خلاصه ماشینی:
It is a question rather of the ruling class, Ataturk (" Mustafa Kamal," as he is still mostly known to the rest of the Muslim world) and his moderniz• ing entourage-men who in the Revolution threw over the old Turkey and all its ways and are seen as deliberately and powerfully setting out to build a new, Western, secular (or irreligious, or anti-religious...
I I Secondly, and of crucial import : their reading of Islamic history, whatever its validity, is not fundamentally apologetics : they actually feel the determinative role of Turks in Muslim development, and are not merely trying, like the modern Arabs, to .
Thirdly and of immediate relevance to questions of religious modernism and re-inter• pretation : while the Arabs glorify classical Arabism, which produced, or even is summated in, classical that is, orthodox, Islam, and while the Persian sophisticates glorify the Achaemenians, who were not Muslim at all, and while the Pakistanis have not yet defined their past, and think of erstwhile Islamic greatness as something, if not remote from themselves as a people, at least transcending them greatly ; the Turks, if they would glorify,-i· n addition to whatever fantasies of Turkish or pseudo-Turkish pre-Muslim history they may allow themselves-so far as Islam is concerned glorify a period whose evolution produced no fixed form, and which can be looked upon as still incomplete.
But our submission is that, by and large, as a group they are Muslims ; that what they have done in the last twenty-five years to the status and form of religion in Turkey is one more development within Islam, a new emergence within its historical, Turkish evolution.