Fouad Ajami always seems to have insight into the Middle East. In this article he discusses the struggle in Turkey between Ataturk's secular vision and Erdogan's drive to return to a more Islamic state.
In every way, Ataturk was the nemesis of what Erdogan stands for.
Where Erdogan is severe on drinking and alcohol, Kemal was addicted to
raki, the country’s anise-flavored liquor. In fact, Ataturk had died of
cirrhosis of the liver at age 57. He was a military officer and a
conqueror, and he took drinking as a manly prerogative. Erdogan had all
but called Ataturk a drunkard, and that kind of blasphemy had not been
well received by a population raised to a tradition of reverence for the
founder.
Ataturk, it should be recalled, had sought nothing less than the
extirpation of the old cultural order: He had abolished the old Ottoman
order and declared a republic; he had abolished the caliphate; he had
outlawed the fez and the turban; he had shifted the calendar from the
Muslim to the Christian era; he had changed the alphabet from Arabic
script to Latin letters; and he had declared null and void the provision
that Islam was the religion of the state. No Westernization program was
more ambitious. He saw himself as a man of the Enlightenment, and
Turkey was to partake of Western culture. He was no Democrat. He lived
by an authoritarian creed: “For the people, despite the people.”
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