That is a little bit of a revisionist history, curiously perpetrated both by Turkish conservatives and liberals. For the liberals, it’s the case of,
’look how backwards the country was in the Empire, and Mustafa Kemal saved it from certain oblivion, vote for us’. For conservatives, it’s more
’Mustafa Kemal destroyed our glorious Islamic past by making Turkey into an European nation state, and suppressed all dissent for the contrary, vote for us’The reality is, Turks historically had a distant relationship to Islam, being the last major adopter of the religion, and Turkey’s Empire has kept and retained, in some cases proudly, many traditions that were openly in violation of quite a few tenets of the Muslim religion, traditions coming from Turks’ pagan past, from Europeans, and from everywhere else.
Ataturk’s ‘revolution’ was much more incremental than most people realise. Just like you cannot plant a parliament in a country that was previously governed by tribesmen, you cannot come up with the idea of ‘secularism’ in a country who was ruthlessly monocultural before and have it survive past your death. For better or worse, the laws Ataturk enacted had its roots in the culture of the land, and that’s the only reason he could, and that’s the only reason they survived past his death.
Muslims were a minority in the Ottoman Empire until the last 50 years of its 600+ year existence. Laicite is just a natural extension of the culture of tolerance that allowed the OE to even exist in the first place, and the extinguishment of which ultimately led to its downfall.