doğmunun 125. yılında mustafa kemal atatürk - Atatürk Araştırma ...

ATATÜRK’S REFORMS AND THEIR IMPACT ON THE MUSLIM WORLD 525
(Atatürkçülük), evidently it grew out of Mustafa Kemal’s
declarations and actions and was not the result of any philosophicaldogmatic
system. Indeed, İsmet Giritli considers Kemalism as ‘a
flexible amalgam of secularism, realism, empirical rationalism, and
nationalism’ as against the ‘rigid ideologies’ such as Marxism and
National Socialism. 12 Its objective was geared to ensuring that the
Turkish society changed structurally towards a modern, civilized
society. 13 However, the Kemalist inkilap did not advocate a sudden
and total break with the Ottoman past; rather its aim was to radicalize
the culmination of that process which had been taking place for over a
century. 14 The fundamentals of Kemalism (announced in a manifesto
in April 1931) lay stress on six principles: (i) republicanism, which
incorporated the concept of national sovereignty that Kemal had
absorbed from his younger days; (ii) nationalism, which was aroused
partly by the writings on the subject but mostly by the tribulations
of the state and found a renewed expression in Turkey’s redefined
boundaries as a sociological-psychological concept disavowing
discrimination of race or religion; (in) populism, which centred on
the ‘people’ as a source of democratic rights and favoured liberal
political democracy in the sense of the people being in the ultimate
control of the state; (iv) etatism, which visualized state participation
in vital sectors of a mixed economy aiming at definite and measurable
targets and results through a comprehensive and systematic strategy;
(v) laicism/laiklik, which meant freedom of mind along with
separation of religion from the state without subscribing to atheism;
and, lastly, (vi) revolutionism, which underscored the other five
principles. 15 These edicts were fully guaranteed in the republican
12 İsmet Giritli, ‘Kemalism as an Ideology of Modernization’, in Landau (ed.),
Atatürk and the Modernization of Turkey, 251; and id., ‘The Superiority
of the Kemalist Ideology over Dogmatic Ideologies’, in Siislii (ed.), A Handbook
of Kemalist Thought, 126.
13 Sulhi Donmezer, ‘Atatürk’s Revolution and Social Change’, in ibid., 6.
14 Ali Kazancigil and Ergun Ozbudun, ‘Introduction’, id., (eds.), Atatürk, 2-3;
Ali Kazancigil, ‘The Ottoman-Turkish state and Kemalism’, ibid., 37 ff; and
Paul Dumont, ‘The Origins of Kemalist Ideology’, in Landau (ed.), Atatürk
and the Modernization of Turkey, 35.
15 See Enver Ziya Karal, ‘The Principles of Kemalism’, in Kazancigil and
Ozbudun, (eds.), Atatürk, esp. 16-23; and several contributions on Kemalism