• Home
• /
• Opinion

Ottoman Turkey and the troubled legacy of Kemal Ataturk

HIS memory still haunts the Dolma Bache Palace in Istanbul where he died, the magnificent mausoleum in Ankara where he is buried. His portraits and busts are prominent in Turkish embassies worldwide. The founder of the first secular state in Islamic history is a hero to reformers and anathema to mullahs from the Maghreb to Pakistan.

Mustafa Kemal Pasha was unquestionably an iconic statesman and nation builder, the Washington, de Gaulle, Cavour and Jinnah of the Turkish Republic. Yet what is the relevance and legacy of the Ataturk legend in out time? Is the ideology of Kemalism still the dominant theme in Turkish history?

Kemalist ideology exalted Turkish nationalism as the core value of the new Republic. Mustafa Kemal, after all, lived during the pathological death rattle of the Ottoman Empire when Greek, Arab, Armenian, Bulgarian and Serbian nationalists collided in their revolt against the decrepit state of the sultans for the past two generations.

As the Ottoman regime imploded, Ataturk faced the Allied invasion of Gallipolli, Tsarist Russia’s depredations in the Balkans, the British and French occupation of Istanbul and secessionist revolts everywhere from Bulgaria to Kurdistan to the Hijaz. As a heroic general hailed as Gazi (victor) for his military exploits at Gallipolli and Smyrna, Ataturk had to create an instant national consciousness in the Anatolian rump of the sultan’s defunct empire.

In Ottoman times, "Turk" was a slightly derogatory term for Anatolian peasants in the cosmopolitan salons and palaces of Istanbul. It was the genius of Ataturk that he created a new national myth at a time when the Treaty of Sevres threatened the very existence of Turkey on the world’s political map.

Yet Turkish nationalism in its Kemalist incarnation was exclusivist and unwilling to accommodate demographic realities of the new Republic. It acquiesced in the mass migration of Greeks and Armenians. It isolated Turkey from the Arab world the Ottoman sultans had ruled for four centuries. Above all, it created the nightmare of Kurdish secessionism since the genesis of the Republic in the 1920’s.

Kemalist ideology inflicted linguistic genocide on the Kurds —the Kurdish language was banned, Kurds were declared "mountain Turks" and resettled in the ghettos of Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir. The Turkish Army generals who acted as the guardians and enforcers of Kemalist ideology, plunged eastern Anatolia into a generation of war after General Evren’s military coup in September 1980.

The PKK under Abdullah Ocalan declared war on the Kemalist state in the 1990’s and the subsequent civil war claimed 30,000 lives. The uber-nationalism of Ataturk and the Turkish General Staff bought only tragedy and war to the mountains of Kurdistan, as well as led to successive Turkish invasions of northern Iraq and threat of war with Syria.

Ataturk is hailed by the West and the Turkish secular elite for his revolutionary transformation of an ancient, traditional Muslim society with good reason. After all, he abolished the Caliphate, replaced the Sharia with the Swiss Legal Code, banned the ancient Turkic dervish brotherhoods and the Ottoman fez, emancipated women and abolished the veil, replaced the Arabic script with Latin and even replaced the Islamic with the Gregorian Calendar.

Yet the general who had used Islam in his war against the invading Greeks and enjoyed the same title of Gazi as Mehmet Fatih, the Ottoman sultan who conquered Constantinople for Islam from the Byzantines in 1453, jettisoned it as an instrument of national integration after the establishment of the Republic.

This act of theological lobotomy created an existential confrontation between successive military regimes and Islamist politicians for six decades after his death. The aggressively secular ethos implicit in the Kemalist message also made it impossible for Ankara to become the natural leader in the Muslim world. Yet not even Presidential edicts could change the ancient religious and spiritual heritage of the Turkish people.

In 2005, a moderate Islamist party controls two thirds of the seat in the Ankara Parliament founded by Ataturk. The Kemalist version of state intervention, magnified by hyperinflation, currency collapse and the ruinous costs of the Kurdistan wars, has also been discredited by time, the IMF and Wall Street.

Time heals all wounds in the lives of human beings and history of great empires. It is so ironic that the scenes of the Ottoman twilight are once again theatres of the Great Game and East-West conflict —Bosnia, Central Asia, Kurdistan the Levant, Palestine, Hijaz, the Balkans, Armenia. The Turkish Republic Kemal Pasha founded still straddles the global geopolitical axis, the vectors of war and peace in the Middle East.

The pageant of Turkish history still resonates to the power and passions of the ancient faith which even a legendary colossus like Kemal Ataturk could not destroy.

Matein Khalid is a Dubai-based investment banker. He can be reached at matein@emirates.net.ae