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He believed that all the torments Turkey has passed through were due to religious traditions standing in the way of social liberties. A fact that nearly a century later seems not yet fully clear to many Iranians who still believe that religious personalities can deliver miracles in the shame of reforms to suit the modern age and era.
Namik Kemal, the famous Turkish poet and dramatist (1840-1888) who lived under the Ottoman caliphs in conditions similar to that of ours in the Islamic Republic has a famous sentence expressing the effects of religious involvement in a country’s daily life. He said, “Death passes over us in a minute, but traditions are eternal. They aim at the way one sits, walks, reads, cuts one’s beard …The traditions have reached such a point that a man cannot be in command of his own beard, let alone of his family.”
Atatürk was not alone in his attempt in modernizing Turkey. During the renovation of Bursa the capital of Bursa province in Western Turkey, Ahmad Vefik Pasha, an outstanding statesman and the governor of the province, found that to implement his plans he had to demolish the tomb of a saint known as the ‘Walking Saint.’ Vefik Pasha went to the tomb, called three times, “O Saint, walk away!” and then had the sanctuary demolished, remarking, “He must have walked away by now.”
In 1928 the constitution, which still mentioned Islam as the religion of the state, was abrogated and in the same year the Latin script was adopted for Turkish language. Some thing that, though attempted by the likes of Abdol Hossein Meftah, but unfortunately never materialized in our country, hence leaving our language in the service of our deficient alphabet instead of the reverse to be the case.
In 1931 statutes of the Party stated that it stood for the principle of ‘laicism’, defined as a condition in which the state took no role in religious life since religion was ‘a matter of conscience’. The text states: ‘The Party has accepted the principle that all laws, regulations and procedures used in the administration of the state should be prepared and implemented in order to meet the needs of this world and in accordance with the foundation of and the forms provided by science and technology in modern times.’
Andrew Mango in his outstanding book, ‘Atatürk-the biography of the founder of modern Turkey’ states, “Atatürk’s message is that East and West can meet on the ground of universal secular and mutual respect, that nationalism is compatible with peace, that human reason is the only true guide in life. It is an optimistic message and it vitality will always be in doubt. But it is an ideal that commands respect.”
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Ardavan Bahrami
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