Modern Turkey, founded by Mustafa Kemal Pasha in 1923, is not Islamic. It is a secular, democratic state. It cannot, and should not, be compared to dictatorial states like Saudi Arabia or even Pakistan.

It is an irony of history that, when Mustafa Kemal was striving to put Turkey on a secular path, Indian leaders, including Mahatma Gandhi, were opposing it. They even wanted Turkey to revert to its religion-dominated past.

            Turkey was the center of the Ottoman Empire, governed from Istanbul (Constantinople, before it was renamed by the Ottomans). The ruler of Turkey, or the Ottoman Emperor, was also the Caliph (Khalifa) of Islam. He was entitled, in that role, to issue fatwas (religious dictates) to Muslims all over the world.

            When Mustafa Kemal ousted the ruler, or the Sultan, of Turkey as the Caliph of Islam, in the early 1920s, it caused a furor among Indian Muslims. They, under the leadership of the famous Ali Brothers – Maulana Mohammed Ali and Maulana Shaukat Ali – launched a movement to get the Caliphate restored to the Sultan of Turkey. The movement, known as the Khilafat (Caliphate) Movement, came in handy for Gandhiji, who had just started another movement -- India's non-cooperation movement against the British. He supported the Khilafat Movement.

            His thinking was that by supporting it, he would be bringing Indian Muslims into the mainstream of the national movement for independence. And he was right. The Ali Brothers and their followers joined the independence movement. The two brothers even attended, along with Gandhiji, the 1931 Round Table Conference, held in London by the British to discuss the possibility of granting independence to India.

Though the Khilafat Movement in India was against the British (as the impression at the time was that the British were trying to remove the Caliph), it was actually the British who were trying to protect the Caliph. But Mustafa Kemal did not budge. He dumped the Khalifa and banished him from Turkey.

The Khilafat Movement died its own death. Its only remnant in India now is the Khilafat House at Byculla, Mumbai. This was the headquarters of the movement. The Ali Brothers also stayed there. Whenever Gandhiji was in Mumbai (at that time, Bombay), he visited them at the Khilafat House. Maulana Mohammed Ali had also launched a popular tabloid journal called Comrade.

            Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first Prime Minister (in his writings, including Glimpses of World History), and Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan (in his not-so-well-known statements), supported Mustafa Kemal and praised his secular outlook. In fact, Jinnah later tried to implement the Turkish model in Pakistan.

            It has to be stated, however, that Nehru's and Jinnah's admiration for Mustafa Kemal came only after Turkey’s secular revolution succeeded. The success also brought to an end the Muslim campaign in India to preserve the Caliphate.

In his book, Jinnah of Pakistan, Stanley Wolpert says: "In November of 1932, Jinnah read H.C. Armstrong's life of Kemal Ataturk, Grey Wolf, and seemed to have found his own reflection in the story of Turkey's great modernist leader. It was all he talked about for a while at home, even to Dina [his daughter, who is still alive and lives in Mumbai] who nicknamed him 'Grey Wolf'. …”

            In 1947, addressing the newly-formed Pakistan's Constituent Assembly, Jinnah declared that, though the majority of the population in Pakistan would be Muslim, the state would be based on secular principles. This is how he put it: "You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed – that has nothing to do with the business of the State. ... You will find that in course of time Hindus will cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the State." Admittedly, Jinnah was trying to model Pakistan on Mustafa Kemal's Turkey.

            When L.K. Advani, the leader of India's Bharatiya Janata Party, visited Pakistan, in 2005, and praised Jinnah for his secular approach and outlook, referring to his 1947 speech in the Constituent Assembly, he was condemned not by the mullahs of Pakistan but by his own party-men and by the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh (RSS).

            Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (the title Ataturk, meaning the father of Turks, was bestowed on him by the Turkish National Assembly on November 21, 1934) separated religion from the state. He created a secular state where religion was not allowed to interfere in the matters of governance. So, strictly speaking, Turkey should not be called an Islamic state.

            Kemal Ataturk was a true Muslim modernist, much ahead of his time. I wish the Muslims of today had his progressive outlook. If only they had, much of the strife in today’s complex world would disappear.

—――

(Irfan Khan is a senior Indian journalist, now working as a communications consultant. He lives in Mumbai.)

(Published on January 9, 2008.)

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