Ziya Gökalp

Ziya Gökalp (born March 23, 1876, Diyarbakır, Ottoman Empire [now in Turkey]—died Oct. 25, 1924, Constantinople [now Istanbul], Turkey) was a sociologist, writer, and poet, one of the most important intellectuals and spokesmen of the Turkish nationalist movement.

While Gökalp was a student at the Constantinople Veterinary School, his active membership in a secret revolutionary society led to his imprisonment. After the Young Turk revolution in 1908, he took part in the underground Committee of Union and Progress in Salonika (now Thessaloníki, Greece) and settled there as a philosophy and sociology teacher in a secondary school. He played a major role as an intellectual leader in this organization, which later virtually ruled the country. During that period he contributed to the avant-garde periodicals Genç Kalemler (“The Young Pens”) and Yeni Mecmua (“New Magazine”), both vehicles for the dissemination of revolutionary nationalist ideas. In 1912 he was appointed to the chair of sociology at the University of Istanbul.

At first Gökalp espoused the ideas of Pan-Turkism, an ideology that aspired to unite the Turkish-speaking peoples of the world. Later, however, he limited his dream to an ideology that essentially embraced only the Turks of the Ottoman Empire and was concerned with the modernization and Westernization of the Turkish nation. Although he was interested in developing his countrymen’s awareness of Turkish history, customs, and beliefs, he thought that the Turkish nation could adopt many of the ways of Western civilization without destroying its Turkish heritage.

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After the 1918 armistice, Gökalp was exiled to Malta with a number of leading Turkish political leaders. Freed in 1921 after the nationalist victory, he returned to Diyarbakır briefly and then went to Ankara, where he worked in a government translation bureau. He was elected a member of the Parliament of the new Turkish republic in 1923 but died soon after.

As a spokesman for Turkish nationalism, Gökalp greatly influenced the politicians and writers of his generation. His best-known works include the verse collection Kızıl Elma (1915; “The Red Apple”). The title poem deals with an ancient Turkish myth in which universal sovereignty, symbolized in the apple, devolves on the Turks.

Other writings are Yeni Hayat (1918; “The New Life”), an anthology of poems; the prose work Türkeşmek, İslamlaşmak, Muasırlaşmak (1918; “Turkification, Islāmization, and Modernization”); fables in prose and poetry, Altın Işık (1923; “The Golden Light”); the prose work Türkcülüğün Esasları (1923 and 1970; Principles of Turkism, 1968); his unfinished Türk Medeniyeti Tarihi (“A History of Turkish Civilization,” vol. 1, 1925); and Malta Mektublar (1931; “Maltese Letters”). Some of his essays have been collected and translated into English by Niyazi Berkes in Turkish Nationalism and Western Civilization: Selected Essays of Ziya Gökalp (1959).