TIME February 20, 1933 p. 18 Word for God

A hard father to his people, Mustafa Kemal told his Turks last December that they must forget God in the Arabic language (Allah), learn Him in Turkish (Tanri). Admitting the delicacy of renaming a 1300-year-old god, Kemal gave the muezzins a time allowance to learn the Koran in Turkish. Last week in pious Brusa, the "green city," a muezzin halloed "Tanri Uludur" from one of the minarets whence Brusans had heard "Allah Akbar" since the 14th Century. Raging at Kemal Pasha's god, they mobbed the muezzin, mobbed the police who came to save him.

Quick to defend his new word for God, quicker to show new Turkey the fate of the old-fashioned, Kemal the Ghazi, "the Victorious One," pounced on Brusa, had 60 of the faithful arrested, ousted the Mufti (ecclesiastical judge) of the Ouglubjami mosque and decreed that henceforth God was Tanri.

TIME, February 15, 1926 - pp. 15-16

"Turkey presents today the most promising and challenging field on the face of the earth for missionary service." Thus wrote James L. Barton, missionary executive, in last week's issue of 'Christian Work.' But first he summarized the revolutionary changes in Turkey since 1923. The changes: .........

For a hundred years Christian missionaries have struggled hopelessly to capture the hearts of the Calif-awed Turks. They had come, said Mr. Barton, to suspect that "the Moslem was outside the sphere of the operation of divine grace."

Turkey, Emil Lengyel - 1941, pp. 140-141

During the early days of Kemal's career, many of his followers were under the impression that he was a champion of Islam and that they were fighting the Christians. "Ghazi, Destroyer of Christians" was the name they gave him. Had they been aware of his real intentions, they would have called him "Ghazi, Destroyer of Islam."

Grey Wolf, Mustafa Kemal - An Intimate Study of a Dictator H.C. Armstrong, 1934

He was drinking heavily. The drink stimulated him, gave him energy, but increased his irritability. Both in private and public he was sarcastic, brutal and abrupt. He flared up at the least criticism. He cut short all attempts to reason with him. He flew into a passion at the least opposition. He would neither confide in nor co-operate with anyone. When one politician gave him some harmless advice, he roughly told him to get out. When a venerable member of the Cabinet suggested that it was unseemly for Turkish ladies to dance in public, he threw a Koran at him and chased him out of his office with a stick.

p. 241:
"For five hundred years these rules and theories of an Arab sheik," he said, "and the interpretations of generations of lazy, good-for-nothing priests have decided the civil and the criminal law of Turkey."

"They had decided the form of the constitution, the details of the lives of each Turk, his food, his hours of rising and sleeping, the shape of his clothes, the routine of the midwife who produced his children, what he learnt in his schools, his customs, his thoughts, even his most intimate habits."

"Islam, this theology of an immoral Arab, is a dead thing."

Possibly it might have suited tribes of nomads in the desert. It was no good for a modern progressive State.

"God's revelation!" There was no God. That was one of the chains by which the priests and bad rulers bound the people down.

"A ruler who needs religion to help him rule is a weakling. No weakling should rule.."

And the priests! How he hated them. The lazy, unproductive priests who ate up the sustenance of the people. He would chase them out of their mosques and monasteries to work like men.

Religion! He would tear religion from Turkey as one might tear the throttling ivy away to save a young tree.

p. 243:
Further, it was public knowledge that he was irreligious, broke all the rules of decency, and scoffed at sacred things. He had chased the Sheik-ul-Islam, the High Priest of Islam, out of his office and thrown the Koran after him. He had forced the women in Angora to unveil. He had encouraged them to dance body close to body with accursed foreign men and Christians.

Turkey - Emil Lengyel, 1941, p. 134

Kemal cared nothing about Allah; he was interested in himself and in Turkey. He hated Allah and made him responsible for Turkey's misfortune. It was Allah's tyrannical rule that paralyzed the hands of the Turk. But he knew that Allah was real to the Turkish peasant, while nationalism meant nothing to him. He decided, therefore, to draft Allah into his service as the publicity director of his national cause. Through Allah's aid his people must cease to be Mohammedans and become Turks. Then, after Allah had served Kemal's purpose, he could discard him.

Ataturk, The Rebirth of a Nation - Lord Kinross, 1965, p. 437

For Kemal, Islam and civilization were a contradiction in terms. "If only," he once said of the Turks, with a flash of cynical insight, "we could make them Christians!" His was not to be the reformed Islamic state for which the Faithful were waiting: it was to be a strictly lay state, with a centralized Government as strong as the Sultan's, backed by the army and run by his own intellectual bureaucracy.

p. 470:
The cleavage in his musical tastes emerged in Istanbul, where he once had two orchestras, one Turkish and one European, brought to the Park Hotel. He listened with constant interruptions, commanding one to stop and the other to play in turn. Finally, as the raki took effect, he lost patience and rose to leave the restaurant, saying, "Now if you like you can both play together." Another evening, incensed by the sound of the muezzin from a mosque opposite, which clashed with the dance-band, he ordered its minaret to be felled - one of those orders which was countermanded next morning.

Ataturk, The Rebirth of a Nation - Lord Kinross, 1965 p. 365

Some confusion as to his identity persisted, however, for some years to come. Inspecting some soldiers in Anatolia, Kemal once asked, "Who is God and where does He live?"

The soldier, anxious to please, replied, "God is Mustafa Kemal Pasha. He lives in Angora."

"And where is Angora?" Kemal asked.
"Angora is in Istanbul," was the reply.

Farther down the line he asked another soldier, "Who is Mustafa Kemal?"
The reply was, "Our Sultan." - Irfan Orga: Phoenix Ascendant.