The Secular Deification

Fame can be earned in many different ways, from appearing in a few movies to “forgetting” to wear pants when you leave the house that one time. But if you want the type of recognition that comes with your portrait in every office, your statue in every park and your face on all the money, you have to either stage a coup in Africa or found a republic in Turkey.

Turkey’s founding-father, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, enjoys a level of celebrity that would make even veteran Hollywood jealous, and seven decades of death have yet to diminish it.

And every November 10^th, at exactly 9:05, Turks commemorate his passing by honking vigorously on their drive to work before returning to their daily honking at traffic to remind it to move.

An Ottoman officer who became “the father of all Turks,” (his adopted name, Ataturk, means just that), his feats include:

• Liberating the defeated Ottoman empire from post-WWI occupiers
• Razing said empire in place of a new modern republic
• Replacing the traditional Islamic lifestyle with a secular Western one
• Being voted Mr. Turkey for nearly nine decades running

Plus all these were accomplished before his 50^th birthday, at an age when most people debate whether they should pad their CV with that one weekend of Microsoft Office certification.

“I see you’ve done a year of model United Nations… we might be able to get you a statue for that.”

All of which makes expressing the proper amount of gratitude difficult; one can never tell what to get a man who liberates the country from a restrictive ideology (Islam) and an omnipresent paternalistic care-taker (the sultan), thank you cards just haven’t come that far yet.

Some might suggest a more intangible appreciation, such as Turks embodying Ataturk’s progressivism in a state that evolves alongside the modern world. But the vast majority instead went in another direction, probably because making infallible doctrine out of Kemalism and expecting all properly revere Ataturk just screams “I love you more.”

So while Kemalists debate the “politicization of religion” and its nascent threat to Ataturk’s values, they ignore how they’ve managed the “religion-ization of politics.” But followers will be followers, regardless of what the leader stood for, as Rudyard Kipling noted in the Disciple:

He that hath a Gospel
To loose upon Mankind,
Though he serve it utterly--
Body, soul and mind--
Though he go to Calvary
Daily for its gain--
It is His Disciple
Shall make his labour vain.

He that hath a Gospel
For all earth to own--
Though he etch it on the steel,
Or carve it on the stone--
Not to be misdoubted
Through the after-days--
It is His Disciple
Shall read it many ways.

It is His Disciple
(Ere Those Bones are dust )
Who shall change the Charter,
Who shall split the Trust--
Amplify distinctions,
Rationalize the Claim;
Preaching that the Master
Would have done the same.

It is His Disciple
Who shall tell us how
Much the Master would have scrapped
Had he lived till now--
What he would have modified
Of what he said before.
It is His Disciple
Shall do this and more....

He that hath a Gospel
Whereby Heaven is won
(Carpenter, or cameleer,
Or Maya's dreaming son ),
Many swords shell pierce Him,
Mingling blood with gall;
But His Own Disciple
Shall wound Him worst of all!