Mustafa Kemal's second name may have come from a maths teacher
He was born simply Mustafa. One story says a mathematics teacher, also named Mustafa, added 'Kemal', meaning perfection or maturity, either in admiration or to tell the two apart; the biographer Andrew Mango thought he may have picked it himself to honour a nationalist poet. By 1934 parliament had given him a third name: Atatürk.
Born around 1881 in Salonica, then an Ottoman city, he lost his father, a former officer turned clerk and timber trader, at seven, and of his siblings only a sister, Makbule, survived childhood. His mother hoped he would learn a trade, but he sat the military school entrance exam in 1893 without telling his family. He excelled at mathematics at Monastir's military high school and entered the Ottoman Military Academy in 1899.
Soon after graduating he was arrested for opposing Sultan Abdul Hamid II and held for months. Posted to Damascus, he joined a secret society of reform-minded officers. His call to keep the army out of politics irritated the ruling Committee of Union and Progress, and he was sent to put down a revolt in Tripolitania, in present-day Libya. In 1909 he helped crush the counter-revolution known as the 31 March Incident, which ended with Abdul Hamid deposed. He attended French army manoeuvres in 1910 and fought the Italians near Derna and Tobruk in 1911.
The defence of Gallipoli in the First World War made his name. After Ottoman defeat, he led the nationalist resistance against the Allied plan to partition the country, set up a government in Ankara and won a war that ended in the Treaty of Lausanne. The sultanate was abolished in 1922 and the republic declared in 1923, with Kemal as president until his death at Dolmabahçe Palace in 1938.
His reforms were sweeping: the caliphate abolished, a secular civil code, the fez banned, thousands of schools opened, a Latin-based Turkish alphabet introduced, and equal civil and political rights for women. They came under a one-party regime that suppressed opponents. Admirers credit him with nation-building and inspiring anti-colonial movements; critics condemn the dictatorship, assimilation policies aimed at Kurds and other minorities, and the persecution of Christians.
Source: Mustafa Kemal Atatürk
