Ataturk's Turkish treatment

ATATURK
An Intellectual Biography
Sukru Hanioglu
Princeton; 273 pages

The shadow of Mustafa Kemal "Ataturk", the first president of modern Turkey, loomed large over the protesters at Taksim Square earlier this year as they vented their discontent at, specifically, construction that would disfigure a public area but more generally against Prime Minister Recep Erdogan's conservative, Islamic-leaning pronouncements. Ataturk's ruthless programme of modernisation in the thirties fashioned a dynamic country from the dying Ottoman Empire - the "sick man of Europe" - and established it as a power to reckon with in European politics (his last name literally means "Father Turk" and was bestowed on him by the Turkish Grand National Assembly in 1934).

Not unlike Jawaharlal Nehru (incidentally a big admirer of Ataturk) and Mohandas Gandhi in India, Ataturk is something of a haloed figure in the Turkish national pantheon, around whom a quasi-religious personality cult has developed and persists in many parts of country. The result is that Turkish historiography often portrays him in messianic terms as a visionary, original thinker uninfluenced by the world around him. In this brilliant little "intellectual biography", first published in 2011 and reissued this year coincidentally around the time of the Taksim Square protests, Princeton professor M Sukru Hanioglu makes the point that Ataturk was not a "solitary genius". As he writes, "While the enormous impact of his leadership on the shape of the republic that sprang from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire is undeniable, it does not diminish Ataturk's contribution to Turkish history to recognise that his ideas and actions were moulded by the intellectual, social and political realities of his time."

Those realities were rooted in Ataturk's childhood in Salonica, situated in the far western end of the doddering Empire. A cultural crossroads of Europe, Asia and Africa, Salonica was not just a "latter-day tower of Babel [that] epitomised Ottoman cosmopolitanism more than any other city in the realm", it was also "fertile ground for the nationalist movements that mushroomed" in the empire's European provinces in the nineteenth century.

Critically, Salonica was also profoundly influenced by the reform programmes launched by the Ottoman government between 1839 and 1876. Generally known as the Tanzimat era, it was led by a class of Ottoman bureaucrats and it looked mainly to Europe for models for change. The intention, says Mr Hanioglu, was to "Westernise the Ottoman Empire and enter, as equals, into the post-Napoleonic club of European states". Thus, British industrialisation, Peter the Great's reforms, Prince Metternich's statecraft were all examined in the search for a path to enlightenment.

But the Empire in which Ataturk grew up was "as much of a European domain as it was Asiatic. Rumelia (European Turkey) and Anatolia (Asia Minor) formed the two central pillars of the state with Istanbul, the keystone in the arch," Mr Hanioglu writes.

Ataturk himself was the product of an eclectic education, first in a religious school to please his mother and then in a fashionable institution patronised by upper-class Muslims that encouraged critical thinking instead of rote learning. The seminal change, however, was when Ataturk enrolled in the military preparatory school. The military schools were, like the civil service, products of the reform era, with a curriculum that focused mostly on secular subjects.

The military was also the critical instrument of secularism, as the Young Turks, who ruled the caliphate for a decade and then crafted a secular nation-state from its dismembered remains, demonstrated (Ataturk was a second-generation participant of that seminal movement). Among the ideas that were in vogue in the late 19th/early 20th century Ottoman Empire was the German doctrine of vulgarmaterialismus, a crude conception of science as a panacea for all ills. Ataturk belonged to an educated generation that "saw in the doctrine of vulgar materialism an indispensable manual for constructing a prosperous, and irreligious modern society". The concept had little traction in Europe, but bore fruit in the chaos of Ottoman decline (where the German influence was strong in any case thanks to the Kaiser's overtures).

It was these scientist leanings that influenced Ataturk, a voracious autodidact by nature, to choose Western secularism in favour of claiming the Ottoman's caliphate legacy of pan-Islamic leadership when he became president. His readings of proponents of "vulgar materialism" and Italian positivism convinced him that, among other things, the driving force behind Islamic expansion was "not religious zeal but the rapacity of the Arab tribesmen".

From here, it was but one step towards reinterpreting Islam from a Turkish nationalist perspective and filtering this view of history into school textbooks. In Ataturk's version, Islam became a religion only when Muslim Arabs began subjugating non-Arab peoples and he supervised histories that described "torrents of Bedouins" moving towards prosperous Turkish cities. He strove to link the Turks to a European past, including their supposedly Caucasian origins.

Ataturk was rightly known as an "authoritarian savior"; he leveraged his military reputation to establish his vision for Turkey. He thought nothing of suborning history to his purposes (not unlike the Fascists in Germany around the same time) and reordered Turkish society - creating a new alphabet, dismissing Islamic strictures on a range of social behaviour - in ways that were iconoclastic and, in the long run, to Turkey's benefit. By setting his remarkable achievements within their historical context, Mr Hanioglu has not only done him a service, he has also provided the reader a better understanding of the contradictions of the fascinating country that is modern Turkey.