AHC/WI: Turkey goes through Iran-style revolution

Kick
I know you mean well, but you have such a rose-tinted, ignorant and frankly condescending and stupid way of looking at the late Ottoman era, that you make it very hard for me to keep myself from insulting you.

I'd like to see Ataturk's reform, but in a more moderate way.

1. The Ottoman script should be kept. No to Latin script.

No. Fuck no. "Ottoman script" is just badly cobbled together Arabic script. Arabic script, due to the pecularities of both languages, does not fit the Turkish language. Today, even basic handwritten historical reports need the collaboration of multiple experts to decipher. This is not about the loss of that script. Even native users of the script (Arabs and Persians) have difficulty. And that is not because of their unfamiliarity. In Arabic, word roots are defined as collections of consonants. Turkish doesn't work like that. In Turkish, meaning is conveyed by differences in wovels. Arabic script doesn't have any wovels.

Before Atatürk's script reforms, the literacy rate in Turkey was in single digit percentages, all either educated elites from Istanbul, or religious leaders from the rural areas. The ease of the new script allowed him to bring that rate to high 70s within a couple of years, and almost full literacy by the end of his lifetime.

Arabic script and Turkish language does not work. Anyone who thinks Ottoman script should have remained has no idea either works.


2. Don't ban people from wearing clothes they want, nor forcing western dress

You have no idea what the "millet" system is or how it worked. In the Millet system, clothing, especially headwear, is a way to distinguish between religious, national and social groups. Forcing Western dress is a way of homogenizing the country without making one group dominant over others. Millet system needed to be destroyed.

3. No changing the name of god from Allah to Tengri. The azan stays in Arabic. (This part of the reform was later reversed).

It was done to break the power of the religious elites, who have done nothing good for the country for the last half century.

4. No closure of all Sufi lodges and banning of brotherhoods. Sure, bad ones that Effendi Khuzdul mentioned can be reformed. But there is no need to make it illegal. Not all of them would have been bad.

Lose the "Effendi". This single word demonstrates the depth of your ignorance, so go read a cartload more books before you even speak of my country again. I am not some Arab sheik, you idiot. I am Turkish.

The "good Sufi lodges" you are dreaming of DO NOT EXIST. Stop hoping that there was any good in that cesspit. There wasn't.


5. No oppression of Kurds. They were banned to speak their own language. This is ridiculous and should be stopped.

That was done later. Ethnic opression of Kurds was not an Atatürk-era policy.


Other than that, I support many of the secular principles. Ataturk did much good for women's role in society and education in schools. Also support for science and modern industry. These things were a valuable step forward for Turkey.

Despite my criticisms earlier, on balance there is no doubt that Ataturk was a far better leader than Erdogan.
 
I know you mean well, but you have such a rose-tinted, ignorant and frankly condescending and stupid way of looking at the late Ottoman era, that you make it very hard for me to keep myself from insulting you.

I am sorry but this is too much. You have been reported.

This post is insulting and needlessly rude. There's no excuse for insulting someone like that. We should be able to disagree without these type of comments.

Moderators, please also note the bolded part in his post, above, where he directly called me an "idiot". Thanks.
 
I am sorry but this is too much. You have been reported.

This post is insulting and needlessly rude. There's no excuse for insulting someone like that. We should be able to disagree without these type of comments.

Moderators, please also note the bolded part in his post, above, where he directly called me an "idiot". Thanks.

You insult me, my heritage, my nation, my history and then have the temerity to bitch about it?

Please never post anything about Turkey again. You clearly know absolutely nothing about the subject, other than some orientalist fantasy. We can do without your input in this subject.
 
"You have no idea what the "millet" system is or how it worked. In the Millet system, clothing, especially headwear, is a way to distinguish between religious, national and social groups. Forcing Western dress is a way of homogenizing the country without making one group dominant over others. Millet system needed to be destroyed."

Isn't turkey majority muslim anyway? So why do you need homogenizing, which groups were being oppressed by the dominant as the majority was more than 90% muslim so who is being opressed.

"It was done to break the power of the religious elites, who have done nothing good for the country for the last half century."

How does this break the power of the religious elite? Also the point stills stands as it was a move of a attack on the religion as. Your trying to justify extreme action that is simple with that point. If it was to westernise then use the word god then as it means the same thing as allah. Tengri is a separate god all together.
 
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"You have no idea what the "millet" system is or how it worked. In the Millet system, clothing, especially headwear, is a way to distinguish between religious, national and social groups. Forcing Western dress is a way of homogenizing the country without making one group dominant over others. Millet system needed to be destroyed."

Isn't turkey majority muslim anyway? So why do you need homogenizing, which groups were being oppressed by the dominant as the majority was more than 90% muslim so who is being opressed.

"It was done to break the power of the religious elites, who have done nothing good for the country for the last half century."

How does this break the power of the religious elite? Also the point stills stands as it was a move of a attack on the religion as. Your trying to justify extreme action that is simple with that point. If it was to westernise then use the word god then as it means the same thing as allah. Tengri is a separate god all together.


a)
The point is that millet dress makes the appearance of Non-Muslims obvious and makes them easier to oppress and mistreat. The idea that this never resulted in oppression brings to mind the genocides of the later Ottoman Empire.

The millet system was abolished, as I understand it, to try to prevent Christians and other Non-Muslims from feeling they might be targeted by pogroms like they had been not long before Atatürk.

b)

I believe Khuzdul was referring to the azan part of the reforms and not the Tengri part. Though even still Allah is "just" God in Arabic, and linguistic reform that decides on Tengri as the Turkish word for God is not an extreme action. Unless you suggest that only conservative religion is true religion then translation of religious terms as basic as "God" is not an "extreme action". Why would you ever in Turkish linguistic reform move from Arabic to English (Allah -> G-d)? Arabic to Turkish makes more sense (Allah -> Tengri).
 
"You have no idea what the "millet" system is or how it worked. In the Millet system, clothing, especially headwear, is a way to distinguish between religious, national and social groups. Forcing Western dress is a way of homogenizing the country without making one group dominant over others. Millet system needed to be destroyed."

Isn't turkey majority muslim anyway? So why do you need homogenizing, which groups were being oppressed by the dominant as the majority was more than 90% muslim so who is being opressed.

The millet system oppresses not just the non-Muslim minorities, but other Muslim sects, such as Alawites (who have always faced significant oppression in the hands of Sunni Ottomans and who make a very large minority especially in the central and eastern Anatolia) and the Shia minorities to the east. Homogenization is especially aimed at those two sects, and to bring them up to the level of Sunni majority. Turkey is not just "90% Muslim", there are a lot of sects and minority groups. Westernization homogenized those and attempted to destroy the low level but everpresent oppression these faced daily. It worked for Alawites, but with the religious elite of the Eastern provinces regaining power by the stupidity of Menderes in the 1950s, these people lost a lot in the rollback of Atatürk reforms.

"It was done to break the power of the religious elites, who have done nothing good for the country for the last half century."
How does this break the power of the religious elite? Also the point stills stands as it was a move of a attack on the religion as. Your trying to justify extreme action that is simple with that point. If it was to westernise then use the word god then as it means the same thing as allah. Tengri is a separate god all together.

It was part of the translation of religious texts. Atatürk's position has always been "if you are going to worship something, at least know what you are praying about". They translated the Qur'an and as part of that drive, translated the Ezan as well. Maybe a bit heavy handed, but there was a definitive purpose. Before that, the religious elite, tarikat sheiks and imams, held all the power because they were the only ones that knew Arabic and thus understood what the religious texts said. People had to take them at their word. Do remember that the translation of the Bible from Latin to local languages was a big part of the Reform in Europe. Atatürk attempted something similar. Sadly, he didn't live long enough to complete the process, and his successors had their heads up their asses about a lot of this.
 
"You have no idea what the "millet" system is or how it worked. In the Millet system, clothing, especially headwear, is a way to distinguish between religious, national and social groups. Forcing Western dress is a way of homogenizing the country without making one group dominant over others. Millet system needed to be destroyed."

Isn't turkey majority muslim anyway? So why do you need homogenizing, which groups were being oppressed by the dominant as the majority was more than 90% muslim so who is being opressed.
What is today Turkey as historically had large Christian minorities, many of whom dissapeared in the early 20th century.

Turkey has also since the decline of the Ottomans accepted many migrants from former areas of influence. Crimean Tatars, Circassians, Balkan Turks, Muslim Balkan populations, muslim Abkhazians.

Turkey has essentially been a very diverse country historically ans still is diverse.
"It was done to break the power of the religious elites, who have done nothing good for the country for the last half century."

How does this break the power of the religious elite? Also the point stills stands as it was a move of a attack on the religion as. Your trying to justify extreme action that is simple with that point. If it was to westernise then use the word god then as it means the same thing as allah. Tengri is a separate god all together.
Perhaps changing the name of Allah to Tengri was done as nationalist project?
 
oh thanks for explaining. i think we can all agree with fuck the Wahhabi ideology that is a threat but surely couldn't they use an pan-islamic identity again as that can bridge the ethnic and national identities.
@Lord Khuzdul this is a question more towards you one of the reforms was banning of the headscarf and religious clothing, is it still oppressive to wear it if the women chooses to wear the headscarf and would be fine with it. (if the women has no choice i personally believe it is oppression no question even if they are fine with it such as saudi arabia) "Sadly, he didn't live long enough to complete the process, and his successors had their heads up their asses about a lot of this." can you explain the part about the successors more please.

Me personally i do believe turkey was a oppressive when it did come to religion (islam) but im not one of those political islam advocates, for sharia and etc, i find that shit outdated and just stupid. If i had to choose between Atarturk turkey or Saudi Arabia it is not a question (turkey the answer) and a i do believe Pakistan is in need of Ataturk style reforms badly, but not become repressive towards religion.
 
I'm shocked at the rather bloodthirsty posts in this thread calling for a Greek invasion, or equating the Arabic script with expelling Turkey from NATO. Some of these suggestions are rather outrageous and would not be tolerated for another country.

These matters are not as simple as the Latin alphabet supposedly being better suited to Turkish. Of course it was far more symbolic than that. It was about the Kemalist obsession with "modernising" Turkey, which at that time meant "Westernisation". During this time, the traditional culture of Turkey was relentlessly vandalised and disfigured in the name of "modernisation", leaving a nation culturally impoverished and cut off from its past and its spiritual nourishment.

The Sufi lodges, ancient centres of wisdom which had guided Turkey for a thousand years, were shut down. Traditional clothing was banned. Ancient ceremonies and cultural traditions were banned. A draconian, nationalistic ideology was rammed down people's throats, while Turkey's rich heritage of cultures, languages, peoples and customs were stamped out, often with violent oppression.

Turkey took a profoundly wrong path, turning its back on its true heritage, founded in the mixing of the Turkish, Arabic, Persian, Greek, Armenian and Kurdish aspects of Anatolia, all blended and mixed in glorious diversity and colour.

Westerners idolize Ataturk and his reforms as some sort of miraculous transformation of the supposedly "backward" and "primitive" Muslim society into the "civilised" and "modern" western society. These ideas are rooted in a dangerous kind of snobbery that combines racism and Islamophobia into the well-worn tropes of "oriental" decadence and inferiority, which are contrasted against the unspoken but clearly implied superiority of white northern European westerners.

Of course these ideas are outdated, offensive and inaccurate trash that deserves to be consigned to the dustbin of history. The true history of Anatolia and its people deserves so much better than to be treated like this.

Oh Jesus... And I thought I was the only one. I've seen these kind of topics before. Writing something like "a joint invasion of Turkey by the USA & USSR" which would not happend, did not happen in Iran and the USA would never allow the Soviets roll in Anatolia anytime between 1949-1991. Never seen an impossible alliance between the USA & USSR just to beat a revolution.

I've seen older topics were these kind of controversial things were discussed. Somehow Turkey & Turks always should have been beaten worse than they were in history. And historically they were already.
 
oh thanks for explaining. i think we can all agree with fuck the Wahhabi ideology that is a threat but surely couldn't they use an pan-islamic identity again as that can bridge the ethnic and national identities.
@Lord Khuzdul this is a question more towards you one of the reforms was banning of the headscarf and religious clothing, is it still oppressive to wear it if the women chooses to wear the headscarf and would be fine with it. (if the women has no choice i personally believe it is oppression no question even if they are fine with it such as saudi arabia) "Sadly, he didn't live long enough to complete the process, and his successors had their heads up their asses about a lot of this." can you explain the part about the successors more please.

Me personally i do believe turkey was a oppressive when it did come to religion (islam) but im not one of those political islam advocates, for sharia and etc, i find that shit outdated and just stupid. If i had to choose between Atarturk turkey or Saudi Arabia it is not a question (turkey the answer) and a i do believe Pakistan is in need of Ataturk style reforms badly, but not become repressive towards religion.

Hard headscarf ban only came around when the Islamists started using it as a political symbol. Before that nobody really gave a fuck. And Pan-Islamism is dangerous to use as a binder, because that way lies the murky waters of Sharia advocacy. Nationalism (not racism as Atatürk's nationalism doesn't include an ethnic component) is much safer.

As for religious clothing bans, as I said it was to promote equality and homogenity of the country. Do remember that these are not hard bans except for headwear which is done to eliminate the Millet system. Banning of çarşaf (I think Arabs call it hijab) was to promote women's liberation, which was not going to happen unless it was forced this way by the government - a lot of the country was simply too backwards and paternalistic. Any grasroots movement would have faced incredible violence, and that violence would have been too distributed to stamp on specifically, so it had to be forced from the top.

Another reason for stamping on religion was to dampen the influence of Eshari thought in the minds of the populace. Eshari brand of Islam, which forms the basis of much of Turkey's Sunni sects, is a dangerously anti-intellectual type of Islamic thought. The populace needed to be shaken free of it.

In the end, what Atatürk did was to emulate what worked in the Reform period of European history, but in a top-down manner.

As for the successors issue, well, with Atatürk's death, and even during his last few years, with his disease advancing, a lot of the spirit went out of his reforms, only the letter remaining. And his successors mostly went with the letter of the reforms and either forgot or remained ignorant of the actual intended effects.

However, what I have to object to is the "oppression of Islam" narrative. Islam was only "oppressed" in the way American evangelicals were "oppressed", they were not allowed to shape the public discourse and society the way they wanted, damn whoever else wants. In return, the state tried to remain secular, and to avoid involving actual religious dictates in its laws and actions. It was heavy handed and inconsistent at times. Almost unbroken succession of right wing governments from 1950 to this day did not really help with that, and the end result was a schizophrenic secularization, which still paid lip service to vile Sunni ideologies, that gave us the current abomination.
 

CalBear

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I am sorry but this is too much. You have been reported.

This post is insulting and needlessly rude. There's no excuse for insulting someone like that. We should be able to disagree without these type of comments.

Moderators, please also note the bolded part in his post, above, where he directly called me an "idiot". Thanks.
Don't use the report system as a threat.

You made the report. That is all that has to be done.
 

CalBear

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I know you mean well, but you have such a rose-tinted, ignorant and frankly condescending and stupid way of looking at the late Ottoman era, that you make it very hard for me to keep myself from insulting you.
Well, you should have tried harder.

If you have an issue with what you see as an insult, report it.

Your chosen method tends to have negative feedback.

Kicked for a week.
 

CalBear

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Let me remind one and all that personal insults, nationalistic insult, flame baiting, and picking fights are ALL actionable.

You need to play the ball folks, not the man. If your feeling on this are so high you can't maintain standards, don't play.
 
Thanks, @CalBear .

It's a shame he felt the need to demand I never post on Turkey again, as if he has the right to silence me just because he doesn't agree with what I have to say.

I can't help but compare this with the way Ataturk himself silenced the opposition, effectively stifling Turkish democracy at birth. Our friend also claimed i know nothing about Turkey. Actually I do happen to know something about this period, having recently finished Lord Kinross' epic biography of Ataturk (which, by the way, is very favourable to its subject).

Ataturk had a naturally authoritarian character. When his original friends in the Turkish independence movement proposed to create a party, on friendly terms with the government, to be a rather mild "opposition" in parliament, he accused them of being a threat to national security and had them banned. The echoes of Erdogan's present dictatorship are there for those who look.

Changing the name of god from Allah to Tengri is not a mere linguistic change. Tengri is a pre-Islamic Turkic deity. People have always called god Allah since Islam first appeared. The name of god has huge symbolic significance. It is a direct connection to the origins of Islam in Arabia. It comes with a whole 1600 years of history and scholarship, traditions, schools of thought, and much else. Of course, that is partly the point, since Ataturk was an atheist and did not believe in god.

I understand what Ataturk was trying to do and I agree that people should understand what their prayers mean, but this name change goes too far. Allah is the god of the Muslims, not Tengri. As for the azan being in Turkish, I'm fine with that. I agree people should understand it. But I seriously doubt there's a single man woman or child anywhere in the entire Muslim world who does not know what "ashadu ana la ilaha ila la wa muhhamad ur rasul Allah" means.

As for the hijab, my view is it's a woman's choice. Nowhere in the Qur'an does it say women must wear hijab. There is reference to it in the hadith, but these are sayings not legal rulings and even here the meaning is disputed. As I understand it, the reference was a curtain in the house of Muhammad, not a head covering, and it in any case refers specifically to his wives, not women in general.

One cannot protect liberty by forcing women not to wear something. This is oppression, no different from forcing them TO wear something. Both are wrong. Either she wears it or not; the state has no business interfering.

And despite what Khuzdul says, Islam WAS oppressed. Some clergy were sent to prison and others even killed. And I refuse to believe that every Sufi lodge was a den of vice by the early 20th cemtury. Such claims, with no evidence to back them up, smack of propaganda and are self evidently absurd. This is just like the argument over the dissolution of the monasteries in England. While some of them doubtless were corrupt, that does not mean all were. Just as certainly, Some of them were genuinely devoted to their original purpose. This could have been dealt with by reform and higher standards. But as in England, it became too convenient to silence a potentially powerful source of opposition and seize their assets for the state.

The demise of honourable Sufism in Turkey has clearly left a vacuum, and left the people looking for new answers. Eventually the rise of Salafist fascism disguised as Islam has taken its place, and we see the damage that is doing to Turkey now every day under Erdogan and his thugs.

Identity politics has trumped common sense and the rule of law in modern Turkey, and it is legitimate to lay a portion of the blame for this at Ataturk's policies. He may have been arguably the most successful leader of the 20th century. But that does not mean every single decision he made was right.
 
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I remember when the allegation was that this board was too Turcophile.

I think the issue @ByzantineLover for Attaturk was attempting to build a Turkish nationalism which was not so strongly tied to the Middle East per se, a region then arguably viewed as being in decline. What set apart the Meiji revolution from the later developments under Attaturk in Turkey was that the Meiji reformers were propping up the empire, whereas Kemal was running away from it. I see your point about the Sufi houses, but I think it would be more accurate to fault the end of the Caliphate (also by Kemal), as well as intellectual and political developments elsewhere in the Islamic world, for the Salafists. You're wholly correct though that Attaturk, like most revolutionaries, became drunk on his own power.
 
I remember when the allegation was that this board was too Turcophile.

I think the issue @ByzantineLover for Attaturk was attempting to build a Turkish nationalism which was not so strongly tied to the Middle East per se, a region then arguably viewed as being in decline. What set apart the Meiji revolution from the later developments under Attaturk in Turkey was that the Meiji reformers were propping up the empire, whereas Kemal was running away from it. I see your point about the Sufi houses, but I think it would be more accurate to fault the end of the Caliphate (also by Kemal), as well as intellectual and political developments elsewhere in the Islamic world, for the Salafists. You're wholly correct though that Attaturk, like most revolutionaries, became drunk on his own power.

I think you mean @Byzantine fanatic. I've never been on this thread, until now.
 
Attaturk was attempting to build a Turkish nationalism which was not so strongly tied to the Middle East per se, a region then arguably viewed as being in decline.

Indeed so.

Persia and the Ottomans had two of the most powerful gunpowder armies in the world by the 18th century. However the consensus of historians seems to be that the Muslim world was more advanced than Western Europe in 1000 CE, on par by the middle of the 16th century, but by 1750, leading Middle-Eastern states had fallen behind the leading Western European states of Britain and the Netherlands.

From a purely military standpoint, this fits well too. The Ottoman army maintained technological parity with Europe until the 1740s, then started to fall behind. Defeats to Russia in the late 18th century proved to be a sign of worse to come. Meanwhile in Persia, the death of Nader Shah in 1747 marked the beginning of the end of Persia as a leading world power.

By the year 1800 the Muslim world had not lost any of its core territory, but the edges were beginning to fray, most notably the Ottoman frontier with Austria and Russia. Then in 1813 Russia imposed the humiliating treaty of Golestan on Persia, by which Persia lost control of the Caucasus. In 1830, Greece won its war of independence from the Ottomans and broke away; in the same year, the French conquered Algiers, beginning the European expansion into North Africa.

Remarkably, the Ottoman Empire still held onto the vast bulk of its territory until 1878, thanks in large part to heroic reform efforts. But after 1878 the empire rapidly collapsed, as Europe was by this time industrialised too far ahead. So overall, the Muslim world first became weaker than the west around the 1740s. But this probably wasn't noticed until the late 18th century and began having serious consequences in the 1830s. The rate of divergence only accelerated from there and by the 1880s the situation was calamitous. By 1920, virtually the entire Muslim world had been conquered and divided by the west.

So Ataturk was wise, back in the 1920s, to attempt a reform of the society. But I'm not sure the root causes of European dominance were fully understood. A society cannot be entirely transformed from the top down. The advance of the West was a bottom up process that occurred naturally over several centuries. But he made a pretty strong effort such as was possible in so short a time. One of the areas that Kinross says Ataturk struggled was with the economy. By inclination, he wasn't much interested in money and left that to others. This was problematic, because the whole basis of western power at the time was its economic and industrial might.

That said, he did make important and significant efforts to establish national industries as part of modernisation. He recognised that Turkey must become self-sufficient in modern technology if it was to maintain its independence. But economic prosperity was never achieved, and the Great Depression in the 1930s didn't help. Perhaps with even more focus on economics, still greater advances for Turkey could have been achieved.
 
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