by Charles King
The end of the caliphate resounded across the world. It sparked outrage from pious Muslims, who regarded the caliph’s role as a sacred trust that no earthly power could possibly break. In Turkey, however, the steamroller of reforms, both sacred and profane, continued. In a nod toward modernizing the physical appearance of Turkish citizens, beginning in 1925 all men were required to wear brimmed hats, not the red felt fez that had become popular in the late empire. Little boys threw rocks to try to ping the old headgear off recalcitrant fez-wearers.Since the regulation did not affect any other element of clothing, for some time later Muslim men could be seen in the streets wearing a fedora with baggy Ottoman-era trousers.
In 1926 a new civil code, based on Switzerland’s, replaced the empire’s complex amalgam of Islamic sharia law, several varieties of Christian canon law, rabbinical decisions, royal decrees, and tribal custom. The same year, drinking liquor in public was officially permitted—although the theoretical ban had never before impeded private club owners—and buffalo-drawn carts were prohibited from Istanbul’s streets. In 1928, Islam was disestablished as the state religion, and the Arabic alphabet was rejected in favor of the Latin one for writing Turkish. All over Istanbul, street signs came down, with the whirls and swishes of Arabic-style lettering supplanted by labels wholly foreign to most local Muslims. Popular photographs from the period show President Mustafa Kemal in front of chalkboards, instructing the new nation in writing and spelling.
These changes were often collectively referred to as an inkılâp—a revolution. Like many revolutionaries, the Kemalists had started out as reformers, seeking to save the sultanate from invaders and occupiers, until it became clear that the old system was beyond repair. But in most other ways, this was a revolution of an unusual type. The Turks legislated their monarch out of existence without ever marching on a royal palace. They conquered no territory but their own. They embraced the idea of a parliamentary republic but just as quickly enveloped their supreme leader in a cult of personality that exceeded that of the Ottoman sultans. Mustafa Kemal’s portrait appeared in every government building, and the press chronicled his every gesture and utterance. He became the father of the nation, the first citizen, and the supreme example of what a good Turk should be. Briefly married and then divorced, he had no “first lady” for most of his long tenure as president and no biological heirs, but he considered as many as seven people his adopted children. The full list of these individuals, as opposed to those merely under his express protection or patronage, is still debated today, but most of them were young women who seem to have impressed the president as especially ambitious, able, and exemplary of the new Turkish woman.
His blue eyes and charismatic personality made him one of the most swooned-over heads of state in the world. He appeared on the covers of major international magazines more often than almost any leader of his time, always dressed with a nattiness bordering on dandyism. His habits of late-night drinking and all-hours conversation gave him a reputation as a seemingly indefatigable transformer—a model for how to wrench an ancient and recondite empire into the twentieth century. Today private businesses no longer feel compelled to keep an image of him on display, but shopowners and restaurateurs might tack up a photograph of Mustafa Kemal in a bathing suit or on the dance floor, a cheeky nod to the maker of a rolling revolution that is nearly a century old and, in a way, still going. Even today, when antigovernment protesters take to Istanbul’s streets, they still carry flags with his image and tie on headbands that proclaim “Atam izindeyiz!”—“Father, we are following in your footsteps!” It is a supreme testament to his legacy that young, middle-class urbanites can see themselves as conservative and revolutionary at the same time. They oppose the strictures of Islamic morality—increasingly promoted by Turkey’s religious-leaning governing party after 2003—by looking back to the traditions of the early secular republic under Mustafa Kemal. Not even the Bolsheviks could have dreamed of a revolution that would turn out to be so permanent.
Mustafa Kemal (center) at a New Year’s Eve ball in Ankara, 1929.
During the independence struggle, Mustafa Kemal carried the title of gazi, a kind of Islamic generalissimo, but Kemalism as an ideology developed in ways less martial than civic and political. It contained six pillars, symbolized by the six arrows on the flag of the Republican People’s Party, the movement he founded: republicanism, nationalism, populism, secularism, statism, and revolutionism. The first five of these principles owed a great deal to the French republican tradition, the model for the Young Turks after 1908 as well as for Mustafa Kemal and his associates in the transition from war-making to state-building. Turkey was not the world’s first Islamic republic—that distinction belonged to Azerbaijan, which had been briefly independent before the Bolsheviks reconquered it during the Russian civil war—but it was nevertheless committed to building a representative government, if not a fully democratic one. For most of the interwar years, the Republican People’s Party was the only legal party, and voters never directly elected their parliamentarians until more than a decade after Mustafa Kemal’s death. The government was also given responsibility for guarding against any privileged role for religion, looking out for the true interests of the people, and making state institutions the engine of economic and social development.
Like other revolutionaries, Kemalists wrote their history with an eraser in hand. In the emerging story of their own triumph, their only opponents were held to be the Allies, abetted by treacherous local Greeks and Armenians. The Kemalist revolution was believed to have unfolded naturally and unproblematically across Anatolia, save for minor hiccups produced by the disgruntled and the unenlightened. The army was remembered as traipsing heroically westward from Ankara to the sea, restoring local sovereignty within Turkey’s natural frontiers, which happened to coincide, more or less, with those the Ottomans controlled at the time of the Mudros armistice in 1918.
In reality, however, Kemalism was a product of—not the cause of—Mustafa Kemal’s hard-won victory over a range of internal opponents. The arrows on his party’s flag became principles for building a new state, but they were more importantly weapons aimed at a very specific set of interests. As a diplomatic observer noted in 1923, a partial list of Mustafa Kemal’s enemies at the time included:
All Old Turks and Sultanites.
All the Generals who have been set aside by Kemal.
All the deputies of the old who have not been elected to the new Assembly.
All the old C.U.P. [Committee of Union and Progress] stalwarts . . . .
All those with whom Mustafa [Kemal] has quarreled or of whom he is jealous or who are jealous of him. . . .
All those who prefer Constantinople to Angora [Ankara] as the capital.
All Ulema, Imams, and Hojas [Muslim clerics]. . . .
All civilians who get no pay, all demobilised soldiers who have no other occupation and can find none. . . .
Anyone in Istanbul could have compiled his own similar list. The brilliance of Mustafa Kemal’s strategy lay in his ability to pick the right opponents to use against the others. He had a knack for bringing into his own camp some of the most thuggish warlords operating in the political vacuum created by war and occupation. A host of colorful and ruthless characters flowed into the ranks of the Turkish nationalists—men such as Ali the Sword and Osman the Lame, whose guerrilla tactics targeted political oppositionists, armed clansmen, occupation forces, and civilians alike. The Kemalists generally avoided the show trials and mass purges that would later engulf the Soviet Union, but a smaller-scale version of revolutionary courts, known as independence tribunals, were established under the authority of the Grand National Assembly. More than seven thousand people were arrested. Close to seven hundred were sentenced to death.
The government allowed occasional experiments with multiple political parties, even though direct, competitive elections were not held until 1950. But openness was usually followed by reaction. In the spring of 1925, a new law o
n the maintenance of public order provided a reason for closing down newspapers and shuttering opposition organizations. Small demonstrations or individual acts of dissent were sometimes exaggerated as “rebellions,” which in turn enabled crackdowns. Communal violence that fell short of threatening the state, such as the razing of Jewish communities by Turkish nationalists in the city of Edirne and other parts of Thrace in 1934, was downplayed in press reporting and official discourse. Still, eighteen armed uprisings challenged the Kemalist government before the Second World War, almost all of them in eastern Anatolia. Major revolts by ethnic Kurds in the region, expressing a range of grievances from the loss of the caliphate to the withering of traditional feudal privileges, were harshly repressed. Military planes, one of them piloted by the president’s adopted daughter, the aviation pioneer Sabiha Gökçen, were sent to bomb villages. Aerial attacks on Kurdish areas in the Dersim region in 1937–1938 became a kind of Turkish Guernica, a shocking bombardment of civilians under the guise of an antiguerrilla operation. The difference from the famous Spanish case, however, was that the people dropping the bombs and those hiding from them were all citizens of the same country.
One might have expected that the old imperial capital would emerge as the heartland of dissent, given that its streetscape was teeming with ancient reminders of the Islamic values the Kemalists were eagerly putting away. The revolution was, after all, everything that Istanbul wasn’t—anti-imperial, forward-looking, and past-negating. But Istanbul’s residents found themselves more ignored than feared. With the abolition of the caliphate, the network of local imams and religious scholars centered in Istanbul had begun to fade. The more career-savvy ones moved to Ankara, like their ambitious counterparts in government ministries, where they became part of the growing state apparatus charged not with eliminating religion but with managing it. In 1924 and 1925, the office of eyhülislam was abolished, Muslim religious courts were suppressed, and the wearing of turbans and other religious garb was restricted to a few government-appointed clerics. Even then, the turbaned pious were expected to take off their headgear to salute the flag on Republic Day—October 29—a practice previously unimaginable to the devout.
The Kemalists adopted a French term, laïcité, to describe their conception of the new role of religion in the republic. Its Turkish equivalent—lâiklik—followed the French model: not separating religion from the state but, instead, actively controlling it. New state institutions were charged with governing mosques, churches, synagogues, and religious foundations. Independent sources of wealth—such as properties belonging to Greek or Armenian church authorities—were either seized or made subject to government oversight.
Although officially secular, the state privileged Sunni Islam as a true marker of Turkish nationality, regardless of an individual’s actual level of religious devotion. In the alchemy of religion and identity in Kemalist Turkey, one was judged not so much by which religion one practiced—since piousness was considered a clear sign of backwardness and superstition—but rather by which religious heritage one rejected. Having a devout Sunni grandparent who might quietly complain about how much alcohol you drank was perhaps the truest marker of being both a good republican and a good Turk. “In that case we’re purging the past?” asks a character in Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s novel of interwar Istanbul, A Mind at Peace (1949). “Of course,” a friend replies, “but only where needed.”
Religious bodies outside the Sunni mainstream, such as Sufi brotherhoods or Alevis, an offshoot of Shi’a Islam, saw their meeting houses closed down or, worse, their beliefs condemned as inimical to the state. The historic Sufi lodge, or tekke, just off the Grande Rue had been established even before the Ottoman conquest of Istanbul, when Mevlevi dervishes came into the city bearing the teachings of their founder, the poet and mystic Rumi. Yet it too was closed as a site of worship. Sufi leaders, or sheikhs, were arrested for subversion. Virtually any episode of violence that involved religious men or women was seen as evidence of retrograde fanatics’ holding back the forces of progress.
One of Istanbul’s signature manmade sounds—the ezan, or Islamic call to prayer—was changed, too. The call was traditionally given in each neighborhood by a muezzin, whose powerful voice would summon the faithful to prayer from the minaret of a local mosque. Those with pleasing voices or melodic creativity were prized; those with less talent were the object of local gossip and complaints. After 1923, the task was made easier with the introduction of amplified public address systems. The ezan was now accompanied by the crackle and hiss of an electric microphone, a descant that floated above the proclamation of faith.
Men sacrifice rams on the tracks of the Taksim–Tünel trolley line in Pera, perhaps to inaugurate a new trolley car.
Beginning in early 1932, however, Turkish muezzins no longer chanted the Arabic words “Allahu akbar,” or “God is great.” As part of its reform program, the government mandated that the Turkish version of the phrase, “Tanrı uludur,” be used instead, with reversions to Arabic declared a criminal offense. The change was part of the government’s broader reform program of purging public space of old imperial influences, including Arabic and Persian elements in the Turkish language. The guttural vowels and the invocation of Tanrı—the sky god of Central Asian nomads—were also nods to a nationalist fantasy: that the truest ancestors of modern Turks were the pony-riding hordes who had once thundered over the Eurasian steppe. Huge crowds gathered to hear the first call to prayer in Turkish at the Sultanahmet mosque. Five of the other largest mosques in the city followed suit. On the Night of Power—the holy evening during Ramadan that commemorates the revelation of the Qur’an—seventy thousand people were packed in and around the Hagia Sophia mosque to hear the full sequence of Islamic prayers delivered for the first time in Turkish. In the new republic, even God had been nationalized, and from morning to night, 1,200 retrained muezzins proclaimed the fact.
Kemalism leapfrogged over Istanbul like it jumped over the Ottomans. Mustafa Kemal assiduously avoided the city until well after the declaration of the republic. He arrived for the first time since the war of independence on July 1, 1927, aboard the sultan’s former yacht, Erturul. He moored at Dolmabahçe Palace, which had been transformed into a presidential residence. The streets were lined with flags. Balconies were draped with bunting. Each summer thereafter, his comings and goings were attended by invited guests and dignitaries, a secular and republican re-creation of the sultan’s weekly procession to the mosque.
The yearly sighting of the president’s yacht and a flotilla of smaller vessels was an event as keenly anticipated as the migration of sardines in the Bosphorus. But outside of the president’s summer holidays, Istanbul and the old imperial identities it represented were put out of the new national consciousness. The republic was held to be the continuation of the Turks’ natural evolution as a nation, despite the half-millennium detour through Islamic imperialism. Turkish schoolbooks taught new generations of students to see their distant ancestors as Turkic tribesmen, even if their grandfathers had actually been Salonican greengrocers or Sarajevan tailors. The “sun language theory,” popular among Turkish linguists in the 1930s, posited that all human languages were descended from a Turkic ur-source. The ancient inhabitants of modern-day Turkey, from the Hittites forward, were brought into the family as well, recast as descendants of even more ancient proto-Turkic invaders from the east.
All of this entailed an act of personal and collective imagination. Muslims whose forebears hailed from Anatolia but also from the Caucasus, Albania, Bulgaria, Crimea, Greece, or other far-flung parts of the old empire suddenly transformed themselves from immigrants into indigenes. Under the Ottomans, few of these families would have dreamed of using “Turk” to describe themselves. That label was generally reserved for a country bumpkin more comfortable astride a donkey than in the sophisticated environs of Istanbul. It was a term that represented the very thing that enlightened Ottomans had despised most about their own empire—the benighted, n
omadic, and fitfully loyal peasants who inhabited the darkest reaches of Anatolia. One could be a Muslim and a subject of the sultan. No one wanted to be a Turk.
Mustafa Kemal’s great innovation—rooted in the theories of the writer Ziya Gökalp, the chief ideologist of Turkish nationalism—was to elevate the derogatory label into a new nationality. Living the ideals of the national revolution was meant to be a personal commitment on the part of each new citizen. “I am a Turk,” pupils were eventually instructed to chant at the beginning of each day’s classes. “I am honest. I am hardworking. My code is to protect those younger than me, respect my elders, and love my homeland and my nation more than myself. My quest is to rise higher and go farther. May my whole life be a gift to Turkishness.” The oath was not so much a pledge of allegiance as a promise of self-improvement. Few countries have gone through revolutions whose aim was to make everything seem so deeply ordinary—making Turkey and the Turks, in other words, a nation just like any other, with their own national liberation movement, national heroes, and national language. But the core of Kemalism was precisely that: a belief that the rump empire and its multilingual, multireligious subjects needed to be dragged, one soul at a time, into modernity.
The nation was hailed as both capacious and aboriginal. Like the simple act of professing belief in one God, a Muslim of Kurdish, Circassian, or Albanian background could participate in the nation-building project with a simple declaration of faith in the new nationalism. “Ne mutlu Türküm diyene,” said Mustafa Kemal in a speech on the tenth anniversary of the republic in 1933. “How happy is the person who says, ‘I am a Turk.’” It became one of his most famous dictums, engraved on stone monuments to the president everywhere. The phrase was at the same time descriptive and cautionary. It was an honor to be a Turkish citizen—the constitution defined all Turkish citizens as Turks, regardless of religion or heritage—but it made life easier if you claimed you were a Turk in an ethnic sense as well. Even a Greek or Armenian Christian, with a bit of inventiveness and a careful silence about who her parents had been before 1923, might manage the same feat.