Türk’e Tapmak: Seküler Din ve I˙ki Savaş Arası Kemalizm by Onur Atalay (review)

Atalay’s Türk’e Tapmak (Idolizing the Turk) is a study of the sacralization of politics and an attempt to portray Kemalism as a secular religion. Onur Atalay does so by placing Kemalism within the context of the rising totalitarian movements of interwar Europe—namely Fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism. References to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk as a prophet, if not a divine being outright, dot the entirety of the text; so, too, do various quotations from early republican publications and proclamations that refer to religion in one capacity or another. Despite this seemingly limited thematic focus and the title’s emphasis on interwar-era Turkey, the book, in fact, deals with pretty much everything else: the first and second chapters, for instance, provide sweeping summaries of how politics were sacralized in Europe, tackling issues such as the rise of the secular, the gradual ascendancy of human rationality, and the ultimate emergence of civil religions—all analyzed within the context of changes such as the Enlightenment and French Revolution. In the rest of the book, “politics-as-religion” turns into a loose thread that connects the two centuries of Ottoman and Turkish intellectual history.

Although this is a monograph published out of a dissertation, one searches in vain for an introductory chapter that could outline the work. As a result, readers do not get much of a chance to learn how the author evaluates the state of research on Kemalism, where he situates his own work, or the types of interventions his book seeks to make in the literature. Only in the first footnote of a two-page-long preface does the author assert that there exists a broader unwillingness in Turkey to do critical research on Kemalism (p. 13). Those who dare to study Kemalism in any critical way, the author warns, could be barred from having access to research funds and scholarships, on top of being cold-shouldered by senior academics. This statement makes one wonder—and eventually double-check—if the book really got published in 2018 instead of a few decades prior. Needless to say, to portray critiques of Kemalism as being “taboo” today is just a straw man argument that not only dismisses the important advances made in the field, but also misrepresents the Turkish context where Kemalism has long turned into a convenient whipping boy used widely by academics and public intellectuals for the past few decades.

The absence of an introduction also means that Atalay does not engage in a serious attempt to define what Kemalism is, explain to what extent it differs from the Unionist political culture, or compare it to latter-day Atatürkçülük—aspects that would ultimately require a periodization of Kemalism. To his credit, Atalay acknowledges the existence of different strands of Kemalism (pp. 14, 75–79, 295), but “secular religion” as an analytic framework often serves against emphasizing differences. As one continues to read the book, it becomes clear that Kemalism is a historical given for the author, a phenomenon that does not require a careful historical contextualization. Chapter 4, which deals with the policies of the Kemalist regime toward religion and secularism, for instance, inexplicably lacks any reference to the abolition of the Caliphate in 1924 or the Sheikh Said Rebellion in 1925. In fact, these crucial episodes are not mentioned at all throughout the entire book. Rather than a simple omission on the part of the author, however, the absence of such a historical discussion is a symptom of a larger de-contextualization: the majority of the text reads like a bundle of quotations organized thematically, a narrative strategy that frustrates a chronological understanding of developments in Kemalist thought and practice.

The organization of chapters also suffers from a similar deficit of process-centered approaches. While the first two chapters deal with the European context, Atalay devotes the third chapter...