mustafa Kemal was named Atatürk (Father Turk) by the GNA (1934). Suggestive of the Roman pater patriae, the name reflected Mustafa Kemal's achievement and political status, but to its bearer, the connotations of "mentor" or "guide" that it had in old Turkish were probably more meaningful. The role of mentor, which his numerous remarks indicate he had assigned himself, was evidently accepted by Turks, as attested by the huge crowds that paid homage to his memory after his death in Istanbul (1938).

Mustafa Kemal's regard for modern science was conspicuous in many of his speeches but was only to a limited extent responsible for his comprehensive secularization campaign. Rather than being motivated by positivistic determinism, his policy grew out of his personal reading of the history of Islam and the vision of an astute politician. Two days before abolishing the caliphate, he told the GNA what amounted in fact to a secular rewording of the pious contention that the politics of humans tarnished Islam: "We see that the emancipation of Islam from the status of political tool that it has been constantly reduced to for centuries, and its exaltation, are really necessary" (Parliamentary Minutes, 2nd Session, vol. 7, pp. 3 - 6). Convinced of the autonomy and primacy of politics in the history of Islam in general, and of the Ottoman Empire in particular, Mustafa Kemal, in a way that was ahead of his time, was able to see that far from creating a dual society by introducing Western institutions into an Islamic polity, successive generations of Ottoman statesmen - from Sultan Selim III (1789 - 1807) to the Young Turks - had Westernized an age-old, secular state tradition. The perceived dualism was only an exacerbation of the secularity of the state. Under these circumstances, if what was sought was an organic relation between state and society (that is, democracy) the society must be synchronized with the state by strictly confining religion to the sphere of the individual. Hence, it would be more accurate to attribute Mustafa Kemal's secularizing measures to the radical anticlericalism of a standard-bearer of raison d'état than to interpret them as a reform of Islam or as the manifestations of anti-Islamic prejudice.

Although a nation builder, Mustafa Kemal was more of a patriot than a nationalist. His interest in the cultural and ideological aspects of nation building (as manifested by the founding of the Turkish Historical Society in 1931 and the Turkish Language Society in 1932) surfaced rather late in his life, and only after the economic and political upheavals of the Great Depression had revealed an ideological vacuum in the country. His first years as president of the republic were necessarily devoted to the strengthening of the new regime against an opposition that predated its founding. Even after establishing his de facto single-party system, however, he did not proceed in a nationalistic direction. His humorous references to the excesses associated with the "Turkish historical thesis" and the "Sun-language theory" - developed, under his guidance,
by the historical and language societies - also indicate his lighthearted approach to nationalist ideology and his view of such theories as a transient pedagogic device in the training of the common citizen.

Mustafa Kemal's aversion to ideological speculation is apparent in his reactions to the attempts to define his regime during his lifetime. Influenced by the proliferation of single-party dictatorships in Europe throughout the interwar period, zealous admirers tended to formulate a doctrine they called Kemalism to describe his government. Mustafa Kemal courteously discouraged such definitions, because he did not want anything to arrest the dynamism of the regime. For the same reason, he published his book Civic Notions for the Citizens (in Turkish; Istanbul, 1930) as the work of his adoptive daughter, Afet. This reluctance to associate his name with the actual politics of his time can best be explained by his view of his regime as being transitory and his ultimate vision of Turkey in the future as a liberal democracy.

Although his was a personal rule in which he went so far as to select individually all the candidates for the GNA, ample evidence shows he very much disliked such dictators as Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini and was genuinely offended by Western commentators and journalists who placed him in the same category as them. He rationalized that his role was exactly the opposite of theirs, in that he was trying to establish a democratic tradition in Turkey; that is why he took care to do everything through the legislature and did not envisage suspending the constitution of 1924 or altering its liberal spirit. He also refused life presidency; he preferred to be reelected by the GNA at the beginning of each term. Mustafa Kemal's dictatorial rule was in effect an apprenticeship in democracy in the paradoxical tradition of Jacobinism, and he was aware of the tragic role he was playing in Turkish history. Very early on, he told a group of journalists how objective conditions prevail over ideas: "An individual would think in a particular manner in Ankara, in a different manner in Istanbul or Izmir, and in yet another different manner in Paris" (in Turkish, 1923; edited by Ari Inan, Ankara, 1982, p. 51).

Mustafa Kemal knew that the establishment of democracy was accompanied by legal, economic, social, and ideological prerequisites, and his regime was designed to prepare the country in these areas.

Bibliography

Ahmad, Feroz. The Making of Modern Turkey. London and New York: Routledge, 1993.

Kinross, Patrick Balfour, Baron. Atatürk: The Rebirth of aNation. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1964.

Lewis, Bernard. The Emergence of Modern Turkey, 3d edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

A Speech Delivered by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1927). Istanbul: Ministry of Education, 1963.

Volkan, Vamik D., and Itzkowitz, Norman. The Immortal Atatürk: A Psychobiography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.

Zürcher, Erik Jan. The Unionist Factor: The Role of the Committee of Union and Progress in the Turkish National Movement, 1905 - 1926. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1984.

— AHMET KUYAS

(at-uh-turk)

A Turkish soldier and statesman who founded modern Turkey in the 1920s, after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Ataturk believed that Islamic influence (see Islam) in government had held Turkey back, and in response he established a secular government.

IN BRIEF: n. - Turkish statesman who abolished the caliphate and founded Turkey as a modern secular state (1881-1938).

Quotes:

"A nation which makes the final sacrifice for life and freedom does not get beaten."