Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"Soon afterward, the Young Turk movement, made up of university students and young army officers, agitated for a return to the constitution that Abdul-Hamid had granted in 1876, then suspended. In 1909, Young Turk soldiers marched on Istanbul and replaced Abdul Hamid with his brother Mehmed, a puppet of the young Turks. Turkey then allied with Germany against the Entente powers of Britain and France--a policy that culminated in her taking the losing side in World War I, which ended in the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire." [Furtado: 1001 Days] "Their leader, Kemal Ataturk, a tough and successful general, was to carry out the Young Turk modernizing programme ruthlessly: a republic was proclaimed, Islam abolished as a state religion, the Roman alphabet substituted for the Arabic, the women were unveiled and sent to school, and Turkish men, if necessary by military force, were put under bowler hats or other western headgear instead of turbans. The weakness of the Turkish Revolution, notable in it economy, lay in its inability to impose itself on the great mass of rural Turks or to change the structure of agrarian society." [Hobsbawm: Empire, p. 284-5]