Atatürk's Reforms in the context of "Headscarf controversy in Turkey"

In Turkey, secularism or laicism (see laïcité) was first introduced with the 1928 amendment of the Constitution of 1924, which removed the provision declaring that the "Religion of the State is Islam", and with the later reforms of Turkey's first president Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, which set the administrative and political requirements to create a modern, democratic, secular state, aligned with Kemalism.

Nine years after its introduction, laïcité was explicitly stated in the second article of the then Turkish constitution on 5 February 1937. The current Constitution of 1982 neither recognizes an official religion nor promotes any.

The Turkish alphabet (Turkish: Türk alfabesi or Türk abecesi) is a Latin-script alphabet used for writing the Turkish language, consisting of 29 letters, seven of which (Ç, Ğ, I, İ, Ö, Ş and Ü) have been modified from their Latin originals for the phonetic requirements of the language. This alphabet represents modern Turkish pronunciation with a high degree of accuracy and specificity. Mandated in 1928 as part of Atatürk's Reforms, it is the current official alphabet and the latest in a series of distinct alphabets used in different eras.

The Turkish alphabet has been the model for the official Latinization of several Turkic languages formerly written in the Arabic or Cyrillic script like Azerbaijani (1991), Turkmen (1993), and recently Kazakh (2021).

Education in Turkey is governed by a national system which was established in accordance with Atatürk's Reforms. It is a state-supervised system designed to produce a skillful professional class for the social and economic institutes of the country.

Compulsory education lasts 12 years. Primary and secondary education is financed by the state and free of charge in public schools, between the ages of 6 and 19. Turkey has over 200 universities as of 2022. ÖSYS, after which high school graduates are assigned to university according to their performance.

Mehmet Ziya Gökalp (born Mehmed Ziya, 23 March 1876 – 25 October 1924) was a Turkish sociologist, writer, poet, and politician. After the 1908 Young Turk Revolution that reinstated constitutionalism in the Ottoman Empire, he adopted the pen name Gökalp ("celestial hero"), which he retained for the rest of his life. As a sociologist, Ziya Gökalp was influential in the negation of Islamism, pan-Islamism, and Ottomanism as ideological, cultural, and sociological identifiers. In a 1936 publication, sociologist Niyazi Berkes described Gökalp as "the real founder of Turkish sociology, since he was not a mere translator or interpreter of foreign sociology".

Gökalp's work was particularly influential in shaping the reforms of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk; his influence figured prominently in the development of Kemalism, and its legacy in the modern Republic of Turkey. Influenced by contemporary European thought, particularly by the sociological view of Émile Durkheim, Gökalp rejected both the Ottomanism and Islamism in favor of Turkish nationalism. He advocated a Turkification of the Ottoman Empire, by promoting Turkish language and culture to all Ottoman citizenry. He found Greeks, Armenians and Jews to be an undesirable foreign body in the national Turkish state. His thought, which popularized Pan-Turkism and Turanism, has been described as a "cult of nationalism and modernization". His nationalist ideals espoused a de-identification with Ottoman Turkey's nearby Arab neighbors, instead advocating for a super-national Turkish (or pan-Turkic) identity with "a territorial Northeast-orientation [to] Turkic peoples".