Yusuf Akçura

Yusuf Akçura (2 December 1876 – 11 March 1935) was a prominent Turkish politician, writer and ideologue of ethnic Russian Tatar origin. ¹ Born at Simbirsk, he developed into a leading advocate of Pan-Turkism in the early republican period, whose writings were widely read and who became one of the leading university professors in Istanbul. ¹ The Arabic article calls him one of the theorists of Turanism and records his birth at Ulyanovsk (formerly Simbirsk). ²

He was born at Simbirsk in the Russian Empire to a Tatar family and lived there until he and his mother emigrated to the Ottoman Empire when he was seven. ¹ He received his primary and secondary education in Constantinople and entered the Harbiye Mektebi (Military College) in 1895, taking up a post in the General Staff Course; but in 1896 he was accused of belonging to the Young Turk movement and exiled to Trablusgarb in Fezzan, in Ottoman Libya. ¹ He escaped exile in 1899 and reached Paris, where he contributed to Meşveret, a periodical of the exiled Committee of Union and Progress, and began to emerge as an advocate of Turkish nationalism and Pan-Turkism. ¹

He returned to Russia in 1903, settling beside Simbirsk, and attracted most attention for his 1904 work Üç Tarz-ı Siyaset (Three Types of Policy), first printed in the Cairo-based magazine Türk. ¹ The work encouraged the formation of an Ottoman nation with a citizenship based on Islam, compared such a nation with Germany, Switzerland and France, and further demanded abandoning the multi-ethnic concept of the Ottoman Empire in favour of focusing on the Turks. ¹ He was one of the co-founders of the Ittifaq al-Muslimin, a Muslim party in Russia. ¹

In 1908 he returned to Istanbul, where his ideas gained more interest after the Young Turk Revolution. ¹ In 1911 he founded the Türk Yurdu Association with Ahmet Ağaoğlu, Ali Hüseynzade and others, and the association began publishing the magazine Türk Yurdu, which sought to become the intellectual force behind Turkish nationalism; he also became a leading force and vice-president within the Turkish Hearths. ¹ In 1915 he co-founded the Turco-Tatar Committee in Istanbul to defend the rights of the Turco-Tatar Muslims in Russia; at the Conference of Nationalities in June 1916 he spoke for the Tatars, demanding the same civil, political and religious rights as the Russian Orthodox and the right to teach in their native tongue. ¹ In July 1916 he visited Zurich and made contact with Vladimir Lenin, to learn what fate awaited the Turkic peoples from the leader of the revolutionaries. ¹ In 1917 the Ottoman Red Crescent tasked him with negotiating the liberation of Ottoman prisoners in Russia, and he spent about a year in Russia by way of Denmark and Sweden. ¹

After his mission he returned to Turkey and joined the newly founded Milli Türk Fırkası in October 1919. ¹ In 1923 he was elected MP for Istanbul, which he remained until 1934, when he was elected MP for Kars. ¹ In 1932 he became president of the Turkish Historical Society. ¹ He died at Istanbul in 1935 and was laid to rest at the Edirnekapı Martyrs' Cemetery. ¹

His best-known work is Üç Tarz-ı Siyaset (Three Types of Policy, 1904). ¹ The Arabic article names among his works a book on the condition of the Tatar Muslims of Russia and many writings published in the magazine Türk. ² He also wrote for Meşveret in his Paris exile and for Türk Yurdu, the journal of the association he co-founded. ¹

This section sets out positions as reported in the sources; it is not a verdict by the museum.

The English article describes Akçura's mature position as defining Turkish identity in purely ethnic terms, looking beyond the country's borders for kinship with other Turkic peoples, calling for a national economy, and arguing for a move away from Islamic values in state-building — an area in which he clashed with Ziya Gökalp, because Akçura wanted a secular Turkey and feared Pan-Islamism would hinder nationalist development; the article adds that he was largely sympathetic to Kemal Atatürk. ¹ These are political positions argued in his writings, and the museum records them as such; no source cited here names a school of Islam for Akçura himself. ³

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