Until now, Turkey has modeled how an Islamic state can modernize
and democratize. When the Ottoman Empire crumbled after World
War I, the Turks retreated to what they considered their
original homeland in Anatolia, once the homeland of the
Byzantine Christian Roman Empire until the Ottomans conquered it
in 1453. Constantinople was renamed Istanbul. Under cover of
World War I, the Turkish military carried out the century's
first ethnic cleansing, a deliberate massacre of the Christian
Armenian population that had lived there for millennia, well
before the Turks arrived. Kemal Mostafa, or Ataturk. This nasty
history aside, modern Turkey was midwifed by a respected Turkish
general, Kemal Ataturk, who devoted his life to transforming the
abysmal remnant of Ottoman rule into a modern, European-oriented
state. In his republic, women discarded the veil and men the fez
(a brimless hat that allowed men to touch their foreheads to the
ground in Muslim prayer). He changed the alphabet from the
Arabic to the Latin, which