DThe history of Turkey in the twentieth century knows the transition from the political, military and economic erosion of the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic, which is a G-20 country today. For decades, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s radical modernization in the 1920s and early 1930s formed the center of the country’s apparently new history. However, in the past decade, “modern” Turkey seems to have been politically, institutionally, and culturally destroyed by Islamist responses. The long road to Europe that began in the nineteenth century has turned.
Maurus Reinkowski’s “History of Turkey” is a political history of Turkey in which the behavior of political actors and the behavior of the country are at the forefront. There are few economic explanations, and the description and analysis of social history and cultural history beyond the realm of religion and political culture are missing. But this is the author’s intention, and he can use his advantages as an Islamic scholar in this way.
The contradiction of a new historical starting point
His book provides a nuanced description of three opposites: Turkish secular and religious, the related conflicts between urban and rural politics, and the politically related emotional-historical tension between confidence and anger, including “the rapid change of heroes-and The role, masculinity and vulnerability of the victim”.
Reinkowski systematically and accurately explained that Ataturk’s reforms were closely related to the Europeanization and modernization of the Ottoman Empire since the late 18th century. The rule of the Ottoman Empire in 1915 and the continued entry of young Turkish elites into the Turkish Republic established in 1923 are the ambivalence of a new beginning in history.
Continued suppression
Nevertheless, the turning point in history is still very deep. Due to the reforms associated with the name Ataturk and the political rule of the Kemalists, a “Kemalist bureaucratic-intellectual-judicial-military complex” appeared, which meant that the Kemalists ruled The country has its supporters among educated citizens, but there are hardly any believers of the country and the Sunni Orthodox Church.
But one of the biggest contradictions of the secular, ideologically vacillating Kemalist project is the definition of the Turkish nation as a secular state with the help of Islam. Not only should the Turks—as one of the political slogans of the early Republic read—be happy to be allowed to call themselves Turks, but they should also be ethnically different from others through his Sunni Islam. In Turkey’s “nation-state”, this exclusive nationalism in the face of religious and racial heterogeneous populations is still a continuous political action by all Turkish governments. The persistence of the nationalist repression not only affected the largest minority of Kurds, but also the Greeks, Jews, Armenians, and Aleves in Istanbul, who still existed after the “population exchange” in 1923.