Word: ataturk
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...Akaretler Row Houses were once regarded as a symbol of change and modernity. The 33 elegantly neoclassical dwellings were designed by a Paris-educated, Ottoman-Armenian architect as accommodation for military staff based in the nearby Dolmabahce Palace. Modern Turkey's founder and onetime army officer, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, lived for a time in No. 76 with his mother...
...Turkey's militant secularism dates back to the 1920s, when Mustafa Kemal Ataturk created a modern nation-state on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. Determined that Turkey's future lay with the West and that modernization was its priority, Ataturk shut down religious schools, abolished the caliphate - Islam's equivalent to the papacy - changed the country's alphabet from Arabic to Roman script and enshrined the separation of mosque and state as a founding principle...
Turkey is a predominantly Muslim country, but the rising tension is evidence that another zealously guarded set of beliefs also holds sway. The principle of state secularism was introduced in the 1920s by modern Turkey's founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, to purge the country of what he considered backward influences. But for leading members of the military, judiciary and civil service, Ataturk's dictates became a license to wage war on political Islam. They did so through coups in 1960 and 1971, the "soft coup" of 1997, and several bans on political parties. In the last decade, such interventions seemed...
...disdain of Turkey's Sunni authorities may explain why many Alevi venerate the country's secularist founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. In his separation of mosque and state, they finally found freedom from discrimination. But that eroded under subsequent governments, often violently. As recently as 1993, a group of 33 prominent Alevi poets, writers and musicians were burned to death by a fundamentalist Sunni mob in a hotel in eastern Turkey...
Modern Turkey has looked Westward since its staunchly secular founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk decreed the separation of mosque and state shortly after World War I. The pro-Western political bent did not immediately translate into liberal economics. Corruption, cronyism and protectionism continued to cloud prospects until the 1980s. Even then, after a period of economic liberalization under reformist Prime Minister Turgut Ozal (a pal of Margaret Thatcher's), the old habits died hard. In 2001, Turkey suffered a full-blown financial crisis in which the Turkish currency lost nearly 50% of its value overnight...