Ataturk: An Intellectual Biography (review)

Mustafa Kemal, later M. Kemal Ataturk, became a surprisingly consummate nation-builder as he rescued the remnants of the Ottoman Empire in Anatolia and Eastern Thrace from destruction and dismemberment. His efforts enabled the resurrection of the Turkish state and the restoration of Turkish society after the losses and disgrace of the Balkan Wars and World War I. Many authors have explored Turkey's rise from the ashes of empire; this book by Hanioglu is among the very best examinations of Ataturk and the Turkish founding period in English.

Other scholars have looked at Ataturk's psychodynamics or at the details of his accomplishments. Many of them have indulged in hagiography. Among the numerous virtues of Hanioglu's clear-eyed dissection of the Ataturkian legend is its refusal to regard Mustafa Kemal as wholly exceptional. Although Hanioglu wisely appreciates everything that Ataturk did to set Turkey on its modern course, he is less overwhelmed than earlier writers by the sheer glamour and domineering qualities of the man, the leader, and the lawgiver. Hanioglu understands better than most of his scholarly predecessors the deep Ottoman and European origins of many of Ataturk's revolutionary ideas and ideals. He sets the making of Ataturk firmly in the Balkan ferment of Salonica, where Ataturk lived and was schooled, and in Macedonian cities like Montasir (modern Bitola), where he was a military cadet. Ataturk was not alone among young Turks and young officers in wanting to be Western. But he was rare in biding his time, soldiering on the periphery of empire, and avoiding the German involvement that ensnared so many of the official Young Turk movement before and during World War I.

The Gallipoli campaign in 1915 was Ataturk's unexpected triumph. As Hanioglu reports, the young Col. Kemal was distinctive in being able to convert his defense of the Dardenelles, and his protection of the motherland against superior Entente forces, into a catapault to national notice and prominence. Later Kemal was successful on the eastern and Mesopotamian fronts, skillfully seizing control of the embryonic Turkish national movement in Anatolia after the Armistice of Mudros in 1918. Hanioglu shows how Ataturk maneuvered himself and others to achieve dominance and finally realized that he could in fact become the legitimate "savior" of the Turkish people. "The key to Ataturk's success," reports Hanioglu, was not the "originality of his ideas but . . . the singularity of the opportunity he seized" (228).

This is hardly an interdisciplinary study. Nor does it break new methodological ground. But it is more than a narrative. Hanioglu weaves the intellectual strands of Ataturk and Turkish nationalism into a convincing fabric that is less biography than explanation. Hanioglu rightly emphasizes Ataturk's "scientism" and his determination to force the triumph of reason over religion. Ataturk was a civilizer and a social engineer who believed that Ottomans and Turks had long been held back by Islam—an Arab faith and "a vehicle for Arab domination" (132)—by clerics, by the caliphate, by Eastern rather thanWestern headgear and garments, by a serious lack of education, and by a religiously inspired narrowness. Ataturk was among the twentieth century's most dramatic modernizers and micromanagers. Hanioglu suggests that Ataturk reformed Turkish society but, paradoxically, that his reforms did little for the masses; Ataturk's reforms, Hanioglu says, hardly penetrated below the level of the elite (222).

Previous biographies may have showed us how Kemal became Ataturk, but Hanioglu tells us much more about the forces that shaped him and his powerful ideas. Yet, there is little in this book, or in others, about how Ataturk exercised mastery over his compatriots. A full study of Ataturk's leadership abilities and quality would be welcome.