According to its long and tantalizing title, the 162-page text of this relatively slim book deals with a key issue, namely, the ethnic identity of contemporary Turks. Cagaptay, a senior fellow and director of the Turkish Research Program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, concentrates on the period of “High Kemalism,” as he calls it, between 1930 and 1938. Placing the question of identity correctly in the context of religion (Islam) and immigration, Cagaptay indicates that the plight of some seven million Muslims, who were forced out of their homes in the Crimea, the Caucasus, and the Balkans in the 19th and 20th centuries, nurtured fear and resentment as well as the need to secure a safe homeland. Those emotions, in turn, produced a defensive and partly anti-Christian form of Turkish–Islamic nationalist response to the refugees' need.

Cagaptay and many students of Turkey, including this writer, think that despite its emphasis on secularism, ethnic nationalism, and modernism, Kemalism “still recognized Islam as the key for access to Turkey” (p. 82) by the millions of Ottoman Muslims who were suffering harassment and discrimination in their homelands. Yet, Cagaptay claims that priority was given to ethnic Turks from the Balkans and Russia. Second consideration went to non-Turks from Bosnia–Herzegovina and the Pomaks of Bulgaria, followed by the Albanians, but Arabs received practically none at all. This policy coincided with the establishment of one-party rule, the utopic history theses of Turkishness, the notorious “speak Turkish” campaign, and restrictions imposed on Armenians, Greeks, Jews, Syriacs, and so forth. Although Cagaptay dramatizes the suffering of non-Muslim minorities, he concludes that the Turkish–Greek détente of the 1930s eventually freed the Greeks of restrictions, and he notes the “absence of anti-Semitism in government policies” (p. 155).

His main thesis—that Ankara “defined the Turks in relation to the Ottoman Muslim millet, and non-Turks in relation to the Ottoman Christians” (p. 65)—needs considerably more elaboration to make clear that it was the recognition of an ongoing process rather than discrimination. The classical millet organization (formally abolished in 1862–65) allowed non-Muslims to maintain a high degree of ethnic consciousness by preserving their faith, native languages, and even churches, which served as identity sources for their nationalism in the 19th century, but there was no real Muslim millet. What existed de facto was an “Ottoman Muslim millet,” encompassing Anatolia and the Balkans, the matrix in which a complex religious–cultural intermix had created a new society beginning in the 14th century. The language of the state representing this Ottoman–Muslim millet was Turkish, spoken both by the Ottoman state and the republic. The Arabs, who preserved their own ethnolinguistic consciousness and a sense of cultural, historic, and religious superiority over the Turks, were outside this Anatolian–Rumelian millet.

The degree of assimilation of various ethnic Muslim groups into the Ottoman–Muslim millet depended on their proximity to the center, compactness of settlement, geography, and leadership. Thus, many Kurds—because of geography and administrative arrangements—and the Albanians—because of compactness, a deep sense of ethnicity, and location—remained somewhat aloof from the nation formation represented by the Ottoman (Turkish) Muslim millet. The heartland of Albania had gained independence by 1912, while the Albanians in Macedonia and Kosovo, living outside the Albanian heartland, freely immigrated to Turkey and assimilated into the Ottoman millet.

The Turkification of the Ottoman state began in the 1880s, with the massive immigration of “Turks,” that is, Muslims from the Caucasus and the Balkans who supplied a large proportion of the modernist and Turkist intelligentsia. Educational and judicial reforms, the press, and modern literature greatly expanded the use of Turkish and created a new Turkic ethnie among the elites from different ethnic backgrounds while the Islamic ethos bound the masses together. High Kemalism sought to bring the two together. The history and geography textbooks of the 1880s spoke of Islam, Ottomanism, and Turkishness as a combined identity of the new ethnie. By 1908, Huseyin Cahit (Yalcin), the star journalist of the Young Turks and early republic, was declaring that the state would become Turkish and all Muslims would unite as Ottomans. The separation of the Arabs in 1916, although painful, allowed the Ottoman Muslim millet to develop its “Turkishness” and “nationalize” or Turkify Islam. Until 1928, the Young Turks and the republic remained respectful of the natural-historical process and modernization, however, and displayed no animosity toward other ethnic groups as long as they did not demand independence and follow Europe's directives.

Cagaptay's High Kemalism outwardly favored a race-inspired Turkishness, but in reality it sought to give the Turkish ethnie that had been developing since the late 19th century a more precise “scientific,” cultural, and unifying territorial expression. Rather than being truly antireligious, secularism was used in this context to forestall the pro-sultanate and pro-caliphate forces and undermine their bases in the religious schools and lower level ulema.

When Inonu assumed the presidency and the leadership of the Republican People's Party in 1938, he placed secularism fully in the service of one-party rule by describing all opposition as inspired by Islamist reaction. In fact, the opposition to one-party rule took the form of calls for democracy and for a return to historically determined Turkishness or “hars,” as Cagaptay mentions. Thus, democracy in Turkey was linked to religious freedom that included an almost century-old historical process of national and ethnic self-definition that had involved Islam in a secondary role.

After 1983 the liberalism—still expanding today—of Turgut Ozal, who openly declared himself to be partly Kurdish and a Nakshbandi, gave a new, definitive impetus to Turkification. What already had homogenized the Turkish society to bring it to that point was the village to city migration that turned Turkey from 18 percent urban in 1950 to 65 percent in 2005 and amalgamated various rural ethnic groups into urban communities, where they speak predominantly Turkish and consider themselves “Turks” in a new and still much debated form. Although Cagaptay does not touch upon these latter-day developments, which are outside his time compass, he gives wide treatment to Kurdish nationalism. Critical as it is, Kurdish nationalism does not have mass appeal; Kurdish political parties receive only 6 to 7 percent of the nationwide vote, whereas Kurds supposedly are 10 to 12 percent of the total population.

Turkey, as Cagaptay implies, is devoid of religious, ethnic, or national hatred and animosities, to some extent as the result of Kemalist policies. Still, the Turks' anger can erupt catastrophically when national survival is threatened and personal, family, and patriotic honor is insulted. The European Union's constant demands for humiliating compromises and the PKK's terrorist acts, subtly accepted by the West, seem to have pushed the limits of Turks' patience. Consequently, Şu Çılgın Türkler (Those Crazy Turks), a publication glorifying the war of liberation in 1919–22, printed a record 281 editions and sold a million copies in a less than a year.

I have taken the liberty to comment on all these issues only in order to give Cagaptay's views the weight they deserve and the vista they miss. Otherwise, there is no question that Cagaptay—a highly intelligent, serious, soul-searching, and inquisitive scholar—has put his finger on several crucial issues in Turkish political and cultural life. In order to make significant contributions to the growing field of Turkish–Ottoman studies, his work needs additional depth, scholarship, and impartiality. This book, as it stands, is an insufficiently revised version of his PhD dissertation, full of repetitive statements endorsed by an overabundance of footnotes (60 pages of footnotes to a text of 162). Nevertheless, besides signaling the emergence of a capable Turkologist, the book opens the door to new approaches and is a contribution to the field.