Quotes About Turkish leader

Under the treaty of Sevres in 1920 Greece had been given Smyrna, and by 1922 the Greek army was trying to push its way up the Aegean coast. The Turks, however, had found a leader in Mustafa Kemal (Kemal Atatürk) with no regard for treaties and a committed hatred of the Greeks. He drove their army back into Smyrna, and then did what any Turkish leader would have done: massacred them.

Bernard Lewis was most likely unaware of the Turkish leader's fan base among Nazis and Fascists when he hailed Atatürk for taking, with his attempted obliteration of Islam, 'the first decisive steps in the acceptance of Western civilization'. Nevertheless, Lewis as well as Atatürk was working with an ideal of civilization originally posited by salon intellectuals in the eighteenth century, and reworked by various modernizers of the twentieth century.