PrintMay 9, 2007
The Relative Stablity of Turkey
Nicolas Sarkozy’s triumph was not the only good news for the resurgant West this pastweekend. The Islamists also suffered a setback in Turkey, by way of the May 5 announcement by Abdullah Gul, the fundamentalists' favorite candidate, that he will no longer seek election as prime minister. For this we have to thank a man who has been dead for seventy years. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk was one of the most fascinating, impressive, and unlikely figures of the past century. A Muslim from birth who became a champion of the secular state, a dictator who established the sole working democracy in the Muslim world, an ascetic visionary who died of complications of alcoholism, Kemal deserves to be much better known than he is. He accomplished with Turkey what many insist even today is an impossibility: dragging a battered, defeated, nearly medieval Muslim state into the modern era by main force, and without the wholesale brutality demonstrated by nearly all other nationalist leaders of his...(Read Full Article)
