302 DESTINY DISRUPTED
where it might go on thriving as a religion like any other, so long as its ad-
herents didn't bother the neighbors.
Turkey was thus the first Muslim-majority country to declare itself sec-
ular and to make the separation of politics and religion an official policy.
Having demoted Islam, however, Atatiirk needed some other principle to
unify his new country, so he elaborated an ideology that sanctified six
isms: nationalism, secularism, reformism, statism, populism, and republi-
canism. Turks still call this creed Kemalism, and some of version of it, usu-
ally emphasizing the first four isms, spread to or sprang up throughout the
Islamic world after World War I.
Atatiirk's nationalism was not to be confused with the hardcore mili-
tarism of the Committee for Union and Progress. The roots of both went
back to the Young Turks, but "Young Turkism" was a broad movement
spanning a gamut from liberal constitutionalism to fascism, and Atatiirk's
was a flexible, cultural nationalism that grew out of the liberal end.
It was cultural nationalism that led Atatiirk to discard the many lan-
guages spoken in the Ottoman Empire in favor of one national language,
Turkish. The many dialects and variants ofTurkish spoken in the old em-
pire gave way to a single standard dialect, and not the literary Turkish of
the old court but a purified form of the street Turkish spoken by the
masses. Some enthusiasts then wanted to ban all words that had crept into
Turkish from other languages, but Atatiirk disarmed this agitation with a
simple narrative: Turkish, he said, was the mother of all the languages, so
words borrowed from other languages were simply Turkish words coming
home. The Arabic script, however, the one in which Turkish had long been
written, was replaced by a new Latin alphabet.
A modernist to the core, Atatiirk did not declare himself king or sultan.
He had a new constitution written, set up a parliament, and established are-
publican form of government with himself as president. The parliamentary
democracy he built endures to this day, but let's be frank: another leader
could not have replaced Atatiirk through the ballot box in his lifetime-hey,
he was Father of the Turks! One does not vote one's father out of office! And
although he was no military dictator and his ruling circle was not a junta (he
established and abided by the rule oflaw), Atatiirk did come up through the
military and he valued discipline; so he herded his people toward his vision
for the country with a military man's direct, iron-handed resolve.