Kemal Had a Century and a State
The most thorough attempt in Islamic history to replace a religious identity with a national one had total state power and a hundred years. It did not take.
Kemal Atatürk had a century, a state, an army and a school system, and he still could not do it.
Between 1923 and 1938 he ran the most thorough attempt in Islamic history to replace a religious identity with a national one. He abolished the Caliphate. He banned the fez. He swapped the Arabic script for Latin, which at a stroke made every Turk illiterate in everything written before him. He imported Swiss civil law in place of the Shariah. He banned the Sufi orders. He turned Hagia Sophia into a museum. He moved the day of rest from Friday to Sunday.
This was not gradual reform. It was a civilisation being reassigned by administrative order, with the full machinery of a modern state behind it, sustained across generations.
And it did not take.
The identity came back. Through the Welfare Party, then the AKP. Through the headscarf. Through a popular religiosity in the Anatolian villages that never actually went anywhere and was simply not visible from Ankara. Hagia Sophia is a mosque again.