Ziya Gökalp

Mehmet Ziya Gökalp (born Mehmed Ziya, 23 March 1876 – 25 October 1924) was a Turkish sociologist, writer, poet and politician. ¹ After the 1908 Young Turk Revolution he adopted the pen name Gökalp — "celestial hero" — and kept it for the rest of his life. ¹ Niyazi Berkes described him in 1936 as "the real founder of Turkish sociology", and his work was particularly influential in shaping the reforms of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and the development of Kemalism in the Republic of Turkey. ¹ He rejected both Ottomanism and Islamism in favour of Turkish nationalism, and popularised Pan-Turkism and Turanism. ¹

Mehmed Ziya was born in Diyarbakır on 23 March 1876, the second son of Muhammad Tefvik Bey, an Ottoman bureaucrat responsible for publishing the provincial yearbook of Diyarbakır, and Zeliha Hanım. ^{1 2} His family, known as the Müftüzadeler, had settled in Diyarbakır from Çermik — the origin of the Çermik birthplace given by the Turkish article's infobox and Wikidata — and his mother's family was the Pirinççizade. ^{2 3} Some sources make his maternal family Kurdish in origin, and his paternal family he himself described as Syrian Turkmen; when detractors later suggested he was of Kurdish extraction, he answered that he was certain of patrilineal Turkish heritage but that it was insignificant: "I learned through my sociological studies that nationality is based solely on upbringing." ¹

He began school at Diyarbakır, entered the military middle school in 1886, and after his father's death took lessons in the traditional Islamic sciences from his uncle, the müderris Hacı Hasip Bey, from 1890 — with him he also studied Arabic, Persian, Sufism and kalam. ^{3 2} At the İdadi he read Ghazali, Farabi, Ibn Rushd, Ibn Arabi and Rumi alongside Western works, and in 1894–95 he fell under the influence of Dr Abdullah Cevdet, then posted to Diyarbakır during a cholera epidemic, who introduced him to the French positivists and enrolled him in the secret Committee of Union and Progress. ² Blocked from continuing his studies in Istanbul and pressed by his family to marry, he attempted suicide in early 1895; Cevdet, a doctor, removed the bullet and saved him. ^{1 2}

In 1895 he reached Istanbul and entered the veterinary school because it was free; there he joined the revolutionary underground, abandoned his veterinary studies, and in 1898 was arrested, spending ten months in Taşkışla and two in the Mehterhane prison — months he said he passed reading the Qur'an, which he credited with ending his spiritual crisis for good. ^{2 1} In 1900 he was ordered to reside at Diyarbakır, where he married his uncle's daughter Vecihe, as his uncle had willed; they had a son, Sedat, and three daughters, Seniha, Hürriyet and Türkan. ^{3 2}

Gökalp founded the CUP's Diyarbakır branch on 22 October 1908 and became the party's regional inspector. ² Before that, while holding small posts in Diyarbakır, he had organised the population against the depredations of the Hamidiye commander İbrahim Paşa: the telegraph office was occupied for three days, and later for eleven, until İbrahim Paşa and his men were removed from the region. ³ In September 1909 he attended the CUP congress at Salonica as Diyarbakır's delegate and was elected to the central committee; at Salonica he co-founded the literary journal Genç Kalemler, began using the pen name Gökalp, and in 1911 gave the first sociology lessons in Turkey, at the party's lycée, on a programme he had proposed himself. ^{1 2}

In March 1912 he was elected deputy for Ergani-Maden to the Ottoman parliament; when parliament was dissolved that August he began teaching, and in 1915 he was appointed professor of sociology in the philosophy department of Istanbul University — the university's first sociology professor, through whom sociology entered Turkish universities. ^{3 2} He refused the education ministry when it was offered in 1913 and 1914, preferring the university. ³ He was among the founders of the Türk Ocağı and wrote for Türk Yurdu, Halka Doğru, İslam Mecmuası, Millî Tetebbular, İktisadiyat, İçtimaiyat and Yeni Mecmua, serialising there the essays that became Turkification, Islamization, Modernization and the poetry collections Kızılelma (1914) and Yeni Hayat (1918). ^{3 2}

After the Ottoman defeat in the First World War he was stripped of his posts, arrested on 28 January 1919, held four months at Bekirağa, and tried by the occupation court over the Armenian deportations and killings, at which he defended the thesis of mutual killing (mukatele) and rejected the charge of massacre. ^{3 1} He was exiled with other Unionists first to Limni and then to Malta, where he lectured his fellow exiles on sociology, philosophy and Turkish history; the exile lasted two years and four months and ended on 19 May 1921. ^{2 1}

His Istanbul chair was not restored to him. He settled again in Diyarbakır, taught, and published the weekly Küçük Mecmua, which ran to thirty-three issues and supported the War of Independence. ^{2 1} In March 1923 he became president of the Ministry of Education's board of publication and translation; that year he published The Principles of Turkism and Türk Töresi, and in August 1923 he entered the second Grand National Assembly as deputy for Diyarbakır, serving on its education committee until his death. ^{2 1} After a short illness he died at the French Hospital in Istanbul on 25 October 1924, aged 48, and was buried after an official funeral in the precinct of the tomb of Sultan Mahmud II at Divanyolu. ^{2 1} His birth house in Diyarbakır was made the Ziya Gökalp Museum in 1956. ^{1 2}

Gökalp held that a nation must have a "shared consciousness" to survive, and that a modern state must be homogeneous in culture, religion and national identity; his conception of the nation was of individuals sharing a common language, religion, morality and aesthetics — "who have received the same education". ¹ Building on Émile Durkheim, whose work he translated and adapted, he set solidarism — a social order of occupational solidarity — against both Western liberal individualism and Marxist class struggle. ^{1 3} He distinguished mere Europeanisation, the imitation of Western societies, from modernity, the taking of initiative, and took Japan as his model of a nation that modernised without abandoning its own culture. ¹

His formula for the new Turkey was Turkification, Islamization and Westernization: by Turkifying their culture the Turks would return to their ancestral norms; by Islamization they declared their loyalty to their religion, Islam; and neither nationality nor religion barred them from Western civilisation — the three components being, as Ahmet Seyhun summarises him, complementary and distinct. ¹ Within that frame he treated religion as an aid to social unity. ³ His pan-Turkism unfolded in stages — the Turks of Turkey; the Oghuz of Azerbaijan, Iran and Khwarizm; and finally the distant Turkic peoples of Turan — most famously in his 1911 poem Turan: "For the Turks, Fatherland means neither Turkey, nor Turkestan; Fatherland is a large and eternal country — Turan!" ¹

A less-read strand of his formation was Sufi: Alp Eren Topal argues that Sufism was a big influence throughout his education and growth, that he admired the solidarity of the Sufi orders, particularly the Naqshbandiyya, and that he prized Ibn Arabi's idealism above Berkeley's and Kant's. ¹ Admiration and formation are recorded here as the sources give them; no source assigns Gökalp himself a Sufi order or a school of law. ²

This section presents differing assessments as the sources give them; they are not the museum's verdict.

The father of Turkish nationalism. He has been characterised as "the father of Turkish nationalism" and "the Grand Master of Turkism", and his thought figured prominently in the republic that emerged as he died; Mustafa Kemal Atatürk is reported to have said, "Father of my meat and bones is Ali Riza Efendi, and father of my thought is Ziya Gökalp." ^{1 3} One concrete trace of his influence: his contention in The Principles of Turkism that Ottoman classical music was Byzantine in origin led the state briefly to ban it from the radio in the 1930s. ¹

Contested readings. For popularising Pan-Turkism and Turanism he has been read both as racist and expansionist and as anti-racist and anti-expansionist; Taha Parla's reading takes his Turanism as a linguistic and cultural model rather than a militant call for the republic's physical expansion. ¹ Many historians and sociologists have suggested that his brand of nationalism contributed to the Armenian genocide; his own recorded view of those events was denial in the form of the mutual-killing thesis he defended at his trial. ^{1 3} He considered Greeks, Armenians and Jews to be an undesirable foreign body in the national Turkish state, and a 1911 article of his presented the Turks as Nietzsche's "supermen". ¹

His origins. The debate over whether he was himself of Kurdish origin ran through his life and after it; his daughter Türkan stated in 1995 that her father was of Bukhara Turks and had written, in Küçük Mecmua, "They call me a Kurd, but I am not." ³

Principal works: Kızılelma (poems, 1914); Türkleşmek, İslamlaşmak, Muasırlaşmak (Turkification, Islamization, Modernization, 1918); Yeni Hayat (poems, 1918); Türkçülüğün Esasları (The Principles of Turkism, 1923); Türk Töresi (1923); Doğru Yol (1923); and, posthumously, Türk Medeniyeti Tarihi (History of Turkish Civilization), Limni ve Malta Mektupları (the Malta letters) and Kürt Aşiretleri Hakkında Sosyolojik Tetkikler (Sociological Investigations of Kurdish Tribes). ^{1 3 2}

• English Wikipedia, "Ziya Gökalp", revision 1379354150. ¹
• Turkish Wikipedia, "Ziya Gökalp", revision 38320250. ³
• Arabic Wikipedia, «ضياء كوك ألب», revision 76146590. ⁴
• Urdu Wikipedia, «ضیاء گوک الپ», revision 9463141. ⁵
• TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, "Gökalp, Ziya" (M. Orhan Okay, vol. 14, 1996). ²
• Wikidata, Q83275. ⁶