Modern Turkey emerged from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire after World War I and adopted a distinctive path of modernization, Westernization, and secularism under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Such policies sought to remove Islam from any significant role in public life, restricting it to the realm of personal devotion, and included abolition of the caliphate, by which Ottoman rulers had claimed leadership of the entire Islamic world. In a speech delivered in 1927, Atatürk explained and justified these policies, which went against the grain of much Islamic thinking.

MUSTAFA KEMAL ATATÜRK

Speech to the General Congress of the Republican Party

1927

[Our Ottoman rulers] hoped to unite the entire Islamic world in one body, to lead it and to govern it. For this purpose, [they] assumed the title of Caliph.° . . . It is an unrealizable aim to attempt to unite in one tribe the various races existing on the earth, thereby abolishing all boundaries. . . .

If the Caliph and the Caliphate were to be invested with a dignity embracing the whole of Islam . . . , a crushing burden would be imposed on Turkey. . . . [Furthermore], will Persia or Afghanistan, which are [Muslim] states, recognize the authority of the Caliph in a single matter? No, and this is quite justifiable, because it would be in contradiction to the independence of the state, to the sovereignty of the people.

[The current constitution] laid down as the first duty of the Grand National Assembly that “the prescriptions of the Shari’a° should be put into force. . . .” [But] if a state, having among its subjects elements professing different religions and being compelled to act justly and impartially toward all of them . . . , it is obliged to respect freedom of opinion and conscience. . . . The Muslim religion includes freedom of religious opinion. . . . Will not every grown-up person in the new Turkish state be free to select his own religion? . . . When the first favorable opportunity arises, the nation must act to eliminate these superfluities [the enforcement of sharia] from our Constitution. . . .

Under the mask of respect for religious ideas and dogmas, the new Party [in opposition to Atatürk’s reformist plans] addressed itself to the people in the following words: “We want the re-establishment of the Caliphate; we are satisfied with the religious law; we shall protect the Medressas,° the Tekkes,° the pious institutions, the Softahs,° the Sheikhs,° and their disciples. . . . The party of Mustapha Kemal, having abolished the Caliphate, is breaking Islam into ruins; they will make you into unbelievers . . . they will make you wear hats.” Can anyone pretend that the style of propaganda used by the Party was not full of these reactionary appeals? . . .

Gentlemen, it was necessary to abolish the fez,° which sat on our heads as a sign of ignorance, of fanaticism, of hatred to progress and civilization, and to adopt in its place the hat, the customary headdress of the whole civilized world, thus showing that no difference existed in the manner of thought between the Turkish nation and the whole family of civilized mankind. . . . [Thus] there took place the closing of the Tekkes, of the convents, and of the mausoleums, as well as the abolition of all sects and all kinds of [religious] titles. . . .

Could a civilized nation tolerate a mass of people who let themselves be led by the nose by a herd of Sheikhs, Dedes, Seids, Tschelebis, Babas, and Emirs°. . . . Would not one therewith have committed the greatest, most irreparable error to the cause of progress and awakening?