Atatürk: An Intellectual Biography

Atatürk

Atatürk

An Intellectual Biography 

M. Şükrü Hanioğlu

with a new preface by the author

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Princeton & Oxford

Copyright © 2011 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR

press.princeton.edu

Cover art: President Mustafa Kemal at Dumlupınar (1924). Courtesy of http://www.tccb.gov.tr/sayfa/ata_ozel/fotograf/, picture #27.

All Rights Reserved

First paperback edition, 2013

Revised paperback edition, with a new preface by the author, 2017

Paperback ISBN: 978-0-691-17582-9

The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition as follows:

Hanioglu, M. Sükrü.

Atatürk : an intellectual biography / M. Sükrü Hanioglu.

  p.    cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-691-15109-0

1. Atatürk, Kemal, 1881–1938. 2. Atatürk, Kemal, 1881–1938—Political and social views. 3. Atatürk, Kemal, 1881–1938—Knowledge and learning. 4. Turkey—Politics and government—1918–1960. 5. Turkey—Intellectual life—20th century. 6. Turkey—Social conditions—20th century. 7. Social change—Turkey—History—20th century. I. Title.

DR592.K4H36 2011

956.1’024092—dc22

[B]                                2010043767

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Garamond Pro

Printed on acid-free paper. ∞

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6

For Sinan

CONTENTS

List of Figures and Tables

Preface to the Paperback Edition

A Note on Transliteration and Personal and Place Names

Turkish Pronunciation Guide

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1.  Fin-de-siècle Salonica

2.  Das Volk in Waffen: The Formation of an Ottoman Officer

3.  The Scientism of the Young Turks

4.  From Wars to the Great War: A Hero Is Born

5.  Muslim Communism? The Turkish War of Independence

6.  The Secular Republic

7.  Nationalism and Kemalism

8.  Turkey and the West

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

FIGURES AND TABLES

FIGURES

1. Fin-de-siècle Salonica

2. The Royal Military Academy in the last years of the nineteenth century

3. Freiherr Colmar von der Goltz and Mustafa Kemal on military maneuvers in Monastir (1909)

4. The title page of Ludwig Büchner’s Kraft und Stoff

5. Partition of the European Provinces of the empire after the Balkan Wars of 1912–13

6. Staff Major Enver Bey (1908)

7. Colonel Mustafa Kemal at the Dardanelles (1915)

8. True Bolsheviks and pretenders: A Bolshevik delegation in Ankara (1921)

9. The partition of the Ottoman Empire according to the Sèvres Treaty of 1920

10. A postcard depicting Mustafa Kemal as a Muslim hero (1922)

11. Turkey and other successor states according to the Lausanne Treaty of 1923

12. Eugène Pittard at the Second Turkish History Congress (1937)

13. The title page of Mustafa Kemal’s magnum opus Nutuk (1927)

14. President Mustafa Kemal engaged in study at his private library at Çankaya (1931)

15. Sabiha Gökçen, one of the adopted daughters of Mustafa Kemal, in aviator uniform (1938)

16. Mustafa Kemal teaching the new alphabet in Kayseri (1928)

TABLES

1. Mustafa Kemal’s Use of Socialist Terminology, April 1920–January 1923

2. Mustafa Kemal’s Use of Socialist Terminology, January 1923–November 1927

3. Mustafa Kemal’s Use of Islamic Terminology, April 1920–January 1923

4. Mustafa Kemal’s Use of Islamic Terminology, April 1923–November 1929

PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION:

KEMALISM IN POST-KEMALIST TURKEY AND HISTORICIZING ATATÜRK

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, passed away on November 10, 1938. At that time, few people could envisage that he would be the sole post-Great War leader whose legacy would prevail in his country in the twenty-first century. While Atatürk’s popularity gradually diminished in the Muslim and the third world, different versions of an ideology—first called Kemalism, and then Atatürkism—rendered the service of an official ideology to Turkey until the early years of the twenty-first century.

In this process, both Atatürk’s initial successors, who had worked with him to found a new nation-state and future generations, embraced Kemalism. Until the early years of the twenty-first century, every political organization in Turkey pledged allegiance to it. However, this fluid ideology has changed substantially from pre-Second World War world to the present day. It was a remarkable success as compared to similar ideologies that seemed unassailable in the 1920s and 1930s but collapsed like house of cards before the end of the twentieth century. Unlike these ideologies, Kemalism lacked a compact ideological framework or even a major book articulating its core tenets. Nonetheless, it resisted time and change much better because of its pragmatic and adjustable nature. Its flexible composition enabled its uncomplicated reconstructions.

Competing political organizations frequently advanced the claim of being More Kemalist than thou. Moreover, these groups strongly denounced their competitors on the grounds of not being Kemalist enough. Thus instead of a distinct, explicit Kemalism, numerous conflicting Kemalisms flourished and competed inconsolably against each other in Turkey. The single-party that ruled Turkey with an iron hand, of course, claimed to be Kemalist. Likewise, almost all the parties that mushroomed after the switch to the multi-party system in the wake of the Second World War maintained that they were the true followers of Atatürk’s principles. Clearly these organizations defined Kemalism in very different ways.

Only the burgeoning Islamist organizations that emerged after 1945 distanced themselves from Kemalism. Yet, even they were compelled to advance their construction of Kemalism in Islamic terms. Necmettin Erbakan, the leader of the Islamist political movement, famously remarked in the 1980s, Had he lived today, Atatürk would have become a member of the Islamic Vision (Millî Görüş).¹ This marked a drastic change in regard to the Islamist conceptualization of Kemalism. For sure, many followers of the movement disagreed with this new and innovative conceptualization; however, at the official level even Islamists felt the need to adopt an unconventional Kemalism.

All these Kemalisms have also adapted themselves to political and social changes throughout Turkey’s history. For instance, early versions, both left and right ones, strongly criticized democracy as an ineffectual and highly corrupt political system, highlighting the necessity of a Chief competently guiding a nation and bringing it to glory and greatness. They situated Atatürk in an authoritarian system as an absolute, all-powerful, and infallible leader. After the switch to the multi-party system, however, all Kemalists maintained that Kemalism essentially intends to advance democracy. They argued that Atatürk principally aspired to institute liberal democracy, though the nation was not ready for it during his lifetime.

The post-1945 expansion of Kemalism also facilitated its transformation into a logocratic discourse. One peculiar aspect of Kemalism, which emerged under single-party rule, is that it served as an indisputable official ideology in an ostensibly pluralistic society after 1945. In a country where everyone claimed to be a Kemalist through reconstructing it differently such as a progressive left-wing or conservative right-wing ideology, Kemalism became extremely obscure, fluid, and blurry. As a result, it reproduced itself as a constantly repeated logocratic discourse with very little substance, though an overwhelming majority felt a loose affiliation with it. Some considered it a Turkish Enlightenment, while others constructed it as an anti-imperialist socialist ideology or as an anti-left nationalism. Kemalism meant different things to different people; it was a treasure chest of disparate ideas where people could pick and choose conflicting views to bolster their ideologies.

While Kemalism survived as the only major post-Great War ideology and continued to reign supreme until the early years of the twenty-first century, it was a logocratic façade. Kemalists with different political and ideological persuasions in fact endorsed diametrically opposite views in the name of Atatürk. Attempts to redefine Kemalist orthodoxy and excommunicating all interpretations as heterodox deviations made very little headway. The most significant attempt in that regard came from the initiators of the 1980 military coup; it too failed to the utter dismay of the junta leaders who thought that creating a single, authentic, and incontestable Kemalism would save the country.

The existence of multiple Kemalisms renders the already difficult task of historicizing Atatürk almost impossible. These Kemalisms have on occasion concocted sayings that Atatürk never uttered; however, they mainly build their ideologies through deliberate misinterpretations or by taking his statements out of their historical and political contexts.

Mustafa Kemal’s political career and pragmatism provided ample material that could be used to construct different, and often conflicting, interpretations of Kemalism. These Kemalisms projected the founder of modern Turkey as a socialist, Islamist, nationalist, enlightenment leader, a defender of the Islamic caliphate, or the destroyer of it. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk indeed advanced conflicting theses as a down-to-earth political leader who occupied leadership positions for almost two decades. Used by different groups making claims on the founder of the republic, his sayings rendered a number of conflicting Atatürks as well. Needless to say, none of these was the historical Atatürk.

The 2002 elections in Turkey marked a turning point in the history of Kemalism. The Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi Justice and Development Party) that won these elections was an offspring of the Islamist political movement. The leaders of the party had extricated themselves from the movement and its main political organization with the claim of creating an institution similar to the Christian democratic parties of Europe. Nevertheless, their understanding of Kemalism did not change much during this process. Thus for the first time in the history of the republic, a party strongly questioning the rationale of maintaining the logocratic Kemalist discourse ascended to power in the Republic of Turkey.² Its leaders paid lip service to it, and even praised Atatürk; however, they also allowed sharp criticisms of Kemalism mainly from liberal intellectuals and Islamists.

Among other things, the 2002 elections heralded the commencement of the post-Kemalist epoch in Turkey. Formal references to the logocratic discourse considerably lessened, many hitherto untouchable Kemalist taboos were opened to public discussion, hero-worship significantly diminished, and attempts aimed at extricating Atatürk from Kemalism gained considerable momentum. While Recep Tayyip Erdoğan chose to start his 2014 campaign for presidential elections in Samsun by likening it to Mustafa Kemal’s decision to launch of the War of Independence in the same town in 1919, he limited his laudatory remarks to Mustafa Kemal’s early leadership and not to his later reforms aimed at turning Turkey into a highly Westernized society. Likewise the 2023 vision³ of the ruling party refrained from making any references to Atatürk’s principles or reforms, as all similar previous documents have made.

These attempts have thus far produced important consequences. They inadvertently helped consolidate Kemalism into a less fluid and more concrete ideology. The gradual waning of the logocratic discourse and the necessity of making references to it resulted in a significant decrease in the number of people adhering to Kemalist rhetoric. In addition, instead of diverse groups of people reconstructing Kemalism in different ways, the current-day disciples of Kemalism, while relatively smaller as a group, describe it in a much more explicit and unambiguous way.

Not only is Kemalism a much less fluid ideology in current-day Turkey, but it is also a nationalistic ideology with strong anti-West undertones. It attempts to overcome the problems of not having tenets outlined by Atatürk or even a major book sketching out its main principles by turning the early Republican era into a golden age. This allows the disciples to produce tenets, principles, and an ideological framework as well as a political praxis. Furthermore, it situates Kemalism squarely in the left of the political spectrum. It also features a dogmatic republicanism, which takes its cues from Régis Debray and presupposes a stark dichotomy with democracy. The new Kemalism likewise fervently clashes with conservative social values and political Islam. While the current-day Kemalism still cuts across different boundaries and attracts enthusiasts from different social strata, it receives stronger backing in the Westernized urban environments and among non-Sunni populations. Similarly it appeals to only token minorities among non-Turkish communities.

While the old fluid Kemalist logocratic discourse did not enjoy popularity, it was nevertheless recited by large numbers of people, most of whom simply paid lip service to it. The passionate followers of the new Kemalism form a relatively smaller group but they advance a more coherent ideology.

The relegation of Kemalism to an ideology espoused by a minority should not suggest that the founder of the republic has irretrievably lost his popularity or the majority of the populace is critical of him. Atatürk still looms large in Turkey and his hero status is rather incontestable. The majority of people who criticize the new Kemalism separate this ideology from the personality of Atatürk.

In fact, this majority does not oppose according Atatürk hero status, but rather, it disputes hero-worshipping and treating republicanism as the antithesis of democracy. Likewise the aforementioned majority strongly criticizes the new Kemalist plea to reproduce the early Republican era regarded as the golden age of modern Turkey by staunch neo-Kemalists. This majority argues that Turkey should gradually evolve into a liberal democracy rather than attempting to reproduce a semi-authoritarian regime, which was not uncommon during the 1930s.

All these developments, of course, help historicize Atatürk and strip him of his once impenetrable cult of personality. The demise of Kemalism as a logocratic official discourse and Turkey’s entry into the post-Kemalist era have paved the way for demythologizing the founder of the republic. This, if we wish to use a Rankenian phrase, prepared the ground for understanding Atatürk’s life, accomplishments, and ideas "as they are (wie es eigentlich gewesen)."

One might view this to be an exceedingly outdated historical approach to analyze the subject in hand. This criticism perhaps carries weight; however, after the application of a logocratic discourse based upon a strong personality cult for decades, this should be considered a major step towards historicizing the founder of modern Turkey and situating him in a meaningful context.

M. Şükrü Hanioğlu

Princeton

March 14, 2015

¹ The term millet originally referred to religious communities and continued to solely render that meaning until the nineteenth century (i.e., the Muslim millet or the Greek Orthodox millet), it then acquired the additional meaning of nation. Thus while millî literally means national in modern Turkish vernacular, members of the Islamist movement used it in its old and somewhat archaic sense to refer to the Muslim religious community. Thus the phrase Millî Görüş should be translated not as National Vision but as Religious Community’s Vision. As the community in question is Muslim, I render it as the Islamic Vision.

² Previously Islamist parties had been represented in coalition governments.

³ 2023 will mark the hundredth anniversary of the establishment of the Turkish Republic.

A NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION AND PERSONAL AND PLACE NAMES

Names and titles in Ottoman Turkish are rendered according to modern Turkish usage rather than strict transliteration. (A pronunciation guide is provided herein to help readers who are not acquainted with the Turkish language). Arabic names and titles are normally transliterated according to a slightly simplified system based on that of the International Journal of Middle East Studies. However, Arabic names and titles of non-Arab individuals and institutions are not transliterated, but are rendered according to their pronunciation in the relevant vernacular. Thus we have Rashīd Riḍā, but Reza Pahlavi. Likewise, we have Muḥammad ‘Abduh, but Mahathir bin Muhammad.

Muslim Ottomans and Turks did not have family names until the Surname Law of June 21, 1934. This ruling required all citizens of the Turkish Republic to adopt a family name by January 1, 1935. Thus, the names by which individuals are referred to before and after the implementation of this law are different. For instance, the founder of the Turkish Republic is referred to as Mustafa Kemal before November 24, 1934 and Atatürk after this date.

For those geographical names frequently used in English language material, common English forms are preferred. Thus we have Salonica, Monastir, and Damascus, and not Thessaloniki, Bitola, and Dimashq, respectively. For all others, the current names are used to avoid confusion.

TURKISH PRONUNCIATION GUIDE

a—as English u in but

â—as English a in far

b—as in English, or pronounced as p at the end of a syllable

c—as English j in jam

ç—as English ch in charm

d—as in English, or pronounced as t at the end of a syllable

ğ—as English gh in through, or pronounced as English y in saying after front vowels (e, i, ö, ü), or not pronounced after back vowels (a, ı, o, u).

i—as English i in fit

ı—as English i in dirt

î—as English ee in feet

j—as English s in treasury

ö—as German ö in östlich or French eu in deux

ș—as English sh in shine

u—as English oo in book

û—as English u in rule

ü—as German ü in übung or French u in tu

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I have been assisted by many who deserve thanks in the research and writing of this book. My greatest debt is to Michael A. Cook and Jesse Ferris, who have read various drafts of the manuscript and came forward with a wide range of fruitful remarks and suggestions. I also owe special gratitude to Senem Aslan, Patricia Crone, András P. Hámori, Hasan Bülent Kahraman, Mete Tunçay, Benjamin T. White, and Muhammad Qasim Zaman who read the final draft and offered valuable advice. Likewise, I am indebted to my colleagues Fatmagül Demirel, Hossein Modarressi, and Michael Reynolds for answering numerous inquiries and providing valuable information. I should be most ungracious if I were to omit expressing my appreciation of the generous permission of Taha Akyol to reproduce some of the tables in his book Ama Hangi Atatürk, on the founder of the Turkish republic. I likewise wish to thank Heath W. Lowry for sharing with me two photographs that he uncovered among the papers of Clarence K. Streit at the Library of Congress; and İffet Baytaș, Sabit Baytaș, and Halit Eren for their help in obtaining some of the illustrations.

At the Press, two wise, competent, and hands-on editors, Brigitta van Rheinberg and Sara Lerner, did everything within their power to make this book as perfect as possible. Brian P. Bendlin in copyediting went above and beyond the call of duty to render the text stylistically more consistent. In the same way, Dimitri Karetnikov, the illustrations specialist, masterfully prepared the final photographic figures to make the book more attractive. The indexer, Maria denBoer, handled numerous foreign terms with great skill to make the book more accessible.

Finally, I am beholden to my wife Arsev and my son Sinan, since working on yet another book deprived them of much of my time.

MŞH

Princeton, New Jersey

March 14, 2010

Atatürk

Introduction

In 1954, a young shepherd was leading his flock out to pasture in the remote village of Yukarı Gündeș in the eastern Turkish province of Ardahan. As the sun set, a shadow falling on a nearby hill seemed to trace the exact profile of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the modern Turkish Republic. Convinced that he had been vouchsafed a religious experience, the incredulous shepherd reported his encounter to the local authorities, who wasted no time in publicizing this rare natural phenomenon nationwide as a miracle. Local excitement did not die down with the passage of time and, in 1997, it was finally decided to launch on this spot a festival that drew enormous crowds of spectators eager to witness the phenomenon for themselves. When, at the seventh annual festival in the footsteps and shadow of Atatürk, a shepherd inadvertently interrupted the spectacle at the critical moment by innocently guiding his flock through the silhouette just as it was becoming visible; the crowd reacted with fury. One parliamentary deputy from among the spectators bellowed, Grazing animals here is highly disrespectful, an act of treason. . . . Why has Karadağ where the miracle occurred not been placed under state protection?¹ This somewhat bizarre episode captures the quasi-religious quality of the personality cult that sprang up around Mustafa Kemal Atatürk during his lifetime and has persisted in many quarters of Turkey to this day. Obviously this was not the only way Turks regarded the founder of the modern Turkish Republic, but an attitude of veneration continues to suffuse most scholarly and popular writing on the subject.

For many years, the scholar who aspired to portray Atatürk as he really was resembled the premodern historian rash enough to attempt a depiction of the historical Jesus. Not surprisingly, the more scholarly and authoritative biographies of Atatürk have been authored by non-Turkish scholars, and even these long after his death. Today the subject can be dealt with more openly in Turkey, but demythologizing Atatürk is still difficult. For instance, many of the sayings attributed to Atatürk have become national maxims, and yet a good number of them are fabrications that were invented to serve particular interests. In recent years, some scholars have taken to exposing these fabrications with a passion reminiscent of Muḥammad ibn Ismā‘īl al-Bukhārī (d. 870), the great medieval critic of spurious traditions and sayings ascribed to the Prophet Muḥammad. Turkish taxi and trucking associations were not particularly pleased to learn that Atatürk never uttered their organizational motto, The Turkish driver is a man of the noblest feelings. But broader sectors of society were affected by the revelation that the following quotations were apocryphal: A society that does not respect its elderly is not a [real] society (carved on the wall of the Social Security headquarters in Ankara); The future is in the skies (engraved on plaques in commercial airplanes); or If an issue is related to the fatherland the rest should be considered trivial (the motto of an ultrasecular-nationalist movement in Turkey).²

Hundreds of books have been written on different aspects of Atatürk’s life and work, their titles ranging from Atatürk and Medical Students and Atatürk and Meteorology to Atatürk and Eurasia or even Atatürk’s Love for Children.³ Most of these are in the form of eulogies that depict the founder of modern Turkey as a sagelike dispenser of wisdom endowed with omniscience and insight in a variety of fields, or even as a philosopher-king who strove to lay down laws de omni scibili. Only a small number are solid monographs. Essayists have used his alleged views to prove almost any point. Thus we have both Atatürk Was an Anti-Communist and The Socialist Movement, Atatürk, and the Constitution;⁴ or I Looked for Atatürk in the Qur’ān and Found Him alongside Atatürk and Science.⁵ Meanwhile, Turkish official history tends to portray Atatürk as a leader from birth, with attempts to present his world through the prism of the person rather than vice versa. In Turkey, for instance, there are still history professors who consider Mustafa Kemal the architect of the 1908 Young Turk Revolution, even though his actual role was marginal.⁶ Similarly, for many years Turkish historiography maintained that Mustafa Kemal had warned American Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur in 1932 about an imminent general war that would destroy the civilized world. On this basis, Turkish scholars have credited Atatürk with having foreseen the Second World War even before the Nazis ascended to power.⁷ Recent research, however, has revealed that Atatürk told MacArthur exactly the opposite. The minutes of the meeting read, When the possible dangers of war were discussed, His Excellency the Gazi said that the occurrence of a world war in the next ten years was virtually impossible.⁸

Thus, any scholar seeking to grapple with the historical Atatürk must engage primarily in demythologizing, historicizing, and contextualizing through the use of primary source material. This is no easy task. While many relevant documents have been published, both during his lifetime and afterward, only recently has a publishing house attempted to bring together all his accessible writings, speeches, and correspondence. The resulting collection, whose publication began in 1998, has currently reached volume 26, thus covering the years 1903–34.⁹ As for his personal notes, Mustafa Kemal, like many other contemporary Ottoman/Turkish officers, scribbled them in a number of notebooks; some of these are in diary form, and range from 1904 to 1933. His adopted daughter, Âfet İnan, produced a sanitized version of one of these diaries extending over six notebooks.¹⁰ An additional thirty-two are located in the Military Archives, the Presidential Archives, and the Anıtkabir Archives in Ankara, and a decision was taken to publish them in twelve volumes. So far nine have been issued, with the latest appearing in 2008.¹¹ The rich collection of materials pertaining to Atatürk located in the Presidential Archives at Çankaya is off limits to bona fide scholars without special permission. Likewise, all hopes for access to his divorced wife’s personal papers, which had been classified for twenty-five years after her death in 1975, were dashed in 2005 when they were placed under lock and key indefinitely at the Archives of the Turkish Historical Association.

Nevertheless, there is no shortage of accessible material with which to work, and the serious historian’s task consists mainly of separating strands of fact from the considerable body of fiction that has accumulated since