The New Old World (73 page)

Hailed as liberator of his country, Kemal was now master of the political scene. He had risen to power in large measure on the back of the parallel state Unionism had left behind when the
Schastlivyi
slipped its moorings, and for a time had more the status of
primus inter pares
among survivors of the CUP regime than of
an uncontested chief. As late as the summer of 1921, Enver had hovered across the border on the Black Sea coast, waiting to reenter the fray and take over leadership from Kemal, should he fail to stem the Greek advance. Military victory made Kemal immune to such a threat, which Talat in Berlin anyway thought ill-advised, instructing his followers to stick with the new leader. But the CUP also represented another kind of danger, as a potential albatross round the legitimacy of his rule. For under the Allied occupation, trials of the key officials responsible for the Armenian genocide had been held by the government in Istanbul, and all eight of the top leaders who had sailed to Sebastopol were condemned to death
in absentia
.

The Weimar regime, fearing they might implicate Germany if extradited, had given them cover. In Berlin, they had developed their own ambitious schemes for the recovery of Turkish power, criss-crossing Europe and Asia—Talat to Holland, Sweden, Italy; Cemal to Switzerland, Georgia;
Ş
akir and Enver to Russia; others to Persia and Afghanistan—with differing plans for a comeback.
²⁶
Had they remained at large, they would have been an acute embarrassment to Kemal's regime, as reminders of what linked them, forcing it to take a public position it wished at all costs to avoid. By a stroke of irony, Kemal was spared this problem by the Central Committee of the Armenian Revolutionary Party, the Dashnaks. Deciding at a meeting in Erevan to execute justice on its own account, the party dispatched operatives to carry out the verdicts of Istanbul. In March 1921, Talat was felled by a revolver a few yards from his residence in the Uhlandstrasse, just off the Kurfürstendamm, in the centre of Berlin; in April 1922,
Ş
akir and Cemal Azmi were shot a few doors down in the same street; in July, Cemal was assassinated in Tbilisi; in August, beyond the reach of Dashnak vengeance, Enver was tracked—supposedly by an Armenian Chekist—and killed fighting the Bolsheviks in
Tajikstan.
²⁷
No clean sweep could have been more timely for the new order in Ankara. With the CUP chiefs out of the way, Kemal could proceed to build a Turkey in his image, unencumbered by too notorious memories of the past.

Three months after Enver was buried, the Ottomans finally followed the Habsburgs, Romanovs and Hohenzollerns, when the Sultanate which the CUP had so carefully preserved was abolished. A year later, after tightly controlled elections had been held, Kemal was proclaimed president of a Turkish Republic. The symbolic break with centuries of a dynastic aura to which Unionism had clung was sharp enough, but by then small surprise. No such predictable logic marked what ensued. In the spring of 1924, Kemal scrapped the Caliphate, a religious institution still revered across the Muslim world—there was a wave of protest as far away as India—and was soon closing down shrines and suppressing dervishes, banning the fez, changing the calendar, substituting civil law for the sharia, and replacing Arabic with Latin script. The scale and speed of this assault on religious tradition and household custom, embracing faith, time, dress, family, language, remain unique in the Umma to this day. No one could have guessed at such radicalism in advance, comparable only to the anti-clerical rigours of Plutarco Calles in Mexico in the same years. Its visionary drive separated Kemal from his predecessors with
éclat
.

But systematic though it was, the transformation that now gripped Turkey was a strange one: a cultural revolution without a social revolution, something historically very rare, indeed that might look
a priori
impossible.
²⁸
The structure of society, the rules of property, the pattern of class relations, remained unaltered. The CUP had repressed any strikes or labour
organization from the start. Kemal followed suit: Communists were killed or jailed, however good diplomatic relations with Moscow were. But if there was no anti-capitalist impulse in Kemalism, nor was there was any significant anti-feudal dimension to it either. Ottoman rule, centred on an office-holding state, had never required or permitted a powerful landowning class in the countryside, least of all in Anatolia, where peasant holdings had traditionally prevailed—the only real exception being areas of the Kurdish south-east controlled by tribal chiefs. The scope for agrarian reform was thus anyway much more limited than in Russia, or even parts of the Balkans, and no attempt at it was made.

Yet the social landscape hit by the cultural revolution was at the same time the opposite of a stable traditional order, in one crucial respect. If no class struggles lay behind the dynamics of Kemalism, ethnic upheavals on a gigantic scale had reshaped Anatolian society. The influx of Turks and Circassians, refugees from Russian or Balkan wars, the extirpation of the Armenians, the expulsion of the Greeks, had produced a vast
brassage
of populations and properties in a still backward agricultural economy. It was in this shattered setting that a cultural revolution from above could be imposed without violent reaction from below. The extent of deracination, moral and material, at the conclusion of wars that had continued virtually without interruption for over a decade—twice as long as in Europe—permitted a
Kulturkampf
that might otherwise have provoked an unmanageable explosion. But by the same token the revolution acquired no active popular impetus: Kemalism remained a vertical affair.

Though it broke, sharply and abruptly, with Ottoman culture in one fundamental respect—by abolishing its script, at a stroke it cut off new generations from all written connexion with the past—in this distance from the masses Kemalism not only inherited an Ottoman tradition, but accentuated it. All pre-modern ruling groups spoke idioms differing in one way or another, if only in accent or vocabulary, from those they ruled. But the Ottoman elite, for long composed not even principally of Turks, was peculiarly detached from its subjects, as a corps of state servants bonded by command of a sophisticated language that was a mixture of Persian, Arabic and Turkish, with many foreign loan words, incomprehensible to the ruled. If administrative Ottoman was less elaborate than its literary forms, and Turkish remained
in household use, there was nevertheless a huge gulf between high and low cultures in the Empire, fixed linguistically.
²⁹

Kemalism set out to do away with this, by creating a modern Turkish that would no longer be the despised patois of Ottoman times, but a language spoken alike by all citizens of the new Republic. But if it sought to close the gap between rulers and ruled where it had been widest in the past, at the same time it opened up a gap which had never before existed to the same extent, leaving the overall distance between them as great as ever. Language reform might unify; religious reform was bound to divide. The faith of the Ottoman elites had little in common with the forms of popular piety—variegated cults and folk beliefs looked down on by the educated. But at least there was a shared commitment to Islam. This tie was sundered by Kemal. Once the state started to target shrines and brotherhoods, preachers and prayer-meetings, it was hitting at traditional objects of reverence and attachment, and the masses resisted it. At this level, the cultural revolution misfired. Rejected by the rural and small-town majority of the country, Kemalist secularism was, on the other hand, adopted with aggressive zeal in the cities by modernized descendants of the Ottoman elite—bureaucrats, officers, professionals. In this urban stratum, secularism became over time, as it remains today, something like an ersatz religion in its own right, in its blinkered intensity. But the rigidity of this secularism is a peculiarly brittle one. Not just because it is intellectually thin, or divorced from popular feeling, but more profoundly because of a structural bad faith that has always been inseparable from it.

There is no reason to suppose that Kemal himself was anything other than a robust atheist, of more or less French Third Republic stamp, throughout his life. In that sense, he is entitled to be remembered as a Turkish Émile Combes, scourge of monkish mystification and superstition. But in his rise to power, he could no more dispense with Islam than Talat or Enver had done. ‘God's help and protection are with us in the sacred struggle which we have entered upon for our fatherland', he declared in 1920.
³⁰
The struggle for independence was a holy war, which he led as
Gazi
, the Warrior for the Faith of original Ottoman expansion, a title he held onto down to the mid-thirties. ‘God is one, and great is
his glory!', he announced without a blush, in a sermon to the faithful delivered in a mosque in 1923.
³¹
When the Constitution of the Turkish Republic was framed in the following year, Islam was declared the state religion. The spirit in which Kemal made use of Muslim piety in these years was that of Napoleon enthroning himself with the blessing of the pope. But as exercises in cynicism they moved in opposite directions: Napoleon rising to power as a revolutionary, and manipulating religion to stabilize it, Kemal manipulating religion to make a revolution and turning on it once his power was stabilized. After 1926 little more was heard of the deity.

Tactical and transient, the new regime's use of Islam, when no longer required, was easily reversed. But at a deeper level, a much tighter knot tied it to the very religion it proceeded on the surface to mortify. For even when at apparent fever pitch, Turkish secularism has never been truly secular. This is in part because, as often noted, Kemalism did not so much separate religion from the state as subordinate it to the state, creating ‘directorates' that took over the ownership of all mosques, appointment of imams, administration of pious foundations—in effect, turning the faith into a branch of the bureaucracy. A much more profound reason, however, is that religion was never detached from the
nation
, becoming instead an unspoken definition of it. It was this, however, that allowed Kemalism to become more than just a cult of the elites, leaving a durable imprint on the masses themselves. For if at village level secularism failed to take, nationalism sank deep popular roots. It is possible—such is the argument of Carter Findlay in his
Turks in World History
—that in doing so it drew on a long Turkish cultural tradition, born in Central Asia and predating conversion to Islam, that figured a sacralization of the state, which has vested its modern signifier—
devlet
—with an aura of unusual potency. However that may be, the ambiguity of Kemalism was to construct an ideological code in two registers. One was secular and appealed to the elite. The other was crypto-religious and accessible to the masses. Common to both was the integrity of the nation, as supreme political value.

As Christians, Greeks and Armenians were excluded from the
outset. In the first elections to the National Assembly in 1919, only Muslims were entitled to vote, and when populations were ‘exchanged' in 1923, even Greek communities in Cilicia whose language was Turkish, so thoroughly were they assimilated, were expelled on grounds that they nevertheless were infidels—their ethnicity defined not by culture, but by religion. Such excisions from the nation went virtually without saying. But there remained another large community within the country, most of whose members spoke little Turkish, that could not be so dispatched, because it was Muslim. In ethnically cleansed Anatolia, Kurds made up perhaps a quarter of the population. They had played a central role in the Armenian genocide, Kurdish detachments supplying shock troops for the extermination, and fought alongside Turks in the War of Independence. What was to be their place in the new state?

While the struggle for independence was in the balance, Kemal promised them respect for their identity, and autonomy in the regions where they predominated. ‘There are Turks and Kurds', Kemal declared in 1919, ‘the nation is not one element. There are various bonded Muslim elements. Every Muslim element which makes this entity are citizens'.
³²
But once victory was assured, Kurdish areas were stocked with Turkish officials, Kurdish place-names were changed and the Kurdish language banned from courts and schools. Then, with the abolition of the Caliphate in 1924, Kemal did away with the common symbol of Islam to which he himself had appealed five years earlier, when he had vowed that ‘Turks and Kurds will continue to live together as brothers around the institution of the
khilafa
'.
³³
The act detonated a major Kurdish revolt under a tribal religious leader, Sheikh Sait, in early 1925. A full half of the Turkish army, over fifty thousand troops, was mobilized to crush the rebellion. On some reckonings, more of them died in its suppression than in the War of Independence.
³⁴

In the south-east, repression was followed by deportations, executions and systematic Turkification. In the country as a whole, it was the signal for the imposition of a dictatorship, with a Law for the Maintenance of Order that closed down opposition parties and press for the rest of the decade. In 1937, in the face
of a still more drastic programme of Turkification, Alevi Kurds rose in the Dersim region, and were put down yet more ruthlessly, with more modern weapons of destruction—bombers, gas, heavy artillery. Officially, by now the Kurds had ceased to exist. After 1925 Kemal never uttered the word ‘Kurd' in public again. The nation was composed of one homogeneous people, and it alone, the Turks—a fiction that was to last another three generations.

But if Kurds were no different from Turks, whatever their language, customs or sense of themselves, what defined the indivisible identity of the two? Tacitly, it could only be what Kemalism could no longer admit, but with which it could never dispense—religion. There were still tiny Christian and Jewish communities in the country, preserved essentially in Istanbul and its environs, and in due course, these would be subjected to treatment that made it clear how fundamental the division between believers and unbelievers continued to be in the Kemalist state. But though Islam delimited the nation, it now did so in a purely negative way—it was the covert identity that was left, after every positive determination had been subtracted, in the name of homogeneity. The result has been that Turkish secularism has always depended on what it repressed.