Kemalist historiography () is a narrative of history mainly based on a six-day speech delivered by Mustafa Kemal [Atatürk] in 1927, promoted by the political ideology of Kemalism, and influenced by Atatürk's cult of personality. It asserts that the Republic of Turkey represented a clean break with the Ottoman Empire, and that the Republican People's Party did not succeed the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP).
Kemalist historiography views Ottoman traditions as an obstacle to the introduction of Westernising political reforms, and instead adopts the heritage of pre-Islamic Turks, which it considers to be naturally progressive, culturally pure and uncorrupted. The historiography magnifies Mustafa Kemal's role in the World War I and Turkish War of Independence, and omits or attempts to justify the suffering of religious and ethnic minorities during the late Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic, often viewing them as a security threat to the state, or rebels instigated by external powers.
The mainstream historians of this historiography were centrist Kemalists particularly İsmail Hakkı Uzunçarşılı and Enver Ziya Karal, left-wing Kemalists such as Niyazi Berkes and Mustafa Akdağ, right-wing Kemalists like Osman Turan, it was also adopted by Western historians such as Bernard Lewis who took on Kemalist ideas as it is.
Today, Kemalist historiography is embraced and further developed by Turkish neo-nationalism (Ulusalcılık), and sometimes by anti-Kemalist conservatism and Islamism, especially in the case of Armenian Genocide denial.
Historiography
Pre-Islamic Turkic people
Starting with 1920s, the Kemalist regime envisioned a Western-style country, with one of the desired goals being an expansion of women's rights. Entrenched Islamic tradition was seen as an obstacle to introduce such reforms, and in order to subvert them, Turkish ideologue Ziya Gökalp composed a myth, suggesting that old Turkic people had the characteristics of a feminist society. According to him, women of this period had the same rights as their husbands, and were equally active in social life with men. He further asserted that women governed fortresses, participated in trade, and rode horses by themselves. Concurrently, Gökalp thought that modernization and Westernization were not the same things, and that the key concepts of modernization were already rooted deep down in Turkishness. For this reason, he argued that Turkey did not necessarily need to become a part of the West, which he saw dangerously individualist and romanticist, but rather should turn back to their semi-mythical Central Asian origins. Yeşim Arat, a Turkish political scientist specialized in gender politics, comments on the legitimacy of this thesis as such:
In the 1930s, the Association for the Study of Turkish History (Türk Tarihi Tetkik Cemiyeti) was ordered to publish a history book called Türk Tarihinin Ana Hatları (Outlines of Turkish History) which reflected this "semi-mythical" nationalist historiography. Some nationalist historians of the Republican era claimed that Hittites were Turks, in an attempt to hearken back the origins of the Turks to prehistoric Anatolian civilizations, despite a wide academic consensus that tribal Turks migrated to Asia Minor during the 11th century. The same historiography also attributed the roots of Sumerian, Akkadian, Celtic, Mongolian, Russian, Irish and Chinese people to Turkishness, to suggest that Turks were the ethnicity that spread 'civilization' to the rest of the world. But this thesis later dropped by Kemalist regime, most of the Kemalists today views this theses as self defence against eurocentrism.
Ottoman Empire
Anti-Western yet pro-Westernization, Kemalist historiography rarely uses Western primary, and secondary sources, as well as the sources that originate from non-Turkish languages of the Ottoman Empire. It describes the history of Ottoman Empire based on Turkish national identity, and often neglects the experiences of non-Muslims and minority groups of the late empire, especially on topics such as conscription, desertion, and forced labor; while also erasing the diversity of the early empire. The historiography therefore has a tendency to 'Turkify' the Ottomanist ideology that was present within the Muslim and non-Muslim subjects of the empire.