IS
~Rise of the
Secular Modernists
1336-1357 AH
1918-1939 CEB
Y I9I9, ASIA MINOR was crawling with French and Italian troops.
Greek armies led by Greek nationalists dreaming of a Greater Greece
were forging deep into the Ottoman heartland. Istanbul itself was occu-
pied by British troops. Resistance movements bubbled up throughout
Anatolia, coalescing around a hawk-faced general with piercing eyes. He
was Mustafa Kemal, later known as Atatiirk-Father of the Turks. His
forces drove out all the foreigners and in 1923 he declared the birth of a
new nation-state: Turkey.
Turkey was not to be the Ottoman Empire reinvented. Atatiirk repudi-
ated the Ottoman past; he repudiated empire. He claimed nothing outside
Asia Minor because he sought a coherent territory that made sense as a
country. Henceforth, Turkey was to be a state with dear and immutable
borders within which the majority of people would be ethnic Turks and
the language would be Turkish. In this new country, Islam would be ex-
cluded from any role in public policy and demoted to the private sphere
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