Notes on the Modernisation of Turkey – The Hungarian Contribution
Notes on the Modernisation of Turkey – The Hungarian Contribution

Summary/Abstract: With Nobel Prize winners and businessmen all over the world, with a NATO army and locally produced aircraft, Turkey is easily the most successful Moslem country. But the problems begin with this statement. Have the Turks a native talent for adapting to whichever empire they happen to encounter, in modern times the American? Or is it that there is a special form of Turkish Islam? Or does it come from the simple fact that the Ottoman Empire, taking over from Byzantium, was originally largely Christian? Another conflict divides the nation, and, now, almost to the point of civil war. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk is the famous figure of Turkish modern history. As military leader, he led the fight for independence, and defeated all comers. Then, before he died in 1938, he introduced reforms of a thoroughgoing sort, including the exclusion from public life of all religion. Is the vast difference between Turkey and her neighbours to east and south ascribable to these reforms – an introduction of the European Enlightenment in a Moslem heartland? The Islamists were prevented from persecuting and have never stopped complaining that they were thereby persecuted. In today’s Turkey they are taking a certain revenge, and a tense election is coming up.

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