Studies on Turkish Politics and Society: Selected Articles and Essays (Social, Economic and Political Studies of the Middle East and Asia)

STUDIES ON TURKISH POLITICS AND SOCIETY

SOCIAL, ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL STUDIES OF THE MIDDLE EAST AND ASIA (S.E.P.S.M.E.A.) (Founding editor: C.A.O. van Nieuwenhuijze)

Editor REINHARD SCHULZE Advisory Board Dale Eickelman (Dartmouth College) Roger Owen (Harvard University) Judith Tucker (Georgetown University) Yann Richard (Sorbonne Nouvelle)

VOLUME 94

STUDIES ON TURKISH POLITICS AND SOCIETY Selected Articles and Essays BY

KEMAL H. KARPAT

BRILL LEIDEN • BOSTON 2004

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Karpat , Kemal H. Studies on Turkish politics and society : selected articles and essays / by Kemal H. Karpat p. cm. — (Social, economic, and political studies of the Middle East and Asia ; v. 94) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. “This book consists of a series of research articles and some essays on Republican Turkey published in the past decades.”—CIP galley, p. 1. ISBN 90-04-13322-4 1. Turkey—Politics and government—20th century. 2. Turkey—Social conditions—20th century. 3. Turkish literature—History and criticism. 4. Turkey—Foreign relations. I. Title. II. Series. DR576.K37 2003 956.I’02–dc21 2003052338

ISSN 1385-3376 ISBN 90 04 13322 4 © Copyright 2004 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Brill provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910 Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands

CONTENTS Copyrights and Permissions ...................................................... Introduction ................................................................................

vii 1

P O Politics Political Developments in Turkey, 1950–70 ............................ The Turkish Elections of 1957 ................................................ Domestic Politics ........................................................................ Recent Political Developments in Turkey and their Social Background .............................................................................. Reflections on the Social Background of the Turkish Revolution of 1960 ................................................................ The Evolution of the Turkish Political System and the Changing Meaning of Modernity, Secularism and Islam (1876–1945) ............................................................................ The Military and Politics in Turkey, 1960–64: A Socio-Cultural Analysis of a Revolution .............................. Turkish Democracy at Impasse: Ideology, Party Politics and the Third Military Intervention ............................................ The Turkish Left ........................................................................ Military Interventions: Army-Civilian Relations in Turkey Before and After 1980 ........................................................ Socialism and the Labor Party of Turkey ..............................

33 71 104 148 172 201 232 272 337 353 378

P T Literature The Impact of the People’s Houses on the Development of Communication in Turkey (1931–1951) .............................. 401 Ömer Seyfeddin and the Transformation of Turkish Thought .................................................................................. 418 A Language in Search of a Nation: Turkish in the Nation-State ............................................................................ 435

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Social Environment and Literature. The Reflection of the Young Turk Era (1908–1918) in the Literary Work of Ömer Seyfeddin (1884–1920) ................................................ 466 Contemporary Turkish Literature ............................................ 491 P T Foreign Affairs Turkish Foreign Policy: Some Introductory Remarks ............ The Muslim Minority in the Balkans ...................................... The Role of Turkey and Iran in Incorporating the Former Soviet Republics into the World System .............................. The Roots of Kazakh Nationalism: Ethnicity, Islam or Land? ...................................................................................... The Turks in America .............................................................. The Civil Rights of the Muslims of the Balkans .................... The Turks of Bulgaria: The Struggle for National-Religious Survival of a Muslim Minority ............................................ The Sociopolitical Environment Conditioning the Foreign Policy of the Central Asian States ........................................ Index ............................................................................................

509 523 543 580 612 639 661 693 741

COPYRIGHTS AND PERMISSIONS We thank the following publishers for reproduction permissions and cite below the name and date of publication (and page numbers if requested). “Political Developments in Turkey, 1950–70”, Middle Eastern Studies, 8:3. London: Frank Cass & Co. Ltd., 1972. “The Turkish Elections of 1957”, The Western Political Quarterly, XIV:2. Salt Lake City: University of Utah, 1961. “Domestic Politics”, Klaus-Detlev Grothusen (hrsg.) Türkei (Südosteuropa-Handbuch, Bd IV). Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1985. “Recent Political Developments in Turkey and their Social Background”, International Affairs, 38:3. London: Oxford University Press, 1962. “Reflections on the Social Background of the Turkish Revolution of 1960”, originally entitled “Réflexions sur l’arrière-plan social de la révolution turque de 1960”, Orient, 37. Paris, 1967. “The Evolution of the Turkish Political System and the Changing Meaning of Modernity, Secularism and Islam (1876–1945)”, Islamic Culture, LIX:4. Hydarabad: Islamic Culture Board, 1985. “The Military and Politics in Turkey, 1960–64. A Socio-Cultural Analysis of a Revolution”, The American Historical Review, LXXV:6. Washington, D.C.: American Historical Association, 1970. “Turkish Democracy at Impasse: Ideology, Party Politics and the Third Military Intervention”, International Journal of Turkish Studies, 2:1. Madison, 1981.

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“The Turkish Left”, The Journal of Contemporary History, 1:2. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966. “Military Interventions: Army-Civilian Relations in Turkey Before and After 1980”, Metin Heper and Ahmet Evin (eds.), State, Democracy and the Military: Turkey in the 1980s. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1988. “Socialism and the Labor Party of Turkey”, The Middle East Journal, 21:2. Washington, D.C.: Middle East Institute, 1967. “The Impact of the People’s Houses on the Development of Communication in Turkey (1931–1951)”, Welt des Islams, XV:4. Leiden: Brill, 1974. “Ömer Seyfeddin and the Transformation of Turkish Thought”, Revue d’Etudes Sud-Est Européenne, X:4. Bucarest: l’Académie de la République Socialiste de Roumanie, 1972. “A Language in Search of a Nation. Turkish in the Nation-State”, Aldo Scarglione (ed.), The Emergence of National Languages. Ravenna: Longo Editore, 1984. “Social Environment and Literature. The Reflection of the Young Turk Era (1908–1918) in the Literary Work of Ömer Seyfeddin (1884–1920)”, C.E. Bosworth, Ch. Issawi, R. Savory, A.L. Udovitch (eds.), The Islamic World. From Classical to Modern Times. Princeton: Darwin Press Inc., 1989. “Contemporary Turkish Literature”, The Literary Review, 4:2. Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University, 1960. “Turkish Foreign Policy: Some Introductory Remarks”, International Journal of Turkish Studies, 6:1–2. Madison, 1992– 4. “The Muslim Minority in the Balkans. Number and Geographical Distribution”, The Polish Quarterly of International Affairs, 1:1–2. Warsaw, 1992.

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“The Role of Turkey and Iran in Incorporating the Former Soviet Republics into the World System”, Karen Dawisha (ed.), The International Dimension of Post-Communist Transitions in Russia and the New States of Eurasia. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1997. “The Roots of Kazakh Nationalism: Ethnicity, Islam or Land?”, Annali della Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, 1992. “The Turks in America”, Les Annales de l’Autre Islam, 3. Paris: INALCOERISM, 1995. “The Civil Rights of the Muslims of the Balkans”, Asian and African Studies, 27. Haifa, Gustav Heinemann Institute of M.E.S., 1993. “The Turks of Bulgaria: The Struggle for National-Religious Survival of a Muslim Minority”, National Papers, 23:4. Charleston, IL: Association for the Study of the Nationalities (USSR and East Europe), 1995. “The Sociopolitical Environment Conditioning the Foreign Policy of the Central Asian States”, Adeed Dawisha & Karen Dawisha (eds.), The Making of Foreign Policy in Russia and the New States of Eurasia (The International Politics of Eurasia, Vol. 4.) Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1995.

INTRODUCTION This book consists of a series of research articles and some essays on Republican Turkey published in the past decades. The articles were written mostly as independent studies, as communications to be presented at various scholarly meetings or as chapters for edited volumes. Their common subject is the internal transformation that took place in Turkey from the beginning of the Republic in 1923 but especially after World War II. Some of the material in these articles is derived from extensive research for a book intended to cover the events after 1960, where Turkey’s Politics (1959) ended its analysis.* My search for the historical roots of the early Republic began in reaction to the distorted view of the Ottoman past, Islam and social change that had been put out for half a century by the Turkish media, educational system and ruling elites. Resulting in a book,1 a great number of articles,2 and additional books (some edited) on Ottoman history,3 my work established that, except for the political regime and inevitable socio-economic evolution, the Republic and its Ottoman predecessor formed much more of a continuum than did, for example, imperial Russia and the Soviet Union.4 But all this research, however deeply satisfying and rewarding, left little time to put together the information on events in Turkey after 1960. While engaged in research on Ottoman Islam and the Empire’s

* I take a special pleasure in thanking Robert Zens for all his help in preparing this article and the book as a whole for publication. Without his able assistance the publication would have been long delayed. KHK. 1 Kemal H. Karpat, The Politicization of Islam: Reconstructing Identity, State, Faith and Community in the Late Ottoman State (Oxford, 2001). 2 Kemal H. Karpat, Studies on Ottoman Social and Political History (Leiden, 2002), henceforth Studies. The book of about 850 pages includes thirty-one articles besides the introduction. 3 Kemal H. Karpat, ed. The Ottoman Past and Today’s Turkey (Leiden, 2000). 4 It is this basic point that Donald Quataert failed to understand in criticizing The Politicization of Islam for “ruminations” about Ottoman history and for dealing with current events in Turkey. History—even Quataert’s type of social-economic history—becomes relevant if linked to contemporary life and the cultural roots of the living society. For his review, see American Historical Review 107:4 (2002): 1327–8.

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last decades, I continued to follow systematically events in Turkey, including the rise of the Justice and Development Party and its victory in the elections of 3 November 2002. At this early point, one may only venture to say that these elections represented a momentous reconciliation between Turkish modernism and Islam based on the interaction between faith and rationality—or iman ve akıl. In fact, many current developments in Turkey cannot be understood without relating them to their historical and cultural roots, and this is particularly true regarding Islam, which has evolved, sometimes in opposition, but mostly in tandem with social change and its underlying ideas. A good number of the articles in this collection were prepared for the volume on events in Turkey after 1960, but, as noted above, historical migration, nationalism, and other forces in Ottoman history are intimately related to events in the Republic. Consequently earlier works about such forces provide the necessary context for these articles, which can be organized under five categories: (1) Identity, Republicanism, and Turkishness; (2) Migration and culturalpolitical homogenization; (3) Literature and the national-modernist acculturation; (4) International Alignments; (5) Politics, Democracy and Islam.

Identity, Republicanism and Turkishness In both the Ottoman state and the Republic the ruling regimes defined the Turks’ ethnic, cultural and political identities according to their own political interests and the prevailing cultural assumptions. The Muslim segment of the population was identified with the state and the faith, which were the political and cultural facets of the same entity—the Muslim community. The {eriat, or religious legal system, enforced by a state-appointed judicial body—the kadı, and the Ottoman political culture produced a fairly high degree of cultural and legal homogeneity among Muslims. Islam, or the various faiths of the non-Muslims, defined the basic identity of all Ottoman subjects. Each subject viewed the state from the perspective of his/her status either as a Muslim living under Muslim authority or as a zimmi (dhimmi)—that is a non-Muslim member of ahl al-kitab (people of the Book)—governed by an Islamic ruler. As the dynasty-sultan provided the personal linkage between the sub-

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ject and the state, the Slavs often referred to the sultan as “tsar” and (stanbul as Tsarigrad. For Muslims, ethnic identities were of secondary importance until the state devised Ottomanism and granted equal citizenship to subjects regardless of faith, ethnicity or language. This secular political identity then made everyone citizens of the state rather than subjects of the sultan. Ottomanism, instead of bringing unity, divided the population into Muslims and non-Muslims. While the former identified with the state, the latter turned their newly reinforced religious identities into nationalities and identified with historical territories that predated the Ottomans. The modernist Muslim intelligentsia associated with the state, in turn, began to search for the ethnic roots of the founders of the Ottoman state and eventually concluded that they were Turks. That Turkish was the language of the state and a large section of population also helped make Turkishness into a political category. Although by the end of the nineteenth century a large proportion of the elites identified themselves as Turks, their “Turkishness” derived neither from a racial identity nor even from an old political sense of group identity. Rather, it was an amalgam of shared historical experience, faith and, especially, identification with the state devoid of any clear sense of territoriality. It could be assumed by any Ottoman Muslim (as in the Balkans, where the term Turk is still the equivalent of Muslim) as long as politically motivated ethnicity was not invoked. The Young Turks (1908–18) remained officially committed to Ottomanism and Islamism in order to preserve the heterogeneous Ottoman state yet were inclined to consider themselves “Turks.” A series of associations, such as Türk Yurdu (Turkish homeland) and ideologues, such as Ziya Gökalp (d. 1924) and Yusuf Akçura (d. 1935), openly espoused the cause of an ethnic Turkishness, often defined by soy (lineage) and race, although culture and modernity remained the chief marks of political identity. Ziya Gökalp, in particular, viewed the Turks as a well-established millenary nation with a specific national culture. For him, the Turks constituted the basis of the Ottoman-Muslim comity despite having been enslaved and used for imperial purposes by the “socially alien” Ottoman ruling class. The sharp line Gökalp drew between the Ottomans and the oppressed and exploited masses of Turks who had preserved their ethnic purity and unique national culture gave rise to populism, one of the six principles of Kemalism. In addition

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to the dismay of Muslim conservatives, Gökalp believed a secularized and Turkified Islam attuned to modern civilization to be part of the Turkish culture. The Young Turks’ discussions, revolving around the history, cultural characteristics and future of the Turkish nation,5 lacked the vital dimension of territory, or fatherland. Previous efforts to define a fatherland—e.g., Namık Kemal (d. 1888) as the Ottoman territory south of the Danube and by other as the Turan, or all the land inhabited by Turks—had been undercut by the changing and shrinking of Ottoman boundaries. The composite issue of Turkishness, fatherland and nation was settled in a precise and categorical fashion by Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) in the period from 1919 to 1923. The Misak-ı Milli (National Pact) issued during the Erzurum Conference of July–August 1919 defined the Turks’ fatherland as today’s Turkey (plus Mosul). Then, the 1919–1922 War of Liberation ended with the expulsion of the Greeks from Anatolia and the retreat of the British, French and Italians from Turkey, attesting to the concrete fact that the Turks had liberated their homeland. For these reasons, reinforced by the government’s calculated discouragement of irredentism, most Turks do not regard the former Ottoman territories as “theirs.” During the discussions on the establishment of the Republic in 1923, Mustafa Kemal declared that for the first time in history the Turks had decided to establish a state bearing their ethnic name, Turkey, although Arabs and Europeans already had referred to the Ottoman lands as Turkiyya and Turkey respectively. The definition of the nation (millet) inhabiting the newly established fatherland was rather vague. The National Pact had not used race or ethnicity as a criterion of Turkishness but had adopted the prevailing definition that the nation was the community of all the Ottoman Muslims living in the territory of the new Turkey. The abolition of the sultanate in 1922 and of the Caliphate in 1924 abruptly liquidated the two pillars of cultural identity and solidarity among the Ottoman Muslims who were the main body of Republican Turks. Secularization measures, such as closing the religious schools and the tarikats (popular religious orders) in 1924 and

5 Two main books on the subject are Taha Parla, The Social and Political Thought of Ziya Gökalp, 1876–1924 (Leiden, 1985) and François Georgeon, Aux origines du nationalisme turc: Yusuf Akçura, 1870–1935 (Paris, 1980).

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adopting the Swiss Civil Code in 1926, undermined the influence of the religious establishment (ilmiye) and left the government free to create loyalty to the national territorial state along with a corresponding political identification. The vast and unique People’s Houses experiment, which still awaits a full study, was undertaken to upgrade and generalize the true culture of the Turkish nation as practiced by the villagers and common folk while imbuing them with the virtues of modern civilization and republicanism. Established in 1932, the Houses replaced the Türk Ocakları and their concept of hars, meaning the traditional culture based on faith, lineage, history and folk spirit,6 with a new culture based on the songs, tales and proverbs of the grassroots people. Despite the stress on village ways, however, the religious exhortations and superstitions of the imams, hocas and other old-time village leaders were superseded along with the traditional culture’s basis in faith. The activities of the People’s Houses including dramatic performances, handicrafts, publications and festivals meant to bring both modernity and republican Turkishness to the masses. Embodying the principle of populism they were active mainly in cities and towns in contrast to their more modest rural counterpart, the Köy Odaları. All were closed in 1951 by the Democratic Party as elitist organizations promoting one-party rule, alien to the needs of the people, and they remained rather passive and obscure when reopened by the military governments after 1960. Nevertheless, there is no question that the People’s Houses represent a significant event in the development of Turkish nationalism, modern identity, elite-imposed populism and tenacious tradition.7

Migration and Political-Cultural Homogenization Migration was a major force in the social and cultural reconstruction of the Ottoman state in the nineteenth century. While some seven to nine million, mostly Muslim, refugees from lost territories in the Caucasus, Crimea, Balkans and Mediterranean islands migrated 6 Füsun Üstel, (mparatorluktan Ulus-Devlete Türk Milliyetaili8i: Türk Ocakları, 1912–1931 ((stanbul: 1997). 7 The two articles in the collection are the chapters from a lengthy manuscript which still awaits publication.

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to Anatolia and Eastern Thrace, during the last quarter of the nineteenth and the early part of the twentieth centuries, about two million Arabs, Armenians and Greeks emigrated from Ottoman lands to the United States, Russia and Greece.8 The far-reaching effects of this immigration-emigration made Anatolia, and so today’s Turkey, a predominantly Muslim-inhabited land. It also accelerated the privatization of state lands and the introduction of a capitalist economy and increased the size of the middle classes. Migrations continued during the Republic through either forced population exchange with Greece or agreements with Romania, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia. After 1950, though the latter two countries forcefully began to oust their Muslim-Turkish citizens.9 In this period of the Republic about 1,500,000 people entered Turkey. Meanwhile, after 1950 Turkey faced an unprecedented, growing tide of internal migration from village to city. Unlike the international migrations before 1950, which were due primarily to political, religious and ethnic reasons, these internal migrations were motivated by economic and demographic reasons. In 1950, about 81 percent of Turkey’s 20,947,000 people lived in rural areas. Then insufficient and unproductive lands or even a lack of arable land along with slow but steady growth of the rural population had resulted in very low living standards; general yearly per capita income in 1950 was $166, and probably only $50 in villages.10 The Democratic Party came to power in 1950 on the strength of rural votes as well as support from the middle classes dissatisfied with the government’s statist policy. The ensuing political and economic liberalization led to private and some foreign investment and then to industrialization, mostly in the cities, creating an acute need for manpower. Consequently, beginning in the mid-fifties and accelerating constantly afterward, large numbers of impoverished villagers began to move to the cities. They were followed by relatives as well as by not-so-needy villagers as the urban wages, which were quite

For the studies on this issue see Karpat, Studies, 689–800; Justin McCarthy, Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821–1922 (Princeton, 1995). 9 Soner Ça8aptay, “Population Resettlement and Immigration Policies of Interwar Turkey: A Study of Turkish Nationalism,” Turkish Studies Association Bulletin 25–26 (2001–2002): 1–24. 10 The figures, if not specified otherwise, are taken from Emre Kongar, 21. Yüzyılda Türkiye 2000’li Yıllarda Türkiye’nin Toplumsal Yapısı, 13th ed. ((stanbul, 1998). 8

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modest by Western standards, far exceeded the meager agricultural incomes.11 Between 1950 and 1997, the total population more then tripled, growing from roughly twenty to sixty-three million, while the per capita gross income rose from $166 to $2,916 in the same period.12 The proportion of urban population, which was roughly 20 percent in 1950, reached 65 percent in 1997.13 The village-to-city migration profoundly affected every facet of Turkish life, beginning with the size and configuration of the cities. It suddenly created on the outskirts of the major Turkish cities a series of shantytown or gecekondu (landed overnight) causing (stanbul to grow from about one to ten million and Ankara from 300,000 to 3.5 million between 1950 and 2000. The gecekondu, usually established on usurped land, violated ever planning regulation, property right and rule of public hygiene. When given property rights over the land, however, the gecekondu were transformed almost just as suddenly into sites of livable, modern three-to-six story buildings and the owners became members of the propertied urban middle class with enduring ties to their original villages. The social, cultural and political impact of the village-to-town migration was profound and lasting. It increased dramatically the migrants’ literacy and living standards and opened for them new vistas for the future. For the first time the old cultural, social and political chasm between village and city narrowed, producing throughout the entire country a new multi-faceted national Turkish culture. Based on its Ottoman-Islamic multicultural communal forerunner, this new national culture incorporated the modernist, secularist, republicanist and westernist features of its own era. It was, in fact, fairly homogeneous, being grounded in the common characteristics of the population, but also because the scope of the new Turkish identity varied with the ethnic composition of regions, it was more widely adopted among urbanites than in rural areas.

11 I studied in depth village-to-city migration assisted by a team of sixteen assistants from Middle East Technical University, see Kemal H. Karpat, The Gecekondu: Rural Migration and Urbanization in Turkey (Cambridge, 1976). 12 Kongar, 402–3. 13 The term “urban” is rather arbitrary. Officially Turkey considered any settlement of 5,000 people “urban” even though these urban sites were merely overgrown villages. However, by 1990 some 67.4 percent of the urban population lived in cities with over 100,000 inhabitants and only 8 percent in cities with 10–20,000 people. Ibid., 550.

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At the same time, the emerging culture and the democratic regime brought into the open a variety of ethnic differences, especially among nationalist Kurds who were sons or grandsons of village migrants. Partly a reaction to the ethno-nationalist policies of the previous government, this ethnic consciousness also arose sporadically among other Muslim ethnic groups, such as the Circassians and Lazzes, but it remained a comparatively insignificant trend. Far more numerous were assimilated and became part of the new Turkish society and national culture shaped by the post-1950 migrations, industrialization and the spread of literacy, which by 1990 had reached a rate of 80 to 85 percent. Yet another major impact of the rural-to-urban migration was profound change in the leadership, organization and voting base of political parties. After the mid-1960s, the parties relied on voters in cities and towns rather than in villages, but while the main parties retained their moderate ideologies, a series of ideologically polarized Marxist, Islamist and nationalist parties arose often among the offspring of the rural migrants. Migration from village to city thus had a profound impact on national Turkish politics over and above its contribution to the rise of regional urban, industrial and commercial centers, such as Bursa, Kayseri, Denizli and Adana, that challenged the authority of the center.

Literature and the National-Modernist Acculturation Literature in Republican Turkey has played a seminal role in defining and popularizing awareness of the social, political and cultural problems arising from change. In the same way, it had served as a forum in the Ottoman era for discussing the status of women, Ottoman and Islamic identities and the usage of colloquial Turkish, as well as for defining abstract concepts of nationhood and fatherland, often before they became subjects of political debate. Shortly after (brahim }inasi (d. 1871) became the first author to plead the cause of a Turkish language and culture in the 1860s, Namık Kemal formulated the idea of an Ottoman fatherland in his play Vatan in 1873. Subsequently, throughout the last quarter of the nineteenth century the novels, short stories and travel diaries of Ahmet Mithat efendi, Ahmet Rasim and other writers and poets formed the basis of modern Turkish literature and the language

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spoken in Turkey today. Their works covered problems ranging from the peaceful coexistence among Ottoman ethnic groups to the virtues and faults of European society and the need to embrace contemporary civilization. Ömer Seyfeddin’s (d. 1920) short stories reflected the nationalist teachings of Ziya Gökalp as well as his own acute observations on the behavior and thinking of his contemporaries. Although neither the Ottoman nor the Republican government tried to use literature to disseminate its political creed or made more than sporadic efforts to ban “subversive” works, individual writers were a different case entirely. Many did attempt to use literature to express their own political opinions or to defend or condemn a particular ruler, regime or practice. For instance, the Ottoman writer Recaizade Ekrem (d. 1914) wrote the novel Araba Sevdası in order to condemn the life imposed on harem women. During the first decades of the new regime, some Republican authors actually vied with each other in condemning the injustice and economic exploitation caused by foreign interests as did the Çıkırıklar Durunca by Sadri Ertem (d. 1943) while still upholding the virtues of modernity. Either writers bitterly criticized the ayan and e{raf, that is, the communal leaders, for oppressing and exploiting their townsmen, the novel Kuyucaklı Yusuf of Sabahattin Ali (d. 1948) being one example of this sort of literary social criticism. Their “village” was fictitious for it was invented to serve ideology. The “real” Turkish village and its problems were discovered in the 1950s. Works by graduates of the Village Institutes such as Mahmut Makal and Fakir Baykurt, promoted understanding for the poor villagers flocking into the cities. This brand of realistic village literature shattered two old contradictory views of the village either as a bucolic site inhabited by innocents or as the home of degenerate semi-animals portrayed in Yakup Kadri Karaosmano