Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan’s packing of the government’s apparatus and major social institutions with his own supporters is a major challenge to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s legacy: turning Turkey from the seat of the Muslim Caliphate into a secular democracy. But Ataturk’s reform of the Turkish language–the cultural anchor of his reforms–remains out of the Islamists’ reach.
As Machiavelli taught, imposing “new modes and orders” on any people requires making sure that the people be rendered unable to remember the laws and ways under which they had lived prior to the new regime’s conquest. Making that happen is less the work of arms than it is about the establishment of what the Marxist Antonio Gramsci called “hegemony” over the people’s cultural life. Language is the key to culture because it contains standards and memories. Your language makes it possible to think certain things and impossible to think others.
The Turkish people originally got their literacy from the Arabs, along with Islam. Until 1928, Turkish was written in Arabic script. This ill-fitted spoken Turkish, but tied literate Turks to the intellectual world of Islam. Learning to read and write was laborious for Turks. Some 80% of the written language’s words were of Arab or Persian origin.
Ataturk forced adoption of the Latin alphabet, which replaced Arabic script with 8 vowels and 21 consonants. Moreover, it replaced vocabulary: words of foreign origin with wholly new ones, built out of Turkish popular language. Now, people could learn to read in a few months and feel at home in their written language. Adult literacy went from circa 15% to near-universal.
But this cut Turks off from the Muslim classics in the original, and opened them to ideas embedded in the Western languages that they could now learn much more easily than they could Arabic.
Prime Minister Erdogan’s Islamic party is trying to establish “modes and orders” that are radically new in modern Turkey. But he is pulling against the heavy anchor of Ataturk’s language reform.
