Atatürk's Dream: The Birth of Modern Turkey

Atatürk built modern Turkey on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire: through forced secularization and Westernization to create a new Turkish DNA in line with his dreams.

Built on the still-smouldering rubble of the Ottoman Empire, Turkey was the first Muslim nation to enshrine itself as a secular republic in its constitution and prepares to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of its creation on 29 October 2023. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk imposed secularism in reaction to Ottoman theocracy and the institutions of the empire, against the Islam of the Ulama and the Sufis, against the Islam of the people, and against the will of the majority. It was "his" secularism. Secularism "alla Turca": the Kemalist method of reducing a religion that claims to govern everything – the political and the personal, all human activity, the spiritual and the earthly – to a personal practice.