Erdogan, the anti-Ataturk.

• Author: Bakshian, Aram, Jr.
• Position: Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Kemal Ataturk - Essay

This November 10, at precisely 9:05 a.m., for the seventy-fifth time in the history of the Turkish Republic, the nation will grind to a halt. In Istanbul, for sixty seconds sirens will drone, ferryboat horns will blare in the Golden Horn and traffic will freeze. Throughout the country, millions of ordinary Turks will stand still and mute to mark the death anniversary of their nation's founding father. It is an impressive moment, and deservedly so. Mustafa Kemal, known to history as Kemal Ataturk ("Father of the Turks"), was an indomitable blend of soldier, diplomat, politician, intellectual and nation builder. One of the twentieth century's most remarkable leaders, he was a man of iron will and incredible vision.

A war hero even as the Ottoman Empire he served crumbled around him, Ataturk was instrumental in defeating an invading British army at Gallipoli. At the end of World War I, when the victorious Allies occupied Istanbul and began to partition Ottoman territory, he took to the Anatolian heartland, forged a new citizen army, routed Greek forces that had seized Smyrna (now Izmir) and much adjoining Turkish territory, and then drove the Allied occupation forces out of Istanbul. But that was only the beginning. As president of his own newly minted, custom-designed Turkish Republic, with inspired eloquence and brute force, he dragged his fellow countrymen, many of them literally kicking and screaming, into the twentieth century. The Turkish language was modernized and systematized. The Latin alphabet replaced an archaic Arabic script. Massive industrial, education and infrastructure initiatives were launched and a new sense of Turkish identity--part authentic, part invented in rewritten history textbooks--replaced the old Ottoman way of thinking. In most respects, this was a great plus for the vast majority of poor urban and rural Turks. Under the Ottoman Empire, even in the glory days when it ruled large chunks of Europe, Asia and Africa, and was mistress of the Mediterranean, most ordinary Turks were part of the impoverished peasant masses. Commerce, finance and other professions were monopolized by a small, educated elite, many--in some cases, most--of them non-Muslim Greeks, Armenians and Jews.

The end of the empire changed all that. At times it was not a pretty picture; transforming the truncated remains of the multiethnic Ottoman Empire into a cohesive, racially rooted nation-state was achieved at great human cost and more than a little tampering with historical truth. While Ataturk had condemned the extermination of Armenians during World War I by his Young Turk predecessors, calling it a "shameful act," he presided over a brutal but less horrific forced mass transfer of populations in which Anatolian Greeks--who, like the Armenians, had lived there for centuries before the arrival of the first nomadic Turkic invaders--were driven from their homes. The same fate, it is worth noting, awaited a smaller number of ethnic Turks living in Greek territory.

The only substantial minority that remained in modern Turkey were the Kurds, fellow Muslims but with their own language and customs, who are still a source of considerable friction today. Even they were subjected to a clumsy attempt at what might be called bureaucratic assimilation. The republic invented a new name for them: until a few years ago, they were officially classified as "mountain Turks," denied a legitimate identity of their own.

A charismatic speaker and popular hero, Ataturk stumped the republic, defining a new sense of "Turkishness" and denouncing anything and everything he considered divisive or reactionary--from fez and veil to traditional Ottoman music and religious orders. Like Peter the Great in Russia two centuries before, he was determined to overcome centuries of backwardness and decline, by brute force if necessary--and it often was. Also like Peter the Great, he had seen the greater world outside his homeland, and he liked what he saw. Once firmly in power in the mid-1920s, he would declare:

I have no religion, and at times I wish all religions at the bottom of the sea. He is a weak ruler who needs religion to uphold his government; it is as if he would catch his people in a trap. My people are going to learn the principles of democracy, the dictates of truth and the teachings of science. Superstition must go. Only it didn't. Today, many informed observers feel that Ataturk's achievement is at risk, threatened by a rising Islamist tide led by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, an unashamed---and historically uninformed--admirer of an idealized version of the Ottoman-Islamic past that exists mainly in his own imagination. It is both significant and ironic that the mass anti-Erdogan protests that swept Turkey this June were initially triggered by his arbitrary decision to destroy Gezi Park, one of Istanbul's few remaining green areas, to replace it with a "replica" of Ottoman-era military barracks and a shopping mall. Other plans included building an enormous new mosque in adjoining Taksim Square, site of the Monument of the Republic.

Why this nostalgia for a romanticized, not to say imaginary, Ottoman-Islamic past? Perhaps it begins with a deep sense of grievance on the part of Turkish Islamists, shared by their brethren throughout the Middle East--the belief that a golden age of Islamic dominance was destroyed by the forces of Western Christianity and Western technology. Whatever is driving this nostalgia for a romanticized past of Islamic vibrancy and power, it has become a compelling force in modern Turkish politics. The late Samuel P. Huntington of Harvard, a leading political scientist of our time, called Turkey a "torn country"--a nation belonging culturally to a particular civilization but whose leaders wish to redefine it as belonging to another. Hence, any...