Mustafa Kemal Ataturk Quotes
A nation which does not make pictures, a nation which does not make statues, a nation which does not practice science, such a nation, one must admit, has no place on the highroad of civilization. But our nation with its true qualities deserves to become and will become civilized and progressive.
This was a radical speech for the time, suggesting reforms that had been unthinkable to most Turks. Although it is not prohibited by the Koran and early Islamic artists made some of the greatest paintings and depictions of people, fundamentalists gained control of Islam and interpreted any statue as an idol that could be worshipped and this generalized to Islamic art in general where people ceased to be depicted and even animal depictions were rare. Muslim art developed incredible geometric intricacy but tended not to depict anything that is real. This extended to photography and illustrations in books including textbooks. At the same time, not unlike some Christian and Jewish Fundamentalists, the Muslim fundamentalists opposed science and the teaching thereof on the grounds that all authentic knowledge was in the Koran and anything else was not only false but also heretical. So this speech was a type of “declaration of war” against the established religious order and culture.
Kemal Ataturk, 1881-1938, 1st President and founder of the Turkish Republic, Speech, Orient Cinema, Bursa, 1923
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At the time, Muslim clerics had a great deal of influence and in many cases legal control over all facets of Turkish society much as exists in other Islamic societies today. They even controlled what was taught in the schools. Remarkably, without bloodshed, Ataturk broke both the power and the influence of the clerics on all official and public activities. Many Turkish Muslims even developed a type of reformed Islam with the relationship between the individual and the clerics one of parity much like Protestant churches in the West. At the same time there was a more orthodox part of the population and while they sent their children to religious schools, they also attended public schools so even the orthodox Muslims in Turkey learned science and modern subjects which are still not taught in most Islamic schools and madrassas.
In 1925 his administration had passed a law banning the wearing of the traditional Muslim hat.
After Turkey’s defeat in WWI, some Turkish leaders like Riza Nur wanted Turkey to become a colony of America. This they believed would hasten Turkey’s development and modernization.
His hope that the elite intelligentsia would lead the nation was thwarted by Islamic fundamentalism which destroyed most of Pakistan education by only teaching religion in its Madrassas and not allowing the leadership to have compulsory education. There has been an enormous brain drain with a huge number of the Pakistani intelligentsia on which Jinnah pinned his hopes, had no opportunity in Pakistan and emigrated to the United Kingdom and America.
Ataturk wanted to change the Turkish alphabet from Arabic to Latin characters. Experts estimated that it would take at least 15 years. Ataturk allowed no parallel usage, made it illegal for any documents or signs to be written in Arabic, and it was done in 3 months. The benefit was that Arabic took much longer to learn. Relatively few people could read or write. Arabic had been imposed on the Turkish language. Printing with movable type was much more difficult in Arabic and Atatuk wanted many more books published and read. Soon Turkey had the highest literacy rate in the Islamic world, and rivaled that of most Western nations. Making the sudden change not only had the advantage of fixating the entire society on the change, but did not allow opponents of the change (of which there were many) —especially the Islamic clergy many of whom felt that the Koran was the only book that people should be allowed to read.
10 centuries ago was a time when the Arabs were far more advanced and modern than other cultures including the Christian West that was in the Dark Ages. However, in the 12th century there was a “closing”—a narrowing of allowable Islamic thinking, and since then, Islamic people have had great difficulty with change or modernity. Not all Muslim nations are equally rigid but the Arabs are at the extreme among Islamic counties.
Ataturk, trying to modernize Turkey was attempting it in a single generation and to a great extent succeeded.
Ataturk as part of his radical reforms elevated secular teachers to a very high social status and moved science and engineering into the curriculum over the objections of traditionalists and Islamic fundamentalists, and he did this in an overwhelmingly Muslim country.
Kemal Atatürk was a Turkish field marshal, revolutionary statesman, author, and the founding father of the Republic of Turkey, serving as its first president from 1923 until his death in 1938. He undertook sweeping progressive reforms, which modernized Turkey into a secular, industrial nation. Ideologically a secularist and nationalist, his policies and theories became known as Kemalism. Due to his military and political accomplishments, Atatürk is regarded as one of the most important political leaders of the 20th century.
