The only people who hated the Ottoman Empire more than the West were Mustafa Kemal and his Kemalists. Atatürk believed, in part, that the backwardness of the Ottoman Empire had allowed for its defeat by the West. Their self-hatred inspired a renewal. Atatürk (which means “father of the Turks,” a name he took in 1934) created not only a new state but a new “Turk,” one with an identity, history, and philosophy of life strong enough to hold together a nation that did not exist. He drew on the ideas of an ideologue named Ziya G?kalp, who had been working on how to imagine the Ottoman religions, ethnicities, and cultures as one “nation”—“a community of individuals who have in common their language, religion, ethics, and aesthetics, acquired through a common education.” This inclusive worldview would be subject to Atatürk’s revisions. The “republic must be forced through by other means before the opposition had time to unite,” Atatürk said. “A debate on it might be fatal.” G?kalp had struggled to reconcile Islam, nationalism, and modernity, without racial undertones or religious authoritarianism. Atatürk opted for Turkism, a nationalism based on race, and laicism, a social system based on extreme secularism, for which Atatürk would be greatly admired by both Hitler and Mussolini.
The creation of the new Turk was a decidedly undemocratic process. Newspapers were closed, opposition members killed, history rewritten. Islam, Atatürk avowed, was the opposite of “modernity.” It would have to be diminished, not destroyed. Atatürk recognized Islam’s importance in fusing the new identity: they were Muslims after all, and the Christianity of the Greeks and Armenians was seen as a threat to the nascent nationalism. Above all, in communities long directed by their imams or their priests, the secular bureaucratic “state” would be privileged over religious leaders. So mosques were seized along with the properties belonging to churches. Sufi tekkes were shut down. Alevism was shunned. Drinking alcohol in public was permitted; buffalo-drawn carts were not. The script was changed from Arabic to roman, and the language dramatically altered to eliminate Persian and Arabic words, rendering millions of people illiterate overnight. Most famously, the veil was discouraged as retrograde, and the charismatic red fez was banned. For weeks, many men in Anatolia didn’t even leave the house, so scandalized were they by the prospect of wearing a Western hat; others wrapped cloth around it and called it a turban; local politicians, upon seeing a fez-wearing rebel in the street, would immediately report him to the authorities. Atatürk deeply hated those conical hats:
“Gentlemen,” Atatürk said in 1927, “it was necessary to abolish the fez, which sat on the heads of our nation as an emblem of ignorance, negligence, fanaticism and hatred of progress and civilization. [It was necessary] to accept in its place the hat, the headgear used by the whole civilized world; and in this way, to demonstrate that the Turkish nation, in its mentality as in other respects, in no way diverges from civilized social life.”
The “Turk,” meanwhile, was defined as modern, Muslim but specifically Sunni Muslim, and, most important, Turkic. The cosmopolitanism of Constantinople was deliberately destroyed. “Turkish schoolbooks taught new generations of students to see their distant ancestors as Turkic tribesmen, even if their grandfathers had actually been Salonican greengrocers or Sarajevan tailors,” the historian Charles King writes. “Under the Ottomans, few of these families would have dreamed of using ‘Turk’ to describe themselves. That label was generally reserved for a country bumpkin more comfortable astride a donkey than in the sophisticated environs of Istanbul.”
To further unify the new Turks, Atatürk posited something called the Sun Language Theory, which was, in the words of the anthropologist Ay?e Gül Alt?nay, “a racialized conception of the history of all civilization [italics mine] at the center of which lay the Turkish race, culture and language.” Even groups like the Kurds, this new history argued, were in denial of their true Turkish identity. Atatürk demanded his people adopt a four-volume history called the Turkish History Thesis, which stated that their ancestors long ago descended from ancient peoples of Central Asia who had migrated to Anatolia, India, and China, where they disseminated their ancient culture. Among their descendants, in fact, were the Hittites of Anatolia, which conveniently allowed Atatürk to lay claim to a land then occupied by Greeks and Armenians and Kurds. Turkish, meanwhile, was declared a language from which many other languages had been derived, including Finnish and Hungarian, which happily connected Turks and Turkishness to the West. The Turks’ most important chapter in history, therefore, was no longer its six hundred years as the Ottoman Empire; Atatürk elevated Central Asia’s significance to marginalize Ottoman and Islamic influence. To make this point, Atatürk moved the capital from grand Constantinople to a terrible plain in Anatolia, closer to the Turks’ Hittite roots. (The writer Christopher de Bellaigue called Ankara “a bare hillock on which to build a new cult.”) Another of Atatürk’s adopted daughters, Afet, set about proving scientifically that Turks—despite their newfound Central Asian origins—were not from the “yellow” race but the “white” one. Atatürk and his band of adopted daughters rewrote Turkish history, and invented a people.
An Ottoman aesthetic that had evolved over multiple centuries would be replaced with a Kemalist one dreamt up in only a few years. Even tulips became suspect. In 1933, scholars of Turkey’s architectural revolution wrote, “Turkish architects today abandoned domes, floral ornaments and tile decoration. They are marching on a new and logical path.” To these modernizers, this path meant mowing down all of the unique artistic techniques of the Ottoman past in order to embrace the bland, modern styles of everyone else in the present. “The temples that the Egyptians constructed for deities or the acropolis that the Greeks built for their Gods … or the fountains and mosques of the Turks,” wrote Aptullah Ziya, an art critic, in 1932, “cannot be the source of art in the twentieth century, when airplanes are hovering in the skies and ocean liners are crossing the sea at phenomenal speeds.”