Atatürk was determined to establish a modern nation-state amid the ruins of the feudal Ottoman empire, which had undergone little industrial development. He believed that a balanced and equitable society, which could deliver the essential guarantees of freedom and justice for individuals, could only be built upon a state’s unconditional power to govern itself, or “the sovereignty of the people.” This, he insisted, could not be granted or negotiated, but had to be wrested by force.

  Sovereignty meant, first of all, democratic self-rule, free from any other authority (including the sultan-caliph), from religious interference in government, and from outside powers. Atatürk’s “Kemalist” nationalism saw the Turkish state as a sovereign unity of territory and people that respected the same right to independence in all other nations. Although an alliance with those outside powers, or “civilization,” would act as an ongoing support for the new nation, the nation would still have to bring itself into being, politically, culturally, and economically, through revolutionary, self-imposed reforms.

This concept of the sovereign power of a people to reform their own state was alien to the bulk of the population. Many in poor rural areas saw Atatürk’s program of modernization as the imposition of the will of a secular urban elite on an illiterate and deeply religious rural culture. Atatürk’s ability to harness the support of the armed forces enabled him to shape the new Turkish republic as a secular, Western-looking nation-state, but tensions between rural Islamists and the secularist military and urban elites persist to this day.

In accordance with Atatürk’s strict secularist ideals, the Muslim hijab, or headscarf, is banned in many Turkish institutions such as universities. This policy is a source of ongoing dispute.