Father of Turkey, who forged a modern nation-state from an empire’s wreckage
The founder of modern Turkey — "Atatürk" means "father of the Turks." When the Ottoman Empire collapsed in the First World War and its lands were carved up by the powers, he led a war of independence, repelled the invaders, and built a republic on the empire’s ruins. He then drove through a series of sweeping modernizing reforms: abolishing the caliphate (the supreme fusion of religion and state), separating religion and state, adopting the Western calendar and Latin alphabet, giving women the vote, reforming dress and education — forcing, within a single generation, an ancient Islamic empire onto the track of a modern secular nation-state. He is the most thoroughgoing model of twentieth-century "top-down modernization."
Atatürk held that the difficult Arabic script was an obstacle to mass literacy in Turkey. In 1928 he ordered the whole country to switch to the Latin alphabet, and personally took a blackboard into the streets and villages as "head teacher," teaching the people the new letters. In a few short years a nation changed the very way it wrote — a transformation so thorough and swift it is rare in the whole history of modernization.
Below are how modern works borrow or reinterpret this name or story — not the original material. The two differ, so keep them apart.