Middle East- Turkey

Welcome to another episode of globe this episode is focused on turkey and what we're going to look at here is why is turkey different from all the other countries in the Middle East? You can see turkey's location is right around here. Next to Syria, Iraq, Israel's further down over here. In turkey is also right next to. It has its main city in Istanbul. Istanbul used to be Constantinople, a part of the Ottoman Empire, and that's where we're going to begin our story. Before we go on, I realized there might be a little confusion between some vocabulary words. So I want to just take a moment to throw out the difference, okay? We have modernized westernized and secular. Modernized to the westernized go together, but modernizes more changing from traditional or older ways and bringing it into the city, an urban place, where there's industrialization where we have factories and machines and new technology, okay? Westernize is focused specifically on bringing aspects of Western European life into your own country. So we're talking about specific political systems, like democracy, different cultures that they're used. That maybe they have more advanced technology like bridges and automobiles. Those were developed in these Western countries first and brought to other countries afterwards. And then finally, you have this other word, which are really going to focus on today. Secular secular means non religious, okay? So there's no religious overtones. There's none of the strict interpretation. It means you don't want to deal with religion. So knowing all of this, let's look at these maps. This is a map of the empire at its biggest. And you can see that I controlled a lot of the Middle East, Africa. The Balkans Greece and parts of Europe as well. And this is where turkey is located today. Eventually we know that the Ottoman Empire begins to lose land and by World War I, it is defeated. All that's left after World War I is this turkey right over here, okay? The Greeks actually tried to invade turkey after World War I to take it over. But one person is going to unify the Turks that are left in turkey and fight off the Greeks. And his name is kemal Atatürk, and Kamal added Turk is going to really make turkey into what it is even today. So even in the 1920s, Kamala avatar has a really big effect. Onto what turkey becomes. So as we said, after World War I, Ottoman Empire falls apart. All that's left is turkey. Kemal Atatürk leads away into forming the new country of turkey. He makes it a democratic government and a secular government meaning there's no religious basis of anything. We see so many countries in the Middle East so far such as Israel and such as Iraq, Iran, who are focused on bringing religion into their country, but kemal Agatha does the opposite. And instead, he modernizes in westernized the turkey. He brings it into the modern age. And we'll see a few quick photographs giving examples of how he's doing that. I think the most obvious example is the way he's dressed. And if you remember what Ayatollah Khomeini looks like, he was very dressed in the traditional Islamic garb. Kemal Atatürk is dressed in a very modern style wearing a suit and a tie. I've even had pictures of modern day turkey as well. Yes, there are some traditional Ottoman architecture aspects of it, but overall we see that turkey is full of a lot of cities with skyscrapers and bridges and modern day shipping. So turkey is very in an urban and modernized city, also can mall was known for bringing that democratic government in. He was also known for giving rights to women. Also, women didn't have to dress a certain way. He allowed freedom of religion. So at the Turk is really ahead of the times. And as I said, he's really creating turkey a secular government in the Middle East as surrounded by a lot of religious countries such as Israel and Iran. So the question is, why is turkey different from all the others? And how did they manage to stay this way all this time? This is the end of the video, so make sure to move on to your Cornell no questions right after this.