Ottoman Salonika
The claim that Dönme schools made secularists out of their students is
also found in influential works by foreign writers. In Vamik Volkan and
Norman Itzkowitz’s psychobiography of Atatürk, it is argued, for exam-
ple, that his father, Ali Rıza, wanted him to attend Şemsi Efendi’s school
so that he could receive a secular education, against the wishes of his reli-
gious mother, Zübeyde.^105 And although Atatürk did not call that school
“secular” in his interview with Ahmet Emin Yalman, Mark Mazower as-
serts in Salonica, City of Ghosts that “helped by his education... [he]
became a pronounced secularist.”^106
In reality, religion and religious actors contributed to creating the
new public sphere and proto-nation that became the Turkish Repub-
lic. Leading Muslims promoted a reformed religion, based on reason,
that was scientific, modern, rational, explicitly anti-superstition, and
opposed to ignorant customs.^107 The Nurcu (or Salafiyya) movement,
for example, linked science, technology, and modernity with faith, reli-
gion, and monotheism, as well as placing a key emphasis on education.
The Nurcu used modern forms of communication and technology to
offer Muslims a way to reconnect to language, emotion, belief, familiar
aesthetics, and ties of personal obligation in everyday life.^108 For Nurcu,
Dönme, and much of the rest of Ottoman Muslim society, religion be-
came “a major source of rational, moral subjects and a central organi-
zation aspect of the public spheres they created,” which were marked
by “political interaction[s] that are crucial to the formation of national
identities.”^109 The empire adopted this standardized rational religion to
build loyalty, civic-mindedness, and civic nationalism, and to eliminate
nonconformity and heterodoxy.
Finally, the nation-state that replaced the empire moved this rational-
ized religion to the private sphere, ethnicized it, and replaced it with ra-
cialized nationalism, which, rather than being neutral, still had religion
as one of its constituent elements.^110 Yet this did not stop it from intol-
erantly coercing and suppressing religious actors. The irony was that the
exclusion of religion was based on a false premise, its contributions in
forming the modern nation-state were forgotten, or misremembered, and
its leaders were deemed enemies of the nation and destroyed.