In his excellent biography, Atatnrk: The Rebirth of a Nation, Lord Kinross tells us that Kemal's mind worked in a practical way. To bring his country into line with the west, Kemal up a democratic system in which, on a long-term view, he believed. It would be necessary to use dictatorial means for a time in order for democracy to become reality. "He stood by his Occidental Assembly. But it needed, on the short-term view, a President exercising some degree of autocracy--a power which, though he himself would not have admitted it, was in character Oriental. Kemal's political and economic policies were ones of expediency--the most effective means to political and economic reform . . . the ideologies behind such policies "could be shed after changing circumstances had divorced them from reality."

Kemal Atatnrk was often called a dictator by his contemporaries, and in a sense he certainly was. But, in saying this, one must remember that his rule was very different from that of other men, in Europe and the Middle East yesterday and today, to whom the same term is applied. Lewis gives us a three-dimensional portrait of Kemal in his book on the emergence of modern Turkey:

Kemal strove to assure Turkey's sovereignty through the Kemalist doctrines of secularism and statism. Secularism involved not just separation of the state from the limitations of Islam but also liberation of the individual mind from the restraints imposed by the traditional Islamic concepts and practices, and modernization of all aspects of state and society that had been molded by Islamic traditions and ways. Liberation of the state had to come first. Sovereignty meant state autonomy, freedom of the state and freedom of the individual mind. "Abolition of the caliphate was followed by a series of reforms to end the union of state and religion that had characterized the Ottoman Empire, thus in turn ending the ability of the religious class to limit and control the state." Kemal wanted to see the disestablishment of Islam, the final separation between