The bases of Mustafa Kemal's policies were enshrined in the RPP program of 1931, which was written into the Turkish constitution in 1937. Kemal's six fundamental principles were republicanism (the creation of the republic), nationalism, populism, statism, secularism, and revolution.
Revolution was implicit in the radical reorganization of the political, social, and economic systems.
Populism was the effort to mobilize popular support from the top through such characteristic devices as the People's Houses (1931-51), which spread the new concept of a national culture in provincial towns, and the village institutes, which performed the same educational and proselytizing role in the countryside.
Nationalism: The creation of a sense of nationalism was encouraged by changes in school curricula, the rewriting of history to glorify the Turkish past, the "purification" of the language by a reduction of the number of words of foreign origin (sometime later, this effort appeared to be redundant in the light of a promulgation that all languages were descended from Turkish), and the renunciation of Pan-Islamic, Pan-Turkish, and Pan-Ottoman goals in foreign policy.
Statism was the movement toward state-controlled economic development; the shortage of skilled labour and entrepreneurs (caused largely by the reduction of the Greek and Armenian communities, which in 1914 had controlled four-fifths of Ottoman finance, industry, and commerce), the lack of capital, and the intense nationalist desire for industrial self-sufficiency that would banish foreign influence all stimulated a movement in the 1930s toward state ownership or control. This was achieved through investment banks, monopolies, state industrial enterprises, and planning. A five-year plan was instituted in 1934, results were disappointing.
Secularism included the reform of law, involving the abolition of religious courts and schools (1924) and the adoption of a purely secular system of family law. The substitution of the Roman for the Arabic alphabet in writing Turkish was a significant step toward secularism; other measures included the adoption (1925) of the Gregorian calendar that had been jointly used with the Hijri calendar since 1917, the replacement of Friday by Sunday as the weekly holiday (1935), the adoption of surnames (1934), and, most striking of all, the abolition of the fez - Tarboosh (1925). The wearing of clerical "sunnah" garb outside places of worship was forbidden in 1934.
These changes, coupled with the abolition of the caliphate and the elimination of the dervish orders after a Kurdish revolt in 1925 [by the Naqshbandi Shaykh Said who fought to re-establish shariah and the Khilafat], dealt a tremendous blow to Islam's position in social life, completing the process begun in the Tanzimat. With secularism, women, who were given the right to vote and to sit in parliament.