Religious and Moral Education represented all that was religious, corrupt, decadent, and sick, an empire
that was in agonizing decline for four centuries, led by arbitrary rulers de-
voted to splendor and “exotic physical pleasures.”^100 In contrast, he sees
the Turkish Republic as representing all that is modern, democratic, and
secular. Yalman uses the history of his family and himself to illustrate this
transformation. When we overlook the important role that religion and
morality played in Dönme life, however, we both misinterpret their experi-
ence and overlook the contributions of religious actors to Turkish history.
Ignoring Dönme religion, Turkish historiography claims that the
Dönme paved the way to secular nationalism in Turkey. Many are con-
vinced that the Dönme, educated in secular schools, became zealous secu-
larists (or, to their detractors, atheists) who supported the CUP because it
opposed the caliphate and wished to bring about the ruin of the Islamic
Ottoman Empire, so that in its place a secular, nationalist republic could
arise. The fact that its first president, the ardent secularist and nationalist
Atatürk, although born in a Muslim quarter at the eastern edge of Salo-
nika, far from the quarters marked by Dönme residence, was a student of
the most important Dönme educator in the city allows people to assume
a connection between allegedly secular education in Dönme schools and
the aims of the early republic.
Many writers are troubled by or gloss over aspects of modern society,
such as the continued significance of religious beliefs and practices that do
not fit their sweeping teleological modernization and secularization theo-
ries.^101 Instead, they deploy a religion / traditional and secularism / modern
binary, and downplay separate Dönme religious identity. This approach
reflects conventional wisdom in Turkey, where it is claimed that there
was an inevitable contradiction in seeking to combine scientific educa-
tion with Islamic morality, which was ultimately unresolved, because one
could not synthesize Islamism and modernism; the teaching of Islam thus
hindered the evolution to modern (secular) education. Without making
religion secondary and secularism primary, it is argued, one could not
have modern schools or teach students to be modern.^102 “As a result of
their education, Dönme girls [including her mother, Sabiha Sertel] in
Salonika began to accept a positivist, even secular, point of view,” Yıldız
Sertel contends.^103 This approach was accepted without criticism most
recently by Aslı Yurddaş, who makes the implausible argument that the
Dönme adopted secular Turkish nationalism in the late Ottoman Empire
in order to save themselves from religious oppression.^104