Turkish Awakening Read Online Free Page A

referred to as the ‘village mentality’ of Anatolia.
    After the First World War, Atatürk brought Turkey back from the brink of collapse. The country was shaken by defeat in the war, under a crumbling Ottoman excuse for a government. After the precarious victory in the war of independence which followed, Atatürk decided that Turkey needed a healthy dose of radical, modern secularism to present a progressive face to Western challengers. Many people equate Atatürk’s push to modernise with a specifically anti-Islamic agenda, but this is not true. He was anti-backwardness, be that the result of religious practice or the broader traditional mores which included superstition, antiquated hierarchies, unbending social etiquette and a general distrust of outsiders and their ways. His reforms were not targeted mainly against religion per se but against the stagnant conservatism that regarded things like scientific education and industrialisation with the utmost suspicion. It is easy to see why Atatürk felt that efforts to nurture a gradual, cultural change might prove too uncertain and lengthy to risk at such a formative time, and that radical steps were necessary; he masterminded a kind of Emergency Enlightenment, which was basically imposed on the Turkish population. While his intentions were admirable, it is also easy to see why such an abrupt departure was too artificial to remain ingrained in a Muslim nation forever. The strength with which Kemalists cling to Atatürk’s ideals is testament to the force of his vision, but it is also seriously outdated and over-rigid. Law 5816 exists to punish ‘crimes committed against Atatürk’, some eighty years after his death. This is not just a symbolic law: people have beenimprisoned for insulting Atatürk or indeed the ideology of Kemalism. Professor Atilla Yayla, an academic from Ankara University, was suspended from his post, tried and sentenced to fifteen months in 2008 for suggesting that the early Turkish republic was less progressive than it is often portrayed in undergraduate textbooks. Overt or covert, criticism of Ataturk is seen as nothing less than blasphemy.
    From a certain point of view a religious analogy is completely inappropriate here, but actually it is striking how similar the Kemalists are to evangelicals, following the inspiration of a quasi-prophet – the only difference being that the gospel of Secularism is preached. Kemalists are as devoted to Atatürk and his doctrine as religious fanatics are to their idols, and his life story, teachings and speeches are taught extensively and emotionally from kindergarten up to university. When a man is a demigod and the country of his making an ideological utopia, laws which punish those who insult him are not so surprising. In addition to Law 5816, there is another law which has put scores of journalists and academics behind bars: Article 301, which punishes those who insult Turkishness. Two notable Turks who have been prosecuted under this law are Hrant Dink, the Turkish-Armenian journalist whose murder in 2007 is now being reinvestigated under suspicion that it was the product of a major criminal conspiracy, and Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk, who is no longer welcome in this country after he called upon Turkey to accept responsibility for an Armenian genocide.
    Kemalism and Turkish patriotism are not synonymous, but it is easier to understand the strength of Turks’ feelings towards Turkey when you can understand the strength ofAtatürk’s legacy. Kemalism has many of the characteristics of a cult – albeit one forged with the best of intentions, for the protection and indeed survival of a nation on the brink of destruction. For a country still insecure about its status, still haunted by the crisis that galvanised the new republic into being from the wreckage of the (Islamic) Ottoman Empire, institutional secularism is seen by many Turks as the defining and protective quality of the nation, to be preserved at all