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hazy vision of mosque on Asian side
Dining In Istanbul
Infront of the Blue Mosque
Toys of OldNot So Kemal
Far be it from me to pass judgment on the national hero of a country I spent less than a week in, but all the idolization of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk has made me curious about the man versus the myth. Wherever we went in Istanbul we bumped into giant statues of him – overlooking the Bosphorus, in Gulhane Park, at the top of Istiklal Caddesi. A huge gold “death mask” of Ataturk is one of the first things you see when you walk into the train station. On the monument it says “No mutlu Turkum diyene” – Proud is he who is a Turk.
Clearly, Ataturk was proud to be a Turk, but it was Turkishness of his own invention.
When he was born, circa 1880, his parents called him Mustafa. His math teacher dubbed him “Kemal,” which means perfection, and “Ataturk” – father of the Turks – came later. In fact, he wasn’t even born in Turkey, but in the Balkans. He chose a military career in the Ottoman army and gradually worked his way up to the top.
As we see so often in this part of the world, military heroism became a springboard for politics. His nationalist movement, the Young Turks, overthrew the Sultan. When the Republic of Turkey came into being on October 29, 1923, Kemal was elected president. He introduced major political, social, legal, educational, cultural and economic reforms. In short, the man was a reformer par excellence. In this respect, he reminds me of some other national leaders I know (Israel’s David Ben-Gurion comes to mind). He was a democratic leader in name, but something of a dictator in practice. According to his leadership approach, you don’t give the people what they want. You give them what they need. And he decided what they needed was to shed Islamic customs – from hats to alphabets, as if these were responsible for holding progress back. What Turkey needed, in his eyes, was to be Europe.
Kemal’s intentions were good, but it turned out that they – and he – were far from perfect. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, his detracters say, was a womanizer, a pedophile and a drunk. He died at 57 from alcohol-related cirrhosis of the liver, leaving behind a country that has indeed made progress, but continues to be torn between East and West.
