Surveying the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire in the 1920s, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk saw an impoverished peasant society that was 90 percent illiterate, whose primary exports were tobacco and dried fruit.
An autocrat, a drinker and a brilliant nation builder, Ataturk set about assembling a state meant to wrench his countrymen out of their backwardness.
Today, Turkey is poised to join Europe - if the continent will have it - in what would be the fulfillment of Ataturk's vision. But in an irony of history, it is a group of politicians who value Islam who are hoisting Turkey up toward the club, which Ataturk's secular contemporaries never were able to do.
So a look to Turkey's past is useful to understand its complicated present.

Sabrina Tavernise
Sunday May 19, 2007
International Herald Tribune