7 Kemal Atatürk 7slipping through the fingers of its people. This became his
message to the Turks of Anatolia.
In 1920, as leader of a national resistance movement,
he set up a rival government in Ankara, 300 miles (480
kilometres) from Istanbul. He expelled Greek forces from
Asia Minor in 1921–22, and in 1922 he proclaimed the end
of the Ottoman Empire. He became president of Turkey
in 1923. On October 29, 1923, the Turkish republic was
proclaimed. Turkey was now in complete control of its ter-
ritory and sovereignty.
Mustafa Kemal then embarked upon the reform of
his country, his goal being to bring it into the 20th
century. His program was embodied in the party’s
“Six Arrows”: republicanism, nationalism, populism,
statism (state-owned and state-operated industrialization
aimed at making Turkey self-sufficient), secularism, and
revolution.
The caliphate—a religious title of leadership con-
trolled by Ottoman sultans since the early 16th
century—was abolished on March 3, 1924. The religious
schools were dismantled at the same time. Abolition of
the religious courts followed on April 8. In the same year,
the religious brotherhoods, strongholds of conservatism,
were outlawed.
The emancipation of women was set in motion by a
number of laws. In December 1934, women were given the
vote for parliamentary members and were made eligible to
hold parliamentary seats. Almost overnight the whole sys-
tem of Islamic law was discarded. From February to June
1926 the Swiss civil code, the Italian penal code, and the
German commercial code were adopted wholesale. As a
result, women’s emancipation was strengthened by the
abolition of polygamy. Marriage was made a civil contract,
and divorce was recognized as a civil action.