ATATÜRK
His Mission
• Replacing orthodox religion with science and literacy
• Unveiling women and building the workforce
• Kindling patriotism with a new alphabet
• Turning an ethnic slur into national pride
In Istanbul on the banks of the Bosphorus in a converted warehouse sits the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art, one of my favorite museums. First, it is not large, so you can see much of it in an hour or two. Second, on the walls are colorful paintings by Fikret Mualla of women twirling skirts, children holding balloons, and men strolling with walking sticks. And that is a political and cultural miracle. But for the acts of a man named Atatürk in the 1920s, it might be illegal to put on public display vibrant images of men and women having fun together. Before Atatürk Turkish art was geometrical or calligraphic and had to please the caliph.1 The interiors of Istanbul’s famous mosques offer stunning displays of lines, curves, and Arabic letters. Koranic hadiths and fatwas forbid images of humans engaged in frivolous activity. The sultans had banned displays even of their own images, not just because they might violate the faith, but because the portraits could help murderous plotters carry out their regicidal schemes. Atatürk was not an artist and I do not know whether he ever lifted a paintbrush. But Atatürk did lift the religious barricade set before artists. And that was among the lightest of the obstacles he shoved aside.
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was born May 19, 1881, in Salonica, Greece. Nearly everything about that sentence is wrong. The man known as Atatürk, meaning “father of Turks,” added “Kemal” and “Atatürk” to his birth name years later. He specifically chose May 19 as his birthday since that was the date in 1919 when he stepped off a boat at a Black Sea coastal town called Samsun and launched his campaign for Turkish independence. Salonica was not a city in Greece but a part of the crumbling Ottoman Empire in 1881. Despite all the fakery and folklore, Atatürk was one of the boldest and most direct leaders ever known. Of course, he is not known well in the United States or among younger Europeans today. My daughter’s 925-page high school AP textbook on world history assigns just a few sentences to Atatürk, about the same as it allocates to “Evita” Peron—which tells you how much Andrew Lloyd Webber and Madonna can influence serious historians.2 Atatürk grabbed a moldering empire that straddled Europe and Asia and dragged its culture and character two thousand miles to the northwest so that it would have more in common with a Paris salon than a Babylonian souk. Under the gaze of the sultan, who simultaneously served as caliph, the Ottoman Empire had sought to exalt and protect Islam, not to raise up any individual nation. Nationalism was a pagan totem, a divisive fetish, and a nation’s flag was no better than a graven image forbidden by scripture. One hadith puts forth a disturbing image: “He who calls for Asabiyyah (nationalism/tribalism) is as if he bit his father’s genitals.”3 Atatürk was not concerned about his forefathers or his past. He would be the father of all Turks to come. When he began his quest, women had the same rights as oxen, and clerics were king. In a short period of time, he banished imams to their mosques, invited women to serve in the National Assembly, got Turks to write in an alphabet none of them had ever seen before, erected universities, and spurred Turks to dance to the music of Beethoven and Count Basie. Along the way the Turkish Republic faced all the troubling paradoxes we have discussed thus far: shifting demographics, destabilizing trade, multicultural fractures, and meddling bureaucrats. Atatürk died at age fifty-seven and did not have time to address all these matters. But what he squeezed into his fifty-seven years turned the threadbare remnants of the seven-hundred-year-old Ottoman Empire into a nation.
Atatürk earned the military title general and during his career took up arms against the European conquerors in World War I; against Greek, Bulgarian, and Armenian soldiers; and against Ottoman sultans. He survived shrapnel wounds, a prison sentence, and an assassination attempt. But his toughest challenge was creating and governing a new country. For us, he raises the following question: can a devotion to science and to Western civilization be a sticky enough thing to keep people glued together as a nation? In this chapter I will begin by sketching the contours of the crumbling Ottoman Empire and explaining Atatürk’s rise from discontented son of a lowly clerk to father of a new republic. Then we can examine the lasting lessons from his reign as Turkey’s first president.
A BOY FROM SALONICA
Alexander the Great thought he was descended from gods on Mount Olympus. Mustafa Atatürk had no such fantasies, although his father, Ali Riza, was a customs clerk for the timber harvested on the slopes of that famous peak. By the time Mustafa was born his mother, Zubeyde, had already given birth to three children, but none of them had survived. It was a house of grieving. A lone surviving son usually gets lavish attention and Atatürk never shied away from a spotlight. Though Salonica (in the region of Macedonia)4 was controlled by the Ottomans, Muslims were in the minority. Walking through neighborhoods one could smell the wafting aromas of Armenian goulash, Bulgarian kavarma, Russian beef Stroganoff, Turkish guvec, and Greek stifado. If you looked at young Mustafa’s face, you would not correctly guess at what table he would feel most comfortable. Blue-eyed and light-haired, the “Father of the Turks” looked more like a Slav. Because Jews outnumbered Muslims in Salonica and because many Jewish families had converted to Islam to escape persecution (they were known as Dönmes),5 some scholars have even speculated that Atatürk might have been of Jewish descent. This seems unlikely, since his father was not originally from the city (his paternal grandfather came from Albania). Salonica was prosperous and busy, but non-Muslims provided the backbone of the economy, raising serious questions about the Ottoman work ethic. Russian farmers plowed fields, Macedonians raised cotton and wool, and Armenians and Greeks fished and worked in restaurants. Jews, who made up nearly one-half of the population of roughly 130,000, loaded and unloaded ships as stevedores. In 1907 Salonica’s docks were the third busiest in the empire, handling twice as much cargo as Baghdad or Alexandria. At the turn of the century Salonica was the most important Ottoman commercial center, other than Constantinople (Istanbul), controlling 40 percent of Ottoman trade in raw materials, including tobacco and cotton.6
Atatürk watched railroads spur the Salonica economy and reduce the time it took to send goods and people to far-off destinations. Trains sped faster than boats and made overland caravans seem Stone Age. The future military leader also noted that trains could bring enemy soldiers, if they gained control of the tracks. The United States had completed a transcontinental railroad in 1869. Atatürk saw trains as a badge of prosperity and class. He was not so interested in tracks that traveled east to Aleppo. He was more excited by those that could take him to Vienna and beyond. The chic jet-setters of the 1960s were preceded by the privileged passengers of the Orient Express. Europeans in 1900 could board a train in Paris after seeing the opera and sixty-one hours later glide or screech (depending on maintenance) into Constantinople’s famous Sirkeci Station for dark Turkish coffee. The cost was the equivalent of sixty-nine dollars, with an additional eighteen dollars for a sleeping car.7 Agatha Christie, who made the Orient Express far more famous than its owners did, giddily reported: “I am going by it! I am in it! I am actually in the blue coach with the simple legend outside Calais-Istanbul.”8 Sirkeci opened in 1890 near the shadow of Topkapi Palace. If you visit the station today, you can tour the Orient Express museum, which displays special dinner china and other artifacts, including a mannequin wearing the stylish uniform. The Orient Express would become a symbol of Turkey’s emerging status as a European nation. As president of the Turkish republic Atatürk funded a railroad-building campaign.
Atatürk did not grow up in a multicultural paradise. There has never been a multicultural paradise anywhere, unless you count Walt Disney’s Epcot in Orlando, which opened in 1982. But one hundred years earlier in Salonica many ethnicities managed to get along without killing each other. Employers sometimes complained that hiring Christians, Muslims, and Jews to work together created chaos, not because they hated each other, but because each group would be absent from work on different religious holidays. And since each religion used a different calendar, scheduling for absences was impossible. There was religious equality in one respect: all the lower classes of each ethnicity huddled in fetid slums and the wealthy did not. A snooty English observer reported that while poorer Salonicans exhibited racism and resentment, the upper crust hobnobbed just fine and the “better classes of Greeks and the Moslem officials . . . patronise the Jewish educational establishments.” She describes a charity ball for a school, featuring brightly lit trees in a garden, dancing, cigarette smoking, and card playing. The governor general, Dervish Pasha, and his son moved among the dancers, while the “Greek Archbishop made a distinguished figure in his tall cylindrical hat and black robes, seated side by side with the . . . Chief Rabbi, in black and white turban.”9
A quiet, but confident young Mustafa lived in a pink house. Perhaps this influenced his sense of style, for he was always happy to stand out as the best-dressed figure in a photograph. In some of his most famous adult portraits, he wears white tie and tails and, with his widow’s peak, looks remarkably like Bela Lugosi, the Hungarian-born actor who played Dracula in movie classics from the 1930s to the 1950s. He was a proud boy and apparently refused to play leapfrog because he did not want other children to jump over him. Although he sometimes played backgammon at coffeehouses, a classmate who later served as president of the National Assembly recalled that “one could see easily that Mustafa Kemal did not like losing.”10 Atatürk’s later rivals might have saved themselves a great deal of frustration had they known of these stories.
TO WHIRL OR WALTZ?
His parents did not always agree with each other, especially on Mustafa’s schooling. His mother was a more traditional Muslim and enrolled him in a religious neighborhood school. Mustafa’s academic career began by parading with other children through the streets wearing a portion of the Koran strapped to his chest, followed by a ceremony filled with proper prayers. His father was patient and waited a few days. Then he pulled the boy out of the koranic school and enrolled him instead in a nonreligious institution run by a Dönme named Semsi Efendi. Unfortunately, the father died a few years later and the mother and son retreated to a farm, where Mustafa first tried a Greek school, then an Albanian tutor, and finally returned to Salonica for a state prep school. None of these succeeded for Mustafa, who looked longingly at the boys at a nearby military school who had shed their baggy oriental trousers for crisp uniforms and parades with swords and rifles: “It was when I entered the military preparatory school and put on its uniform, that a feeling of strength came to me, as if I had become master of my own identity.”11 Perhaps in joining this environment he could recapture the masculine relationship he lost when his father died. Mustafa stayed in military dress through high school and into the war college. As a young man, he cultivated an image that was noble and even dashing. He was well-liked, quick at math, and not so quick as a runner. He could, however, dance and took waltz lessons. Waltzing presented a dilemma for young Muslim men, who were prohibited from dancing with girls. In fact, one could encapsulate the battle for Atatürk’s loyalties in the following choice: “Whirl or Waltz?” To whirl was to join in with the dervishes, enraptured in mystical prayer. To waltz was to glide toward Vienna and Paris. In one vacation break from school, Atatürk engaged in both. But his loyalty to the ways of the West would soon win out.
TO LOSE AN EMPIRE
If Mustafa did not like losing, the Ottoman Empire was no place for him. By the time Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was born, a consensus of historians tells us that the empire was losing territory, losing its markets, and losing any sense of hope. During the 1860s and 1870s, Serbia, Bulgaria, Moldavia (present-day Moldova), and Montenegro crept away from Ottoman rule, following parts of modern day Greece a few decades earlier. With the loss of European regions and the gain of refugees, the empire’s population was becoming more Muslim. Tsar Nicholas I said that the empire had “fallen into a state of decrepitude,” which inspired the label “sick man of Europe,” a tag that ever since has traveled around Europe like a tour bus, stopping in England in the 1970s and more recently in Portugal and Greece.12 We must admit, though, that the Ottomans had enjoyed a glorious run for half a millennium. In the 1500s, Suleiman the Magnificent marched his armies beyond the Mediterranean, slashed through much of Hungary, and battled at the walls of Vienna. To the east and south, the Ottomans stormed through western Georgia and Armenia, not to mention Baghdad, Cairo, and Somalia. From the Euphrates to the Danube to the Nile, the Ottomans reigned. By controlling Mecca and Medina, Suleiman became God’s partner:
God’s might and Muhammad’s miracles are my companions. . . . In Baghdad I am the shah, in Byzantine realms the Caesar, and in Egypt the sultan; who sends his fleets to the seas of Europe, the Maghrib and India. I am the sultan who took the crown and throne of Hungary. . . . The voivoda Petru raised his head in revolt, but my horse’s hoofs ground him into the dust, and I conquered the land of Moldova.13
Even Alexander the Great might have blushed at the braggadocio. The population was to be loyal to the sultan, for he was the protector of all things holy.
Individual nations meant nothing to the sultan. He would not have thought of himself as a “Turk.” Until the “Young Turks” rebelled in the late 1800s, the term sounded pejorative, conjuring up the image of a nomadic hick. It was Atatürk who would later exalt this lineal image as a picture of nobility and honor.
Beyond sharp swords and swift boats, the Ottoman economy was built on agriculture and guilds, which did not seamlessly mesh with the Industrial Revolution. As modern machines like steamships and railways arrived from Europe, they were matched and mismatched with more primitive ways. Trains arriving in Ankara were greeted by thousands of camels. While literacy rates rose sharply in England and France in the 1800s so that workers could master new machines like the steam engine, literacy and numeracy in the empire lagged behind. However, it is not true that the Ottoman economy was collapsing or even sinking during the final fifty years under the sultans. I would argue, in fact, that a rise in living standards fractured the empire more than a fall. The economy continued to grow in most of the Ottoman lands, even if growth rates trailed those of England, France, and the United States. As families bought and deployed new tools, from looms to reapers, productivity leaped. In agriculture, exports jumped 45 percent between 1876 and 1908.14 Exports of silks and carpets also multiplied. From territories in Iraq, trade quadrupled between 1860 and 1900.15 While the Ottomans racked up debt to pay for the Crimean War in 1853–56, theirs was not a terribly indebted government until it started getting wealthier in the second half of the century.
By then the Ottomans did face a few disadvantages compared with their European rivals. First, there was water. In Europe plentiful streams and rivers spun waterwheels to mill and hammer flour, paper, and textiles. Without as many navigable internal waterways, Ottoman transportation costs did not decline as quickly as those in Europe. Even camels must stop for water once in a while and they cannot carry as much as a riverboat down the Rhine. Consider that today one might take a riverboat cruise from Amsterdam to Bucharest, but few suggest a long camel ride from Ankara to Mugla. Tribal toll takers would also hamper swift transit. Second, as the protector of Islam, the sultan could not as easily countenance business contracts that provided for interest paid on debt. Christian authorities had long figured out how to get around biblical bans on lending money.16 Only in recent decades have banks developed sophisticated sharia-compliant bonds to ease commerce. Third, the empire covered so much territory and so many battling tribes that government administrators faced an impossible task. Moreover, in times of war—and there were many—it was increasingly difficult to sound a call to arms in the name of a sultan whom few had ever seen in person or in a photograph or drawing.
Sultan Abdülhamid II was neither a monster nor a ninny. He began his reign in 1876 by trying to goose the modernization effort that began with his predecessors Mahmud II and Abdülmecid I, who presided over a reform movement known as Tanzimat, which pushed for modern schools and a more modern military. Tanzimat also abolished the slave trade, decriminalized homosexuality, allowed non-Muslims to join the army, and gave non-Muslims equal rights under the law. However, the Ottoman Empire crumbled despite rising incomes and despite a de facto expansion of civil rights, culminating in the First Constitutional Era beginning in 1876. Of 115 members of the Chamber of Deputies, forty-six were non-Muslims, including Armenians, Arabs, Jews, and Greeks. Unfortunately, almost as soon as the parliament met, the empire found itself at war with Russia and besieged by the British navy. Moreover, a large part of the Arab population distrusted their new constitutional rights, seeing them as permission for sinful licentiousness. Smugglers of tobacco, opium, and vodka felt they had gained new rights, too. Anticonstitutionalists pointed to transvestite prostitutes smoking hashish and whispered that it was all a Masonic scheme. They called Constantinople the “Byzantine whore.” The founder of modern Turkish poetry, Tevfik Fikret, called the city “a widowed virgin of a thousand men.”17 Faced with Russian and English guns, as well as Arab scimitars in the hinterlands, Abdülhamid officially revoked the constitution. Despite the revocation, though, a more liberal spirit began to spread. Even as the sultan ostensibly sneered down from Yildiz Palace in a grumpy, despotic mood the director of a school in Izmir praised the de facto freedom:
What strikes a Bulgarian when he enters Turkey is, before everything else, the air of freedom that one breathes. Under a theoretically despotic government, one definitely enjoys more freedom than in a constitutional state. . . . One almost does not feel that there is a government. . . . The absence of an irksome police, of crushing taxation, of very heavy civic duties.18
Newfound freedoms spurred nationalists of every sort to gather in the twisted alleys of bazaars to dream, and even to plot the breakup of the empire into independent homelands for Arabs, Armenians, Kurds, and Albanians. Turks had the same idea. Why shouldn’t Turks shed the crusty patina of an empire spread too thinly across thousands of miles? What good did the empire do for Turks? Besides, it kept losing wars and territory.
Recall our theme from chapter 5 on feelings of superiority. The Industrial Revolution was breeding more trade and more economic upheaval at a time when the Ottoman Empire could not engender a durable, widespread, or passionate feeling of group superiority (except by appealing to religion). When citizens saw that railroad cars were stamped “MADE IN GERMANY” instead of with the sultan’s seal (tughra), and that mechanical looms came with English-language instructions, spirits sank (even if those rails and looms lifted incomes). When the empire began losing battles and terrain, morale evaporated and it could not be revived. Because few believed that the empire was better than its rivals—in peacetime or in wartime—fewer believed that it would rebound from defeat.
Though he was a loyal and decorated captain in the army, Atatürk agreed with and joined the Young Turks in the 1908 revolution, which restored the 1876 constitution and elections. Andrew Mango, the author of a comprehensive biography on Atatürk, recounts Atatürk’s initiation ceremony into a rebel group, which resembles either a college fraternity initiation or a “made man” sequence in a Godfather movie: blindfolded recruits would be walked into a house and “take an oath of loyalty with one hand resting on a Koran and another holding a pistol, which was to be used against them if they betrayed their oath . . . candidates for admission wore red cloaks . . . while the rest of the company had their faces covered with a black veil.”19
Once again, though, a constitutional revolution that created a multiethnic Chamber of Deputies was followed by more fighting. First it was internal, as anti-Constitutionalists incited an army mutiny in Constantinople. At this point, Sultan Abdülhamid slipped onto a train to hide in Salonica (guarded by a friend of Atatürk) and let his brother Mehmed V take charge. His was not a very peaceful reign. In 1911 the Italians declared war to take Tripolitania (now Libya) and a year later the Balkan League (Greece, Montenegro, Serbia, and Bulgaria) attacked, conquered, and created Albania. Macedonia and Crete were gone, too, pushing the empire almost entirely off the map of Europe.
What else could go wrong? Six hundred miles away from Constantinople a skinny little Serb named Gavrilo Princip, who was told he was too small to join the army, showed up in Sarajevo, drew a pistol, and shot Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, igniting a war that would kill sixteen million people. It would also dismantle forever the Ottoman Empire and allow Mustafa Kemal Atatürk to declare the birth of the nation of Turkey.
AND NOW A WAR
In 2014, on the hundredth anniversary of the beginning of World War I, I took my daughters to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, DC. A special exhibition covered almost an entire floor. It was entitled “The Price of Freedom: Americans at War” and provided testimony to and explanations of each important battle and war fought since 1754. One could see a Civil War musket, Andrew Jackson’s coat from the Battle of New Orleans, and a Red Cross uniform from World War II. What attention did World War I merit? It got a nook in a dim corner.20 At first I thought this was a snub, until I noticed that the nook did post the depressing number of soldier and civilian deaths by cannon, mustard gas, and disease. Then I realized that the Smithsonian provided so little space to commemorate World War I because not even the Smithsonian’s experts really understand why it was fought! Better to gloss over it than to get stuck in a web of treaties, miscommunications, and long-held grudges among kings who were almost all related to each other, including cousins King George V, Kaiser Wilhelm II, and Tsar Nicholas II. Poor Mehmet V was the outlier, not invited to any summer soirees but invited and, in fact, forced to fight for his throne in the Great War.
I will not be giving away a dramatic ending to tell you that the Ottomans, who joined Germany, lost. In the decades preceding the war, the sultans had created a close relationship with the Germans, who sent advisers to the Ottoman army and to Ottoman universities. The Germans also tried to gin up a hatred of the Allies. Kaiser Wilhelm despised his first cousin, England’s King George, and instructed his aides to publicly tear the “mask of Christian peaceableness off of England’s face.” He told his agents in Turkey and India to “inflame the whole Mohammedan world to wild revolt against this hateful, lying, conscienceless people of shopkeepers.”21 Perhaps Germany’s blandishments and money would not have drawn the Ottomans into the war without a third factor: the Ottomans could not resist the chance to bloody their archenemy, Russia, which fought on the side of England. In the previous three hundred years the Ottomans had fought the Russians thirteen times. Ottoman sailors escorted German warships through the Dardanelles and the Sea of Marmara into the Black Sea and even allowed them to fly Turkish flags. When the kaiser’s vessels began bombarding Odessa, Russia declared war on the Ottomans. It did not go well for the sultan’s soldiers. Amid a snowstorm in a desolate and steep mountain range called Allahuekber (“Allah is great”), eighty thousand Ottoman troops trudged toward the Russians in December 1914. Only ten thousand returned, many of them frostbitten and never able to serve again. On the Egyptian front, eighteen thousand crossed the Sinai Desert and tried to cross the Suez Canal, only to be beaten back by the British. Ottoman losses were three thousand. The Egyptian Muslims did not join them in trying to repulse the Anglo heathens.
A few years earlier during the Italo-Turkish War in Libya, Atatürk tried to organize flighty Arab tribesmen, to plan reconnaissance missions, and generally to keep his sanity in the North African desert. A fellow soldier who knew him as a young man wrote to a friend, “You should see Mustafa Kemal sorting out dry beans” for the chef.22 Atatürk complained that the Arab sheikhs, while ostensibly on the Ottomans’ side, were more interested in stringing out the war and receiving a continuing flow of funds than in actually winning.
GALLIPOLI
In 1915 as the blood flowed freely Atatürk marched into the middle of the red stream. The word Gallipoli recalls one of the fiercest campaigns of the war, a debacle for the British Empire and a stunning display of bravery by Atatürk’s troops. The British War Council knew that if Britain could command the Dardenelles they could strangle Constantinople and the sultanate. In March they sent battleships and gunboats steaming through the Aegean. Atatürk and his division defended the land on the eastern shore, while Turkish sailors and army soldiers fired on the invading ships, sinking three battleships and disabling one-third of the fleet in a single day, March 18. A new plan. The British, along with Australians and New Zealanders (Anzacs), an infantry brigade from India, Gurkha regiments from Nepal, and Newfoundlanders, would send landing boats to the Gallipoli Peninsula and take it by gun, bayonet, and hand-to-hand combat. The Australian public cheered on its boys and the folks back home displayed colorful battlefield maps and patriotic commemorative ceramics. They could not imagine what would happen. At 6 a.m. on April 25, four thousand Australian troops began boarding boats and then rowing to the beaches, facing ravines and cliffs too sheer to scale. Atatürk rallied his cavalry into position, equipped with machine guns. He ordered them to fire, and the Aussies battled back. By 8 a.m., eight thousand men were ashore and the last arriving Australian troops saw the stumped limbs and lifeless bodies of 650 of their comrades, who had arrived earlier that morning. But then some of the Ottoman troops began to retreat. They had run out of ammunition.
“If you’ve got no ammunition, you have your bayonets,” Atatürk told them.
He later recalled ordering them to “fix their bayonets and lie down. As they did so, the enemy too lay down. We had won time.”
But now the trench warfare began. His entire regiment was nearly blown apart. “I don’t order you to attack. I order you to die,” he said. “By the time we are dead, other units and commanders will have come up to take our place.”23 New troops did show up, and for eight months the Ottomans kept the Brits and Anzacs from snatching more than a toehold. The Allies finally evacuated in January 1916. By then Kaiser Wilhelm had already awarded Atatürk the Iron Cross.
As the Gallipoli plan imploded, covered in blood and human tissue, the master of the plan, General Ian Hamilton, asked in words that would have commanded the attention of Alexander the Great, “Are the High Gods bringing our new Iliad to grief? Whose door will history leave the blame for the helpless, hopeless fix we are left in?”
The Australian government’s official description of Atatürk, its former enemy, states that his “superb grasp of strategy and ability to inspire his troops by his reckless bravery in action boosted Turkish morale and proved decisive in thwarting allied plans.”24 For his bravery, Atatürk was awarded the title of pasha and, more important, he earned the fame that would catapult him into the presidency of a new republic.
After the war Atatürk sealed his reputation with the Aussies and Brits by delivering a speech in praise of their heroism and in promise of brotherhood among the countries. The speech is engraved in the Atatürk Memorial at Anzac Parade in Canberra. While there are some doubts about whether the text was spoken word for word, the message is stirring and poignant. Just as the British forces touted and cheered their Johnnies, the Turks could cheer and honor their Mehmets, those that survived, and those that died:
Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives . . . You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours. . . . You, the mothers who sent their sons from faraway countries, wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well.25
His message reminds one of the Rupert Brooke poem “The Soldier,” which I cited in chapter 5. Brooke died on his way to fight at Gallipoli. His prescient poem avows that wherever a soldier dies becomes the soil of that soldier’s homeland. Atatürk adds a touching coda. When that soldier dies in a foreign land, he becomes a son, too, of that faraway place.
Atatürk’s bravery on Gallipoli would not save the Ottoman Empire. For all his passion and persuasion, 300,000 soldiers not under his command deserted and, under the influence of a hypnotic Brit in Arab headdress named T. E. Lawrence, Arab tribes switched sides and starting bombing Ottoman rail lines. The Russians continued to advance and the Ottoman government deported suspect Armenian, Greek, and Assyrian populations, leaving their fate to genocidal zealots who felt no shame or guilt in ethnic cleansing and killing perhaps 1.5 million.
To complete the echoes of the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Ottoman surrender took place on October 30, 1918, aboard a ship called the Agamemnon. You might recall that the story of Agamemnon tells of a king whose troops fight a protracted war in the Dardenelles. Then he is killed. It was not a good omen for Sultan Mehmed V.
THE CARVING BEGINS
The old sultan did somewhat better than Agamemnon. Though hounded by Turkish nationalists and humiliated by Allied victors who trampled on Istanbul as if they were shopping at JCPenney for last year’s markdowns, the sultan clung to his palace for a few more years. As he looked out he saw strange sights: the French commander General Louis Franchet d’Esperey rode triumphantly into Constantinople on a white horse. The joke was on him, because British general Edmund Allenby had already arrived on his own white horse a day earlier. A British officer scoffed that it was “like having two prima donnas on the stage together and the play went much better if we could keep one in her dressing room.”26 As the old-time vaudevillian Jimmy Durante said, “everybody wants to get into the act.” The king of Greece, Alexander, marched toward Ankara and Constantinople with thousands of his troops. He got stopped by a pet monkey. While strolling with his German shepherd Fritz, the king saw the dog suddenly embroiled in a fight with a pet monkey. Perhaps weary of wars, the king tried to play peacekeeper but the monkey bit him in the leg. He contracted a quick infection, called out to his mother in delirium, and died (Fritz was not badly injured). The king’s successor took Greece back into war with Turkey, and Churchill remarked that “a quarter of a million persons died of this monkey’s bite.”27 And why did the pooch of a Greek king have a German name, Fritz? Ah, yes, those relatives! Alexander’s mother was the daughter of Emperor Frederick III of Germany and was Kaiser Wilhelm’s sister.
The Allies approached the Ottoman Empire’s far-flung provinces (vilayets) with a carving knife and a pen.
Today we look at a map of the Middle East or the roster of the United Nations and see distinct names like Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and Israel. But it is hard to imagine that these borders and nations simply did not exist one hundred years ago. Foreign policy commentators today may speak of forcing Israel to go back to the 1967 borders or even suggest that the state is illegitimate, but do they realize that there were no real borders separating any of these countries until after World War I? After the war the British and the French essentially dipped pens in inkwells and began drawing up boundaries and awarding fiefdoms to those tribal leaders who had been most helpful, based on the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916. In some cases they imported dominant Arab families from one region and installed them in power in another. Take a look at a map and the border between Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Some geographers explain the bizarre zigzag jutting into Jordan as “Winston’s Hiccup.” They surmise that as secretary of state of the colonies Churchill must have burped up whiskey and quivered while holding a pen and trying to draw a straighter border line in 1921.28 The ink was permanent, which is more than one can say for these artificial Middle Eastern borders. Around the same time, Faisal, who was born in Mecca (now Saudi Arabia) and raised in Constantinople was made king of Iraq because he was trusted by the British and rode camel sorties with Lawrence of Arabia. Diaries show how casually British prime minister David Lloyd George and French prime minister Georges Clemenceau could discuss their power over the map and over millions of people:
“Tell me what you want,” Clemenceau said to Lloyd George as they strolled in the French embassy in London.
“I want Mosul,” the British prime minister replied.
“You shall have it. Anything else?” Clemenceau asked.29
Along with carving apart the empire, they resolved that Saudi Arabia should be controlled by the house of Saud, a family that had deep roots in the Arabian Desert and had also helped the British battle the Ottomans. The British agent in charge was actually named William Shakespear. The idea of naming a country after a family sounds like a comedy routine, and in fact, Ali G, the fake hip-hop reporter played by Sacha Baron Cohen, had it almost right when he interviewed a United Nations representative:
Ali G points to a seat marked Jordan: “Ain’t it stupid to let one sportsman have his own seat? No matter how powerful he is?”
UN official: “That is not Michael Jordan . . . that is the state of Jordan.”
Ali G: “Innit ridiculous letting one person have the same power as a whole country?”30
ATATÜRK TO THE FRONT AGAIN—BUT WHICH ONE?
Atatürk’s rise was no accident. He was as shrewd and savvy in public relations as in battle. During the occupation of Constantinople by British, French, and Italians, Atatürk checked into the Pera Palace Hotel, built to host Orient Express passengers. He asked the hotel manager to arrange a meeting with a London Daily Mail reporter who had arrived on the Agamemnon. Atatürk appeared in a frock coat and fez, “a handsome and virile figure, restrained in his gestures, with a low, deliberate voice,” the reporter recalled. Atatürk then explained that he preferred the British to the French and would like a role in reshaping the conquered land. Charles King, who wrote an engaging history of the Pera Palace Hotel, states that Atatürk “met with virtually anyone who would receive him: military officers, cabinet ministers, disgruntled parliamentarians, and on four occasions Sultan Mehmed VI himself.”31
While the Allies gave a master class on creative cartography, the fighting resumed, as Armenia and Greece tried to pick at the Ottoman corpse. Atatürk and other officers led brigades to fight them off. Once again Atatürk showed great skill but now he was torn. Who was he fighting for? On the surface, he was still fighting for the Ottomans and taking orders, but he was also fighting against the Ottomans on the side of the Turkish nationalists who wanted to toss the sultan from the throne. Word of his Gallipoli heroism spread fast. He was becoming a symbol of Turkish nationalism and created a rival National Assembly and government in Ankara. If the sultan could not defend Constantinople from European dandies gallivanting on white horses, then Constantinople should no longer be the capital. Atatürk wondered, should I fight for the remnants of his Ottoman Empire? Or for a people, the Turks, a name that sounded like an ethnic slur? The answer became clear. He would first defend against new onslaughts from Armenia and Greece and then fight for a new entity he would call Turkey. The term had not been used officially until the armistice agreement on the Agamemnon.
How many would die in a civil war between the Ottomans and the nationalists? Who would the Arabs, Serbs, Bulgarians, and others side with? In Smyrna, Muslims outraged by an attempted Greek invasion had already lynched the Greek archbishop. A twenty-three-year-old reporter from the Toronto Star named Ernest Hemingway was worried about the capital: “There is a tight-drawn, electric tension in Constantinople such as people who live in a city that has never been invaded can[not] imagine.” He reported that “foreigners are nervous . . . and have booked outgoing trains for weeks ahead.” He described Atatürk as a “short, bronze-faced blond Turk with a seasoned army of 300,000 men.” Hemingway confronts Atatürk’s man in Constantinople:
“Canada is anxious about the possibility of a massacre of Christians when Kemal enters Constantinople,” I said.32
“What have the Christians to fear?” he asked. “They are armed and the Turks have been disarmed. There will be no massacre.”
But in 1922 Sultan Mehmed VI (who took over when his brother died in 1918) was as worried as Hemingway. He feared that Atatürk would, in a highly organized way, arrest him, try him, and hang him for treason, or, alternatively, that marauding anarchic bandits would climb the gates of Topkaki and hang him. So the sultan did the safe and logical thing. He arranged for British soldiers to kidnap him and shuffle him away. While he took a walk with his son, soldiers threw them both into an ambulance and sped to the harbor. A British warship took them to Malta, from which they sailed up the coast to lovely San Remo on the Italian Riviera. His five wives the sultan left behind. When the ruler skipped his usual Friday religious service in Constantinople, the Brits admitted that the royal palace bed was empty and the National Assembly appointed Mehmed’s cousin as caliph, but denied him the title of sultan. The house of Osman was an empty house for the first time since 1299.
Around this time the League of Nations administered an exchange of populations between Greece and what was left of the Ottoman lands. Both Greece and Turkey signed the agreement, which sent about 1.5 million Orthodox Greeks from Anatolia to Greece, and 500,000 Muslims in Greece to Turkish lands.
Atatürk took charge and was named president of the Turkish republic. In a metaphorical nod to the story of Oedipus, he had killed off the Ottoman sultan/father and declared himself the new leader and father of his country. His march to reform was faster than any blitzkrieg tactic he learned from the Germans.
BIRTH OF A REPUBLIC: REPLACING RELIGION WITH SCIENCE AND LITERACY
Atatürk grew up wanting to march in military parades waving a sabre. But after he took office in 1923 he mostly ruled Turkey like a man who held out a dove toward its neighbors. Though he had proved that his army could still overwhelm Greece’s, he never tried to take back Salonica, his birthplace (now Thessaloniki). Nor did he exploit revolts against Libya’s Italian occupiers or political quakes across Arabia as an excuse to send his army marching to swipe oil wells. Imperialism was over. This, I think, is one of the most important accomplishments in political history over the past two hundred years: Atatürk would lead a nation based on patriotism and nationalism—but this nation would not turn into an imperialist conquerer, even of its weaker neighbors. Critics of nationalism assume or make broad claims that such feelings always translate into trampled borders and pillaged neighbors. Certainly, Nazi Germany and fascist Japan did in the 1930s. But is it a force of law, or a choice of men and women? Atatürk proves it is a choice and gives us hope that we can resuscitate fallen morale without letting slip the mad dogs of war.
Atatürk was forty-two years old when he took power. He knew that his biggest challenges were at home. The previous twelve years had been brutal. Everything was “one-third off,” but this was not a retail sale: international trade had plummeted by one-third and Turkey had one-third fewer people and one-third less land than under the Ottomans. Atatürk was determined to lead a nation of Turks, but the Turks themselves could not follow his logic. They had been taught to be ashamed of their very name. How could he persuade them to show pride and confidence? Newspapers would not help much. Literacy rates were dreadful, about 10 percent for men and less than 5 percent for women. The majority of newspapers in cosmopolitan Constantinople were in foreign languages.33 Muslims had been slow to accept even the technology of printing. The first Muslim-owned printing press had not arrived until 1727 and it came from a Hungarian. Sephardic Jews and Armenians had been using printing presses in Ottoman cities since 1494 and 1567, respectively.34
In prizing handwritten calligraphy over printing, the Muslims denied themselves Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, and Galileo. Of course, Muslim scholars reminded Atatürk of the historical glories of early Islamic math and science, including algebra and camera optics. Some Islamic philosophers even claimed that Einstein’s theory of relativity could be derived from the Koran and its use of the word nur (light). But Atatürk had no patience for a history lesson or for fanciful religious boosterism. He needed to plunge Turkey into the future, authentic and gritty. To Atatürk, the calendar said 1923, but the overriding mentality still read AD 1299. In fact, even that was wrong. The Ottomans had used a different calendar from the West, the solar-based Rumi calendar, which starts with the year of Muhammad’s journey from Mecca to Medina in AD 622. Under this calendar, it was still the year 1339, not 1923. Atatürk had no time to lose in a country where it was almost impossible to tell time. He could not depend on the muezzin’s five-times-a-day call to prayer, since the exact time changed from day to day and from place to place depending on the town’s longitude and latitude.
In sum, Atatürk faced two disparate but primary tasks:
• First, create a nation that Turks could take pride in.
• Second, push that nation to adopt science and the learning of Western civilization.
Secular schools spread, universities emerged, and Atatürk recruited scientists from England, France, and Germany to lecture. In the 1930s when the Nazis came to power, Turkey invited Jewish scholars and other educated escapees to teach and do research.
Atatürk found himself nearly gored on the horns of the dilemma I discussed in chapter 2. He clearly saw that orthodox Islam and an insular attitude threatened Turkey’s economic progress. When he walked past the shelves of bookstores and libraries he had to squint to see any books written in Arabic, for they were far outnumbered by books written in Western languages. But there was another horn of the dilemma: chapter 2 showed us how globalized economies and worldwide trade can disintegrate the traditions and bonds that link citizens together. How could he and Turkey escape the treacherous dilemma? He had to figure out a way to disband the orthodoxy yet devise or uncover unifying myths, stories, and themes for a new country.
The republic began with a 101-gun salute. The next shot was a verbal one fired at the caliph. Soon Atatürk dismissed him and disbanded the Islamic courts that had regulated everything from debts to divorce. New courts would enforce a version of the Swiss civil code. The caliph scooted away to Bulgaria on the Orient Express. As the train was about to pull out of the station, the governor of Constantinople slipped him an envelope stuffed with cash and waved good-bye to the caliph and two of his wives. Atatürk was sorry there was not room on the Orient Express for all the clerics. He had a very clear view on religion: it stood in the way of Turkish pride, personal responsibility, and science. “I wish all religions at the bottom of the sea,” he explained to an interviewer. “My people are going to learn the principles of democracy, the dictates of truth and the teachings of science.”35 Atatürk did not mind that other people worshipped; he just did not want their worship to blind them to the real hard work of nation building. “Superstition must go,” he added. To Atatürk, orthodox Islam was like a toxic cloud that broke down the idea of free will and personal responsibility: “To expect help from the dead is a disgrace for a civilized society.”36 Help yourself, he said.
But Atatürk also knew that religion could drive people in remarkable ways. In the trenches of the war he described his devout soldiers calling upon unearthly inspiration that made them stronger than the enemy and willing to carry out orders that could send them to their death:
They see only two supernatural outcomes: victory for the faith or martyrdom. Do you know what the second means? It is to go straight to heaven. There, the houris [heavenly virgins], God’s most beautiful women, will meet them and will satisfy their desires for all eternity.37
This raises a profound question for a secular leader: How do I inspire without appealing to holy spirits? An agnostic or atheist army general simply cannot promise virgins in heaven. But he’d better promise something better than a roll in the hay with a wartime prostitute and a vial of arsenic to combat syphilis.38
Atatürk also had to be careful about separating religion from the government, without pricking Islamists so sharply that they might declare jihad on the new, fragile state. In a clever rhetorical twist he argued that a more secular, westernized education would ultimately help Islamic learning. He asserted that Christian scholars from France and Germany had plumbed more deeply into Islamic theology than even Islamic clerics, who felt forbidden from questioning their elders. Clearly, European institutions were devoting resources to preserving and studying Islamic scripture. Atatürk would have been pleased that in 2014 the University of Birmingham discovered in its collection portions of the Koran that are at least 1,370 years old, possibly written during Muhammad’s lifetime.39
UNVEILING WOMEN AND BUILDING THE WORKFORCE
In chapter 1 we saw how prosperity can send birthrates plunging, which threatens to shrink a country’s workforce. Atatürk was not worried about fertility per se, but he knew that Turkey’s workforce suffered from two problems: (1) a shortage of hardworking Turks and (2) a badly educated population of males. He quickly conjured up a solution. He would educate and liberate women, while encouraging them to enter the workforce. In 1923 he did not appear to be a likely booster of women’s rights. He had spent his life in the company of boys at schools and men on the battlefields. When Atatürk took the new oath for the presidency of a new Turkey, he was forty-two years old and had just gotten married for the first time. While he got along well with his mother, the “apron strings” had been cut long ago when he took the entrance exam for military training without telling her. She had died a few months before his presidency and when he visited her grave he blamed the former sultan’s “secret agents, the spies, the hangmen of tyranny” for the miseries she faced in life. Nonetheless, he would encourage the women of Turkey to climb over the barricades stacked up by sultans, clerics, and tradition. He had been planning this for a long time, and back in 1916 wrote in his diary that Turkey should “be courageous in the matter of women . . . adorn their minds with serious knowledge and science.”
Liberating women was bold and smart and had long-term repercussions. Having lost millions of people through the wars, population swaps, and surrendered territory, Turkey needed more bodies in the workplace. A series of reforms banned polygamy, while overriding Islamic law and allowing women to divorce, inherit equally, and attend public schools. The right to vote would follow and in its early years Turkey’s National Assembly would have twice as many women serving as Western European parliaments.40 In urging reform Atatürk turned to women and addressed them separately but as patriots:
To the women: “Win for us the battle of education and you will do yet more for your country than we have been able to do.”
To the men: “If henceforward the women do not share in the social life of the nation, we shall never attain to our full development. We shall remain irremediably backward, incapable of treating on equal terms with the civilizations of the West.”41
At his mother’s grave site before he could launch any reforms, he stated: “I am sorry that I lost my mother, but the mother [country] has its freedom and it is developing, and this eases the pain that I feel inside me.”42 A few years ago I attended a meeting of the executive committee of Garanti Bank of Turkey. I was impressed to see a far greater proportion of women than I had ever seen at a US or UK board meeting. Some of them were concerned, though, that Atatürk’s reforms could be rolled back by the administration of current president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who represents the Islamicist-based Justice and Development Party. Erdoğan has been criticized for tightening controls on the press and removing judges that were known secularists and supporters of Atatürk.43 Across the southern Turkish border in Syria and Iraq, the situation is far more dire. Female professionals in Turkey know that just a few miles beyond the border, ISIS runs villages.
Encouraging women to become educated and to join the workforce at the highest levels changed Turkey’s demographics, pushing down its fertility rate. Women of Turkey’s Kurdish minority, who do not usually go to school for as many years, have a fertility rate twice that of other Turks. In Turkey’s more prosperous western areas the fertility rate is just 1.5, well below the replacement ratio. Atatürk’s reforms, while putting Turkey on the path to greater wealth, may have accelerated the risks for Turkey’s demographic survival.
THE HAT
It is hard for us today to appreciate the power of a hat. In Atatürk’s era Broadway theater seats had hooks on the back for gentlemen’s hats. A 1923 photograph of the opening day of Yankee Stadium shows every man and woman wearing a hat, except one or two that must be dangling a hat from their hands.44 My father told me of a tradition on the Staten Island Ferry, where on the last day of summer, men would toss their summer straw hats into the harbor. The Bible prescribes head coverings, and religious Jews still follow the commandment. Catholic cardinals and bishops wear skullcaps. Islam teaches that men and women must show appropriate modesty (which may be interpreted as a headscarf, kaffiyeh, or even a hijab for women). Around the world, hats were never just about fashion. They defined status, religion, gender, and military rank. The fez, named for the Moroccan city, had been costume de rigueur in Turkey since the early 1800s. It was often worn over a skullcap and it had practical religious purposes beyond its stylish appeal. Lacking a brim, the fez aided men in prayer, for it allowed them to demonstrate their humility before Allah, while also permitting them to touch their foreheads to the floor of the mosque.
To Atatürk the fez showed a different sort of subservience—subservience to old-fashioned “orientalism.” Atatürk thought that civilized Westerners looked down on a fez-wearing Turk, who would be taken no more seriously than a “Chinaman” holding a paper umbrella or an African carrying a spear. Once again, he used inventive arguments to bolster his case. He would argue that the fez also hurt the economy: “Skullcaps, fezes, turbans—it all costs money which goes to foreigners.”45 He did not explain why money for homburgs and Panama hats would not also go to foreigners. Nonetheless, he abolished the fez and urged men to wear brimmed Western hats.
WESTERN VICES AND THE VIRTUE OF WESTERN MUSIC
Atatürk’s thrust toward westernization carried with it more controversial symbols like prostitution and alcohol. In the latter realm, he had personal experience. He was known to raise a glass or two or three. While some were aghast at the idea of official licensed brothels, Atatürk explained, “Most of the people in our country are, in terms of culture, still quite primitive,” and presumably needed their primitive urges taken care of.46 During the occupation the French had taken control of awarding licenses for Constantinople’s brothels and administered weekly medical inspections. They threw aside the idea of égalité and set aside the fanciest rooms for high-ranking officers. Most of the clients were sailors and tourists. Under the republic, Turkey set up a new bureaucracy to manage the trade, which flourished amid the jazz-age nightclubs. Occasionally the government would arrest and deport particularly bad characters who straddled the Venn diagram of jazz, liquor, and sex, including one deportee whose job title was officially classified as “pianist/pimp.”
Atatürk was not a jazz aficionado but, as I discussed earlier, he preferred the Viennese waltz over the dervish whirl. Violins showed up in Turkish homes. He praised symphonic music and invited famous pianists and composers to tour, including Paul Hindemith from Germany. Choosing Hindemith shows that Atatürk was not simply feigning nostalgia for the dusty classics of Mozart and Bach. Atatürk was not a poser, someone who lines his bookshelves with leather-bound volumes of Goethe and Molière, never to be cracked open. Hindemith was known for bringing to the stage avant-garde composers like Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern, who could frustrate audiences who loved hummable melodies and tonal scales. Later the Nazis condemned Hindemith’s own modernist compositions as “degenerate,” and Joseph Goebbels dismissed him as an “atonal noisemaker.”47 Like Schoenberg, Hindemith tried to reinvent musical composition and saw fluctuations between dissonance and consonance as natural rather than artificial. He developed his own methods of setting out harmonic structures. By endorsing Hindemith, Atatürk proved that Turkey would take Western culture forward, not just bow down to its past.
KINDLING PATRIOTISM WITH A NEW LANGUAGE
Atatürk must have felt a brotherly connection to someone like Hindemith, who was willing to overhaul convention. By the time the composer toured Turkey in the 1930s, Atatürk had already introduced an entirely new alphabet for Turks, which he believed would raise literacy rates. Instead of Arabic script, children would learn the Turkish language with Latin (Western) letters, which would more easily allow for the multiple vowels in the Turkish language. Instead of calling the letters “Latin,” he described them as “Turkish” and they became an emblem of patriotism. Atatürk was not content to rely on teachers. He personally toted blackboards around the country, and joined in the nationwide teach-in for Turkish literacy. Literacy rates doubled from 1923 to 1938.48 There was a problem, however: Turkish had a deficit, a “word gap” with Western languages. While the Turkish dictionary listed forty thousand words, French and German dictionaries listed more than twice that number (English was far higher because of its more mongrel origins). Turkey needed more words and Atatürk would not stand on the sidelines. He placed a blackboard in his dining room and asked guests to submit new words. Partly due to Atatürk’s dining room, in the past ninety years Turkish has closed the word gap.
WHAT WAS A TURK? TURNING AN ETHNIC SLUR INTO NATIONAL PRIDE
Women’s rights, public secular education, a new alphabet—could these form the foundation of a Turkish people? In addition to shoving aside the Ottomans and carving out a new future, Atatürk realized that Turks needed to feel an emotional tug from the past. Playwrights call it a backstory. Where had the Turks come from before the Ottoman sultans showed up? He worked with historians to develop an “Outline of Turkish History” that tried to show how modern-day Turks descended from noble, nomadic, prehistoric tribesmen. Moreover, these same early Turks had allegedly multiplied and had colonized much of the modern world. There was certainly some mythmaking going on in this backstory exercise. And just as Atatürk embarked on this historical venture that would attempt to instill pride in the very name Turk, he got a lucky break from French and Austrian linguists. They informed him that an early form of Turkish was the mother tongue of all languages! This was exquisite timing for Atatürk’s backstory. According to the Sun Language Theory, primitive Turks worshipped the sun, whom they called ag, and the guttural sound agh became the original building block for human speech. It turned out to be pseudoscience, but Atatürk was unstoppable.
Having set out a past and a future and created a new alphabet and a theory of language, he still needed to redefine for the present the very word Turk. He used the phrase “a good Turk.” A good Turk would be proud, diligent, and confident. The cynic would say it sounded like a Boy Scout pledge. But symbols and words matter. “A good Turk” could be applied to a bricklayer as well as to an artist. A good Turk would learn to play music with discipline and skill or to show up for work on time.49 Atatürk told his countrymen that the word Turk comes from turka, meaning strong. In the haunting movie Midnight Express, which is rightly despised by anyone affiliated with the Turkish tourist bureau, the imprisoned American spends his day walking clockwise around a large stone wheel along with other inmates, most of them addled or crazed. One day the American decides to rebel. He begins to walk counterclockwise. The others try to dissuade him or push him in the correct direction. One of them, trying to be helpful, grabs his shirt and says, “A good Turk always walks to the right.”50 The point here is not the direction or the disturbing prison. The point is that even a prisoner thinks that he should aspire to be a “good Turk.”
But could this work? Could Western science and a bit of Turkish nationalistic pseudoscience sufficiently bind a nation together? The economy held up well enough that Turkey did not spin into the hyperinflation of Weimar in the 1920s or the crippling Great Depression that spurred fascism in the 1930s. Turkey performed better than the other losers from World War I and avoided fascism, communism, disintegration, and annihilation. Each of those four disasters was a real possibility.
Today Turkey bleeds from its perilous relationship with Kurdish separatists. In October 2015 Turkey suffered the most deadly terrorist attack in its modern history, when suicide bombers linked to ISIS killed ninety-seven people, many of whom had gathered for a pro-Kurdish peace rally. Many Kurds blamed President Erdoğan for not protecting them and for attacking their separatist cause. In an election a few weeks later, Erdoğan’s “get-tough” attitude won his party a majority in parliament. While Atatürk did not favor independence for Kurdistan, he did convince many Kurds (and Assyrians) that they, too, were legitimately Turks and entitled to all the privileges of being so. Subgroups like Kurds and Assyrians could fit within his nationalism. He wrote to Kurdish leaders and assured them that they are “true brothers joining hands in . . . sacred unity.”51 Atatürk’s concept of Turkishness may not have eliminated a Kurdish desire to separate but it did discourage extremists from taking more violent action and encouraged them to take part in the emerging Turkish economy.
We cannot discuss “Atatürkonomics,” because his economic policy was rather eclectic, in other words, confused. An opposition party, the Free Republicans, briefly sprang up to argue for laissez-faire economics. There were periods of free markets and then periods of New Deal–like regulation. During the 1920s and 1930s the economy grew at a healthy pace of nearly 5 percent per year, despite the headwinds of the Great Depression in the 1930s.
A LEGACY
Atatürk was mostly adored by his public and applauded by foreign leaders. Critics called him dictatorial and he often was. Multiparty democracy did not come until well after Atatürk left. He did not acknowledge the plight of Kurds and Armenians. But what individual, commission, or gang would have done better? I was speaking with a Turkish political scientist who told me that Atatürk “moved too fast” with his reforms. He should have spread them out over a long period of time, my friend contended. I am not convinced. If the Turkish republic had begun by forming committees and subcommittees to determine whether women should have equal rights or whether secular science should be taught in classrooms throughout the land, those meetings might still not be adjourned. Atatürk was in many ways an extremist. But an extremist in the pursuit of what? I am reminded of Barry Goldwater’s controversial pronouncement that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And . . . moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” Atatürk was no saint and his motives could be infected by egoism. And yet he managed to drag a defeated, polyglot empire toward Western civilization and to simultaneously restore its pride. And that pride would be based not on the will of heaven, but on the hard work of men—and women.
Atatürk was nervy and optimistic. In 1926 a band of assassins plotted to murder him. The police dragged in one of the hired assassins before Atatürk for questioning. This conspirator did not know that Atatürk was the man standing in front of him. He admitted that he had been hired to shoot Atatürk because the leader had purportedly harmed the country. Atatürk asked, “But how could you kill a person you had never seen? You might have picked the wrong man.” The assassin explained that another conspirator was to point out Atatürk before he fired. Atatürk drew his revolver and handed it to the assassin, saying, “Well, I am Mustafa Kemal. Come on, take this revolver and shoot me now.”52 The man collapsed to the ground sobbing.
I hope Atatürk was not too optimistic about the durability of civilized republics. He stated that “Civilization is a fearful fire which consumes those who ignore it.”53 “Fearful fire” sounds more biblical than secular. In fact, around the world today we see radical throwbacks like the Taliban and ISIS conjure up a religious fervor that literally sets cities ablaze. They do this by inflaming young minds with sweaty, reckless rage. There is a danger that Atatürk will be proved wrong: incendiary anticivilization forces may be more powerful or at least more easily motivated than civilized forces. Civilized people go out on a summer night to hear a symphony orchestra play acoustic cannon instruments to accompany the 1812 Overture. Uncivilized people go out to shoot real cannons.
In 1938 Atatürk became ill and was diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver. He died soon after. Naturally, his critics grumbled about alcohol. The clock in his bedroom at Dolmabahce Palace is still fixed at 9:05 a.m., the time of his death. This, too, turns out to be a victory, for the old Ottoman clocks would have used the confusing, old-fashioned Ottoman numerals, where “5” was symbolized by a “0.” Even in death, Atatürk made things more modern.
Atatürk did not win at everything. His marriage had lasted only two years. But over the years he adopted seven girls and a son. One of his daughters grew up to become the world’s first female fighter pilot. Atatürk was a father to his eight children, and to an entire republic.