Aliens in This World

In 1881, a boy known simply as Mustafa was born in Thessaloniki — then a city not of Greece, but of the Ottoman Empire. His father, Ali Riza, died while Mustafa was still young; so he was raised by his mother, Zubeyda. (None of these people had surnames, folks. Surnames just weren’t a feature of the culture then.)

Mustafa was first sent to a traditional madrassa-style school; but was soon switched into a modern school. This enabled him to enter a military high school in 1893. There his math teacher gave him the byname “Kemal”, perfection, for his outstanding performance. Thus his name changed to Mustafa Kemal.

Mustafa Kemal went on to attend the army officer academy and serve as an officer. But when posted in Damascus (yes, that was also part of the Ottoman Empire then, and Syria didn’t even exist), he joined up with a secret army political society. In 1908, this group launched a coup which toppled the Sultan from his throne. (The Ottoman Empire stayed in business for the moment, though.) Mustafa Kemal’s army career took him higher and higher, until he became a national hero for being the colonel responsible for causing the Brits and their allies to suffer disaster in the Dardanelles. (Including Gallipoli, IIRC.) This won him his generalship. (And the title “Pasha”.)

But World War I didn’t go particularly well for the Ottoman Empire as a whole, and Mustafa Kemal Pasha led a revolution — a Turkish war of independence — that brought down the weakened Ottoman Empire. (The Lausanne Treaty of 1923 apparently carved off the non-Turkish bits of the old Ottoman Empire, but agreed to let Turkey be.) Mustafa Kemal Pasha became Turkey’s first president. He served as president for fifteen years, until his death.

In the Ottoman Empire’s place, he built modern Turkey as a completely secular state. Completely secular, because he did not think Turkey could prosper under oppressive sharia law and Muslim custom, and because he didn’t particularly want to play with the new Muslim fundamentalists.

Women were to have equal rights and education, and they were forbidden to wear the veil. Polygamy was abolished. The Turkish language was to be written in the Latin alphabet, not the Arabic one, to facilitate relations with the progressive half of the world. But while Turkish language and culture were to be promoted, all sorts of education, knowledge and industry from the European world were also to be spread. He also tried to spread democracy, but felt that Muslim fundamentalism prevented him from allowing Turkey to become a democratic society.

In 1934, a law was passed to make all Turkish people adopt surnames. The National Assembly voted Mustafa Kemal Pasha the surname “Ataturk”, meaning “Father of the Turks”. He died in 1938.

Clearly, there’s a lot of stuff going on today in Turkey that Ataturk wouldn’t approve of.

But then again, how much can we approve of Ataturk? Was his bottling up of Islam the only way? Did his reforms truly free Christians, Jews, and other non-Islamic peoples to practice their religions, or did he just modernize dhimmitude? Hard to say. What about his attempt to make Turkish culture and language replace that of the Kurds, Greeks, Armenians, and other ethnic minorities? What about some of his crazier plans and statements? Clearly, some of the lunacy reaped by today’s Turkey is of Ataturk’s sowing.

So it should be interesting to see the Pope visit the tomb of Ataturk, as he is scheduled to do. Will he just politely lay a wreath on the bones of the father of that country? Or will he have something to say?