ABSTRACT
Kemal Ataturk, elected Turkey's first president, transformed the Ottoman Empire into a modern state. Ataturk was born Mustafa in Salonika in Greece (then part of the Ottoman Empire) on March 12, 1881. His father, a minor civil servant, insisted he be educated at a secular school. There a teacher gave him the surname Kemal. Kemal joined the nationalist Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) and the Young Turk movement. In 1908, Young Turks, led by army officers including Mustafa Kemal, forced the sultan of the Ottoman Empire to restore the constitution, promulgated in 1876 but immediately suspended. When the Ottoman Empire allied with Germany and Austria-Hungary in World War I, Kemal served on the Gallipoli Peninsula, where he became a national hero after repelling a British invasion in 1915. Kemal Ataturk transformed his country from a multiethnic empire based on Islam into a secular nation-state, providing a model for newly independent countries facing similar challenges in the twentieth century.
