Cevdet was a prominent name in the Young Turk movement — an ideological, political and military cadre that took control of the Ottoman Empire in two supplementary military coups in 1908 and 1913. Not all Young Turks were as secularist as Cevdet was, and actually some of them, such as Ziya Gökalp, were Muslim believers, but Cevdet definitely represented an important faction. Soon after the founding of the Turkish Republic in 1923 by the heirs of the Young Turks, Cevdet's line of thought gained the upper hand. Some historians think that Cevdet influenced even Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Turkey's founder, to a degree.

Creating An Ersatz Religion

That's why the young Turkish Republic followed a policy aimed at minimizing the role of religion in public life. The intellectual conviction of the time was that religion, and especially Islam, was “an obstacle to progress.” To get rid it of, the Republic created alternative sacraments. “Turkishness” was praised and it was officially argued that Turks were much more enlightened before they accepted Islam. The truth is just the opposite — pre-Islamic Turks were a nomadic people with little, if any, trace of art, science, architecture, and literature, which they all later learned from the then sophisticated Muslim Middle East — and that's why the Republic engaged in extravagant methods of myth-making. The notorious “Turkish History Thesis” of the 1930s, a state-sponsored doctrine at the time, argued that Turks were the seeds of the finest braches of the human race. The Sumerians, the Hittites and even the Ancient Egyptians were in fact all Turkish — that's why we still have a state company called Sumerbank, and there is a giant Hittite monument in the middle of Ankara.

Another sacrament that the Republic presented to its subjects was a deified leader. A cult of personality was created around Atatürk, which was best proclaimed by popular poets in the 1930s. “Let the Kaaba be for the Arabs,” wrote Kemalettin Kamu, “for us, Çankaya is enough.” Atatürk's residence was now a national shrine. Behçet Kemal Çağlar was even more explicit when he called Atatürk “the god who stepped foot into Samsun,” by referring to the historic mission of the national leader to the city of Samsun, an act that had initiated the War of Liberation in 1919.

The newspapers of those years were full of such praises for the Republic and its sacred symbols — along with news about “backward-minded criminals” who were caught by the police for simply teaching the Koran or distributing Islamic books. The “secularism” of this republic did not include the idea of protecting religion from the state, as it is the case in the United States. No, here secularism meant the diminishing of religion by systemic state propaganda and persecution. “The Republic itself is principally a religion and faith,” Ahmet Ağaoğlu wrote in daily Son Posta on January 12, 1931. And it was a faith with little tolerance for others.

The Children of The Republic

In Turkey, a person who has bought into this ersatz religion is commonly called as the “child of Republic.” (There is also a female version; “woman of the Republic.") Please note that being a “child” of a state is quite different from being its citizen. The latter relationship is based on the idea of social contract. You pay taxes to the state, and you expect services. You obey its laws, but you have a say in their making. However, the “children” of the Turkish Republic have a very emotional devotion to the state and Atatürk, which they see as all-knowing, all-loving and all-providing. And anybody who criticizes the Republic, in their eyes, are wicked enemies that need to be defied and even crushed.

The fundamental problem with the “children of the Republic” is that they never updated themselves since the ‘30s. It was perhaps normal at the time to believe in nationalist myths and promises of “scientific” salvation. But soon it turned out that “science and reason” couldn't be infallible guides for humans; the gas chambers and gulags were, after all, based on very “scientific” ideologies. That's why post-war philosophers started to point out that we also need morality, which is very hard to base on anything other than religion and tradition. More recently, social scientists show that religiosity and modernity are compatible, and there is even a “de-secularization” process that is going on in the modern world.

Yet the “children of the Republic” have no clue about any of these new, post-secular ideas. They still live in a mental world shaped in the 1930s and defined by people like Abdullah Cevdet. That's why they are so Islamophobic. For the same reason, most of them are against Turkey's integration with the word. For them, the good-old Republic should be kept as it was seven decades ago — anti-religious, anti-liberal, and rigidly authoritarian.

The good news is that there are millions of others in this country who have grown up from childhood to maturity, and have become citizens with open minds. A Turkey shaped by them will be much less haunted by Islamophobia and all other irrational fears. Only then Turkey will stop being a country at war with its own faith and tradition.