turkish identity—from the ottomans to atatu¨rkturkish identity—from the ottomans to atatu¨rk...

c h a p t e r o n e

Turkish Identity—from theOttomans to Ataturk

The political tensions over what it means to be Turkishstill resonate strongly between the AKP and its secular

opponents. As previously noted, Ataturk defined a Turk asany citizen of the Turkish Republic, regardless of religion orethnicity. He realized that the new state needed immediatelyto form a geographically based national identity, which couldtranscend the religious and ethnic divisions that had plaguedthe diverse groups inhabiting Anatolia and the Eastern Bal-kans. Otherwise, these regions risked being divided as a re-sult of foreign military intervention following the collapse ofthe Ottoman Empire. But beneath the surface of this officialdefinition of Turkishness, religious and ethnic factors con-tinued to vie for a greater role in determining the nationalidentity.

During the past few decades, Islam has been a more sig-nificant determinant of that identity. Religious nationalism,

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Copyright © 2010 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

Torn Country: Turkey between Secularism and Islamism

centered on the country’s predominant branch of Islam, Sun-nism, propelled the AKP to power. Historically, religious na-tionalism has generated hardship for Turkey’s religiousminorities (especially its largest group of non-Sunni Muslims,the Alevis, a heterodox Islamic sect that claims fifteen totwenty million adherents out of a total Turkish population ofseventy-two million). Periods of secular nationalism have oftengenerated hardship for the country’s ethnic minorities, espe-cially its largest ethnic sub-group, the Kurds. Today’s secularnationalists are struggling to organize themselves into a viablepolitical bloc that can oppose the AKP.

Comprehending the underlying dynamics of this currentpolitical struggle requires a deeper exploration of how thedefinition of Turkish identity has evolved over the course ofthe centuries.

Identity Vis-a-Vis the Ottoman Empire

The modern concept of Turkishness emerged in the OttomanEmpire in the mid-nineteenth century. Until then, the em-pire’s ethnically diverse inhabitants thought of their national-ity as Ottoman, though they often retained sub-identities asTurks, Greeks, Armenians, Jews, Bulgars, Albanians, et al.‘‘Turk’’ was in fact a derogatory word; it defined Anatolianpeasants who spoke Turkish and who adhered to customsrooted in the Turkic tribes that began migrating westwardfrom the Altai Mountains (straddling present-day Russia andMongolia) in the sixth century. The Ottoman sultans devel-

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Turkish Identity—from the Ottomans to Ataturk

oped a concept of Ottoman nationality to bind their ethnicallyand religiously diverse subjects together. Not until the mid-eighteen hundreds, as nationalist doctrines gained momentumacross Europe, did the concept of a Turkish identity began totake shape.

Identity was thus a complex concept during the Ottomanreign. Its evolution can be traced back to Sultan Mehmet II’sconquest of Constantinople in 1453. The fall of the ByzantineEmpire presented Mehmet II (or Mehmet the Conqueror)with the need to establish a new administrative system for hisexpanded empire. The system divided the empire’s ethnicallydiverse subjects into political groupings based on their reli-gious affiliation. Each religious community or nation wascalled a millet. Separate millets were established for Muslims,Greek Orthodox Christians, Armenian Apostolic Christians,Syriac Orthodox Christians, and Jews. In this way, each groupretained a sub-identity. All of the empire’s Muslim popula-tions, regardless of particular ethnicity within Islam, weregrouped as the Muslim millet, and ruled themselves accordingto sharia. Officially, the Ottoman state considered the Turkicidentity of the original Turkic tribes to be subsumed underthe umma.

The fusing of political, religious, and ethnic determinantsof identity was also evident in Sultan Selim I’s decision—afterdefeating the Mamluks in Egypt in 1517—to establish SunniIslam as the empire’s state religion. The victory transferredthe title of Caliph to the Ottoman Sultan from his Mamlukcounterpart and transformed the Ottoman Empire into theCaliphate, the worldwide political authority for all Sunni Mus-

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lims.1 Having acquired vast numbers of new subjects fromdiverse ethnic and religious backgrounds, Selim I needed ameans to bolster the legitimacy of the ruling Ottoman family,and thereby hold his empire together. The new title of Caliphpromised such legitimacy, at least among the large number ofArab Sunni Muslims, who now constituted the largest pluralityamong the millets. Moreover, designating Sunni Islam, the reli-gion of the Ottoman family, as the state religion, differentiatedthe Ottoman Empire from its challenger to the east, Iran’sShia Safavid Empire. The Safavid rulers were also ethnicallyTurkic, and competed with the Ottomans for the loyalties ofpeople living in the regions intersected by the two empires.Selim I was thus trying to define a primary ‘‘national’’ identityfor his empire, determined by twin yardsticks: a political-legalfactor (being the sultan’s subject) and a religious factor (beinga Sunni Muslim). In practice, establishing this new nationalidentity proved difficult, given that the diverse populationswithin the empire persisted in adhering to their ethnic andreligious sub-identities.

Officially, daily business in the Ottoman Empire was nowconducted according to a version of sharia based on the Arabs’Sunnism. This interpretation of sharia consigned women,non-Sunnis, and non-Muslims to secondary status, thoughChristians and other non-Muslim millets were free to practicetheir own faiths, provided they paid taxes.

However, life in the Ottoman Empire did not change dras-tically with the adoption of Sunni Islam as the state religion.Even though sharia officially guided marital affairs, businesstransactions, and criminal matters, secular law was actually

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enforced at the personal discretion of the sultan, based onthe Abbasid practice known as kanun, or administrative law.Although kanun was distinct from sharia, ‘‘The complex rela-tionships between administrative law and sharia,’’ as the Otto-man historian Norman Itzkowitz has observed, ‘‘wouldbecome a focal point of dispute in future reigns.’’2

Like their supreme rulers, who could also trace their ethnicroots to the Turkic tribes of Central Asia, Anatolian Turks didnot simply abandon their traditions when Sunnism becamethe state religion of the Ottoman Empire. They instead main-tained a sense of their own sub-identity based on the ethno-cultural factor of the tribes’ traditions, mixed with those theAnatolians acquired during their migrations.

Thus, Islam did not come to dominate all aspects of life forthe Anatolian Turks. According to the earliest Turkic languageinscriptions found in the Orkhon River Valley of present-dayMongolia, the original Turkic tribes were mostly pagans whoadhered to shamanist practices. Even after they embracedIslam as they migrated westward, the tribes also adopted thehumanistic traditions of tolerant faith and scientific learningthat characterized Islamic thought in Central Asia (especiallyin Bukhara and Samarkand), in the tenth and eleventh centu-ries. This spirit of Bukhara and Samarkand confined religionto the private sphere, leaving science and civic affairs to begoverned by rational thought. Such a mindset provided a natu-ral foundation for the separation of mosque and state, andreflected the observation in the archaic Turkic text, KutadguBilig, that the early Turkic tribes held governance and societyabove religion.3

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The separation of the religious and secular realms blurredunder the Seljuks, who emerged as the most powerful Turkictribe in the ninth and tenth centuries. After defeating theByzantines at Manzikert in 1071, the Seljuks established anempire centered in Anatolia and stretching to present-dayIran, Iraq, and Afghanistan. They had embraced Sunni Islam,which acquired powerful influence over their empire’s gov-ernment, politics, and culture. But in Anatolia, the Seljuksencountered a complex mix of secular traditions and reli-gions, which preserved some degree of separation of everydayreligious and civil life.

The above discussion demonstrates that both Seljuk andOttoman policies aimed to merge political and ethnic differ-ences into a single ‘‘national’’ identity based on Sunni Islam.But political and ethno-cultural factors persisted, preventingreligion from becoming the pre-eminent determinant of na-tional identity. That in turn facilitated the emergence of theAnatolian Turks’ sub-identity. They were bound together bythe ancient traditions of Central Asia and Anatolia and by theTurkish language. The latter differed from the language of theOttoman court, where the palace elite spoke ‘‘Ottoman,’’ amix of Turkish, Farsi, and Arabic.

Geography played an important role in shaping the peren-nial battle between religious and non-religious factors, as wellas national identities, in the empire. Both the Ottoman iden-tity and the Anatolian Turkish sub-identity were rooted in theEast, in the Turkic tribes’ Central Asian and Anatolian ancestryas well as the traditions of Islam. Yet the Ottoman dynastyand its Anatolian subjects also sensed that their destinies lay

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toward the West, and they made numerous forays in that di-rection.

For centuries, Turkic tribes had been migrating westward.They had conquered Byzantium, a center of Western civiliza-tion in both the secular and spiritual realms. Mehmet theConqueror had relied on a Hungarian cannon designer tomanufacture the artillery that breached the previously impreg-nable walls of Constantinople. Under Suleyman the Lawgiver(known in the West as Suleyman the Magnificent), the Otto-mans had extended their European conquests to Rhodes, Bel-grade, and Budapest by the mid-sixteenth century, deepeningtheir contacts with European ideas and technology. The Otto-mans also expanded trade with the Europeans; Genoa andVenice maintained the trading colonies they had establishedunder the Byzantine Empire, just across the Golden Hornfrom Constantinople. The Ottoman sultans brought Europeanslaves to work in the Topkapi Palace as counselors and newtroops (or janissaries) who served as the sultans’ personal se-curity force.

Though the Ottomans had anchored their empire in Eu-rope to fulfill what they viewed as an inexorable Turkic-Islamic destiny to move westward, their attitudes toward theWest remained ambivalent. They regarded Europeans as un-civilized—infidels, barbarians. The Ottomans detested travelto Europe, where they believed they could not learn anythingnew and would return home with diseases such as syphilis.The Ottomans acquired some new technology through trade.But pride in their imperial achievements deterred them fromadapting their thinking to Europe’s profound societal

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advancements during the Renaissance (and later the Enlight-enment); they borrowed some European technologies butfailed to adopt the new thinking that underlay them.

As a result, the Ottoman Empire began to lag behind Eu-rope technologically, especially in the military sphere. In1571, the Ottomans suffered their first naval defeat since thefourteenth century, when Holy League of Christian statesrouted their fleet at the Battle of Lepanto. That finished Otto-man domination of the Mediterranean, and for the first time,the Europeans gained confidence that the previously unstop-pable force could be countered.

Despite their defeat at sea, the Ottomans continued theiradvance into Europe on land. In 1683, they reached the gatesof Vienna for the second time in one hundred fifty-plus years.(The first was Suleyman the Lawgiver’s unsuccessful siege in1529.) In September 1683, following the Ottomans’ two-month siege, Polish King Jan Sobieski led a combined Polish-Austrian-German-Tuscan-Cossack force that defeated the Ot-toman-Crimean/Tatar-Romanian force besieging the city.4

Though the war continued another sixteen years, the Battleof Vienna marked the end of Ottoman expansion into Europeand an iconic beginning of the empire’s decline. The Treatyof Karlowitz, in 1699, memorialized the conclusion of the warand the acceleration of the Ottomans’ decline.

That treaty, as Bernard Lewis points out, was a watershedevent for the Ottomans.5 Previously, they looked back on amillennium of westward expansion by Turkic tribes. Now, forthe first time in the history of their empire, the Ottomansceded sizable amounts of territory back to the Europeans: Hun-

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garian lands returned to Austria, Podolia to Poland, and Dalma-tia and the Morea (the Peloponnesus) were granted to Venice.The military and diplomatic defeat concluded by the Treaty ofKarlowitz awakened many Ottomans to the reality that theylagged behind Europe and that their empire was in decay. In acentury or so, such thoughts gave birth to a vigorous reformeffort to absorb new ways of thinking from the West.6

For the moment, however, as the eminent Ottoman histo-rian Niyazi Berkes argues, the Ottoman Empire was reducedfrom a major power in Europe to the status of a diplomaticpawn used by major European powers.7 France, Austria, Brit-ain, and Russia alternately allied with and opposed the Otto-man Empire as they managed their conflicts with each other.The Europeans also looked to the Ottoman Sultan and Caliph,the world leader of all Sunni Muslims, as the West’s key inter-locutor with Muslims to the East. It was during this periodthat the empire reinvented a new strategic role for itself as abridge between East and West, supplanting its previous statusas an Eastern power anchored to the West. Thus, Islam againgrew in importance as a determinant of the empire’s identity.

The Ottoman sultans of the early nineteenth centuryquickly checked the temptation to rely on Islam as theircrutch for sustaining strategic relevance. As the doctrines ofthe French Revolution spread through their European hold-ings, the sultans recognized the vulnerability of their empireto exploitation by European powers and to disintegrationunder pressure from independence movements. To forestallthose eventualities, Ottoman leaders realized they would needto attract Western technologies and modernize state institu-

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tions by secularizing them through Westernizing reforms.Mahmut II, who assumed the throne in 1808, emerged as oneof the greatest reformers in Ottoman history. He eliminatedthe dangerously scheming janissary corps, which had repeat-edly led religious uprisings against previous sultans, and devel-oped a Western-trained standing army. Mahmut also soughtto curtail the influence of the empire’s leading Islamic author-ity, the Seyhulislam, over the leadership of the Ottoman state.He began to secularize education by founding state schoolsspecializing in technical and scientific studies, that functionedalongside the madrassas (Islamic schools) providing religiouseducation.

Mahmut’s reforms launched the Westernization of the Ot-toman identity and–during the Tanzimat period, under his sonand successor, Sultan Abdulmecit II—led to even more dra-matic reforms. The new Tanzimat policies reflected an under-standing that, as Greeks won their independence in 1832 andother nationalist movements gained momentum, existing reli-gious, military, and civil institutions were no longer adequateto maintain the empire’s territorial integrity. In an attemptto reintegrate these diverse nationalities into the empire, theOttoman government provided greater rights to the sultan’snon-Muslim subjects, who suffered second-class status underthe millet system.

The Tanzimat period also produced a dramatic effort tosecularize and modernize the empire’s state institutions andthereby restrain Islam’s societal role. That effort had a majorimpact on all aspects of life, leading to criminal and civilcodes, a financial system based on that of France, the building

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of railroads and canals, the launching of the first universitiesand academies, and, in 1876, the codification of the first Ot-toman constitution, which checked the authority of the sultan.The secular schools opened in the Tanzimat period were in-strumental in the rise of free thinkers who, toward the end ofthe nineteenth century, led a new wave of modernization thatwould catalyze the re-emergence of a Turkish identity. Themost famous graduate of these schools was Ataturk.

European diplomatic intervention undercut the ability ofthe Tanzimat reforms to stem the centrifugal forces of theempire’s European minorities. At the end of the CrimeanWar, in the Charter of 1856, the Great Powers demanded andsecured greater autonomy for ethnic communities than theOttoman rulers had envisioned. The empire’s Muslim popula-tion became convinced that Christian minorities enjoyed spe-cial privileges allowing them to prosper at the expense of theMuslims’ economic well-being. That led to resentment culmi-nating in a nationalist awakening of a Turkish identity andeventually to the ‘‘Young Turks’’ movement.

When Sultan Abdulhamit II assumed the Ottoman thronein 1876, movements for autonomy and independence wereturning into tenacious insurrections in the Balkans. Abdul-hamit’s fear of imperial dissolution was severely heightenedby Russia’s declaration of war in April 1877 and victory overthe Ottomans the following year. The Treaty of San Stefano,which ended that war, cost the Ottoman Empire its domin-ions in Europe, including those that later became the coun-tries of Romania, Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria, as well asArmenia.

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Abdulhamit II reversed the relative decline of Islam’s soci-etal role during the reigns of his two predecessors. He be-lieved he could hold the crumbling state together and securehis authority by pushing a pan-Islamist ideology. By posing asa pious caliph and mediator among Britain, Russia, and theMuslim world, he passed as a respected leader—not only inthe eyes of his Muslim constituents but also in the Westernpress. Despite the unraveling of the Tanzimat reforms in agri-culture and economics, a meltdown of the Ottoman economy,and the suspension of constitutional rule and the parliamen-tary system, even the most rational and intelligent of Abdulham-it’s subjects tended to be infatuated with his image as apowerful caliph, the ‘‘Shadow of God’’ on earth. He estab-lished strong ties with shaykhs (religious leaders), ulema (Is-lamic scholars), and other Muslim community leaders.

Returning to the fundamental ideas of Mehmet the Con-queror’s millet system and Selim I’s designation of Sunni Islamas the Ottoman state religion, Abdulhamit sought to uniteall Muslims—regardless of their ethnic identity—under hiscaliphate. He brought the most powerful of Arab and Afghanshaykhs to Istanbul and gave them lucrative commissions toproselytize according to their strict interpretation of Islam,alien though it was to the empire’s Turkic subjects. This pe-riod saw Ottoman identity particularly subsumed by its Mus-lim counterpart.

Not surprisingly, Abdulhamit’s rejection of further West-ernizing reforms accelerated both the decay of the Ottomanstate and the independence of orthodox Christian nations,while his pan-Islamism failed to stem pan-Arabism. A reac-

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tionary pan-Turkic movement—the Young Turks—arose inresponse at the turn of the twentieth century. Although someof the movement’s pioneers championed the Muslim compo-nent of the Turkish identity, the Young Turks’ predominantidea was to create a new nation, known as Turan, based onthe ethnic concept of unifying all Turkic communities fromthe Balkans to Central Asia. Language was a key factor indefining this nation. Over time, Turkish, as opposed to Otto-man, had become the language overwhelmingly used in Ana-tolia and eventually in parts of Thrace and the Balkans. Theunifying power of the Turkish language deterred many Turksin Anatolia from joining the Arab nationalist and pan-Islamistmovements taking hold at the time.8

As the Ottoman Empire collapsed in the wake of WorldWar I, a true Turkish identity was emerging for the first time.Ethnicity now prevailed over Islam as the key element of thisnew Turkish nationalism. The Young Turks trumpeted theirethnic credo with the slogan ‘‘Turkey for Turks.’’ The emerg-ing military and political leader, Ataturk, born in 1881 in theculturally diverse city of Thessaloniki, bristled against this eth-nic chauvinism. And drawing on the cosmopolitan educationhe received during the Tanzimat period, he proceeded to rede-fine what it meant to be Turkish.

Turkish Identity under Ataturk

This new and charismatic leader mistrusted the nineteenth-century nationalism based on ethnicity and religion, which he

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saw as having prompted the Balkan wars of liberation that ledto the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Ataturk understoodthat the Kurds in the East would be tempted to break awayfrom the Ottoman territory to pursue their own sovereignstate. At the same time, he worried that Abdulhamit’s anti-Westernism and pan-Islamism were keeping the empire fromthe modernization required for survival.

Ataturk believed that Turkey’s destiny was shaped by a con-stant pull toward the West. Ingrained with Western ideas froman early age, he received Prussian training as a soldier in theOttoman army. His experience in both Western and Arabparts of the empire convinced him that Westernization wasessential for Turkey to ‘‘take its rightful place among civilizednations.’’ Ataturk concluded that, to modernize, Turkey wouldhave to evolve from an Islamic state into a secular democracy,which protected individual rights through the rule of law.

Ataturk thus recognized the need for a national identitythat could establish, unify, and preserve a new Turkish state.In 1920, the Ottoman monarchy accepted the humiliatingTreaty of Sevres with Greece, France, Italy, and Britain. Thetreaty preserved the Ottoman sultan’s claims to the caliphateand Istanbul, but divided Ottoman lands among the Euro-peans, leaving only central Anatolia as ‘‘Turkey.’’ Ataturk op-posed the Ottoman government’s readiness to partition theempire to save itself. He co-founded the National Movementto organize opposition to the government. In response to theTreaty of Sevres, he convened the Turkish Grand NationalAssembly in Ankara as a new parliament and alternative politi-

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cal authority. And he took matters into his own hands bylaunching the Turkish War of Liberation.

Ataturk would engage Greek forces, which had invaded An-atolia with British support, and also confront the Italians andFrench, who had taken over parts of Anatolia. His defeat ofthose combined forces allowed Turkey to renegotiate theTreaty of Sevres and avoid a Western land grab; the Treaty ofLausanne of 1923 established the borders of the Turkish Re-public that remain today. Ataturk’s victory also led the TurkishGrand National Assembly to abolish the Ottoman Sultanate inNovember 1922.

Ataturk sensed that in order to survive, this fledgling repub-lic would need to unify its citizens through a new nationalidentity. He advocated a Turkish identity embracing all ethnic-ities and religions found among the citizens of the republic.Thus, a geographically based political and legal factor—citizenship—supplanted religion as the primary determinantof Turkish identity. In stating that a Turk was a citizen of theTurkish Republic, rather than a member of the Muslim milletand the global umma, Ataturk was placing Muslims, Jews, andChristians on an equal footing, and thereby confining religionto the private sphere. In his mind, that would clear the wayfor his countrymen to adopt not just technology but also newways of thinking from the West, which he believed were cru-cial to the Turkish Republic’s survival and prosperity.

Ataturk, it should be pointed out, did not deny Islam’simportant role in determining the Turkish sense of self; nordid he deny the modern Turks’ ethnic connection with their

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Turkic ancestors. Instead, he tried to draw on the historical,cultural, geographical, and linguistic roots of the Turkish iden-tity to create a Turkish or Anatolian Islam. By claiming thatancient Anatolian civilizations such as the Hittites and Sumeri-ans were Turkish in essence, he tried to forge links betweenall the peoples of Anatolia.9 Among Ataturk’s greatest sup-porters were the Alevis, Anatolian Muslims who embraced aform of Shia Islam that incorporates elements of humanismand universalism and who had suffered under Sunni oppres-sion for centuries. The leader’s goal was to relegate Islam tothe private domain as a source of moral and ethical behaviorand teachings.

Ataturk established the Directorate of Religious Affairs (Di-yanet) within the Turkish government to develop Turkish Islamand prevent the return of the Islamic mindset he believed hadled the Ottoman Empire to disaster under Sultan AbdulhamitII. The Diyanet oversaw (and still oversees) all religious offi-cials—as state employees—to prevent religious authoritiesfrom politicizing Islam. In an effort to connect Islam withAnatolia rather than Arabia, Ataturk changed the call to prayerto Turkish from Arabic. He abolished the caliphate in 1924and eliminated Islam as the state religion of the Turkish Re-public in 1937, a year before his death.

In keeping with his birth and educational grounding in theWest, Ataturk recognized that to be strong and modern, Tur-key must become a democracy. But democratic norms wouldcome only with time, after the new Turkish state launched adramatic reform program to establish a secular state, a mod-ern society, and a Turkish identity in line with Ataturk’s phi-

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losophy. After all, he was a military officer who did not believein gradual and incremental changes; he pursued a top-downrevolution of Turkish culture and institutions, capitalizing onthe enormous political legitimacy he had earned as the saviorof the nation. After replacing the sultanate with the TurkishRepublic in 1923 and abolishing the caliphate the followingyear, Ataturk replaced sharia with the rule of secular lawthrough the adoption of a civil code modeled on that of Swit-zerland. He banned madrassas and established a state systemof secular schools focused on scientific learning to preparestudents for modern life.10

Ataturk’s approach to education reflected his convictionthat ‘‘the most genuine guide in life is science.’’ He changedTurkey’s official language from Ottoman to modern Turkishand replaced the Arabic alphabet with its Latin counterpart;that tremendous modification quickly helped increase the lit-eracy rate and moved people closer to the modern world,although it weakened their ties to their past. Turkey wouldnow also adopt the Gregorian rather than the Islamic cal-endar.

Gender equality benefited significantly from the replace-ment of sharia with a civil code. Ataturk believed moderniza-tion required equal rights for women. He staunchly held thatthe oppression of women under sharia constituted a seriousimpediment to a nation’s development. Ataturk asked, rhetor-ically, ‘‘How can a nation soar if half of the people are chainedto the ground?’’

Turkish women played an enormous role in the War ofIndependence; moreover, in traditional Turkic culture, they

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had enjoyed equal standing with men. In supplanting sharia,Turkey’s new civil code banned polygamy and ensured womenequal rights in divorce, inheritance, and child custody. Ataturkpushed for women to be educated, eligible for elected publicoffice, and allowed to enter any profession. Turkish womengained the right to vote in 1930 and to hold elected office in1934, sooner than in many Western countries. Ataturk for-bade the Islamic headscarf for women (along with the fez formen) in favor of Western headgear, though the traditionalAnatolian headscarf continued to be used, mostly by peasants.

Ataturk’s reforms marked perhaps the most thoroughgoingrestructuring of Turkish life since the Turkic tribes first de-parted the Altai Mountains. Implementing such a radical pro-gram required centralized authority with an efficient andpowerful bureaucracy. To that end, Ataturk banned the Is-lamic Sufi orders. (He viewed the Sufi followers’ strong alle-giance to their shaykhs as a threat to the state’s authority,and he regarded the Sufi orders’ communitarian mentality asundermining individual liberty.) He founded and relied onthe Republican People’s Party to secure and execute politicalpower in the Grand National Assembly.

As a soldier, Ataturk relied not just on civilians but on amilitary bureaucracy as well. In the preceding decades, theTurkish military had evolved into one of the country’s mostWesternized institutions, thanks in large part to its Prussiantraining. In subsequent decades, the military would gain thestrong support of many Turks as a custodian of Kemalist ideol-ogy and the secular democracy Ataturk established.

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Yet the military’s later role in ousting four democraticallyelected governments underscores the peculiar nature of thedemocratic system Ataturk launched. A strong societal rolefor the military was perhaps inevitable in 1923, given the pre-carious circumstances under which the Turkish Republic wasborn. But nowadays the proper role of the military in thenation’s political life is being debated as intensely as theproper role of Islam in society at large. In any case, Ataturkused his severe methods to lay the foundation for a modernstate and a new Turkish identity based on separation ofmosque and state, ethnic and religious tolerance, and respectfor both religious and secular Turkic traditions.

Opponents of the monopoly of power Ataturk’s rulingparty enjoyed arose on the political left and right. Meanwhile,center-right politicians tapped into many conservative Turks’desire to restore Islam’s former role in society. When Ataturkdied in 1938, the foundation was laid for a resurgence ofIslam in Turkish society, which played out in the Turkish Re-public’s first fully democratic elections in 1946 and, moredecisively, in 1950.

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turkish identity—from the ottomans to atatu¨rkturkish identity—from the ottomans to atatu¨rk...

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