Who would you guess the woman in the photo is? She's fashionable, she's reading (an indication of being educated), she's allowing herself to be photographed (an indication of openness). The woman in the photo is Princess Hadice Hayriye Ayshe Dürrühsehvar, the daughter of the last Caliph of Islam before the abolition of the office in 1924. In Turkish history, the Kemalist regime is seen as the great modernizing regime and the Caliphate is often characterized as a backwards institution that held the Turks back from complete modernization. Is this necessarily true? After all, the Tanzimat movement was a product of the Ottoman Sultans' need to modernize. The princess' father, the Caliph of Islam, believed deeply in women's education. The princess herself believed in employment for women and an abolition to the segregation of women from men.
Was modernity in Turkey a foregone conclusion? If so, then the two camps differed in what respect modernity would be implemented. The Kemalists completely abolished the Caliphate system, but did not try to eradicate Islam itself. They merely sought to bureaucratize and institutionalize it within the secular state system. Had the Caliphate survived, secularism would probably not have been eradicated either but bureaucratized and institutionalized within the religious state system.
People see Turkey as struggling with opposing forces: Islam and secularism. But the reality is, both are institutionalized in society and in government. It's not necessarily an issue two opposing forces so much as a issue of overlap. Where do the two meet? Where do the two diverge? Did Ataturk create something unique, or did he finally synthesize what Sultan Mahmut II, Abdulmecid I and the CUP created which was a state where secularism and Islam overlapped?
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