Perry Anderson looks closely at Kemalism’s “brittle secularism”, noting the complicated picture prior to the (official) end of the Ottoman sultanate than is typically portrayed in the literature of certain Islamist groups.
But, as noted earlier, Kemalism was not the sharp break with the ‘past’ it attempted to be or is thought to be:
Though it broke, sharply and abruptly, with Ottoman culture in one fundamental respect by abolishing its script and so at a stroke cutting off new generations from all written connection with the past, in its distance from the masses Kemalism not only inherited an Ottoman tradition, but accentuated it.
Plus, Anderson notes:
Kemalism did not so much separate religion from the state as subordinate it to the state, creating ‘directorates’ that took over the ownership of all mosques, appointment of imams, administration of pious foundations – in effect, turning the faith into a branch of the bureaucracy.
The article also touches on Kemal, the man:
Towards the end, photographs of Kemal have something of the glazed look of a worn roué: a general incongruously reduced to a ravaged lounge lizard, terminal blankness nearby. Stricken with cirrhosis, he died in late 1938, at the age of 57.
