PDF Dosyası - Ankara Üniversitesi Kitaplar Veritabanı

Raised from early childhood in a non traditional manner, a processwhich his father espoused, it was natural for him to reject any associationwith the "backward" peoples the Empire ruled över. This explains notonly his emphasis on western, non-Arab, non Middle Eastern garb, headdress ...ete, but also his rejection of the very seript in which Ottoman language,history, culture and its religious core were written.His was not a piecemeal reformist program but a total revolutionagainst the existing order and its replacement with a new one. The corevalues must change and the core values of the order in which the Empirelanguished, he thought, were archaic and more concerned with form andceremony than substance. He seems to have arrived at his own conclusions,ali by himself, without the anticlerical tradition which Marx foundstrong in western societies and which encouraged him to think of religionas the opium of the masses. In a speech at inebolu in 1925 Atatürk spellsout clearly and rightly his view of the need to modernize. He says"...Before the impetuous torrent of civilization resistance is futile: it isquite without merey towards the heedless and refractory. In the face ofthe might and superiority of civilization, which pierces mountains, flies inthe sky, sees everything from the atoms invisible to the eye to the stars,and which enlightens and investigates, nations striving to advance with amedieval mentality and primitive superstitions are condemmed to perishor at least to be enslaved and humiliated. But the people of the TurkishRepublic have decided to live to eternity as a civilized and progressivecommunity, and have torn to pieces the chains of slavery with a heroismunequalled in history" 5 .It is the totality of his revolutionist approach that is astonishing aswell as his frank daring to challenge the existing status quo. It is notenough to say that his father inspired him, for however true that may havebeen, it does not explain the genuine commitment or the sustained determinationthat drove him to challenge the totality of the order of life inwhich he was born. After ali, the Ottoman Empire was a great achievmentof the genuis of the Turkish people: their disipline, their administrationand their sense of mission. Under the circumstances, one vvould haveassumed that reform, not total revolution, vvould have been the response.Would it not have been more natural for Mustafa Kemal, the proud Turkthat he was, to take pride in Ottomanism which was an expression ofTurkish civilization? Surely he was aware that the empire, with whatevershortcomings it may have had in his eyes, was one of the last great empiresthat survived on equal footing with other empires of its time.These and similar questions may never be satisfactorily answeredthough speculation may continue well into the future. The fact remains,5. Ibid, p. 289.