The little-known Turkish philosopher Celal Yaliniz, “Bearded Celal” to those who knew him, once likened Turkey’s Western-oriented intellectuals to “members of a ship’s crew who are running toward the west as their ship traveled east.”

Yaliniz, the son of an Ottoman naval commander, was a graduate of the highly Westernized Galatasaray Lycée in Istanbul, from which the famous football team also hails. He and his protégés among Turkey’s intellectual elite, including Nazim Hikmet, Haldun Taner, Hıfzı Veldet Velidedeoglu, Melih Cevdet Anday and Orhan Veli, were no enemies of the West.

His metaphor has, however, been used by Turkish Islamists and anti-Western nationalists to denigrate admirers of Western values and lifestyles. While this may be understandable for Islamists, it was always an odd stance for nationalists, especially those who are admirers of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey.

Ataturk, after all, was not only highly Westernized himself, but also introduced the West into Turkey, from the manner in which people dressed to the secular principles of the civil code. Democracy, however, was not his priority, which was also the case for many European leaders at the time. This tendency prevailed for decades in the dominant class that came to be known as “Kemalist,” for which preserving secular Western ways has always been more vital than promoting democracy.