Word: kemal
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...friend's 6-year-old recently started primary school in Istanbul. By the second week, his favorite superhero, Spider-Man, had been supplanted by a flesh-and-blood mortal who died 70 years ago: Mustafa Kemal, better known as Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey. The boy's shift of allegiance is a universal rite of passage in Turkey, where children are raised on a diet of passionate poems, military derring-do and sanitized history that elevate the national hero into a demigod. (See pictures of cultures co-existing in Istanbul...
...personality cult is slowly cracking, and the ructions are reverberating through the nation's political life. A new film about the legendary officer, who fought off occupying European powers to create modern Turkey from the remnants of a moribund Ottoman Empire, has stirred controversy by depicting Mustafa Kemal the man, not the icon. He is shown as a lonely figure, a heavy drinker and a failed husband, racked by doubts at the end of his life. The documentary uses original footage as well as re-enactments and is tellingly called Mustafa instead of Atatürk (literally, Father...
Instant Noodles To see more of Kemal Jufri's photos of an Indonesian noodle factory, go to time.com/IRD
...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...