Ziya Gökalp's Turkism, the Republic's Turkism

Ziya Gökalp, who spoke of the brotherhood of Turks and Kurds and of their love for one another being a religious and political obligation, is known as the intellectual father and ideologue of the Republic of Turkey. It is even frequently said that he was the intellectual father of all the moves Mustafa Kemal would later make in favor of Turkism and on the path of Turkification.

The fact is that Gökalp spent the first period of the National Struggle years in exile in Malta, and from the moment he was released in 1921 he set about actually supporting the National Struggle, but since he had been in exile in Malta because of his Unionism, he was not very warmly received when he came to Ankara, owing to the attitude toward the Unionists. So even though he went to his hometown Diyarbakır, through his publications from there, the articles he wrote in the Küçük Mecmua that he published, and his books, he "directs the intellectual tendencies of Istanbul." This characterization was made by Falih Rıfkı himself.

In fact, in 1922 the Unionists worked on founding a new party and offered him a place in it, but he preferred to work with Mustafa Kemal and in a sense parted ways with them.

He showed this loyal attitude and decided to walk the road with Mustafa Kemal, and thought that he was on the same line with him through his writings and ideas. But because his life did not suffice, he could not see the difference between what Mustafa Kemal would do later and what he himself had written. One cannot help wondering what he would have done had he seen it, but history of course offers no means of satisfying this curiosity. But the facts history does offer are that the road that would later be taken in the name of Turkification and Modernization was very different from what Ziya Gökalp proposed or foresaw.

For instance, in his book titled "Türkleşmek, İslamlaşmak, Muasırlaşmak" (To Turkify, To Islamize, To Modernize), against those who accused the Turkism he advocated of contradicting Islam, he gives a harsh answer: "The goal of the Turkists was a 'Contemporary Islamic Turkdom.' For if the national ideal of the Turks is Turkdom, their ummah ideal is Islam." And then he writes that the Turkists must have an ummah program and that this must contain the following principles:

"1. To use the Arabic letters, which are common among all Muslim peoples, without changing them.

2. To organize terminology-determination congresses among Muslim peoples so that scientific terms may be made common among all Muslim peoples, and to form the terms from Turkish, Arabic and Persian.

3. To convene education congresses so that a common education may be realized among all Muslim peoples.

4. To establish a permanent link among the muftiates of all Muslim peoples.

5. To act together in order to preserve the sanctity of the Crescent (moon), the symbol of the Islamic ummah.

It is understood from these principles that Turkism is at the same time Islamism.

Only, the Turkists distinguish themselves, as proponents of the Islamic ummah, from the Islamic Nationalists. For neither Turks, nor Arabs, nor Indians (Pakistanis), nor Afghans, nor Berbers, nor Persians can today accept establishing such an unnatural union that destroys the feeling of nationality among Muslim peoples.

In strengthening their national ideals, the Turks have not tried to instill 'national hatred' against any people that is their co-religionist and fellow citizen."

It is not at all difficult to understand from these lines that what Ziya Gökalp understood by Turkification or Turkism has no relation whatsoever to the Turkism that would later be put into practice. Perhaps these thoughts were consistent with what Mustafa Kemal, with whom he thought he was walking the road until then, was voicing.

But we cannot know whether Ziya Gökalp, who died in 1924, had he lived, would have abandoned these thoughts and gone with the flow like many others, or would have been excluded by the Republic, which turned its course in an entirely different direction; but we can see the clear difference between these texts.

Perhaps for this reason, Ziya Gökalp's cult work Türkçülüğün Esasları (The Principles of Turkism), after its first edition in 1923, was never printed by either the state or private publishers until 1939; in 1939 it was printed in small numbers through the efforts of Reha Oğuz Türkkan, then, like all his other books, was again not printed or read until 1950. The words we quoted above probably made him unacceptable in the eyes of the Republic's shaped ideology.

What the Republic understood by Turkism would become fully clear in the skull studies that Afet İnan carried out within her anthropological work at the DTCF in order to determine the Turkish race. As Mustafa Armağan pointed out in an article on the subject (Akit, 22 May 2022), as a result of these skull studies it was concluded that the Turkish race was itself the Aryan race. There is of course no need to say that the journey was begun in order to arrive at this conclusion. That is, the European Aryan race, plain and simple, was sought to be registered as the ancestor of the Turk.

Since this appeared to fit the physical build of the blond-haired, blue-eyed Mustafa Kemal, it seemed very agreeable at first. So the following words of Afet İnan, Atatürk's adopted daughter, who took this matter so seriously that she named her own daughter "Âri," at the 1st Turkish History Congress received official acceptance or perhaps were a translation of the official view:

"Today's Turkish children (...) are not from a tribe of 400 tents (that is, the Ottomans), but a nation of high ability descending from a high, civilized Aryan race of tens of thousands of years."

Could Ziya Gökalp have swallowed these words and this thesis on Turkdom? Or how far could any person who has somehow embraced Turkism today embrace these words? Should we not reconsider the idea that Ziya Gökalp, who conceived Turkism as a culture, a nation, even Islamism, beyond race, was the ideologue of the Republic?