Abdullah Cevdet

He was born on 9 September 1869 at Arapgir in Malatya province, the son of Hacı Ömer Vasfi Efendi, a battalion clerk, and described himself as a Turk of Kurdish origin and a Sunni Muslim. After primary school at Hozat and Ma'muretulaziz he studied at the Kuleli Military High School and then at the Military Medical School in Istanbul, where the biological materialism then circulating among the students — he translated Ludwig Büchner's Kraft und Stoff in 1890 — drew him away from the piety of his upbringing. He graduated as a junior captain and worked as an ophthalmologist at Haydarpaşa hospital. ^{1 2}

On 3 June 1889, with İbrahim Temo, İshak Sükûti, Mehmed Reşid and Hikmet Emin, he founded the Ottoman Union Committee. Arrested and exiled to Tripolitania in 1897, he escaped to Paris, wrote for the Young Turk press, was expelled from France, and in 1904 settled in Cairo, where in September 1904 he founded the journal İctihad, later moved to Istanbul and published, with repeated closures, until his death. His 1911 translation of Reinhart Dozy's history of Islam made him notorious among religious conservatives; his journal was prosecuted again and again, and he stood trial on charges arising from writings his opponents called blasphemous — in 1922 he was sentenced to two years over his article proposing the Baháʼí Faith as a new religion, a conviction later quashed. ^{1 2}

Cevdet wanted a thoroughly Westernised, secular Turkey and said so without softening: he proposed adopting the Latin alphabet, closing dervish lodges and shrines, lifting the ban on headgear reform, and giving women equal rights — proposals Atatürk later acknowledged among the sources of the Turkish reforms. ¹

His inner position is documented more as a trajectory than as a settled label. The English article's sources describe a young man initially pious and religiously educated whom materialist philosophy turned against institutionalised religion; quoting Şükrü Hanioğlu, they record his view that "although the Muslim God was of no use in the modern era, Islamic society must preserve Islamic principles", his project of an "Islamic materialism", his self-description as a "materialist mujtahid", his line "We are pious infidels", and his successive turns to Bektashi heterodoxy and to the Baháʼí Faith, which he praised as an intermediate step toward the abandonment of religious belief. Karl Süssheim's encyclopaedia entry records that opponents labelled him "eternal enemy of Islam"; the Turkish article reports that at his funeral he was "accused of irreligion", and both articles' category systems file him among atheist writers, while Wikidata carries a single religion value of atheism. No scholarly tradition attests a school for him, and the scholarly tradition that knows him best documents advocacy and accusation rather than a profession of atheism, so this record states no affiliation. ^{1 2 3}

He died of a heart attack at Istanbul on 29 November 1932 and was buried at Merkezefendi Cemetery; the funeral prayer was itself disputed because of his reputation, and was performed after Peyami Safa's appeal to the mufti. ^{1 2}

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