Ali Suavi
1838 - 1878
Ottoman intellectual.
Born into a working-class family in Istanbul, Ali Suavi became a teacher in ruşdiye schools (for adolescents) in Bursa and Filibe before being dismissed by an irate governor for his unorthodox ideas. He traveled to Paris and London and there joined such individuals as the poets Namik Kemal and Ziya Paşa, members of the Young Ottomans. In 1867, Ali Suavi became the editor of Munbir, a Young Ottoman newspaper devoted to issues of government reform.
Ali Suavi was deeply religious and passionately devoted to the unification of all Turkic-speaking peoples; he soon broke with the other Young Ottomans, who were more interested in the reform of the Ottoman Empire along the lines of European liberalism. After opposing Midhat Paşa, grand vizier of the empire, and the Constitution of 1876, Suavi gained the favor of the autocratic Sultan Abdülhamit II, and he was rewarded with an appointment as director of the Galatasaray Lycée. But Ali Suavi soon became dissatisfied with the new sultan, and after the ignominious defeat of the Ottomans in the Russo - Ottoman War of 1877 - 1878, Suavi led a coup attempt to restore the deposed Murat V to the throne. The coup failed, and Ali Suavi was executed.
Bibliography
Lewis, Bernard. The Emergence of Modern Turkey, 3d edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Shaw, Stanford, and Shaw, Ezel Kural. History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976 - 1977.
— ZACHARY KARABELL
