Ataturk by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: nld
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780691151090
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

7

Nationalism and Kemalism

The elimination of Islam as an ideological pillar of the main Ottoman successor state created a legitimacy vacuum at the center of the regime. Although the policy of Ottomanization had already diminished the role of religion within official state ideology in the nineteenth century—citizenship, for example, was not defined in denominational terms—Islam nonetheless maintained its pride of place in official ideology until the very end of the empire. The new republic, however, strove to remove religion from the public sphere and confine it entirely to the private realm. An effective modern state, so the argument went, no longer required the fiction of religion in order to gain the support of its populace. To illustrate the point, Mustafa Kemal cited the example of Jesus, describing him as “a weak ruler . . . who need[ed] religion to uphold his government.”1 Likewise, the founder of the republic is said to have developed an admiration for the first Umayyad Caliph, the sharpwitted Mu‘āwiya I (d. 680), who rose to prominence through cunning political maneuvers at the expense of his more pious rivals.2 Mustafa Kemal himself wished to see religion “at the bottom of the sea.”3 However, he knew well that he needed a replacement for it. Crass scientism, so obviously deficient when it came to the formation of identity, would not suffice as the sole precept of the new state ideology. Furthermore, the abolition of the sultanate and the dissolution of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) had given rise to a second void necessitating the creation of substitute foci for popular allegiance—both personal and institutional. Mustafa Kemal sought to fill this lacuna with a new civic religion buttressed by a number of cults.

The new ideology, unsurprisingly, was a modified, scientifically sanctioned version of Turkish nationalism. There were several associated cults: a Turkish cult of reason, reminiscent of those of the French and American revolutions, based on Enlightenment ideas as well as on late nineteenth and early twentieth century scientism; an institutional cult of the republic, which aspired to create a sentiment reminiscent of the French esprit républicain; a personality cult surrounding Mustafa Kemal, “the savior Gazi”; and a further institutional cult around his own Republican People’s Party. In the 1930s, his followers and party pulled together various strands of these cults to create Kemalism, an all-encompassing state ideology based on the sayings and writings of Mustafa Kemal.4

The new Turkish nationalism had its roots in the Turkism that had gained substantial ground in Ottoman intellectual circles from the last quarter of the nineteenth century onward, but it carried this nascent current to new heights. Mustafa Kemal wished to infuse Turkish nationalism with scientism, fashionable racial concepts, and popular Darwinian theories of evolution. This reinvigorated form of nationalism, it was assumed, would supersede religion in the formation of identity. An official history book of the time emphasized that Turks should “rectify their thoughts by abandoning superstitions” that were based mainly on “Jewish myths” and understand that their evolution stemmed from “deep racial roots.

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