MODERN TURKEY

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 549, 5 June 1933, Page 7

MODERN TURKEY

KEMAL PASHA'S TASK RACE TO CATCH, UP WITH THE LOST CENTUiRIES. ALLAH'S NAME CHANGED. Stamboul, May 6. B'e modern ur suffer the conseqnenees. With this challenge, President Mustapha Kemal has levelled his deter- . mination at the old Turkey of veiled women, harems, mosques; at fezzed and turbaned heads; at the ignorant and fanatical; and at all the drugged fatalism of an Oriental land, states a writer in an American paper. He has been at it for ten years. The results: A few hundred dead, many millions modernised in spots, and some still on the fence. A handful of the latter' are holding the stage at present. They are the twenty-five muezzins and clergymen at Broussa, who revolted against the . President's most recent modernisation step. Not Dipped in Blood. It would be. gross sensationalisni to iihply 'that all of this decade's great reforms have been dipped in blood. The modernisation of Turkish women was effected peacefully— except, of course, for private family 'quarrels. A Turkish beauty was "Miss Universe" for 1932. From the Eastern Asiatic Euphrates to the Western Ei^ropean Maritz%,, Turkish women have heen freed from Koranic and Sultanic oppression. „ The women f .Istanhul, Angora, and Smyrna know it, aiid act it, but it will take another fifty years for the women of the provinces to realise what the new freedom is all about. Veils still beautify the peasant women, and polygamy in the hinterland is still so. widespread that just this year the Government granted an "amnesty" to a million children born outside the republie's one-wife civil ceremony marriage laws. These offspring of secret religious rites will he1 recognised as legitimate, but it is the Government's last concessdon. Peaceful, too, has been the modernisation of education, the greatest of Kemal's reforms. He closed all the mosque schools, where primary .education consisted solely of learning the Korau. Scientific and practical education is beihg built up in the new State schools. Hundreds have heen opaned, but there is still only one primary school for every thirteen villages in Anatolia. Racing to catch up: with lost centuries, the President challenged time with his most daring educational reform. He scrapped the Arabic alph'ahet, and enforced in six months a new alphabet based on the Latin ,far simpler and easier to learn than the Arabic. He opened adult A B C schools throughout the country and forced. everyone between the ages of 16 and 45 to attend. He lowered illiteracy. Public Health. He has modernised health. Witeh doctors and secret potions are taboo. Government doctors have been stationed in all but thirteen Cazas (subdivisions of provinces) where none existed before. Physical education is obligatory in all State schools, and football is replacing camel fights as the national sporfe. By taxing every citizen's monthly earnings 27 per cent. the Government has made a modern city of Angora, has built 1800 miles of railroads, built and repaired 7000 miles of roads, and increased the number of factories from 130 to 2200 in ten years. The construction of modern apartments eontinues in Istanbul at a. fast pace, but Anatolian towns and villages remaan primeval. Time and money are still the victorious enemies there. American experts are being engaged to clinch the modernisation of Turkish eheconomies. Modernising Religion. It is chiefly Kemal's modernisation of religion that leads to disorder. He abolished the caliphate, separated Church and State, abolished th'e fez (a headgear of religiousi significance to orthodox Moslems), abolished the dervishes, modernised sermons, changing the subject matters civics and economy, and now has even changed the name of Allah'. Forty reactionaries in the Black Soa district were shot for refusing to wear hats instead of fezzes; twentyeight clergymen and derbishes were hanged at Menemen during the dervish uprising of 1930. Hundreds were killed during the two Kurdish revolts of 1925 and 1929, revolts that wero motivated chiefly by religious frenzy. Now the religious party is staging a last fight against the modernisation movement, with Broussa's protest aginst the Turkification of mosque prayers. After the arrest of protestors there, muezzins in the rest of Turkey began callihg the faithful to prayer in the name of the Turkish tanri. "Th'e Turkish language, and no other, shall dominate the life of this nation," says Keirial.