Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (c. 1881– 1938) was a Turkish
field marshal and revolutionary statesman who was a founding
father
of the Republic of Turkey, serving as its first president
from 1923
until his death in 1938. He undertook sweeping
reforms, which modernized Turkey into a secular, industrializing nation.
Ideologically a secularist and nationalist, his policies and
socio-political theories became known as Kemalism.
President Recep Erdogan of Turkey has turned his country back
to the mediaeval past from which Kemal Atatürk rescued it.