Kemal - The Kaafir

[haqq]

Interesting Article


KEMAL – THE WORST KAAFIR TO
EVER RULE A MUSLIM STATE


INTRODUCTION


The fact that he was a despot and dictator cannot be denied. It was his cruelty and sadistic treatment of Muslims that makes him stand out as one of the worst enemies of Allah. The above was only what was reported and recorded by mostly Western observers. The extent of what actually went on in the new Turkey by the direct policy of Kemal, was heinous to say the least. He was an enemy of Allah (swt) to the core. TIME January 9, 1933 p. 64


Squinting skyward last week, Turks looked for the new moon. When they should see it Ramadaan would begin. Ramadaan the mystic month in which the Quraan was revealed to Prophet Muhammad (sallallahu alayhi wasallam). This year the first glint of the new moon had a special, dread significance. Turks had been ordered by their stern dictator, Mustafa Kemal Pasha who made them drop the veil and the fez (TIME, Feb. 15, 1926 et seq.), that beginning with Ramadaan they must no longer call their god by his Arabic name, Allah.


No godly man, Dictator Kemal considers that there is no reason why Turks should not call Allah by his Turkish name Tanri. There is no reason except centuries of tradition, no reason except that Turkish imams (priests) all know the Quraan by heart in Arabic while few if any have memorized it in Turkish. Strict to the point of cruelty last week was Dictator Kemal's decree that muezzins, calling the faithful to prayer from the top of Turkey's minarets, must shout not the hallowed "Allah Akbar!" (Arabic for "God is the Greatest!") but the unfamiliar words "Tanri Uludur!" which mean the same thing in Turkish.


When imams threatened to suspend services in the mosques and hide the prayer rugs, the Government announced that it was holding 400 brand-new prayer rugs in reserve, threatened to produce "newly trained muezzins who know the Quraan in Turkish and are ready to jump into the breach." .........


Nearer & nearer crept the moon to crescent. Ramadaan was almost upon Turkey when officials of the Department of Culture (which includes religion) screwed up their courage and told Dictator Kemal that he simply could not change the name of Turkey's god – at least not last week. Already several muezzins had been thrown into jail for announcing that they would continue to shout "Allah Akbar!" The populace was getting ugly, obviously sympathized with the Allah-shouters.


Abruptly Dictator Kemal yielded "Let them pray as they please, temporarily" he growled. Beaming, his Minister rushed off to proclaim the glad respite only a few hours before the new moon appeared. "On account of the general unpreparedness of muezzins and imams," they suavely declared, "prayers may be offered and the Quraan recited in Arabic during the present month of Ramadaan, but discourse by the imams must be in Turkish."


During Ramadaan all Muslims are especially irritable because they eat nothing during the hours of daylight. After the fasting is over Turks will be more tractable, may accept from their Dictator a new name for their God.

*****

TIME February 20, 1933 p. 18


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 Quraan 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 Muslim 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 Quraan 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 o*ne 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 Quraan 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 o*ne European, brought to the Park Hotel. He listened with constant interruptions, commanding o*ne 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 o*nce 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.

Further down the line he asked another soldier, "Who is Mustafa Kemal?"

The reply was, "Our Sultan."

-Irfan Orga: Phoenix Ascendant.


From: http://www.themajlis.net/

[al-Shami]

WHEN KEMAL ATATURK RECITED SHEMA YISRAEL

"It's My Secret Prayer, Too," He Confessed

{FORWARD} A Jewish Newspaper published in New York.
January 28, 1994

ZICHRON YAAKOV - There were two questions I wanted to ask, I said over the phone to Batya Keinan, spokeswoman for Israeli president Ezer Weizman, who was about to leave the next day, Monday, Jan. 24, on the first visit trip ever made to Turkey by a Jewish chief of state. One was whether Mr. Weizman would be taking part in an official ceremony commemorating Kemal Ataturk.

Ms. Kenan checked the president's itinerary, according to which he and his wife would lay a wreath on Ataturk's grave the morning of their arrival, and asked what my second question was.

"Does President Weizman know that Ataturk had Jewish ancestors and was taught Hebrew prayers as a boy?"

"Of course, of course," she answered as unsurprisedly as if I had inquired whether the president was aware that Ataturk was Turkey's national hero.

EXCITED AND DISTRESSED

I thanked her and hung up. A few minutes later it occurred to me to call back and ask whether President Weizman intended to make any reference while in Turkey to Ataturk's Jewish antecedents. "I'm so glad you called again," said Ms. Kenan, who now sounded excited and a bit distressed. "Exactly where did you get your information from?"

Why was she asking, I countered, if the president's office had it too?

Because it did not, she confessed. She had only assumed that it must because I had sounded so matter-of-fact myself. "After you hung up," she said, "I mentioned what you told me and nobody here knows anything about it. Could you please fax us what you know?"

I faxed her a short version of it. Here is a longer one:

Stories about the Jewishness of Ataturk, whose statue stands in the main square of every town and city in Turkey, already circulated in his lifetime but were denied by him and his family and never taken seriously by biographers. Of six biographies of him that I consulted this week, none even mentions such a speculation. The only scholarly reference to it in print that I could find was in the entry on Ataturk in the Israeli Entsiklopedya ha-Ivrit, which begins:

"Mustafa Kemal Ataturk - (1881-1938), Turkish general and statesman and founder of the modern Turkish state.

Mustafa Kemal was born to the family of a minor customs clerk in Salonika and lost his father when he was young. There is no proof of the belief, widespread among both Jews and Muslims in Turkey, that his family came from the Doenme. As a boy he rebelled against his mother's desire to give him a traditional religious education, and at the age of 12 he was sent at his demand to study in a military academy."

Secular Father

The Doenme were an underground sect of Sabbetaians, Turkish Jews who took Muslim names and outwardly behaved like Muslims but secretly believed in Sabbetai Zevi, the 17th-century false messiah, and conducted carefully guarded prayers and rituals in his name, even after Zevi had converted to Islam after realizing his mistake and ordered them to stop such practices. The encyclopedia's version of Ataturk's education, however, is somewhat at variance with his own. Here is his account of it as quoted by his biographers:

"My father was a man of liberal views, rather hostile to religion, and a partisan of Western ideas. He would have preferred to see me go to a lay school, which did not found its teaching on the Koran but on modern science.

In this battle of consciences, my father managed to gain the victory after a small maneuver; he pretended to give in to my mother's wishes, and arranged that I should enter the [Islamic] school of Fatma Molla Kadin with the traditional ceremony. ...

Six months later, more or less, my father quietly withdrew me from the school and took me to that of old Shemsi Effendi who directed a free preparatory school according to European methods. My mother made no objection, since her desires had been complied with and her conventions respected. It was the ceremony above all which had satisfied her."

Who was Mustafa Kemal's father, who behaved here in typical Doenme fashion, outwardly observing Muslim ceremonies while inwardly scoffing at them? Ataturk's mother Zubeyde came from the mountains west of Salonika, close to the current Albanian frontier; of the origins of his father, Ali Riza, little is known. Different writers have given them as Albanian, Anatolian and Salonikan, and Lord Kinross' compendious 1964 Ataturk calls Ali Riza a "shadowy personality" and adds cryptically regarding Ataturk's reluctance to disclose more about his family background: "To the child of so mixed an environment it would seldom occur, wherever his racial loyalties lay, to inquire too exactly into his personal origins beyond that of his parentage."

Learning Hebrew

Did Kinross suspect more than he was admitting? I would never have asked had I not recently come across a remarkable chapter while browsing in the out-of-print Hebrew autobiography of Itamar Ben-Avi, son of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the leading promoter of the revival of spoken Hebrew in late 19th-century Palestine. Ben-Avi, the first child to be raised in Hebrew since ancient times and later a Hebrew journalist and newspaper publisher, writes in this book of walking into the Kamenitz Hotel in Jerusalem one autumn night in 1911 and being asked by its proprietor: " 'Do you see that Turkish officer sitting there in the corner, the one with the bottle of arrack?' "

" 'Yes.' "
" 'He's one of the most important officers in the Turkish army.' "
" 'What's his name?' "
" 'Mustafa Kemal.' "
" 'I'd like to meet him,' I said, because the minute I looked at him I was startled by his piercing green eyes."

Ben-Avi describes two meetings with Mustafa Kemal, who had not yet taken the name of Ataturk, 'Father of the Turks.' Both were conducted in French, were largely devoted to Ottoman politics, and were doused with large amounts of arrack. In the first of these, Kemal confided:

"I'm a descendant of Sabbetai Zevi - not indeed a Jew any more, but an ardent admirer of this prophet of yours. My opinion is that every Jew in this country would do well to join his camp."

During their second meeting, held 10 days later in the same hotel, Mustafa Kemal said at one point:

" 'I have at home a Hebrew Bible printed in Venice. It's rather old, and I remember my father bringing me to a Karaite teacher who taught me to read it. I can still remember a few words of it, such as --' "

And Ben-Avi continues:
"He paused for a moment, his eyes searching for something in space. Then he recalled:
" 'Shema Yisra'el, Adonai Elohenu, Adonai Ehad!'
" 'That's our most important prayer, Captain.'
" 'And my secret prayer too, cher monsieur,' he replied, refilling our glasses."

Although Itamar Ben-Avi could not have known it, Ataturk no doubt meant "secret prayer" quite literally. Among the esoteric prayers of the Doenme, first made known to the scholarly world when a book of them reached the National Library in Jerusalem in 1935, is one containing the confession of faith:

"Sabbetai Zevi and none other is the true Messiah. Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one."

It was undoubtedly from this credo, rather than from the Bible, that Ataturk remembered the words of the Shema, which to the best of my knowledge he confessed knowing but once in his adult life: to a young Hebrew journalist whom he engaged in two tipsily animated conversations in Jerusalem nearly a decade before he took control of the Turkish army after its disastrous defeat in World War I, beat back the invading Greeks and founded a secular Turkish republic in which Islam was banished - once and for all, so he thought - to the mosques.

Ataturk would have had good reasons for concealing his Doenme origins. Not only were the Doenmes (who married only among themselves and numbered close to 15,000, largely concentrated in Salonika, on the eve of World War I) looked down on as heretics by both Muslims and Jews, they had a reputation for sexual profligacy that could hardly have been flattering to their offspring. This license, which was theologically justified by the claim that it reflected the faithful's freedom from the biblical commandments under the new dispensation of Sabbetai Zevi, is described by Ezer Weizman's predecessor, Israel's second president, Yitzchak Ben-Zvi, in his book on lost Jewish communities, The Exiled and the Redeemed.

'Saintly Offspring'

"Once a year [during the Doenmes' annual 'Sheep holiday'] the candles are put out in the course of a dinner which is attended by orgies and the ceremony of the exchange of wives. ... The rite is practiced on the night of Sabbetai Zevi's traditional bithday. ... It is believed that children born of such unions are regarded as saintly."

Although Ben-Zvi, writing in the 1950s, thought that "There is reason to believe that this ceremony has not been entirely abandoned and continues to this day," little is known about whether any of the Doenmes' traditional practices or social structures still survive in modern Turkey. The community abandoned Salonika along with the city's other Turkish residents during the Greco-Turkish war of 1920-21, and its descendants, whom are said to be wealthy businessmen and merchants in Istanbul, are generally thought to have assimilated totally into Turkish life.

After sending my fax to Batya Keinan, I phoned to check that she had received it. She had indeed, she said, and would see to it that the president was given it to read on his flight to Ankara. It is doubtful, however, whether Mr. Weizman will allude to it during his visit: The Turkish government, which for years has been fending off Muslim fundamentalist assaults on its legitimacy and on the secular reforms of Ataturk, has little reason to welcome the news that the father of the of the Turks' was a crypto-Jew who passed on his anti-Muslim sentiments to his son. Mustafa Kemal's secret is no doubt one that it would prefer to continue to be kept.

[ozgurislam]

brother don't believe the most all the sources are from english writers

[mama]

Abdul Hakim Murad has a contention, as I remember it goes something along the lines of this, 'there is no god, and ata Turk is his prophet'.

From a traditional perspective its hard to argue, make excuses for him, reading biased/unbiased biographies hardly makes it any easier. I've found Turks hardly anymore forthcoming, plenty of evidence for those looking for brainwashing in education i suppose......

It's very hard watching the news and seeing the West use the turks as an example of how the two cultures can be bridged. It reminds of another contention by Abdul Hakim Murad, again from memory, 'can one be western and not have a secular ethic?'

[Omar HH]

Attaturk is an idiot.

Good post Haqq.

Wassalam.

[Fatih Sultan Muhammed]

brother don't believe the most all the sources are from english writersso what..?

[ozgurislam]

so what..?

I am not a fan of Ataturk but we have to be fair and check the sources whether they are trustable or not.

Beside who are we to label him as a Kaafir?

[Fatih Sultan Muhammed]

I am not a fan of Ataturk but we have to be fair and check the sources whether they are trustable or not.
it doesn't make any difference whose fan you are. Then let us know about the "trustable" sources.

When the kemalists advertise mustafa kemal when a western source glorifies him, do you also show the same reaction?

If you closely look in turkey how he is being proteceted with state laws against public, then we can know how he and his followers were against the people's will..


Beside who are we to label him as a Kaafir?ok, then let us know... who is eligible to call a non-muslim as "kaafir".. teach us if you claim you know!

[Usman]

Parvez Musharraf is an example of ataturk's legacy of kufr. His Ideal is also ataturk, so whatever is said above, is proven through parvez's actions. So the incidents are "Hasan lighairihim"(smile)

[ozgurislam]

it doesn't make any difference whose fan you are. Then let us know about the "trustable" sources.

When the kemalists advertise mustafa kemal when a western source glorifies him, do you also show the same reaction?

If you closely look in turkey how he is being proteceted with state laws against public, then we can know how he and his followers were against the people's will..

ok, then let us know... who is eligible to call a non-muslim as "kaafir".. teach us if you claim you know!


Like i said im not a fan of him...

Im just saying we have to verify those western sources, why there not any turkish source claiming the same as those western sources?

think about it. And dont tell me the state is hiding them, because it would come out for sure

[Fatih Sultan Muhammed]

I'm just saying we have to verify those western sources, why there not any turkish source claiming the same as those western sources?

think about it. And dont tell me the state is hiding them, because it would come out for surehow do you know there aren't any? Can you tell us a little bit how it's to talk against him in turkey. can you tell us how the people would be treated if these comments were openly discussed in turkey, say, in newspapers, schools or TV. Can anyone dare to do so?

People can't tell the stories about those early years of turkey becasue they are very oppressed, they are punished.. I know it very well because WE experience it all the time..

[Abu Talaal]

Assalaamu alaikum,

Anyone who believes Secular (human-made) laws are better than (God-given) Islamic laws is automatically a kaafir.

Or am I wrong?

[Usman]

WIKIPEDIA ON ATATURK (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mustafa_Kemal_Atat%C3%BCrk)

if I were to spit on this guy's grave, it would make my saliva najis

[Fatih Sultan Muhammed]

Assalaamu alaikum,

Anyone who believes Secular (human-made) laws are better than (God-given) Islamic laws is automatically a kaafir.

Or am I wrong?
that's correct akhi..

[Ahmed]

Interesting Article


KEMAL – THE WORST KAAFIR TO
EVER RULE A MUSLIM STATE


INTRODUCTION


The fact that he was a despot and dictator cannot be denied. It was his cruelty and sadistic treatment of Muslims that makes him stand out as one of the worst enemies of Allah. The above was only what was reported and recorded by mostly Western observers. The extent of what actually went on in the new Turkey by the direct policy of Kemal, was heinous to say the least. He was an enemy of Allah (swt) to the core. TIME January 9, 1933 p. 64


Squinting skyward last week, Turks looked for the new moon. When they should see it Ramadaan would begin. Ramadaan the mystic month in which the Quraan was revealed to Prophet Muhammad (sallallahu alayhi wasallam). This year the first glint of the new moon had a special, dread significance. Turks had been ordered by their stern dictator, Mustafa Kemal Pasha who made them drop the veil and the fez (TIME, Feb. 15, 1926 et seq.), that beginning with Ramadaan they must no longer call their god by his Arabic name, Allah.


No godly man, Dictator Kemal considers that there is no reason why Turks should not call Allah by his Turkish name Tanri. There is no reason except centuries of tradition, no reason except that Turkish imams (priests) all know the Quraan by heart in Arabic while few if any have memorized it in Turkish. Strict to the point of cruelty last week was Dictator Kemal's decree that muezzins, calling the faithful to prayer from the top of Turkey's minarets, must shout not the hallowed "Allah Akbar!" (Arabic for "God is the Greatest!") but the unfamiliar words "Tanri Uludur!" which mean the same thing in Turkish.


When imams threatened to suspend services in the mosques and hide the prayer rugs, the Government announced that it was holding 400 brand-new prayer rugs in reserve, threatened to produce "newly trained muezzins who know the Quraan in Turkish and are ready to jump into the breach." .........


Nearer & nearer crept the moon to crescent. Ramadaan was almost upon Turkey when officials of the Department of Culture (which includes religion) screwed up their courage and told Dictator Kemal that he simply could not change the name of Turkey's god – at least not last week. Already several muezzins had been thrown into jail for announcing that they would continue to shout "Allah Akbar!" The populace was getting ugly, obviously sympathized with the Allah-shouters.


Abruptly Dictator Kemal yielded "Let them pray as they please, temporarily" he growled. Beaming, his Minister rushed off to proclaim the glad respite only a few hours before the new moon appeared. "On account of the general unpreparedness of muezzins and imams," they suavely declared, "prayers may be offered and the Quraan recited in Arabic during the present month of Ramadaan, but discourse by the imams must be in Turkish."


During Ramadaan all Muslims are especially irritable because they eat nothing during the hours of daylight. After the fasting is over Turks will be more tractable, may accept from their Dictator a new name for their God.

*****

TIME February 20, 1933 p. 18


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 Quraan 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 Muslim 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 Quraan 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 o*ne 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 Quraan 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 o*ne European, brought to the Park Hotel. He listened with constant interruptions, commanding o*ne 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 o*nce 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.

Further down the line he asked another soldier, "Who is Mustafa Kemal?"

The reply was, "Our Sultan."

-Irfan Orga: Phoenix Ascendant.


From: http://www.themajlis.net/

al haq