Year: 1968
Type: paratext
Abstract: In the forty years that have elapsed since the founding of the Republic of Turkey under the guiding hand of Mustafa Kemal Pasha, later to be known as Kemal Ataturk, there has been no dearth of English-language books on that Middle Eastern state.The successful efforts of the Turks to traverse overnight, as it were, the difficult and usually long road between a backward Oriental state and a modern Western one, exemplified most vividly in the radical remolding of the country's social fabric by what are generally called the Ataturk Reforms, have attracted not only the attention and interest but also the undisguised admiration of the West.Other nations have achieved equal or even greater progress in as short a time, but it would be difficult to cite an example which involved less brute force to accomplish.For although democracy did not arrive in Turkey simultaneously with the Republic, Ataturk's regime was a benevolent one, even if a dictatorship.The books that have been published about the Turkish transformation tend to focus on Ataturk and to assign to him all credit for the rapid progress towards Westernization and modernization made by Turkey in the years following the establishment of the Republic.Perhaps this is as it should be, for it is difficult to conceive how such progress could have been made without the catalyst of Ataturk's charismatic personality and leadership.Yet it should not be forgotten, as has usually been the case, that Ataturk did not begin his work in a vacuum and that the ideas which produced the Ataturk Reforms did not spring full grown from his head, as did Pallas Athena from the head of Zeus.Ataturk was the man of action, the creator of modern Turkey, the man who decreed and imposed his reforms on a not always receptive nation, but the distinction of being the philosopher, the man of ideas, of the Ataturk Revolution belongs to Ziya Gokalp.His name is unlikely ever to be found in any study of the world's great thinkers and it commands but brief mention in most English-language books on modern Turkey.Nonetheless, his name is writ large in Turkish history.To Gokalp, one of the most influential Turkish writers of the twentieth century, more than to any other one man, belongs the credit for reviving Turkish national pride, which Ataturk later ex-
Source: BRILL eBooks
Author: Robert Devereux
Language: Ido
Topic: Historical Turkish Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4392436639