Mustapha Kemal, remembered today chiefly as Ataturk, is generally credited with the creation of modern Turkey, or rather what Turkey became two generations ago. The great phrase habitually used to summon up his achievement used to be "He abolished the veil". He also, incidentally, largely abolished both the fez and the turban, replacing them with the bowler or top-hat (loathsome headgear!) of the West. In his time, all this stood for constructive progress; today, witnessing the relentless Westernisation of most of the globe and the universal conquest of the hamburger-and-coke culture, we may wonder if all, or at least much, of it was worth it. But for an entire generation, it emphatically was worth it and the benefits went on to a younger generation. Kemal came just at the breakdown of the senile Ottoman Empire, once one of the great, relatively civilised powers of the globe, but long caught in a time-warp. He found his country centuries behind the West, socially and technologically, and he left it a modern secular nation.
In his youth women were still little better legally than harem concubines; Islam had fallen into defensive, stagnant conservatism; society was stratified and inert; and, above all, the territorial legacy of the great sultans was shrinking. Russia, the reawakened Balkans, Austria-Hungary and Greece pressed relentlessly on it, pushing back the conquests of centuries and steadily contracting the lands which the Turks unified under their rule. The generation which Kemal represented faced the bitter prospect of seeing the increasing political and cultural marginalisation of their homeland, or even its domination by foreigners. It was his achievement to get rid of the detritus of the imperial past and to make Turkey again a respected power.
Kemal was born in 1881 in Salonika when it was still a leading Ottoman city, though most of its population spoke Greek. His background was "precariously" middle class, and he was the son of a minor official who died young; his mother, Zubeyde, 20 years younger than her husband, seems to have been one of the dominant influences of his life. Equality of women before the law became one of Kemal's obsessions, yet he was romantically shy of them in private life, or else domineering and almost patriarchal. When he finally married, to a younger woman, the marriage soon went sour, though previously he had a long relationship with a niece of his stepfather, who again was much younger and played the submissive, undemanding role he seems to have been most at ease with in women. Kemal took up the army as a career, and it was in the Gallipoli campaign of World War One that he first made his mark. Fortuitously allied to Germany and Austria, the Turks - stiffened by German officers - fought off the Anglo-French landing on which Churchill had staked his reputation, and which aimed to capture Istanbul, the capital. Technically Kemal was only a colonel, but he proved an inspirational force, even if he was reckless with his men's lives and proved a difficult, sometimes insubordinate colleague. He was also active in the final campaign in which the British under Allenby broke the Turkish front in Palestine and Egypt, more or less knocking Ottoman Turkey out of the war. Surrender was made on humiliating terms, and most of what was left of the empire was then carved up between Britain and France.
FROM the start, Kemal had thrown in his lot with the innovative Young Turks who had sidelined the ageing Sultan Abdulhamit and finally got rid of his ineffectual successor. Enver Pasha, the leader of the Young Turks, was a magnetic figure who lacked pragmatism or any real organising ability, so Kemal - much abler and more realistic, and also a master of intrigue - was able to outmanoeuvre him and become supremo. The great challenge, however, was the military invasion of the Greeks, with the backing of Lloyd George and the French, who thought that defeated, fragmented Turkey was now easy pickings.
Instead, they were defeated in the field and ignominiously driven back to the sea, ending in the famous holocaust of Smyrna - "infidel Izmir" to the Turks - in which two hundred thousand Greek inhabitants of the city were burnt out of their homes and only saved by Allied warships in the harbour. (Among those who escaped, though this book does not mention the fact, was Aristotle Onassis, whose parents died either in the flames or in the ensuing massacre). The Greek-Turkish enmity of our time goes back a long way and has been recently revived in Cyprus. Kemal had saved his country and he became its acknowledged leader and master, setting up a (largely benevolent) republican dictatorship whose legacy has lasted into the present. A man of extraordinary energy, with practical and organising abilities untypical of the run-down empire he inherited, he ruthlessly modernised and westernised Turkish society, though without ever becoming a Western puppet. He broke much of the power of the Islamic priestly class, whose stances were mostly archaic and reactionary, and did much for the legal status of women, as well as cleaning up administration and initiating many practical reforms. Ankara became the capital of the new state, though in recent decades ancient, historic Istanbul (once Constantinople) has reasserted its claim as one of the world's great cities.
Andrew Mango has written a good book from the historic viewpoint, though the inner, private Kemal does not emerge in any final clarity. Perhaps this is irrelevant anyway, since the private citizen was submerged in the man of action, resourceful, self-willed, far-sighted, ruthless, despotic, but also a genuine patriot and - though in a rather dated sense - a committed humanitarian. Mango rather slurs over the infamous massacre of Armenians, though he does point out that multi-racial Turkey had much the same (virtually insoluble) problems as those which bedevil the Balkans today. This detailed amassing of fact is sometimes indigestible, and Mango lacks real talent either for character-drawing or for catching the colour and tone of an epoch. Nevertheless, in terms of explicating a culture little known or understood in the West, his is an important book.
Brian Fallon is an author and critic