TURKEY: Word for God

A hard father to his people, Mustafa Kemal told his Turks last December that they must forget God in the Arabic language (Allah), learn Him in Turkish (Tanri). Admitting the delicacy of renaming a 1300-year-old god, Kemal gave the muezzins a time allowance to learn the Koran in Turkish. Last week in pious Brusa, the “green* city,” a muezzin halloed “Tanri Ulndur” from one of the minarets whence Brusans had heard “Allah Akbar” since the 14th Century. Raging at Kemal Pasha’s god, they mobbed the muezzin, mobbed the police who came to save him.

Quick to defend his new word for God, quicker to show new Turkey the fate of the oldfashioned, Kemal the Ghazi, “the Victorious One,” pounced on Brusa, had 60 of the faithful arrested, ousted the Mufti (ecclesiastical judge) of the Ouglubjami mosque and decreed that henceforth God was Tanri.

Westerners, whose religious wars lie centuries behind them, could not easily understand how Turks felt last week. Kemal’s ventilation had swept away the Turk’s fez, his extra wives, his remaining wife’s veil, and now his church service. Last week, for the first time in history, Turks of Istanbul, where the reform was inaugurated, understood what the priests were saying. But they found it hard to believe it was the same thing as the Arabic gibberish that had had 13 centuries of mumbo-jumbo behind it.

Centre of the mumbo-jumbo belt is green Brusa where orthodoxy flared. It lies across the Sea of Marmora from Istanbul (Constantinople). It was the first Ottoman capital and might have been the capital of the Turkish Republic instead of white-cement, Babbittized Angora, had it not been too near the sea.

* Prophet Mohammed’s favorite color.