Mustafa Kemal Ataturk Quotes
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. My people are going to learn the principles of democracy, the dictates of truth and the teachings of science. Superstition must go. Let them worship as they will; every man can follow his own conscience, provided it does not interfere with sane reason or bid him act against the liberty of his fellow-men.
This is a very Jeffersonian type statement.
Kemal Ataturk, 1881-1938, 1st President and founder of the Turkish Republic, An interview with Grace Elllison, ~1926
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At the time, Muslim clerics had a great deal of influence and in many cases legal control over all facets of Turkish society much as exists in other Islamic societies today. They even controlled what was taught in the schools. Remarkably, without bloodshed, Ataturk broke both the power and the influence of the clerics on all official and public activities. Many Turkish Muslims even developed a type of reformed Islam with the relationship between the individual and the clerics one of parity much like Protestant churches in the West. At the same time there was a more orthodox part of the population and while they sent their children to religious schools, they also attended public schools so even the orthodox Muslims in Turkey learned science and modern subjects which are still not taught in most Islamic schools and madrassas.
At the time the Algerians leading the impendence movement were very secular, and were committed to modernity, multiculturalism and religious freedom and tolerance. Within Algerian Muslim society, there has been a constant battle against the right wing Islamic extremists and terrorists.
Public money had traditionally been spent to support shrines of Muslim saints. Ataturk ended such subsidies.
Abdul Rahman, Afghan citizen, had converted from Islam to Christianity 16 years before. Conversion from Islam is a capital crime under Sharia Law which was the law of Afghanistan even after the Taliban had been overthrown. He was jailed and threatened with death. Statements like this and others made directly to the government persuaded the Afghan politicians to go against their mullahs who demanded the death penalty as is proscribed by Islamic Law—Sharia. The judges tried to get Rahman to recant and he would not (see {589518}). So they finally decided that he must be mentally insane and therefore could not be tried, and the problem was solved that way.
This was a remarkable public statement for its time. No other political leader of an Islamic country would dare claim that people have a right to be atheists. Very few would even suggest that people should be free to choose their own religion.
It is an error to say that. It is an error to say that He was the last Pope to hold temporal power. Years later, the Vatican rejected this view and adopted the modern concept of freedom of conscience. See {612714}.
One of the reasons that this quotation is so significant is that the Roman Catholic Church had been historically antithetical to science and scientists. It took hundreds of years before the church would admit that Galileo was right and the church wrong about the earth revolving around the sun. But Pope John Paul II, along with his other major accomplishments removed the traditional Catholic hostility in theology and tradition. He even acknowledged the validity of the Theory of Evolution and taught that there was nothing inherent in evolution that denied God or scripture.
The palace, which had belonged to the Ottoman Caliphs, who were called “Shadows of Allah on Earth”.
Journalists and writers are among the most persecuted people in Islamic nations and even writers in non-Muslim nations have been murdered and intimidated for writing material that fundamentalist Muslims thought was heresy.
In 2005 Rose published a number of cartoons some of which depicted the Muslim Prophet, Muhammad which offended many fundamentalist Muslims who had a tradition who had a tradition of never depicting the visage of the Prophet. A delegation of clerics demanded an apology from Rose and the country of Denmark, claiming that they and Islam, like other religions, were entitled to respect.
Kemal Atatürk was a Turkish field marshal, revolutionary statesman, author, and the founding father of the Republic of Turkey, serving as its first president from 1923 until his death in 1938. He undertook sweeping progressive reforms, which modernized Turkey into a secular, industrial nation. Ideologically a secularist and nationalist, his policies and theories became known as Kemalism. Due to his military and political accomplishments, Atatürk is regarded as one of the most important political leaders of the 20th century.
