Becoming Turkish: Nationalist Reforms and Cultural Negotiations in Early Republican Turkey, 1923–1945 by Hale Yılmaz (review)

In November 1925, the newly-established Republic of Turkey under Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) mandated that all men wear European style hats, but officials soon faced the reality that some men continued to wear fezzes, kalpaks, or kerchiefs on their heads, in contrast to the “civilized” image that the new regime sought to project. Along the Syrian border, peasants sometimes shared a single collective hat, which they individually wore when they had business in the provincial capital, while reverting to local dress upon their return to the countryside. Some Kurdish villagers simply rolled up their traditional headgear (külahs) to make them appear more like European caps.

Hale Yılmaz recounts these incidents and a rich variety of others to add new context and nuance to the implementation of Turkey’s ambitious reform agenda during the two decades following its independence in 1923. Her account draws on archival research (including rare access to the archive of Turkey’s Interior Ministry), oral histories, and an impressive range of other primary and secondary sources. Yılmaz finds that diverse or incomplete implementation of the reforms did not mean that far-reaching Kemalist reforms did not affect the lives at the village level, nor did it mean a simplistic religious-based reaction to a secular regime, as scholars have sometimes suggested. Instead, Yılmaz shows that uneven implementation of reforms reflected the state’s continuing negotiation with society. Yılmaz also challenges the assumption of a unitary state and describes occasional divergence of views between the government in Ankara and the local administrators, judges, and police who provided many Turks’ main point of contact with the state.

Yılmaz does not simply rehash the well-known story of the state-led reforms, which aimed at forging a new Turkish nation and citizenry, but instead limits her study to four thematic chapters on the hat reform, women’s dress, language reform, and celebrations of national holidays. Attempts to regulate men’s dress and require the hat, covered in the first chapter, were part of broader efforts to forge a secular, modern, and homogenous citizenry from an ethnically and linguistically diverse population. Religious authorities, the press, schools, police, and other officials each played distinct roles in promulgating the newly decreed men’s fashion to the public. The second chapter similarly shows that the Turkish state sought to change women’s dress as it promoted an image of the new woman. However, lack of consensus among state officials about women’s dress resulted in the delegation of responsibility for promoting European-style women’s dress or limiting the veil (peçe) or chador (çarşaf) to provincial authorities. Class, education, generational factors, and other social issues influenced individual responses to state efforts to regulate garb, while many women (and the men who often decided on their behalf) generally avoided open confrontations with the state. Turkey’s linguistic transition from a script based on the Arabic alphabet to a Latin-based one (chapter three) aimed to increase literacy and also build a more homogenous national culture. Schools, the press, and military all promoted the new letters, but the older script lingered often less due to ideology than personal habits and preferences. The final chapter considers new national holidays that celebrated and reinforced the new regime and ideals. National Sovereignty and Children’s Day, for instance, not only celebrated the regime’s version of national liberation, but also reinforced Kemalist ideals, such as the importance of education, children as the future of the nation, and mixed gender schooling. At the same time, national celebrations ultimately hinged on mass participation both in Istanbul and Ankara, as well as in more remote areas.

By emphasizing societal negotiation with the state, Becoming Turkish adds to a wave of historiography that questions undue emphasis on the life of Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) to the detriment of other actors...