Turkish Quotes

Armenian dissidents in Turkey formed military units like Hinchak which during the First World War, attacked unarmed Turkish Muslim Villages behind the front lines. The object of the Armenians was to have turkey lose the war and obtain their own ethnic state afterwards. The atrocities committed by the Armenians were unfortunately matched by the Turks in what is now referred to as the “Armenian Genocide”. The hatred still prevails – see {588211}.

In the rest of the Islamic world, the call to prayer was said in Arabic regardless of the national language. This reform was castigated by throughout the Islamic world who wanted Arabic to be the only language for Muslim religious communications. This was not unlike the insistence that they Catholic Church had maintained that all scripture was read in Latin and would not allow Bibles or mass to be said in any other language.

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.