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Historians of the modern Middle East will be familiar with the monochromatic historiography of inter-war Turkey, limited to explicating political developments especially those related to the ideas and person of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. The prevalence of Mustafa Kemal in representations of early Republican history or the Turkish Revolution, as the years of his presidency (1923-38) are known, is evident in two rather divergent historiographic trends. The one concentrates on the Ataturk era exclusively and is rooted in the scholarship of Turks concerned to demonstrate that this period symbolized a distinct break with the past and thus marked the birth of an entirely new Turkish nation-state.1 The other situates the Ataturk era in a much broader chronology, spanning at least two centuries, and is characteristic of the work of foreign historians who emphasize the continuity between modem Turkey and its predecessor, the Ottoman Empire.2 Despite the potential inherent to these contradictory interpretations for very different and therefore fruitful analysis of the Ataturk era, however, the two approaches yield remarkably similar images each depicting a political process dominated by Mustafa Kemal.
The narrow focus of this historiography is due primarily to the particular sources exploited by historians to date: these include the many recorded speeches of Mustafa Kemal and his loyal political cadre, their published memoirs, and the records of Turkey's Grand National Assembly. Although these sources provide sufficient grounds for documenting the dynamics of Turkish politics as well as the corpus of reform legislation that constituted the Turkish 'Revolution', their focus is restricted almost exclusively to the activities of the political elite. On those occasions when this elite actually looked beyond the political intrigue unfolding in Ankara and recorded their observations concerning popular Turkish experiences of and responses to a revolution by legislation, their thoughts reflected the positivist rational tenets of Kemalist ideology. Implicit in this ideology was the conviction that the Kemalist elite was distinct from the Anatolian 'masses' in terms of rational intelligence and adaptability, and was therefore responsible for leading Anatolian townsmen and peasants out of darkness and into light. The Kemalist conception of progress derided institutions and cultural accretions - especially religious beliefs and practices - associated with the Ottoman-Islamic past; it reflected not only the elite's limited understanding of but also...