Ataturk Quotes

In Turkey, the Kamalist elite ignored the religious leadership, the countryside, and the Kurds. Creating groups of very unhappy people who cohered into a new political opposition. The same happened in Israel, and Menachem Begin connected with them. Today, both Erdogan and Netanyahu rule from a support base that is more religious, more rural, and less educated, where honor and nationalism are important. That makes the relationship between the two very hard.

The reason Ataturk, Kemal Ataturk was and is so highly reputed, is he was attempting to modernize… That’s not the right word. Well, it is. For lack of a better way of saying it, he was trying to make Islam compatible with the modern twentieth century world.

There is much to justify Turkey's reverence for Ataturk. He is the force that allowed Turkey to rise from the ashes of defeat and emerge as a vibrant new nation.

No Muslim country has ever done as much as Turkey to make itself over in the image of a European nation-state; the country's westernised elite brutally imposed secularism, among other things, on its devout population of peasants.

Shakespeare wrote, Einstein thought, Ataturk built.

For five hundred years these rules and theories of an Arab sheik and the interpretations of generations of lazy, good-for-nothing priests have decided the civil and the criminal law of Turkey. They had decided the form of the constitution, the details of the lives of each Turk, his food, his hours of rising and sleeping, the shape of his clothes, the routine of the midwife who produced his children, what he learnt in his schools, his customs, his thoughts, even his most intimate habits … Possibly it might have suited tribes of nomads in the desert. It was no good for a modern progressive State.

I felt grateful to Ataturk that my parents were so well educated, that they weren't held back by superstition or religion, that they were true scientists who taught me how to read when I was three and never doubted that I could become a writer.

My father believed very strongly in Ataturk. Ataturk was a very powerful man and a man of great vision.

Secularism is the crucial difference between Turkey and the rest of the Muslim world.

Ataturk sent several Turkish staff officers to Afghanistan, helped them build their own army.

The imams are ignorant and are misconstruing the Prophet's words regarding science…. science is for the elite and religion was for the masses …. It is absurd that men should take 4 wives and have as many concubines as they wished sanctioned by the imams. If I were a woman, I would embrace atheism and never become a Moslem.

My father was in Ataturk's closest group. They lived together during the War of Liberation in Turkey.

My father was a very religious person. And he prayed five times a day. And he did that throughout his relationship with Ataturk - at a time when it was very brave to do because Ataturk was cutting off the heads of the imams. And people thought that that was foolhardy of my father.

Ataturk approved of the mevlevi dervish approach to God as being 'an expression of Turkish genius' that reclaimed Islam from what he saw as hide-bound, backward Arab tradition.