Mehmet Ziya Gökalp | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | Mehmed Ziya (1876-03-23)23 March 1876 |
| Died | 25 October 1924(1924-10-25) (aged 48) |
| Resting place | Çemberlitaş,Fatih,Istanbul |
| Education | Veterinary school |
Mehmet Ziya Gökalp (bornMehmed Ziya, 23 March 1876 – 25 October 1924) was a Turkishsociologist, writer, poet, and politician. After the 1908Young Turk Revolution thatreinstated constitutionalism in theOttoman Empire, he adopted the pen name Gökalp ("celestial hero"), which he retained for the rest of his life. As a sociologist, Ziya Gökalp was influential in the negation ofIslamism,pan-Islamism, andOttomanism as ideological, cultural, and sociological identifiers. In a 1936 publication, sociologistNiyazi Berkes described Gökalp as "the real founder ofTurkish sociology, since he was not a mere translator or interpreter of foreign sociology".[1]
Gökalp's work was particularly influential in shaping thereforms ofMustafa Kemal Atatürk; his influence figured prominently in the development ofKemalism, and its legacy in the modernRepublic of Turkey.[2] Influenced by contemporary European thought, particularly by the sociological view ofÉmile Durkheim,[3] Gökalp rejected both the Ottomanism andIslamism in favor ofTurkish nationalism.[4] He advocated aTurkification of the Ottoman Empire, by promotingTurkish language andculture to all Ottoman citizenry. He foundGreeks,Armenians andJews to be an undesirable foreign body in the national Turkish state.[5] His thought, which popularizedPan-Turkism andTuranism, has been described as a "cult of nationalism and modernization".[6] His nationalist ideals espoused a de-identification with Ottoman Turkey's nearby Arab neighbors, instead advocating for a super-national Turkish (or pan-Turkic) identity with "a territorial Northeast-orientation [to] Turkic peoples".[7]
Mehmet Ziya was born inDiyarbakır of theOttoman Empire on 23 March 1876 to Muhammad Tefvik Bey and Zeliha Hanım. He was the second son of the family.[8] He, specifically his maternal family,[9] was ofKurdish origin by some sources.[10][11][12] Ziya described his paternal family asSyrian Turkmen.[9][13] His father was an Ottoman bureaucrat and responsible for publishing theSalname of Diyarbakır.[8] He had a close relationship with his uncle, who would have liked to have seen Ziya marry his daughter.[8] His uncle was religious and opposed Ziya's interactions withAbdullah Cevdet, who was an atheist.[8] Diyarbakır was a "cultural frontier", having been ruled byArabs andPersians until the 16th century, and featuring "conflicting national traditions" among the local populations of Turks,Kurds, andArmenians.[14] This cultural environment has often been suggested to have informed his sense of national identity; later in his life, when political detractors suggested that he was ofKurdish extraction, Gökalp responded that while he was certain ofpatrilineal Turkish racial heritage, this was insignificant: "I learned through my sociological studies that nationality is based solely on upbringing."[14]
Gökalp attempted suicide in early 1895 after an existential crisis caused by his discovery of materialism.[15] Cevdet, who was a doctor, rescued him, which he would lament later as Gökalp became a Turkist ideologue.[8] After attending primary and secondary education in Diyarbakır, he settled in Istanbul, in 1895.[16] There, he attendedveterinary school and became involved in underground revolutionary nationalist politics[8] for which he served ten months in prison.[17] He developed relationships with many figures of the revolutionary underground in this period, abandoned his veterinary studies, and became a member of the underground revolutionary group, theCommittee of Union and Progress (CUP).[17]
The revolutionary currents ofConstantinople at the time were extremely varied; the unpopularity of theAbdul Hamid II regime had by this time awakened diverse revolutionary sentiment in Constantinople. He inaugurated the first CUP office in Diyarbakır in July 1908.[18] In September 1909 he moved toSelanik, where he became a member of theCUP Central Committee in 1910. There he cofounded a literary and cultural journal,Genç Kalemler.[19] While residing in Salonika,Talaat Pasha was often a guest in his house, where they delved into political discussions. It was also during his stay in Selanik that he began using the penname Gökalp and his future role within the CUP was to be determined.[20] In 1912, he moved back to Constantinople, as did the CUP.[21] Gökalp was one of the regular contributors of the political magazineİslam Mecmuası from 1914 to 1918[22] and the military journalHarp Mecmuası between 1915 and 1918.[23]
AfterWorld War I, he was arrested for his involvement in the Committee of Union and Progress[24] andexiled to Malta for two years between 1919 and 1921.[25]
While exiled on Malta, he continued to write and consolidate his ideas and drafted hisPrinciples of Turkism, published in 1923. He returned toTurkey in the spring of 1921, but was not given back his chair at the University of Istanbul. He settled in his hometown of Diyarbakır where he taught sociology and psychology at a secondary school and teacher's seminary.[26] He began publishing a small weekly newsletter,Küçük Mecmua, which slowly became influential and led to contributions in the major daily newspapers of Istanbul and Ankara. At the end of 1922, Gökalp was invited to direct the department of publication and translation at theMinistry of Education. He was selected to serve as a member of theGrand National Assembly of Turkey until his death in 1924, and he served on the Committee for Education[27] which reformed the school system, curriculum and textbooks according to his guidance. He emphasized that the education provided should includeTurkism, Modernism andIslamism. Besides Turkish culture and language, he advocated for the inclusion of Persian and Arabic language, theQuran and mathematics, physics and some European languages in the curriculum.[28] Additionally, he participated in the drafting of the1924 constitution.
Ziya Gökalp was the owner of land which included 5 villages in the northeast of Diyarbakır.[29]
Ziya Gökalp was married, and his daughter was namedHürriyet as a reference to the revolution of the Committee of Union and Progress in 1908.[30] He died on 25 October 1924 inIstanbul, where he went to rest after a short illness in 1924.
Gökalp's work, in the context of thedecline of the Ottoman Empire, was instrumental in the development of Turkish national identity, which he himself referred to even then asTurkishness. He believed that a nation must have a "shared consciousness" in order to survive, that "the individual becomes a genuine personality only as he becomes a genuine representative of his culture".[4] He believed that a modern state must become homogeneous in terms of culture, religion, and national identity.[31] This conception of national identity was augmented by his belief in the primacy of Turkishness, as a unifying virtue. In a 1911 article, he suggested that "Turks are the 'supermen' imagined by the German philosopherNietzsche".[31]
His major sociological work was interested in differentiatingAvrupalılık ("Europeanism", the mimicking of Western societies) andModernlik ("Modernity", taking initiative); he was interested inJapan as a model in this, for what he perceived to be its having modernized without abandoning its innate cultural identity. Gökalp suggested that to subordinate "culture" (non-utilitarianism, altruism, public-spiritedness) to "civilization" (utilitarianism, egoism, individualism) was to doom a state to decline: "civilization destroyed societal solidarity and morality".[32]
Informed by his reading ofÉmile Durkheim, Gökalp concluded that Western liberalism, as a social system, was inferior tosolidarism, because liberalism encouraged individualism, which in turn diminished the integrity of the state.[32] Durkheim, whose work Gökalp himself translated intoTurkish, perceived religion as a means of unifying a population socially, and even "religion as society's worship of itself".[33] Durkheim's assertion that the life of the group was more important than the life of the individual, this was a concept readily adopted by Gökalp.[33] A well-known newspaper columnist and political figure, Gökalp was a primary ideologue of theCommittee of Union and Progress. His views of "nation", and the ways in which they have informed the development of the modern Turkish state, have made for a controversial legacy. Many historians and sociologists have suggested that his brand of nationalism contributed to theArmenian genocide.[24][34] His conception of nation was of a "social solidarity" that necessitated "cultural unity".[35] "Geographic nationalism", in which everyone living under one political system was a part of the nation, was unacceptable to Gökalp, who conceived of a nation as linguistically and culturally unified.[35] Finally, merely to believe one was a part of a nation, this was not enough, either; one cannot choose to belong to the nation, in his view, as membership in the nation is involuntary.[35]
His 1923The Principles of Turkism, published just a year prior to his death, outlines the expansive nationalist identity he had long popularized in his teachings and poetry. The nationalism he espouses entails "a nation [that] is not a racial or ethnic or geographic or political or volitional group but one composed of individuals who share a common language, religion, morality, and aesthetics, that is to say, who have received the same education".[36]
He proceeds to lay out the three echelons of pan-Turkist identity that he envisions:
The second stage was "Oghuzism", and the final stage would be the "Turanism" that he and other nationalist poets had been promoting since before World War I. While this broad conception of "Turkishness", of pan-Turkism, often embraced what Gökalp perceived to be ethnic commonality, he did not disparage other races, as some of his pan-Turkist successors later did.[37]
Stating that theTurkic peoples in old ages were both feminists and democrats, he said that thePan-Turkism movement andfeminism were born together. He based its origins by referring toShamanism.[38] He described hisanti-war attitude on the grounds that the gods ofTurkic mythology were also the gods of peace and tranquility.[39]
For Gökalp the end of the Ottoman Empire marked the end of Pan-Islamism for Turks, who then should concentrate on nationalism but without rejecting their Islamic heritage, which was an integral part of the Turkish identity, nor Western modernity, which he deemed necessary for Turks to compete with other major geopolitical powers, ultimately for Gökalp Turkification, Islamization and Westernization were all legitimate interconnected phenomena as "these three components of the Turkish nation were both complementary and distinct from each other", as Ahmet Seyhun writes before summarizing Gökalp's position: "By Turkifying their culture, the Turks would return to their ancestral ethnic norms. By Islamization, they declare their loyalty to their religion, Islam. Moreover, the author argues that their nationality and their religion would not prevent the Turks to be a part of theWestern civilization."[40]
Alp Eren Topal, a scholar fromBilkent University, while trying to showcase the originality of Gökalp, and not as someone who only "repeated" European ideas, also talks of the much-neglected influence ofSufism on the thinker: being "a big influence throughout his education and growth", he lauded its "military" lexicon and came to admire the solidarity found in theSufi orders, "particularly theNaqshbandiyya", which not only had spiritual influence, but also a role in the modernization of the Ottoman Empire, while he also appreciated themetaphysics of medieval Andalusian thinkerIbn 'Arabi, saying that hisidealism, as system of thought, was superior to that ofGeorge Berkeley orImmanuel Kant – who, he says, recycled ideas already known to Ibn 'Arabi, but without taking them too far –, and, far from being "Gnosticism-mysticism orpantheism", his ideas were pretty contemporary, resonating with those of moderns likeAlfred Fouillée,Jean-Marie Guyau,Nietzsche, andWilliam James, concluding that "in all its progression idealist philosophy has not surpassed 'Arabî’s absolute and perfect idealism".[41]
In addition to his sociological and political career, Gökalp was also a prolific poet. His poetic work served to complement and popularize his sociological and nationalist views. In style and content, it revived a sense of pre-Islamic Turkish identity. The protagonist in hisKızılelma, the "ideal woman",[42] suggests: "The people is like a garden, / we are supposed to be its gardeners! / First the bad shoots are to be cut / and then the scion is to be grafted."[42] She is the teacher atYeni Hayat ("New Life"), where Eastern and Western ideals meet and form a "new Turkish World".[42]
His poetry departs from his more serious sociological works, though it too harnesses nationalist sentiment: "Run, take the standard and let it be planted once again inPlevna / Night and day, let the waters of theDanube run red with blood...."[43] Perhaps his most famous poem was his 1911Turan, which was first published inGenç Kalemler and served to complement hisTuranist intellectual output: "For the Turks, Fatherland means neither Turkey, norTurkestan; Fatherland is a large and eternal country--Turan!"[44] During the First World War, hisKızıl Destan ("Red Epic") called for destroyingRussia in the interest of pan-Turkism.[44]
Ziya Gökalp has been characterized as "the father of Turkish nationalism",[45] and even "the Grand Master of Turkism".[46] His thought figured prominently in the political landscape of theRepublic of Turkey, which emerged from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire around the time of his death. His influence resonated in diverse ways. For instance, hisPrinciples of Turkism had contended thatOttoman classical music wasByzantine in origin; this led to the state briefly banning Ottoman classical music from the radio in the 1930s, becauseTurkish folk music alone "represented the genius of the nation".[47]
For popularizingpan-Turkism andTuranism, Gökalp has been viewed alternately as being racist and expansionist, and anti-racist and anti-expansionist.[48] These opposite readings of his legacy are not easily divisible into proponents and detractors, as nationalist elements in Turkey (such as the "Nationalist Movement Party") have appropriated his work to contend that he supported a physical realization of Turanism, rather than a mere ideological pan-Turkist kinship.[48] Some readings of Gökalp contend, to the contrary, that his Turanism and pan-Turkism were linguistic and cultural models,[48] ideals from which a post-Ottoman identity could be derived, rather than a militant call for the physical expansion of the Republic of Turkey.[citation needed]
Although he often held quite different ideas, Arab nationalistSati al-Husri was profoundly influenced by Gökalp.[4]
It is claimed thatMustafa Kemal Atatürk once said "Father of my meat and bones is Ali Riza Efendi and father of my thought is Ziya Gökalp".[49][50]
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was put in jail for having recited a poem by Gökalp in 1997, the poem being considered to be "Islamist" in nature and thus threatening the country's secularism.[51]
Gökalp's opinion of theArmenian genocide was that "there was no Armenian massacre, there was a Turkish-Armenian arrangement. They stabbed us in the back, we stabbed them back". This view was widely held among theYoung Turks.[52]
The house where he was born has been converted into theZiya Gökalp Museum in 1956.[53]
