NEW FREEDOM

Evening Post, Volume CXV, Issue 104, 5 May 1933, Page 14

NEW FREEDOM

MODERNISING TEN YEARS' PROGRESS Bo modern or suffer tho consequences. With this challcngo President Mustapha Kcmal has levelled his determination at tho old Turkey of veiled women, harems, mosques; at fezzed and turbaned heads; at the ignorant and tho fanatical, and at all the drugged fatalism of an Oriontal land, states a writer in an' American paper. Ho has been at'it for ton years. Tho results: A few hundred dead, maiiy millions modernised in. spots, and , some still on the fence. A handful of tho latter arc holding tho stago at present. They arc tho twenty-five muezzins and clergymen at Broussa, 'who revolted against tho President's most recent modernisation step. It would bo gross sensationalism to imply that all of this decade's great reforms have been dipped in blood. The modernisation of Turkish women. was effected peacefully —except, of , course, for private family quarrels. , A Turkish beauty was "Miss Universe" for 1932. Prom the Eastern Asiatic Euphrates to the Western European Maritza, Turkish women havo _ been freed from Koranic and Sultanie oppression. The women 'of Istanbul, Angora, and Smyrna know it, and act it, but it will tako another fifty years for the women of tho provinces to realise what tho new freedom is all about. Veils ' still beautify the peasant women and polygamy in the hinterland is still so widespread- that just this year tho Government granted an "amnesty" to a million children, born outside the republic's one-wife civil | ceremony marriage laws. '. These offspring of secret religious rites will be recognised as legitimate, but it is tho Government's last concession. Peaceful, too, has been the modernisation of education, the greatest of Kcmal's reforms. He closed all tho mosque schools, where primary education consisted solely in learning tha Koran. Scientific and practical cducai tion is being built up in tho new State schools. Hundreds have been opened, but there is still only one primary school for every thirteen villages in ; Anatolia. I Racing to catch up with lost centuries the President challenged time i with his most daring educational reform. He scrapped the Arabic alphabet, and. enforced in siX months a new [alphabet based on tho Latin, far 'simpler and easier to Jearn than the I Arabic. He opened adult ABC ! schools throughout tho country and forced everyone* between the ages of 10 arid 45 to attend. He lowered illiteracy. He has modernised health. Witch doctors and secret potions are taboo. ■ Government doctors have/ been stationed in all but thirteen cazas (subdivisions of provinces), where none existed before. Physical education is obligatory in all State schools and football is replacing camel fights as tho national sport. By taxing every citizen's monthly earnings 27 per cent., the Government has made a modern city of Angora, has built 1800 miles of railroads, built and repaired 7000 miles of. roads, and increased the number of factories from 130 to 2200 in ten years. . Tho construction of modern apartments con tinues in Istanbul, at a fast pace, but Anatolian towns and villages remain primeval. Time and money arc still the victorious enemies there. American experts arc being engaged to clinch tho modernisation of Turkish economics. It is chiefly Kcmal's modernisation of religion that leads to disorder. He abolished the -caliphate, .separated Church and State, abolished the fez (a headgear of religious ' significance to orthodox Moslems), abolished tho dervishes, modernised sermons, changing tho subject matter to civics and economy, and now has even changed the name- of Allah. Forty reactionaries in the Black feca district were shot for refusing, to wear hats instead of fezzes; twenty-eight clergymen and dervishes were hanged at Mencmen during tho dervish uprising of 1930. Hundreds were killed during tho two Kurdish rovolts of 1925 and 1920, revolts that wero motivated chiefly by religious frenzy. Now the religious paHy is staging a last fight against the modernisation movement, with Broussa's protest against the Turkification of mosquo prayers. After the arrest of protestors there, muezzins in. the rest ot Turkey- began calling tho faithful to prayer in tho name of the Turkish "The Turkish language, and no other, shall dominate tho. life ot this nation," says Kcmal.