Ataturk: the Turkish republic and the end of the caliphate
On the ruins of the Ottoman empire a secular republic arises, and the caliphate, standing since the seventh century, is abolished by a single law.
On 29 October 1923 Mustafa Kemal, the general who had saved Anatolia from partition after the First World War, proclaims the Turkish republic with its capital at Ankara. On 3 March 1924 the parliament abolishes the caliphate—the office of head of all Muslims, which the Ottoman sultans had held for four centuries and the caliphs before them since the seventh. Then come laws such as no Muslim country had yet seen: the Latin alphabet in place of the Arabic, a European code in place of the sharia, civil marriage, a ban on the fez, the vote for women. The parliament gives Kemal the surname Ataturk, 'father of the Turks'. For the Jewish communities of Turkey, settled here since the expulsion from Spain, it is a time of equal rights and, at the same time, of pressure on everything non-Turkish.
Sources
Documents of the period
- the law abolishing the caliphate, 3 March 1924 — the end of the caliphate
Scholarship
- studies of the history of Turkey — the proclamation of the republic and the reforms of the twenties
Basis: documents and evidence.