THIS NOVEMBER 10, at precisely 9:05 a.m., for the seventy-fifth time in the history of the Turkish Republic, the nation will grind to a halt. In Istanbul, for sixty seconds sirens will drone, ferryboat horns will blare in the Golden Horn and traffic will freeze. Throughout the country, millions of ordinary Turks will stand still and mute to mark the death anniversary of their nation’s founding father. It is an impressive moment, and deservedly so. Mustafa Kemal, known to history as Kemal Ataturk (“Father of the Turks”), was an indomitable blend of soldier, diplomat, politician, intellectual and nation builder. One of the twentieth century’s most remarkable leaders, he was a man of iron will and incredible vision.

A war hero even as the Ottoman Empire he served crumbled around him, Ataturk was instrumental in defeating an invading British army at Gallipoli. At the end of World War I, when the victorious Allies occupied Istanbul and began to partition Ottoman territory, he took to the Anatolian heartland, forged a new citizen army, routed Greek forces that had seized Smyrna (now Izmir) and much adjoining Turkish territory, and then drove the Allied occupation forces out of Istanbul. But that was only the beginning. As president of his own newly minted, custom-designed Turkish Republic, with inspired eloquence and brute force, he dragged his fellow countrymen, many of them literally kicking and screaming, into the twentieth century. The Turkish language was modernized and systematized. The Latin alphabet replaced an archaic Arabic script. Massive industrial, education and infrastructure initiatives were launched and a new sense of Turkish identity—part authentic, part invented in rewritten history textbooks—replaced the old Ottoman way of thinking. In most respects, this was a great plus for the vast majority of poor urban and rural Turks. Under the Ottoman Empire, even in the glory days when it ruled large chunks of Europe, Asia and Africa, and was mistress of the Mediterranean, most ordinary Turks were part of the impoverished peasant masses. Commerce, finance and other professions were monopolized by a small, educated elite, many—in some cases, most—of them non-Muslim Greeks, Armenians and Jews.

The end of the empire changed all that. At times it was not a pretty picture; transforming the truncated remains of the multiethnic Ottoman Empire into a cohesive, racially rooted nation-state was achieved at great human cost and more than a little tampering with historical truth. While Ataturk had condemned the extermination of Armenians during World War I by his Young Turk predecessors, calling it a “shameful act,” he presided over a brutal but less horrific forced mass transfer of populations in which Anatolian Greeks—who, like the Armenians, had lived there for centuries before the arrival of the first nomadic Turkic invaders—were driven from their homes. The same fate, it is worth noting, awaited a smaller number of ethnic Turks living in Greek territory.

The only substantial minority that remained in modern Turkey were the Kurds, fellow Muslims but with their own language and customs, who are still a source of considerable friction today. Even they were subjected to a clumsy attempt at what might be called bureaucratic assimilation. The republic invented a new name for them: until a few years ago, they were officially classified as “mountain Turks,” denied a legitimate identity of their own.

A charismatic speaker and popular hero, Ataturk stumped the republic, defining a new sense of “Turkishness” and denouncing anything and everything he considered divisive or reactionary—from fez and veil to traditional Ottoman music and religious orders. Like Peter the Great in Russia two centuries before, he was determined to overcome centuries of backwardness and decline, by brute force if necessary—and it often was. Also like Peter the Great, he had seen the greater world outside his homeland, and he liked what he saw. Once firmly in power in the mid-1920s, he would declare:

I have no religion, and at times I wish all religions at the bottom of the sea. He is a weak ruler who needs religion to uphold his government; it is as if he would catch his people in a trap. My people are going to learn the principles of democracy, the dictates of truth and the teachings of science. Superstition must go.

Only it didn’t. Today, many informed observers feel that Ataturk’s achievement is at risk, threatened by a rising Islamist tide led by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, an unashamed—and historically uninformed—admirer of an idealized version of the Ottoman-Islamic past that exists mainly in his own imagination. It is both significant and ironic that the mass anti-Erdogan protests that swept Turkey this June were initially triggered by his arbitrary decision to destroy Gezi Park, one of Istanbul’s few remaining green areas, to replace it with a “replica” of Ottoman-era military barracks and a shopping mall. Other plans included building an enormous new mosque in adjoining Taksim Square, site of the Monument of the Republic.

Why this nostalgia for a romanticized, not to say imaginary, Ottoman-Islamic past? Perhaps it begins with a deep sense of grievance on the part of Turkish Islamists, shared by their brethren throughout the Middle East—the belief that a golden age of Islamic dominance was destroyed by the forces of Western Christianity and Western technology. Whatever is driving this nostalgia for a romanticized past of Islamic vibrancy and power, it has become a compelling force in modern Turkish politics. The late Samuel P. Huntington of Harvard, a leading political scientist of our time, called Turkey a “torn country”—a nation belonging culturally to a particular civilization but whose leaders wish to redefine it as belonging to another. Hence, any effort to understand the dynamics of Turkish politics today must begin by probing the rise to power and remarkable national stewardship of Kemal Ataturk, as well as the leadership vacuum that ensued upon his death.

HE WAS one of many bright, young Ottoman officers of his generation who had been posted as military attachés in Europe before World War I. These young men often came home dazzled by Western society and technology, with a newfound contempt for traditional Ottoman culture and religion and with an indiscriminate zeal for all things Western and modern. At the dawn of the twentieth century, this often meant embracing fashionably “enlightened” free thinking, anticlericalism, and the rather naive belief that science and rational materialism could solve all of society’s ills if only the right people (i.e., themselves) could take charge from their elders.

In 1908, they did, pressuring the reactionary Sultan Abdul Hamid II to hold parliamentary elections and embrace constitutional government. When he tried to renege a year later, Young Turk officers and their troops deposed him, replacing him with Sultan Mehmed V, an elderly nonentity who served as a ceremonial figurehead. But rather than arresting the imperial decay, the Young Turks actually accelerated it, suffering a string of humiliating defeats in the first Balkan War, losing most of what was then European Turkey. The humiliation only ended when the Christian victors—Serbia, Greece, Montenegro and Bulgaria—turned on each other in the second Balkan War and the Turks managed to reclaim some of their lost territory. Total disaster followed after the Young Turks plunged their creaky old empire into World War I on the side of the Central powers, proclaiming a jihad against the ultimately victorious Allies.

Unlike Enver Pasha and the other members of the Young Turk junta, Kemal Ataturk put no stock in jihads. While he would sometimes invoke the name of Allah to rally the masses during the early days of the republican struggle following World War I, his mission was modernizing and Westernizing Turkey.

While a new class of privileged, Westernized Turks rose to the top of republican society and replaced most of the old minority-dominated commercial and professional elites, millions of poor city dwellers and the vast majority of the rural peasantry remained poverty stricken, uneducated and, for better or worse, true to their old customs and Muslim faith in a quiet, low-key way. The shallow tide of Western modernity swept over them but did not carry them with it. If Ataturk—who played as hard as he worked and was a notoriously heavy drinker—had not died early, he might have completed his modernizing mission by sheer force of character. But his passing in 1938 at the relatively young age of fifty-seven left a void no successor could fill. His loyal wartime aide, Ismet Inonu—a brave soldier and a staunch patriot, but a leader of limited vision—succeeded him, but Ataturk’s initial reforms froze in place.

When he died on the morning of November 10, 1938, in his small, modest bedroom in Istanbul’s vast old Dolmabahce Palace, all the clocks in the building were stopped. They remain so to this day. Like the static moment of mourning each year commemorating Ataturk’s death, the stopped clocks in the Dolmabahce Palace serve as an unintentional reminder of what that premature death meant to Turkey: the beginning of a long era of suspended animation, of social and political inertia bordering on stasis.

Even with the strongest of wills and best of intentions, Ataturk’s successors would have had a hard time continuing his work. He had died at the worst possible time. In 1938, the Western democracies were still reeling from the Great Depression. To many politicians and intellectuals, Communism and fascism—both with a heavy emphasis on police-state tyranny and centrally managed economies—seemed to be the wave of the future. Europe was also about to plunge into a disastrous Second World War, and Turkey’s leaders would have their hands full simply protecting the sovereignty and neutrality of their impoverished, militarily vulnerable nation.

Ataturk’s whole life had been spent broadening his understanding and seeking sensible new solutions. The Turkish future he envisioned was one of expanded education, opportunity and prosperity for the poor, uneducated Turkish masses with gradually evolving democratic institutions as progress was made. While his rhetoric remained in place, most of his vision died with him. Until free-market economic reforms were ushered in by Turgut Ozal, who served as a genuinely reformist prime minister and then president from 1983 to his suspicious death in 1993, Turkey did remain a secular state—but it also remained a 1930s-style corporate state based on crony capitalism, government corruption, and a senior military and moneyed class that defended its own special privileges at least as zealously as it protected the secular state. When politicians—Islamist or otherwise—got in the way, they were removed by force. One of them, Adnan Menderes, an economic reformer who courted religious voters by promising to remove restrictions on the traditional Arabic-language call to prayer and to allow new Muslim schools and the building of new mosques, was not only removed in a coup d’état but also hanged by the military after a hastily improvised trial.

The sad case of Menderes—a genuine reformer but also a rabble-rousing populist who jailed opposition journalists and politicians and openly appealed to voters on religious lines—starkly illustrates the fault line in modern Turkish politics. On the one hand, all too often the advocates of needed economic and social reform have also been political demagogues willing to play the religion card and trample on the rights of their political opponents. On the other hand, when the republic has been “rescued” from such men by the military, and the secular nature of the state has been preserved (along with the special privileges of the “rescuers”), desperately needed economic and social reforms have been either tabled or rescinded.

This pattern is far from unique to Turkey. The same scenario has played out repeatedly in Muslim countries as different as Egypt, Pakistan and Bangladesh. What makes it particularly tragic in the case of Turkey is that—unlike new postcolonial nations with artificial borders and no strong patriotic tradition to draw on—it possesses most of the raw materials for a healthy, modern civil society. Indeed, Turks have been trying to “modernize” since at least the last quarter of the eighteenth century.

Admittedly, the results have been mixed at best. Sultan Selim III, who reigned from 1789 to 1807, attempted to revive the empire and modernize the obsolete Ottoman military system only to be overthrown by the traditional Janissary corps and murdered shortly afterward. Sultan Mahmud II, who reigned from 1808 to 1839, managed to establish a “new model” army of sorts, abolish the Janissaries and modernize the civil service. But the empire had already begun to disintegrate, with Greece gaining full independence and Egypt remaining nominally Ottoman but autonomously ruled by its own hereditary dynasty of Khedives. The Western-oriented technocrats of the “Tanzimat” reform era of the mid-nineteenth century and the later Young Turk movement that overthrew the reactionary Sultan Abdul Hamid II had both tried to inject new life into the Ottoman Empire to little or no avail; indeed, it was Young Turk leader Enver Pasha’s insistence on entering World War I on the side of the Central powers that sealed the empire’s fate.

Only with the death of the empire, which left a smaller but more cohesive core Turkish nation, was Ataturk able to succeed where the best and brightest of Ottoman soldiers, sultans and statesmen had failed. And yet a strong residue of sentiment remained in the country that resisted any impulse toward Westernization and longed for a return to that golden age of Islam that lit up the world before the West’s inexorable rise.

A SUPERFICIAL glimpse at the medieval world would seem to bear out this wistful view of history. As the doyen of Near and Middle Eastern historians Bernard Lewis has pointed out, “In the course of the seventh century, Muslim armies advancing from Arabia conquered Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and North Africa, all until then part of Christendom, and most of the new recruits to Islam, west of Iran and Arabia, were indeed converts from Christianity.” Further gains would be made in Spain, much of which was overrun by Muslim North African Arabs and more recently converted Berber tribesmen. Eventually other non-Arab converts to Islam, most notably primitive but tough Tartar and Turkic nomad warriors, would carve out Muslim empires in large parts of Eastern Europe, Russia, the Levant, India and the Balkans.

More important than this military success was the fact that, in the early years of the Muslim surge, cities like Baghdad, Damascus, Alexandria and, to a lesser extent, Cordoba were centers of a cultural flowering that preceded and—by preserving, recovering and building on classical knowledge lost in most of the surviving Christian West—helped make possible the brilliant achievements of the European Renaissance. This, in turn, led to the development of the modern Western civilization that would, in a few centuries, leave the Islamic world behind in the dust. Was the rise of the Christian West responsible for the decline of the Muslim East? Or was the relatively short period during which Muslim-conquered cities in the formerly Christian world of antiquity became centers of progress and learning a mere blip on the screen, a temporary, albeit benign, “hijacking” of more advanced, more populous societies by a primitive, desert-sprung society of warrior-conquerors that overran them?

Surely it is no coincidence that nearly all of the cultural blossoming under early Islamic rule occurred in places far from Mecca and Medina (the cradles of Islam), and with centuries of history rooted in the Greco-Roman and early Christian past. Other centers of high Islamic culture like Persia and Mughal India were also homes to ancient civilizations long predating Islam. Thus, the intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic roots of the short-lived golden age of Islamic culture were almost entirely pre-Islamic in their origins and nature. Even the system of “Arabic” numerals that revolutionized mathematics was not really Arabic at all; it was borrowed from India by Arab traders.

The decline of Islam’s golden age occurred as Islam tightened its grip on the cultures it had overrun and, in the case of Europe, as a rapidly progressing Christendom began to push back the Islamic advance. The more pervasive Islam became in the territories it had conquered, the more those territories fell behind, perhaps because of the Islamists’ belief that their religion contains a complete, hermetically—and prophetically—sealed formula for the running of every aspect of human society. Such a mind-set has a built-in hostility to the spirit of inquiry and the desire to subject prescribed notions of faith and fate to the tests of intellectual rigor. Ask no new questions and you will discover no new answers.

The decline of the once-mighty Ottoman Empire mirrored the earlier decline in the rest of the Islamic world, culturally, militarily, economically and intellectually. “The Ottoman experience,” writes Turkish historian M. Sükrü Hanioglu in his Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire, “provides a superb opportunity to examine the impact of modernity in a non-European setting.” Leaders like Ataturk who lived through the imperial collapse attempted to build a modern Turkish alternative. It was a daunting task, and even its partial success was a remarkable achievement, remaining so to this day.

AT THE height of the Cold War, it used to be said that Vienna, which had repulsed a Turkish attack at the height of Ottoman power, was two different cities. Approached from the Communist-dominated East, Vienna was a bustling, modern metropolis compared to anything Hungary, Poland or Czechoslovakia had to offer. But approached from the West, Vienna seemed more like a charming but antiquated relic than a living center of modern commerce and culture. Earlier this year, while reviewing Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk’s novel Silent House, it occurred to me that the same is true, though in a very different way, of contemporary Turkey:

Straddling the great divide between Europe and Asia, Christendom and Islam, Turkey wears two faces. Viewed from the East, it looks like a prosperous pillar of stability and civic order, especially when compared to any of its Muslim neighbors. Viewed from Western Europe, however, it presents a different picture, that of a country dangerously divided: on the one hand, a pampered and often corrupt pseudo-Western economic and social elite relying on the Turkish military to protect both its privileges and its secular values; on the other hand, a growingly militant and sometimes violent mass movement of Islamists—many of them poor urban immigrants from the backward, neglected countryside—determined to purge their country of alien “impurity” and turn it into a theocracy by whatever means necessary.

For ten years now the latter of these two flawed factions has had the upper hand, thanks mainly to one man—the determined, driven visionary, Erdogan, who wants to remake Turkey in his own image and his own imagination. A powerful orator and skilled political organizer with a strong autocratic streak, boundless energy and an obsessive sense of his (self-perceived) historic mission, Erdogan was described by one observer I spoke with in Istanbul this May as

a strange joke played on Turkey by history. If Kemal Ataturk had had an evil twin, it would have been someone exactly like Mr. Erdogan. Most of his views are mirror opposites of Ataturk’s, but he is the first overwhelming, larger-than-life figure in Turkish public life since the Ghazi [Ataturk] himself.

Like Ataturk, whose father was a minor government official, Erdogan rose from obscure origins through intelligence, drive and unbounded ambition. But there the similarity ends. Ataturk was, at most, an agnostic who felt that Islam, as practiced in the Ottoman Empire, was an enemy of progress; Erdogan is a devout Muslim who often waxes nostalgic about the good old imperial days. But that was after his party—the Justice and Development Party (AKP)—came to power in 2002 with a 34 percent plurality in the national parliamentary elections. On his way to the premiership, Erdogan had run as a democratic reformer, promising to fight entrenched corruption, open up the economy to competition and growth, and bring basic services such as improved schools and sanitation to the poorer regions of the country, just as he had done to Istanbul’s poorer neighborhoods as a reforming mayor.

Erdogan kept many of his promises. Government graft and cronyism still exist, but the swag is no longer the privileged preserve of a small, old elite. Corruption has not been eliminated, but it has been democratized. And Erdogan has devoted billions of lira to development projects, especially in poor, rural areas where they are most needed. As a self-made business millionaire himself, he also understood—and delivered on—economic and regulatory reforms following the earlier example of Turgut Ozal, mentioned above. Under Erdogan’s leadership—although not entirely due to it—in less than a decade the Turkish economy became the eighteenth largest in the world and per capita income nearly tripled, which helps to explain the AKP’s strong showings in the 2007 and 2011 elections (it received nearly 50 percent of the vote in the latter). It can truly be said that, as prime minister, Erdogan delivered on much of his public agenda. The problem is with his private agenda. According to Der Spiegel he once said, “Democracy is like a train. We shall get out when we arrive at the station we want.”

After his party’s record victory in the 2011 elections, Erdogan seems to have decided he was approaching his station. Wall Street Journal correspondent Joe Parkinson summed it up rather neatly:

Since [the 2011 elections], the prime minister has sought to impose further restrictions on alcohol consumption and abortion and repeatedly called for all women to have at least three children to grow Turkey’s population. He has held forth on what citizens should eat at the family dinner table, and intervened to censor sex scenes in prime-time television series. His government has sought to muzzle the press; Turkey now jails more journalists than Iran or China.

He has also denounced raki, an anise-based liquor similar to the Greek ouzo—Turkey’s alcoholic beverage of choice for centuries—declaring ayran, a drink made from diluted yogurt, the new national beverage. He has even declared war on white bread, his personal preference being the brown variety. On the brighter side, unlike the unhinged Latin American dictator in Woody Allen’s comedy classic Bananas, he has yet to order everyone to wear their underpants over rather than under their trousers.

More significantly, Erdogan has pushed for constitutional changes that would reduce parliamentary powers—and those of the prime minister—while transforming the office of the president from a largely ceremonial post to an “imperial” presidency his friends liken to that of Charles de Gaulle and his opponents liken to that of Vladimir Putin. If he can get the desired changes, he intends to run for the presidency and, if elected, would be eligible to run again for a second five-year term, giving him ten years as an elected autocrat. As Ilter Turan, a political scientist at Istanbul’s Bilgi University, told the New York Times, Erdogan “has a highly majoritarian understanding of democracy. He believes that with 51 percent of the vote he can rule in an unrestrained fashion. He doesn’t want checks and balances.”

ALL OF these factors help to explain how what began as the protest of a few environmentalists to save a small wooded park in Istanbul metastasized in hours into mass protests involving hundreds of thousands—possibly millions—of Turkish citizens in major cities across the country. In Washington before my recent trip to Turkey, and in Istanbul days before the demonstrations began and were brutally suppressed, I talked with Gareth Jenkins, a British journalist who has resided in Istanbul since 1989. Jenkins is an expert on the Erdogan government’s mass arrests and show trials of civilian and military critics of its regime, as well as its mounting efforts to intimidate journalists by arresting and trying reporters and applying economic pressure—fines, litigation and the threat of the same—to newspaper and broadcast owners.

Some of the allegations of planted evidence and rigged trials would be funny were it not for the human price paid by the innocent victims. In one case, a retired general returned to his home to find it had been ransacked and to learn he was about to be charged with conspiring to overthrow the state. He knew he was innocent, but he was told that investigators had found incriminating documents in his home that named him as a plotter. It turned out that the “evidence”—which must have been planted and was probably concocted—had nothing to do with him, but contained the similar name of another retired general who was probably innocent as well: two cheers for the gang that couldn’t frame straight. When I asked Jenkins why Erdogan’s power plays seemed to be growing more and more blatant, he mentioned that in November 2011 the prime minister underwent emergency surgery for the removal of a malignant growth in his intestines, that he had a second operation in February 2012, and that he is now heavily medicated and subject to frequent health checks—with a distinct possibility that his cancer will return. Heavy medication could explain some of Erdogan’s odder statements in recent weeks, such as his declaration that “there is now a menace which is called Twitter. . . . To me, social media is the worst menace to society” and that “the death of 17 people happened” during the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations in New York. (The latter was a totally false claim; there were no fatalities at all.) He also repeatedly has claimed that anti-Erdogan demonstrators desecrated an Istanbul mosque by smoking and drinking beer in it, even after the imam of the mosque insisted that no such thing happened and that the demonstrators had been invited to take shelter in the mosque, suffering from police-inflicted injuries and tear-gas inhalation.

Whatever Erdogan’s physical life expectancy may be, the mass demonstrations made it clear that time is not on his side. The prodemocracy demonstrators, overwhelmingly nonviolent and well behaved, were also overwhelmingly young, the vanguard of a rising generation of Turks who care about personal freedom and will not be bullied into silence. They represent a new political demographic that can’t be pinned down as strictly right wing or left wing, observant Muslim or secular. And they are a generation of young people with access to electronic communications no tyranny can fully block, with a strong awareness of their rights and of those who would deny them those rights.

But you can’t beat something with nothing. The absence of strong, credible opposition leaders has left the political stage to the highly skilled Erdogan, who sometimes reminds this observer of a cross between Huey Long, Margaret Thatcher and Juan Peron. In the short term, growing doubts and divisions among his parliamentary followers may put more of a brake on his aspirations than any number of peaceful demonstrators. But, as Jenkins points out, even if most of the protesters represent a specific section of society, the demonstrations that swept the country “are arguably Turkey’s first ever spontaneous, grassroots political movement . . . the participants [are] feeling empowered, determined but also bewildered by what is happening. They have never been here before. And neither has Turkey.”

One thing is certain. Except for the ones in the Dolmabahce Palace, the clocks in Turkey have started ticking again.

Aram Bakshian Jr. is a contributing editor at The National Interest. He served as an aide to Presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan and writes frequently on politics, history and the humanities.

Image: Flickr/Alp Enes Arslan. CC BY 2.0.

Image: Pullquote: Like Peter the Great in Russia two centuries before, Ataturk was determined to overcome centuries of backwardness and decline, by brute force if necessary—and it often was.Essay Types: Essay