Mustafa Kemal was born in about 1880. We are uncertain of the day or month and have to guess even at the season: it may have been spring. Like most Muslims at the time, he bore only one name. He was Mustafa. Later, as a student, he assumed the surname “Kemal” (which means “perfection”). Later still, he obtained from his followers the name “Atatürk” (“Father of the Turks”) and was called the “Ghazi”: a warrior for Islam or the “Crusader.”
In large part he created his own name, and also his own history. He was born in the Balkans. In physical appearance he resembled the Balkan people amongst whom his family lived: Slavs and Albanians. But his parents spoke Turkish as their native language, and when Mustafa became a nationalist he claimed that he descended from Turkish nomads who had settled in the Balkans in the service of their sultan.
Actually there was no such thing as a Turkish ethnicity. Turkish was, if anything, a language group. The Turkish-speaking warrior hordes that poured out of Central Asia beginning a thousand years ago were of mixed blood. Animists at first, they converted over the course of years to Islam. One such war band, the followers (according to tradition) of a certain Osman (hence “osmanlis,” or, as they became, “Ottomans”), went on to build an empire that at its height half a millennium ago comprised the Arab-speaking Middle East, North Africa, and Balkan Europe all the way to the gates of Vienna.
The Ottoman Empire was a dynastic state: an assemblage of disparate lands and peoples having in common their subjection to the occupant of the Ottoman throne in Constantinople (today’s Istanbul). The empire contained between two and three dozen “nations”—depending upon how nationality is defined. As generation after generation of Turkish warriors settled on the estates that were their rewards for military service, new warriors were recruited from among the conquered peoples, and acquired the Turkish language and the Muslim faith. Bulgarian Christians, thus converted, formed over the years a particularly large—and ever larger—percentage of “Turks.”
The Ottoman Empire was a theocracy. It was a Muslim state, not a national one. A common religion provided the overriding loyalty that bound the peoples of the Arab-speaking and Turkish-speaking Muslim world together in one commonwealth. It was elsewhere—in the empire’s lands in Christian Europe—that internal turmoil erupted. It was there that the full force of nationalism, unleashed by the French Revolution and Napoleon, was felt. The Ottoman retreat from empire at the start of the eighteenth century became a rout by the end of the nineteenth. It was assumed by outside observers that the disintegration would lead to total collapse.
The chancellories of Europe hoped and believed that one day soon the Ottoman Empire would retire from all of its Balkan territories, but they worried that the scramble by the Great Powers to pick up the pieces might destroy the balance of power among them and lead to a general war. This was the famous “Eastern Question” that so bedevilled Great Power diplomacy throughout the nineteenth century. The concern proved to be justified. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, a consequence of the clash between Slavic and German peoples about who should have Bosnia when the Ottomans definitely lost it, led to the First World War.
Mustafa Kemal was born at the frontier: in Salonika, capital city of Macedonia. Salonika (today’s Greek city of Thessaloniki) was a city largely Jewish and Dunmeh (a Jewish sect that had converted to Islam centuries before). It was a center of Freemason activity. Beyond the effective control of the sultan in Constantinople and his secret police, it was alive with subversive ideas. Macedonia was a province at the edge of the empire, coveted by Greece, Bulgaria, and Serbia, a prey to brigandage, and Ottoman troops sent to garrison Macedonia were subject to disaffection.
Kemal came into the world at a frontier in time. His was the last generation of Ottoman army officers. The autocratic Sultan Abdul Hamid II (1842–1918) instituted reform and modernization in his own despotic way, but lost ground to the advancing forces of imperialist Europe. Kemal and his contemporaries saw the empire dying before their eyes. In their own young lifetimes before the First World War, the empire lost much of North Africa and the Balkans.
Like other ambitious young men with few other opportunities, Kemal sought out a military career. The army provided an education and also an engine of change in an otherwise backwards state. Secret societies provided the only outlet for political expression in Abdul Hamid’s domains, and, for evident reasons, the military secret societies proved the most effective. Modernisation was the theme of their discourse, and warding off European control was their goal. As a young officer, Kemal played a notable role in secret society affairs, but he was eclipsed by the leaders of a group called the Committee for Union and Progress (CUP), more generally known as the “Young Turkey” party.
In the turbulent Macedonia of 1908, the Young Turks sparked off a revolt, followed by a coup d’état in 1913 that brought them to supreme power. They ruled thereafter with a puppet sultan, a brother of the deposed Abdul Hamid. The most conspicuous of the Young Turks, a self-promoting young officer named Enver who married the sultan’s niece and made himself minister of war, was well aware of Kemal’s abilities and commanding personality, and jealously made sure that he received only obscure appointments.
In power, the Young Turks were uncertain how to go about modernizing the ramshackle empire. Beforehand, they had committed to a partnership among all the two or three dozen peoples of the empire. The Young Turk triumph therefore was greeted with enthusiasm by those released from Abdul Hamid’s tyranny. In Europe, too, there were many well-wishers; the British foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, was one of those who hoped the Young Turks would prove to be liberal reformers.
The CUP government opted for the rule of Turkish-speaking Muslims (perhaps 40 percent of the empire’s population) over Arab-speakers (perhaps another 40 percent) and others. Later Enver was to pursue an imperial fantasy: uniting his Turkish-speaking subjects with Turkish-speaking Central Asia so as to form a Turanian state stretching from the Mediterranean to the Chinese frontier.
In pursuit of yet another fantasy, Enver led his colleagues to enter the First World War—which was entirely unnecessary and in the end cost the empire its existence —and to bet on a German victory, which turned out to be a losing wager. Kemal, though an outsider powerless to change government policy, was never prey to such delusions. He was opposed to the war.
Despite Enver’s best efforts, Kemal was given a chance to distinguish himself in the war. It was in 1915, when Allied troops invaded the Gallipoli peninsula, the European shore of the Dardanelles strait that leads from the Mediterranean via the Sea of Marmara, the Bosporus Strait, and Constantinople to the Black Sea. In overall command of the defense was a German general, Liman von Sanders, and he gave Kemal a battlefield command.
With the eye of a tactical genius, Kemal saw the key position on the peninsula, seized the high ground, and held it. Gallipoli, much written about since in the English-speaking world as an Allied failure and an historic tragedy, is remembered in Turkey as a triumph. Kemal emerged from it, and from the entire 1914–18 conflict, as a war hero of the Ottoman armies.
The defeated Central Powers—Germany, Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire—signed separate surrenders in the autumn of 1918. The Young Turkey leaders fled Constantinople and left the country. The feeble sultan was willing to agree to any terms imposed by the Allies, so long as he was allowed to retain his throne. In the event, these terms were harsh almost to the point of being Carthaginian. After wrangling among themselves for almost two years, the Allies forced the sultan’s government to sign the Treaty of Sèvres in the summer of 1920, leaving the Turks very little in the way of self-rule.
In 1919 Kemal left for the interior of Asia Minor—what is now Turkey—on an official commission. He found Turkish army groups there that still were intact. In a move reminiscent of Charles de Gaulle, leaving France for London in 1940 after securing the allegiance to himself of French officers, who ranked above him, in order to carry on the battle, Kemal solicited and obtained the support of the commanders of these army groups. Thus began the War of Independence (1919–23) that led to the establishment, by Mustafa Kemal, of the Turkish Republic.
Britain, France, and the other main Allies had been forced by domestic public opinion and by sentiment within their armed forces to demobilize soon after hostilities ceased. They therefore commissioned Greece to employ its armed forces to impose Allied terms on Turkey. Greece was a principal beneficiary of those terms. But the landing of the hated Christian Greek soldiers in Asia Minor aroused passion in Turkish-speaking Muslims. Turks turned their backs on the sultan and rallied instead to Kemal’s nationalist cause.
In defeating the Greeks, Kemal displayed strategic genius. He personally took responsibility—when nobody else would—for ordering his Turkish armies to abandon strategic locations in order to retreat deep into the interior of the country to give battle where he chose, with backs to the wall.
He also showed himself a master of diplomacy in playing off the Allies—Britain, France, and Italy—against one another, and Communist Russia against all of them. His toughness was evident in his dealings with the Soviets, taking what he needed from then and essentially giving nothing in return. He entertained no illusions about their ideology. He formed an “official” Communist party, loyal to himself, that could be joined by those who genuinely believed in Communism. A different fate was in store for those who took their directions from Moscow. A delegation of Turkish Communist officials that arrived from Russia was murdered. Their bodies were dumped in the harbor of Trabzon on the Black Sea. Local thugs did it, believing it, probably correctly, to be Kemal’s desire. Later Kemal’s soldiers killed the thugs.
Kemal was supremely disciplined in his approach to politics. In making peace with the Allies in 1922–23, he resisted the temptation to raise his demands when he won. Early on, he had outlined the terms he felt he needed, and never wavered from them.
The Ottoman Empire had lost its Arab-speaking territories in the war. Apart from a disputed border province in the south, Kemal did not want them back. To be a modern country, Turkey would have to be a nation-state. In turn, that required a relatively homogeneous population, living in a coherent territory. To Kemal, the empire was a burden to be cast away. Out of its heart, he cut a cohesive new nation.
A British traveller in Ottoman writing before the First World War began his book, “How many people realize, when they speak of Turkey and the Turks, that there is no such place and no such people?” That is one of the things that Kemal changed. Since 1923, there has been a Turkish state and a Turkish people. And Mustafa Kemal did it.
For Mustafa Kemal the conquering Ghazi, fighting the War of Independence was somewhat like riding a tiger. The forces that carried him to victory were not his own, and might well consume him in the hour of triumph. The Muslim mullahs were among the chief supporters of Kemal’s revolt, enflamed by the Greek Christian landing. Yet Kemal aimed at disestablishing Islam in Turkey. The Young Turkey network had gone underground in 1918 in the autumn of defeat. It remained intact and provided an organizational structure for the nationalist cause. But its first loyalty was to Enver, who schemed to return to contest Kemal’s leadership.
The army was the Ghazi’s chief instrument, but its commanders expected to participate in a collegial leadership, while Kemal was a dominating personality who could not tolerate equals. From men as from women, he demanded and expected complete loyalty, unquestioning obedience, and what one can only call worshipful admiration.
Victory over the Allies in 1923 therefore was only the beginning. Mustafa Kemal turned next to the taming of his supporters. In scrupulous detail, Mango provides an account of the distasteful episodes in which Kemal drove old friends, allies, and colleagues out of public life. The low point was reached in purge trials that resulted in the hanging of innocents.
Secure in his position as dictatorial president, with a rubber-stamp parliament, a rubber-stamp single political party, and a firm control of an adoring army, Kemal left administration and details to his admirably efficient prime minister Ismet Inonu. Kemal had accumulated as much power in himself to change his country as any ruler possibly could have. It was, besides, really his country: he had created it himself.
Unlike third-world leaders today who argue that they can modernize their countries while at the same time retaining their traditional cultures, Kemal believed it necessary to go the whole way. His program was for Turks to become Europeans, and it was breathtaking in its sweep. He abolished the caliphate, and changed the country from a theocracy to a secular republic. He moved its capital city from Istanbul inland to Ankara. He instituted a unified secular education system. He introduced a civil code and emancipated women. He changed the sabbath from Friday to Sunday. He broke the Islamic ban on reproducing human images; statues and pictures were introduced. So was Western music. He ended the ban on alcohol and encouraged the growth of a wine industry. Sermons were to be delivered in the language of the country, Turkish, and no longer in Arabic. Then there was the change to the Latin alphabet and to Western numerals; the introduction of new words; the literacy drive. The traditional head piece, the fez, was banned. It was a total cultural revolution, imposed by one man’s iron will and by the force of an army.
Kemal’s approach—commanding people to behave in a modern way—still is being tested. It has brought Turkey to the verge of being European. But a devotion to religion and to the old ways remains. An elite, especially along the coast, has become thoroughly Western; in the interior there are many who have not.
Kemal was a great soldier, a great diplomat, and a great world statesman.; above all he was a man of the Enlightenment, and “the Enlightenment was not made by saints.”
Atatürk’s message is that East and West can meet on the ground of universal secular values and mutual respect, that nationalism is compatible with peace, that human reason is the only true guide in life.
It says much for the enduring value of his legacy that, despite his great flaws as a human being and the dark side of his dictatorial and often vindictive politics, his army remains loyal to him. Nearly eighty years after he led them to victory, his troops still would follow him to the ends of the earth.