230 • 14 MODERNIZING RULERS IN THE INDEPENDENT STATESand joined with Muslim leaders to defend Turkey against the Greeks. Even
if he displayed some of the attitudes and practices of his Muslim fore¬
bears, though, he was determined to destroy Islam's power to block Tur¬
key's modernization. He let a member of the Ottoman family retain the
caliphate briefly, but abolished the position in 1924. Angry protests from
Muslims in Egypt and India could not save the caliphate, and the Turks
themselves were indifferent. After all, the caliphs had been powerless for a
thousand years.
From 1924 on, the Grand National Assembly passed laws closing the
Sufi orclers and madrasas, abolishing the waqfs and the position of shaykh
al-Islam, and replacing the Shari'a, even in the hitherto untouchable
realm of family law, with a modified version of the Swiss Civil Code.
Women, assured of equal rights with men in marriage, divorce, and prop¬
erty inheritance, also started to enter the higher schools and professions,
as well as shops, offices, and factories. Given the vote for the first time in
1934, Turkish women elected seventeen of their sex to the Assembly the
next year. The veil, which had begun to disappear in Istanbul and Smyrna
before and during the war, was discarded (with Kemal's encouragement)
during the 1920s.
Of great symbolic importance was a law forbidding Turkish men to
wear the fez or any other brimless headgear. Muslim males had always
worn turbans, skullcaps, kufiyas, or other head coverings that would not
hinder prostrations during formal worship. In common speech, "putting
on a hat" meant apostasy from Islam. But Kemal, addressing a crowd in
one of Anatolia's most conservative towns, wore a panama hat, mocked
the traditional clothing of Turkish men and women, and announced that
henceforth all males would have to wear the costume of "civilized" peo¬
ples, including the hat. It is ironic that Turkish men fought harder to go on
wearing the fez, imposed by Sultan Mahmud a mere century earlier, than
to save the caliphate, started by Abu-Bakr in 632! What people wear often
reflects how they live, the way they think, and what they value most highly.
Soon, Turkish men and women dressed pretty much like Europeans.
Turkey faced west in other ways. The Ottoman financial calendar was re¬
placed by the Gregorian one, and clocks were set to European time, a
change from the Muslim system by which the date changed at sunset. Met¬
ric weights and measures replaced the customary Turkish ones, and the
adoption of a formal day of rest (initially Friday, later Sunday) showed how
Western the country had become. The call to worship and even Quran
recitations were given in Turkish instead of Arabic. In 1928 the Turkish
constitution's reference to Islam as the state religion was expunged.