One of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s earliest biographies in a European language was in Spanish by Jorge Blanco Villalta. I have its English translation, spread over nearly 500 pages in a small font. The first biography in English was, of course, HC Armstrong’s classic, Grey Wolf, which the Quaid-i-Azam read in one night. The one biography I never get tired of is by Lord Kinross, a prolific writer, whose Ottoman Centuries found a mention in my first Evergreen in the Eos issue of June 20, 2021.

It would be a mistake to consider Kemal as one of those generals who seize power by a coup. Kemal was already a national hero because of his Gallipoli feat. After the end of World War I, with the Ottoman Empire’s dismemberment, Kemal’s presence in Istanbul was an anathema to the sultan-caliph and his advisers, who were aware of Kemal’s opposition to their surrender to the victors’ diktat. They, therefore, deliberately gave him an unpopular job — to disarm whatever remained of the Turkish army.

Given the dubious title of inspector general, Kemal nevertheless had the satisfaction of being in army uniform, and thus, he could issue orders. Soon, he changed his role from an obedient general to someone whom the sultan and his advisers denounced as a traitor. Then began the Kemal saga that ended with the Grand National Assembly conferring on him the title of “ghazi” [fighter for the faith] in September 1921, and of Ataturk — the father of Turks — in 1934.

In his reactions, he could be fanatically patriotic if provoked. For instance, when his mission was still incomplete, an ambassador from a friendly country said British authorities were protesting against the violations by his soldiers of the “Straits zone,” which was under British occupation because of the Sevres treaty.

Muhammad Ali Siddiqi delves into more of his Evergreens from his reading shelf in an eighth installment

Kemal told the ambassador that he didn’t recognise any “Straits zone,” that the Bosphorus and Dardanelles were Turkish territory, and that he would turn Istanbul into the graveyard of the British Empire, if London didn’t pull out.

On Kemal’s insistence, the treaty of Sevres was abandoned, and under the Lausanne pact, Britain agreed to quit the channel, while Kemal, always a realist, accepted the waterway’s demilitarisation under Turkish sovereignty.

He was casualty conscious, and never threw his men into battles whose outcome he was not sure of, his dictum being: “never fight a battle you cannot win.” His foreign policy, as pointed out by author Lord Kinross, was based not on expansion, but on the “retraction of frontiers.”

Before the war, he had parted with the Young Turks, who were concentrating on regaining the territories lost. Kemal believed sinking, multinational empires could not be re-floated and pleaded with them to concentrate on a future nation-state, having a Turkish majority in Anatolia, eastern Thrace and the Bosphorus region.

Ataturk’s denigrators thought he had abandoned religion. There is no doubt he believed in a secular state, but, as a Turk, Islam was in his blood.

At a party given by some Soviet diplomat, Ataturk asked the host where those who had prepared the feast and laid the table were. When the cook and others arrived, Ataturk called it a “classless” table and added: “Your Revolution doesn’t acknowledge differences of class. It is the same in Islam, where rich and poor are equal.”

Yaroslav Trofimov’s book, The Siege of Mecca, contains one of the finest accounts of the seizure of the grand mosque at Mecca 45 years ago, by men you can describe variously — anti-Saudi factionalists, monarchy-hating reformers, religious fanatics, democracy-loving idealists, mujahideen without a cause, anti-establishment rebels boiling with rage over the royal misuse of oil wealth, and last but not least, today’s most widely used epithet — terrorists.

Re-reading the book reveals how — in moments of crises — even sane minds can go mad and talk nonsense. There was no evidence during the first few hours — in fact on the entire first day — who exactly were the militants who had taken over the grand mosque, but the reactions were superlatives.

The Americans, hurt by Iran’s treatment of its diplomat, thought Tehran-led Shia militants were out to destroy the Saudi dynasty, while the Iranian leadership saw the Americans behind the sacrilege of Islam’s holiest precincts.

Ayatollah Khomeini’s exhilaration over the attack by a Pakistani mob on the American embassy in Islamabad can be gauged from his reaction. Warmly praising Pakistanis in a televised speech for the destruction of the American embassy, the Ayatollah said: “It is a cause of joy that … all Pakistan has risen against the United States.”

Meanwhile, paralysis gripped the Saudi government because of the mistaken belief that Imam Mehdi had finally ‘arrived’ and his followers had taken control of the grand mosque. In Washington, the US defence secretary informed a White House meeting that aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk, with 85 planes, would join another carrier group already in the Arabian Sea, and this would give a sense of security to countries such as Saudi Arabia.

It was 24 hours later that King Khaled’s government could retrieve its nerves and tell the Saudi people and the world that some “deviators” had taken over the grand mosque by use of force and that they had nothing to do with Imam Mehdi. The official announcement dismissed them as Khawarij.

Author Trofimov’s write-up seems like a TV reporter’s account of the grand mosque’s takeover by Juhayman al-Utaybi and his brainwashed acolytes. One is, however, astonished by the failure of the Saudi intelligence and of its Western allies to get wind of a conspiracy of such dimensions. Re-reading the book is always a pleasure.

John L Esposito is an American scholar with several books to his credit. I interviewed him for Dawn way back in the eighties and found him to be a firm believer in tauhid. I have two of his books, The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality? and Islam: The Straight Path.

I found the latter fascinating for the originality of his views. The book obviously begins with Islam’s early days and one of his remarks deserves to be noted. The Quran, he says, sought to regulate the existing practices instead of abolishing them, which could create chaos in society. The reforms about slaves and women fell in that category.

For South Asian readers, pages concerning the impact of British rule on Islamic laws as practised here are intellectually stimulating. Esposito quotes Dr Mohammad Iqbal extensively, particularly the poet-philosopher’s musings on the lack originality in thinking among the subcontinent’s ulema.

For Iqbal, the situation in South Asia was part of a larger problem affecting the entire Muslim world, because ijtihad disappeared in the Muslim world after the end of the Abbasid empire and the destruction of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258.

While acknowledging the role of the Subcontinent’s ulema in the past, Iqbal, according to Esposito, blamed them “for conservatism that had characterised Islam” since the fall of Baghdad.

The writer is Dawn’s External Ombudsman and an author

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, September 15th, 2024