The historical foundations of secularist trends in contemporary Turkey

Abstract EN

This paper drives at studying two significant aspects of the reformation in the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey: The first is to trace back the foundations of secularist trends in the Ottoman Empire highlighting the salient domains and the legal procedures it encompassed down to its branching off with Mustapha Kemal efforts.

The second is to tract the policy of kemalism in the field of establishing a novem state according to secularist principles which exclude religious impact from politics.

However, the paper reached that a consequence which made Mustapha Kemal Ataturk `successors realize that was impossible to ignore a rather significant reality that religion is one of the most political and Social forces influencing Turkish Society.