Pre-Islamic Turkic people Starting with 1920s, the Kemalist regime envisioned a Western-style country, with one of the desired goals being an expansion of women's rights. Entrenched Islamic tradition was seen as an obstacle to introduce such reforms, and in order to subvert them, Turkish ideologue
Ziya Gökalp composed a myth, suggesting that old Turkic people had the characteristics of a feminist society. According to him, women of this period had the same rights as their husbands, and were equally active in social life with men. He further asserted that women governed fortresses, participated in trade, and rode horses by themselves. Concurrently, Gökalp thought that modernization and Westernization were not the same things, and that the key concepts of modernization were already rooted deep down in Turkicness. For this reason, he argued that Turkey did not necessarily need to become a part of the West, which he saw dangerously individualist and romanticist, but rather should turn back to their semi-mythical Central Asian origins.
Yeşim Arat, a Turkish political scientist specialized in
gender politics, comments on the legitimacy of this thesis as such: In the 1930s, the Association for the Study of Turkish History (
Türk Tarihi Tetkik Cemiyeti) was ordered to publish a history book called
Türk Tarihinin Ana Hatları (Outlines of Turkish History) which reflected this "semi-mythical" nationalist historiography. Some nationalist historians of the Republican era claimed that
Hittites were Turks, in an attempt to hearken back the origins of the Turks to prehistoric Anatolian civilizations, despite a wide academic consensus that
tribal Turks migrated to Asia Minor during the 11th century.
Ottoman Empire and initiated the Tanzimat reforms. His introduction of
fez foreshadows Mustafa Kemal's clothing reforms. Anti-Western yet pro-Westernization, Kemalist historiography rarely uses Western primary, and secondary sources, as well as the sources that originate from non-Turkish languages of the Ottoman Empire. It describes the history of Ottoman Empire based on Turkish national identity, and often neglects the experiences of non-Muslims and minority groups of the late empire, especially on topics such as conscription, desertion, and forced labor; while also erasing the diversity of the early empire. The historiography therefore has a tendency to 'Turkify' the
Ottomanist ideology that was present within the Muslim and non-Muslim subjects of the empire. The reforms implemented in the late Empire that date back to Selim III and the
Tanzimat period, is regarded as a "teleological history of modernization" that aims to facilitate "ideological mobilization", a view that thrived further in the early Kemalist Republic. Erasing the memory and culture of the Ottoman Empire was therefore seen as a necessity by the Kemalist regime, in order to successfully implement said "ideological mobilization", that is, to introduce modern Western political ideals into Turkey.
World War I The Kemalist narrative of the Great War (
Cihan Harbi) puts an emphasis on the victories that took place on the Turkish mainland, thus excluding Balkan and Arab provinces. Therefore, it promotes the
Battle of Gallipoli, led by Mustafa Kemal, and sidelines events such as the
Siege of Kut, which took place in
Mesopotamia. The historiography also downplays the importance of German officers and
Esad Pasha in the former battle, thus elevating Kemal; this is achieved by an extensive interview published in a newspaper called
Yeni Mecmua, publicising him as the "hero of Anafartalar"
. Even though Kemalist historiography is critical of the Unionists' decision to involve in the world war, the similarity of personnel and ideas between the CUP and the early Kemalist revolutionaries encouraged Kemalist Turkey to protect the legacy of CUP members; this was a tendency that lasted until the rise of the
AKP in the early 2000s. During the War of Independence, Soviet leadership and Turkish socialists depicted the conflict as a struggle against imperialism. Mustafa Kemal used this interpretation in his rhetoric, in order to rally support for the national movement. According to Turkish writer
Fikret Başkaya, this narrative enabled the atrocities against non-Muslims and Kurds to be overlooked. After the establishment of the Republic, politicians
Kazım Karabekir,
Rauf Orbay,
Rıza Nur disputed the official historiography of War of Independence by writing and publishing their own memoirs. In contemporary Turkey, Islamist, socialist, liberal, and Kurdish nationalist narratives challenge the official historiography of the war.
Armenian and Greek genocides promotes the view that Armenians committed genocide against Turks, rather than vice versa. Kemalist historiography omits the grievances of
Greek and
Armenian minorities (see
Armenian and
Greek genocides), and memorializes the
suffering of the Turkish people. This narrative is not only embraced by admirers of the Kemalist past, however, as Conservatives and Islamists maintain the same approach to the events of 1915. To this day, the memory of the perpetrators of Armenian genocide is preserved in many place names, including schools, streets, and squares, both in Turkey and
Northern Cyprus. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the works of
Taner Akçam challenged orthodox scholarship, which had also been adopted by scholars outside Turkey, such as
Stanford Shaw. Largely because of this shift, followers of Kemalist historiography after the turn of the 21st century minimize the suffering of Armenian people, instead of completely ignoring it. This, too, is regarded to be illegitimate by the wider academic consensus. == Atatürk's speech (
Nutuk) ==