The Ottoman army officer who led the Turkish War of Independence, abolished the sultanate and caliphate, and founded the Republic of Turkey in 1923 as its first president. Through sweeping top-down reforms he built a secular, Western-facing nation-state on the ruins of a multiethnic empire. His achievements and his authoritarian, assimilationist methods are both part of the record, and both are still argued over.
On a November day in 1928, Mustafa Kemal stood at a blackboard with chalk in his hand, teaching the new Latin letters to a room of grown men. Within months the Arabic script that had carried Turkish for centuries was replaced in official life by a new Latin alphabet. A state campaign promised mass literacy, even as it cut many citizens off overnight from centuries of Ottoman writing. The man at the blackboard had already abolished the sultanate, ended the caliphate, and helped bury the Ottoman imperial order. He was now rewriting how his people could read.