biography
| name: |
Atatürk
|
| |
originally Mustafa Kemal
|
pronunciation:
[ataterk]
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1881–1938)
|
| biography:
| Turkish army officer, politican, and president (1923–38), born in Thessaloniki, Greece. He raised a nationalist rebellion in Anatolia in protest against the post-war division of Turkey, and in 1921 established a provisional government in Ankara. In 1922 the Ottoman Sultanate was formally abolished, and in 1923 Turkey was declared a secular republic, with Kemal as president. He ruled as a dictator, supported by the bureaucracy and rising middle class. He successfully launched a social and political revolution introducing Western forms of dress, the emancipation of women, educational reform, the replacement of Arabic script with the Latin alphabet, and the discouragement of traditional Islamic loyalties in favour of a strictly Turkish nationalism. He transformed Turkey into a modern, secular state, even abandoning the constitutional requirement that Islam be the state religion. In 1935 he assumed the surname Atatürk (‘Father of the Turks’). |
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