Did Ataturk use the rhetoric of Islam to come to power?

According to Muhammed Asad, it seems to be the case (he’s talking about Sayyid Ahmed, an Islamic activist);

One should remember that, in the beginning, the heroic struggle of Kemal’s Turkey stood in the sign of Islam, and that it was religious enthusiasm alone that gave the Turkish nation in those grim days the strength to fight against the overwhelming power of the Greeks, who were backed by all the resources of the Allies.

Placing his great spiritual and moral authority in the service of the Turkish cause, Sayyid Ahmed traveled tirelessly through the towns and villages of Anatolia, calling upon the people to support the Ghazi, or ‘Defender of the Faith’, Mustafa Kemal. The Grand Sanusi’s efforts and the lustre of his name contributed immeasurably to the success of the Kemalist movement among the simple peasants of Anatolia, to whom nationalist slogans meant nothing, but who for countless generations had deemed it a privilege to lay down their lives for Islam.

But here again the Grand Sanusi had committed an error of judgment – not with regard to the Turkish people, whose religious fervour did lead them to victory against an enemy many times stronger, but with regard to the intentions of their leader; for no sooner had the Ghazi attained victory than it became obvious his real aims differed widely from what his people had been led to expect. Instead of basing his social revolution on a revived and reinvigorated Islam, Ataturk forsook the spiritual force of religion (which alone had brought him to victory) and made, quite unnecessarily, a rejection of all Islamic values the basis of his reforms. Unnecessarily even from Ataturk’s viewpoint: for he could easily have harnessed the tremendous religious enthusiasm of his people to a positive drive for progress without cutting them adrift from all that had shaped their culture and made them a great race.

-The Road to Mecca, p. 319

Maybe some of our Turkish readers could help us understand why the Turkish society seems now so polarized about their, ‘Father of the Turks’?

Related;
The Sanusi of Cyrenaica, E. E. Evans-Pritchard

"The Sanusi Letters: a checklist" Sudanic Africa

Sufi and Scholar on the Desert Edge: The Heritage of Muhammad B. Ali Al-Sanusi and His Brotherhood By Knut S. Vikør