Turkish Reflections…
“Going to Turkey, you’ll see burkha-clad women and men with beard everywhere”, this is what my friend told me when I was leaving for Istanbul. In fact I too had similar impression of Turkey. All I knew was that though they were a Muslim majority nation they did not like Arabic language to be there in their mobile phones and any phone to be sold in Turkey must have the six Turkish special characters (ç, ğ, ı, ö, ş, ü). I knew this because I used to develop mobiles for Turkish market also.
When I got down at the Atatürk airport everything changed. Istanbul looks and feels completely like a European city. The only difference you see is some beautiful mosques which they call ‘Jami’ (‘Cami’ as written in Turkish) instead of chapels and cathedrals. Turkey is democratic republic. Secular, to the true sense of it. People dress up like Europeans, behave somewhat like them. Step up to any bus, get on the Metro you are sure to see couples showing their love for each other. It is impossible to see something like that in India. All these made me really curious. I started reading the Turkish history. I read tens of articles related to Turkey on Wikipedia.
The Ottoman Emperors had carefully conserved the Islamic way of life. After the Turkish nationalist revolution and subsequent abolition of Caliphate, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk took charge of the nation and replaced age old customs traditions and belief with European ideas making Turkish national pride and ‘Kemalism’ much above the Islamic religion beliefs or the ‘Sharia’ law practiced earlier by the Ottoman emperors. Don’t expect me to blog about the details more, you can read those in Wikipedia. The startling point is one man’s dream was put to practice word by word as he had imagined. Even the Turkish script was changed from Ottoman Arabic to Turkish (an extended Roman alphabet to cater to Turkish sounds). An all these things did not take centuries to change. The change has taken really fast. From women with veils, people following Islamic traditions to 180 degrees turn to European democratic society. Hats off to the people here and hats off to Mr. Atatürk. If today Turkey is a developed nation and is not in a mess like the other Arabic nations including Pakistan, it is because of these changes.
