At a glance
Era 12- Dates
- 1881-1938 CE; president 1923-1938 CE
- Who
- Ottoman officer who led the Turkish war of independence and founded a secular republic
- Era
- The Modern Ummah
ProfileMustafa Kemal Atatürk
Mustafa was born in 1881 in Salonica, then an Ottoman city, and trained as an army officer. A teacher at military school gave him his second name, Kemal. He served in Libya and the Balkans, and in 1915 at Gallipoli he commanded the division that held the heights against the Allied landings. It made his name.
After the Ottoman defeat in 1918, Allied troops occupied Istanbul and planned to divide Anatolia. In May 1919 Mustafa Kemal landed at Samsun and organised resistance. A Grand National Assembly met at Ankara in 1920, and its armies drove out the occupying forces by 1922. Muslims as far away as India followed the war with hope, and many of the soldiers believed they were fighting for the caliph.
What followed shocked them. The Assembly abolished the sultanate in 1922, declared a republic in October 1923 with Mustafa Kemal as president, and on 3 March 1924 abolished the caliphate itself. Over the next years his government closed the Sharia courts and the Sufi lodges, replaced Islamic law with a civil code taken from Switzerland, banned the fez, removed Islam as the religion of the state and replaced the Arabic script with the Latin alphabet. From 1932 to 1950 the call to prayer had to be given in Turkish. In 1934, when surnames were introduced, the Assembly gave him the name Atatürk, "Father of the Turks".
He died in Istanbul in 1938. Many Turks honour him as the founder of their nation. Many Muslims elsewhere remember him above all for ending a caliphate that reached back to Abu Bakr, and for cutting Turkey off from much of its Islamic past.
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