The Modern Middle East (11 page)

The 1910s and 1920s were periods of profound international change, with new countries being born and old empires dying. The Middle East emerged from the postwar settlements of the 1920s with a new map, one almost unrecognizable compared to the map of the prewar era. Concurrently, it saw the participation of a host of new international actors—Britain, France, the League of Nations, and, to a much lesser extent, the United States—that previously had been only marginally interested in the region. By the time the 1920s drew to a close, the dust had almost all settled. Most of the outstanding border issues—for example, the question of whether the oil-rich, predominantly Kurdish city of Mosul would be part of Turkey or Iraq—were settled by 1925 (the British saw to it that Mosul remained in Iraq). Only one territorial swap occurred later, when Alexandretta was transferred from Syria to Turkey in 1939.

The 1930s, by contrast, were marked less by international changes, at least in the Middle East, than by a consolidation of the domestic political dynamics set in motion in the 1920s. Of the countries of the Middle East, Transjordan, Syria, and Lebanon did not necessarily experience significant changes, remaining mandatory territories and becoming independent only in the 1940s. Egypt also remained in a state of semicolonial submission to Britain, and the Egyptian world would not be turned upside down by Nasserism until after 1952. But far-reaching changes were fundamentally altering the social and political landscape of Turkey, Iran, Palestine, and the Arabian peninsula. Turkey and Iran became dominated by men who strongly advocated what may be labeled statist modernism: using the apparatus of the state, at times repressively, to impose modernization on their countries. Palestine was overcome by Zionism, and any doubts as to whether European Jews needed a distant Zion were settled by the madness of Nazi fascism. Arabia, finally, was taken over by the Saudis, a puritanical clan of warriors from the central Najd region. The Kingdom of Hijaz ceased to exist. In its place was born the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Atatürk and the New Turkey

One of the most profound processes of change in the Middle East was set in motion in Turkey by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and his fellow nationalist reformers. The changes Atatürk instituted in Turkey were so far-reaching that they are often considered to have been a national revolution.
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How much of a “revolution” these changes constituted is open to debate.
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But few can deny that the cumulative effects of what occurred in Turkey were revolutionary. The greatest change occurred in four areas. First was the
transformation of subjects of the Ottoman Empire into Turkish citizens with a new, national identity. Linked to this issue of nationalism was the construction, after five centuries of caliphal rule, of a new state apparatus. Third was the state’s engineering of far-reaching social changes to remedy a number of perceived ills. Fourth was the promotion of economic development, and hence state efforts to foster industrial modernization.

It would be unfair to the Young Turks and to the members and sympathizers of the Committee for Union and Progress (CUP) to call Mustafa Kemal the father of Turkish nationalism, for these earlier activists were the first to formulate and express ideas of national and popular sovereignty. The beginnings of Turkish nationalism can actually be traced to linguistic and literary innovations in Istanbul and elsewhere in the empire in the 1860s and 1870s.
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But Kemal gave Turkish nationalism its most articulate expression, one that continues to have deep resonance in Turkey today. This was not an easy task at first, for Ottomanism not only stood for a political entity of sorts but, more importantly for those subject to it, also signified the caliphate (succession) and the guardianship of the larger Islamic community (
umma
). Even some of Kemal’s closest associates remained loyal to the notion of the caliphate. “I am bound by conscience to the Sultanate and the Caliphate,” one is reported to have confessed. “It is my duty to remain loyal to the sovereign: my attachment to the Caliphate is imposed on me by my education. . . . To abolish this office and to try and set up an entity of a different character in its place, would lead to failure and disaster. It is quite inadmissible.”
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Determined to create a new Turkey and a Turkish national identity, Kemal went about his task in incremental steps. First, in 1922, he abolished the Ottoman sultanate (literally, “family dynasty”), thus wresting political power from the Ottomans. But he allowed one of the Ottoman princes to remain as the caliph, thus appeasing the religious sensibilities of his associates and the masses at large. In 1924, when his powers had become more secure, Kemal abolished the caliphate as well.

National identities are not created out of thin air, and Kemal and his like-minded colleagues had many materials to work with. Nevertheless, the task facing them was difficult. As a remedy, repression was applied liberally whenever the new stewards of the state deemed it necessary. The Ottoman Empire had long been multinational in character, and only in the early 1900s, as the empire was dying, did the idea of a distinctively Turkish nation gain currency among some of the younger generation. Even then, the idea of a Turkish nation was so new and tenuous that it lacked a name in the Turkish language. Only during the Young Turk movement, especially from
1908 to 1918, did the name Türkiye come into common usage.
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But the nationalities problem persisted. That many nationalities under Ottoman rule started agitating for independence did not make matters easier. In 1915, the Armenians, who had for centuries lived in peace in Anatolia along with the rest of the population, were forcibly removed to Russian Armenia, with the tragic consequence that some 1.5 million of them perished. An untold number of Turks also lost their lives in the ensuing carnage as the Young Turk government forcibly resettled populations wherever it saw fit. Still, the emerging Turkish nation was by no means ethnoreligiously cohesive. Not only the Kurds in the southeast but a significant Greek population remained within the young country’s borders. Consequently a massive population resettlement was undertaken in the 1920s, much like what was happening elsewhere in eastern and central Europe. Between 1923 and 1930, as a result of an agreement between Greece and Turkey, about 1.25 million Greeks were sent from Turkey to Greece, and a smaller number of Turks moved from Greece to Turkey.
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The ideals of nationalism were articulated by the political party Kemal came to head shortly after assuming power, the Republican People’s Party (RPP). In its Third Congress in May 1931, the party officially adopted six principles as the pillars of what by then had come to be known as Kemalism (Kemalizm) or Atatürkism (Atatürkçülük): populism, nationalism, statism, republicanism, secularism, and reformism/revolutionism.
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Interrelated, all of these principles were meant to support the larger project of state building facing the new rulers of Turkey. Nationalism was deeply imbued with militarism; the very idea of a Turkish nation had been born out of and sustained by a war of national liberation. That Kemal faced rebellions from the Kurds and from a Sufi mystic (
dervish
) Şeyh Said within Turkey up until the mid-1920s,
after
he had secured Turkish independence from foreign powers, only served to heighten the military character of Turkish nationalism. Although theoretically he kept the military separated from the civilian apparatus of the state, militarism and nationalism went hand in hand and were seen as inseparable in Kemalism. This was to have consequences for the life of the Turkish republic long after Kemal’s death in 1938. Repeatedly, in 1960, 1971, 1980, and 1997, the Turkish military assumed the role of the savior of the republic and protector of the legacy of Kemalism, taking matters into its own hands—the last time from behind the scenes—to ensure that Kemalism remained the nation’s guiding light.

The republican state that Kemal created allowed for no dissent. In 1924, an opposition party called the Progressive Republican Party was formed by
some of the disenchanted members of the RPP, but it was crushed the following year and its leaders were arrested. Some five hundred political activists were put to death in 1926 and 1927 alone, many hanged publicly.
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Another brief experiment with party politics in 1930, this time in the form of a loyal opposition named the Free Democratic Party, lasted for only a few months. From then until 1946, the RPP remained the only venue for political activity. For the remainder of his life, Kemal ruled as an enlightened, modernizing despot. In the words of the historian Bernard Lewis, “Kemal’s reelections by the Assembly were no more than a matter of form. In fact, he enjoyed life tenure, with powers as great as those of any Sultan, appointing and dismissing Prime Ministers and other ministers at will.”
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Despite the continuity of despotism, however, the new system was markedly different from the one it had replaced. New ministries were formed, the civil service was reorganized, and the state assumed a plethora of economic and social functions in its attempts to reshape Turkish society and culture.

Engineering social change was one of the new state’s highest priorities, and it was in this arena that the average Turk felt the impact of Kemalism most profoundly. Like the Young Turks and the CUP, Kemal ardently believed that Turkey’s salvation lay in making itself European. Unlike the CUP, however, Kemal was virulently antireligious and saw Islam as the primary source of his country’s backwardness. “I have no religion, and at times I wish all religions at the bottom of the sea,” he is reported to have said once. “He is a weak ruler who needs religion to uphold his government; it is as if he would catch his people in a trap.”
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Systematically, therefore, he set out to dismantle Islam’s grip on Turkish society. He succeeded only partially, but his efforts and initiatives were revolutionary. In 1924, with only slight modifications, the Swiss Civil Code was adopted and replaced the
sharia
(Islamic law). The fez, traditionally worn by Turkish men as a sign of piety, was banned in 1925, and all men were mandated by law to wear Western-style bowler hats instead. Traditional clothing for women was also ridiculed, but, fearing too much of a backlash, Atatürk did not ban the veil outright.
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There were municipal orders against the veil in some places, and Kemal’s female relatives broke with Islamic tradition by appearing in public unveiled. One of his daughters went so far as to become a pilot in the Turkish air force.

An even more revolutionary step was taken in 1928, when Kemal introduced a new, Latin alphabet, abandoning the Arabic script in which Ottoman Turkish had been written. In an address to the nation on August 9, 1928, Kemal told his countrymen that “our rich and harmonious language will now
be able to display itself with new Turkish letters. We must free ourselves from these incomprehensible signs, that for centuries have held our minds in an iron vice. You must learn the new Turkish letters quickly.”
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In 1934, all Turks were also ordered to adopt surnames, and their old titles were abolished. The National Assembly gave Kemal the last name Atatürk (Father Turk). At the same time he dropped the excessively Arabic Mustafa, thus becoming Kemal Atatürk.
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In the economic arena, the state embarked on a major industrialization program, symbolized by a much-celebrated railway line from the new capital, Ankara, to the central city of Sivas. In the absence of a vibrant class of industrial capitalists, the republican state saw itself with little alternative but to actively intervene in the economy, in the process helping the private sector grow and mature.
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Corporatism became the hallmark of the state’s economic pursuits. To foster cooperation with the incipient business community and to finance various development projects, a Business Bank was set up in 1924, and in 1927 the Law of Encouragement of Industry was enacted. Burdened with high debt and a woefully inadequate infrastructure, the state entered into a number of joint ventures with foreign capital, inaugurating, with Soviet help, a massive textile mill in 1935.
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Protectionist measures, meanwhile, were enacted in the hope of promoting domestic industries.

Such was the state of Turkey in the 1920s and 1930s. The six principles of the Republican People’s Party—statism, republicanism, secularism, nationalism, populism, and reformism/revolutionism—were more than mere slogans; they informed the policies of the new republic both during and after the life of its founder. Turkey had forever been changed, not only in name and designation, but in far more profound ways than even the most imaginative scenarios could have predicted.

The last years of Atatürk’s life saw a rapid decline in his health and vigor and an accompanying degeneration of what had once been measured and careful rule. As Lord Kinross, one of Atatürk’s most celebrated biographers, describes, “A rationalist without a rationalist philosophy, he fell into a mood of disillusion and despondency. A man of action with no actions left to perform, he fell back on the familiar substitute, alcohol; and this began to undermine his physical and mental condition. . . . His nerves were no longer under control. He lost his temper more easily, the tiger now forever caged, snarling abruptly at friends and enemies alike.”
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Atatürk’s legacy, of course, did not go uncontested, and after the tenure of his onetime lieutenant Ismet Inönü ended in 1950, there were modifications to the one-party system over which he had presided. But the bulk of
his policies remained in effect, and his larger legacy continues to reign supreme in Turkey today. In many ways, these policies served as models for the modernizing efforts of another contemporary Middle Eastern leader, Iran’s Reza Pahlavi, although here the depth of reforms was significantly less than in Turkey.