Mustafa Kemal Ataturk
The Ottoman general who saved a Turkish state from the wreck of the empire and then rebuilt its alphabet, law, dress, and religion by decree.
In 1919 the Ottoman Empire had lost the war, its capital was occupied by Allied troops, a Greek army had landed at Smyrna, and the treaty being drawn up in Paris would have left the Turks a small state in central Anatolia. Four years later there was a Turkish republic with defensible borders, recognized by the same powers that had planned to carve it up. The man who organized that turnaround then spent fifteen years using his authority to rebuild Turkish society from the top down.
Mustafa Kemal was born in Salonica, now Thessaloniki, around 1881, and trained in the Ottoman military schools that produced the empire's reform-minded officers. He made his name at Gallipoli in 1915, where he guessed the Allied landing points correctly and held the ridges above them. He came out of the war a respected general who had not been involved in the ruling party's disasters.
Building a country out of a defeat
Sent to eastern Anatolia in May 1919 to disarm the remaining troops, he organized them instead. Through congresses at Erzurum and Sivas he built a nationalist movement around a simple program: keep the Ottoman lands with a Turkish and Muslim majority, give up the Arab provinces. In April 1920 a Grand National Assembly met in Ankara and declared itself the real government while the sultan's ministers signed the Treaty of Sevres.
The war of independence was fought mostly against Greece. It was decided at the Sakarya river in 1921 and by the offensive of August 1922 that drove the Greek army into the sea at Smyrna, where much of the city burned and its Christian population was killed or expelled. The Treaty of Lausanne in July 1923 replaced Sevres, recognized the new borders, and set up a compulsory population exchange: roughly 1.2 million Orthodox Christians sent to Greece and about 400,000 Muslims to Turkey.
Revolution by law
The republic was declared in October 1923. In March 1924 the assembly abolished the caliphate, ending an institution that had claimed leadership of Sunni Islam for four centuries, with a vote in a provincial town. Muslims from India to Egypt were stunned, and the question of who speaks for Islam has been open ever since.
Then came a stream of laws. Religious courts and schools were closed. The Swiss civil code replaced Islamic family law. The fez was banned in 1925 and the brimmed hat required, a change about political direction disguised as a change of clothing. In 1928 the Arabic script was swapped for a Latin alphabet within a matter of months, which cut the next generation off from everything written before, including the religious texts. Women got the vote in national elections in 1934. A law that year required every citizen to take a family name, and the assembly gave him his: Ataturk, father of the Turks.
None of it was consensual. This was single-party rule with a controlled press, and revolts were crushed hard, including the Sheikh Said rising in 1925 and the Dersim operations of 1937 and 1938. Kurdish identity was legislated out of existence on paper, which is one root of a conflict still running.
Ataturk died in 1938, and Turkey has argued about him ever since. The army treated his settlement as something to defend and intervened four times to do it. The religious and provincial Turkey he tried to legislate away kept voting, and has governed since 2002, undoing parts of his program; Hagia Sophia became a mosque again in 2020. His portrait still hangs in every classroom, and insulting his memory is still a crime.