THE ROBI POLIKAR CYBERDOMAIN ROOT PAGE
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Last updated November 6, 1995
For centuries the Turks were seen through western eyes as the scourge of Christianity and a thread to the European order. In the western countries of the midiveal Europe, the very word Turk came to symbolize everything that was savage or barbaric, and in the popular imagination of the time Turks took their place in the litany of plagues, floods, earthquakes, and comets used by the Almighty as punishment for the wicked.
As far as the Ottoman Empire (1299-1918) is concerned, in the minds of most westerners, still conjures up images of decadence of harems, and it is left to few historians to marvel at its extraordinary religious tolerance and at an astonishingly fair system of "promotion" under which a slave could (and frequently did) rise to be the Grand Vizier, the today's equivalent of prime minister.
The above mentioned extraordinary religious tolerance of Turks is what made today's modern Turkey the "beloved home country" of hundreds of thousands of Jews and Christians, where they live in peace with Muslims (a vast majority of the Turkish population)...such a piece that no Jew or Christian has ever seen in any other country. Turkey today is the only non-sectarian and democratic country in the world with a muslim majority with all non-muslims citizens having the very same rights and duties, not to mention of course , the parliamentary rights.
Today, Turkey is a member of the European Council and it is also a NATO member (since 1952). It is hard to overemphasize Turkey's strategic position, lying at the geographic junction of different forces, allies, and ideologies of Europe and Asia, of Christianity and Islam, of (vestigial) Communism and Hellenism. If Turkey were to leave NATO, the West would lose its control of the vital Bosphorus straits, as wellas to relinquish its ability to carry out air strikes from Turkish NATO bases on Iraq (as it did in the Gulf War), Iran, any Arabic or ex-Soviet trouble spot.
Today, Turkey represents the only area of stability in the most unstable and unpredictable part of the world.Military victory , however, was the easiest challenge he took, considering that he had to form the nation, literally from scratch. The Ottoman Empire had left a vast amount of external dept, a ruined country with no industry and economy. He had to reform the country, and he knew that his government could only achieve his reforms by securing the support of the majority of the Turkish people.
In 1923, he formed "The Republic of Turkey", immediately followed by structural reforms. Most of his reforms (in 1920s and 1930s) were concerned with religion, in recognition of the fact that Turkey could not become a part of Europe with the then existing religious laws.
He therefore stopped the religious education in schools and replaced the Arabic alphabet with the Latin one. This one was a double blow for Islam, for Arabic is not only the script of the holy Koran, but also the sacred calligraphy that adorns all mosques. But Turks are not Arabs, and the language they speak is not Arabic either. The Ottomans tried to use the Arabic script with the Turkish language, but obviously the Arabic alphabet was not suitable for the Turkic language.
Probably the most astonishing reform was getting rid of all the islamic laws. No other country with a muslim majority has managed or even attempted to abolish the Koranic law, a remarkable reform, as in many ways the Koranic law is the most sacred part of Islam and the very essence of religion.
Ataturk replaced the Koranic-Islamic law with the modern European codes of law, an extraordinary affront to orthodox muslims. All reference to Islam was erased from the new constitution, and by becoming a secular state in 1923, Turkey effectively withdrew from the Islamic world.Ataturk's aim was not to abolish the religion, however, but to free the people from what he believed to be Islam's frequently oppressive and backward-looking influence: a necessary step in order to allow them to look forward, and to make progress toward the elusive goal of modernization.
THE ROBI POLIKAR CYBERDOMAIN ROOT PAGE
Click here rpolikar@iastate.edu to check if I am logged in at this time. You will see the machine adress(es) that I am logged in at Iowa State University.