Edited at https://subtitletools.com [BLANK_AUDIO] Now let's move on to the non-Arab states and there are two of these, the Republic of Turkey, and then we will talk about Iran. The allied powers after the first world war wanted to teach the Ottomans a lesson. And that was to teach them a lesson for trying to rally the Arabs under the banner of Pan-am, Pan-Islamism. Their defeat, therefore, the allies wished, would be seen very clearly, and they were out to punish the Turks. Resuscitating the empire was not an option, so they wanted to dismantle it, weaken the Turks, and even oversee them, once this was achieved. [BLANK_AUDIO] The Arab regions had been successfully separated from the Empire by the Treaty of Sevres that was signed in August, 1920. [BLANK_AUDIO] This was not the case however, with Anatolia, and eastern Thrace. And Turkish nationalists did not agree, with the partition plans that, that had been devised for these areas. And they revolted against the Treaty of Sevres and they emerged victorious. The Treaty of Sevres was replaced by the Treaty of Lausanne in July, 1923, and was a very different treaty. And what separated between Sevres, which was this oppressive treaty that was imposed on the Turks and Lausanne which was this much more independent Turkish Republic that emerge from from it, was the war of independence that the Turks fought. [BLANK_AUDIO] There were Greek claims over western Anatolia, and the Greeks had landed in Izmir in May, 1919. This for the Turks was the ultimate provocation. Here were these Greek conquerors, former subjects of the Ottoman Empire, part of the Greek minority that had traditionally been ruled over by the Ottomans. And moreover, the Greeks had been guilty in their occupation of Izmir of a variety of atrocities against the Turks. The Turkish nationalists rose up in revolt, under the leadership of a successful military officer and war hero of the First World War, Mustafa Kemal, who was later to assume the name Atatürk, as the first president of the new and independent Turkish Republic. The resistance was especially strong against the Greek and the Armenian claims in Anatolia. These aroused a powerful spirit of resistance amongst the Muslim public. And in the war of independence, the revolutionaries recaptured Izmir, ending Greek control in September 1922, and shortly thereafter, the Greeks evacuated Eastern Thrace as well. The Ottoman Sultanate was abolished in November, 1922, thus creating one central nationalist government of the revolutionaries in Ankara, which now entered into new negotiations with the European Allied powers. And thus was achieved the treaty of Lausanne in July, 1923. The Arab lands were given up totally, but Anatolia was jealously protected and kept. Kurdish and Armenian claims now disappeared as if they had never existed. Neither were there any French or Italian protectorate zones in Anatolia. Turkey also controlled the straits, and Turkey had therefore successfully restored its complete and total independence. So, what was the role of Turkish nationalism in this revolutionary retrieval of Turkish independence? Turkish nationalism really took root only during the war with the Greeks. But then, with very strong Islamic undertones, as a mobilizing force together with Islam, it was used in the war against the infidels, the Greeks and Mustafa Kemal had the title Gazi, which has a very strong Islamic meaning. Gazi goes back to the first days of Islam and is the title of a conqueror in the name of Islam. [BLANK_AUDIO] Only Muslims were considered real Turks. It was only Muslims who were Turks in the full sense of the term. And in the negotiations for the Lausanne Treaty of July, 1923, an agreement was also achieved between Turkey and Greece, on a population exchange. About one million Greeks were sent from Turkey to Greece, and the lesser number of Turks were sent from Greece to Turkey. But what is particularly interesting in this question, was how these national identities were defined. Religion was what defined which nation these people belonged to and not language. Therefore, Christians who spoke Turkish were defined as Greeks and were sent to Greece. Muslims who spoke Greek were defined as Turks, and were sent to Turkey. And in this exchange of population, both Turkey and Greece became more homogeneous nation-states. The population of Turkey had declined as a result of the ravages of war, and the population exchange. And a census in 1927 showed that the population of Turkey was only 13.6 million. Of these, however, 98% were Muslim, and of the Muslim populations, some 10% were Kurdish, and the Greek and Armenian populations had sharply reduced after the war, and the population exchange. [BLANK_AUDIO] The main ideologue of Turkish nationalism as we have already seen in our discussion on the emergence of nationalism, prior to World War I, was Ziya Gökalp. But now his ideas of a more narrowly based Turkishness were more readily accepted. The empire no longer existed. There were not huge populations who were not Turkish that were part of the empire. And therefore Turkishness was much more readily accepted now after the dissolution of the empire than before. And Gökalp had been deeply influenced by the French philosopher and sociologist Émile Durkheim, who had regarded nationalism as a form of civil religion. Accordingly, in Gökalp's version of nationalism, Islam became an inseparable part of the Turk's cultural heritage but it was not the cohesive element of society. They're only one of a number, including language, history and culture. Religion, however, was separated from the state and replaced with secular nationalism, and religion was reduced to a matter of personal belief. At least, in theory. The collapse of the empire and Atatürk's decision not to expand the borders, paved the way for a process of radical secularizing reforms that went hand in hand with the founding of the new Turkish Republic. The Sultans deep hostility towards the nationalist movement only accelerated this process of radical reform. At the end of 1922, Ankara was determined as the new capital. Ankara in the Turkish heartland of Anatolia, rather than imperial Ottoman Istanbul. At the same time, the abolition of the Sultanate, Sultan Mehmed VI, fled and he was replaced by Abdülmecid II, who was appointed Caliph, a purely ceremonial position with no political power. In October, 1923, Turkey formally became a Republic. And in March, 1924, the Caliphate was finally abolished. The role of Islam in law and education was terminated. The Sharia courts were abolished. Sharia personal law was replaced by a version of the Swiss civil code in 1926. The Sufi mystical orders were banned. And in 1925, a special Hat Law, requiring that men wear hats with brims, which would seem a rather innocuous introduction of a new law but in fact, it had great political and cultural importance. The hats with brims were designed to obstruct the regular performance of prayer. This was a way of imposing secularizing and secular reform. Between 1928 and 1937, secularism was established as a principle of governance, in accordance with the constitution. The only country in the Middle East that has such a clause in its constitution. The Latin alphabet was introduced in 1928, which was an obvious attempt to erase the influence of Arabic and Persian in the Turkish language, and by changing the alphabet, creating this huge disconnect between the present and the past. No other country in the Middle East ever went that far, in the formal process of secularization. And this was all part of a very deliberate effort by Atatürk, to break with the past and to emphasize the uniqueness of the Turkish nation. Opposition, which there was, though not very substantial, coming mainly from some religious or Kurdish sources in the east, were ruthlessly crushed. The republican regime was unquestionably autocratic. The Israeli Ottoman historian Oreal Head noted that Kemalism, was a logical result of the very long process of Westernization, which had created a secular upper social class in Turkey. One should add to that, that the reform was possible due to the prestige and the legitimacy of Atatürk, the victor. In the courageous war of liberation that the Turks had fought for their independence. The collapse of empire had also dealt a blow to the status and the image of the Ottoman legacy. In later years however, this would all change again.
