Mehmet Ziya Gökalp

Mehmet Ziya Gökalp (c. 1875-1924) was a Turkish publicist and pioneer sociologist. He was influenced by modern western European, especially French and German, thought and elaborated an ideology of Turkish nationalism which was largely implemented, after his death, by Kemal Atatürk.

Ziya Gökalp (this last name, Old Turkish "Sky hero," was originally a pen name;) was born in Diyarbakir in southeastern Anatolia either on an unknown date in 1875 or on March 23, 1876. After attending a local secondary school, he arrived in the capital, Constantinople (Istanbul), in 1896. He had already imbibed the liberal and reformist ideas which were associated with what became the Committee of Union and Progress, and his attitudes soon attracted the attention of the despotic Sultan Abdul-Hamid II's secret police, leading to Gökalp's imprisonment for a year.

The Young Turk Revolution of 1908 enabled Gökalp to openly advocate his views and to act as a cultural and educational adviser to the government. In 1915 he became the first professor of sociology at Istanbul University. In 1919 his identification with the party which had led Turkey into World War I resulted in his being exiled to Malta for 2 years, but he subsequently returned and spent the last part of his life in endeavoring to provide an intellectual basis for the new regime of Mustapha Kemal (Kemal Atatürk). Gökalp died in Constantinople on Oct. 25, 1924.

Gökalp was primarily exercised by the problems of how far Turkey should adopt Western culture and how far the traditional Islamic civilization should accordingly change in the direction of a European-type nation-state. He rejected the religious and political conservatism of the pan-Islamists, regarding traditional Islam as a brake on the nation's progress. He was for a while attracted by Ottomanism, the ideal of a multinationalism made up of the separate nationalities within the Ottoman Empire; but as political and military events demonstrated the impossibility of this, he evolved his idea of "Turkism," the realization of the Turkish national spirit and culture, to be achieved through a revival of Turkish popular culture and literature and a purification of the language by ridding it of extraneous elements.

Gökalp flirted only briefly with pan-Turanianism, the union of all Turkic peoples in Asia. His views on the social ideals which should mold a nation he derived above all from the French sociologist Émile Durkheim. Thus, while he was neither a very original nor a very clear thinker, Gökalp's teachings came after his death to have a profound influence on the evolution of Turkey under Atatürk.

Further Reading

Much of Gökalp's work appeared as essays and articles in journals; there is no complete edition of his work. A good general survey of the man and his significance is in Uriel Heyd, Foundations of Turkish Nationalism: The Life and Teachings of Ziya Gökalp (1950).

Additional Sources

Heyd, Uriel, Foundations of Turkish nationalism: the life and teachings of Ziya Gökalp, Westport, Conn.: Hyperion Press, 1979.

1876 - 1924

Turkish social and political thinker.

Ziya Gökalp was born in the province of Diyarbekir. At the time of his birth, Diyarbekir contained ethnic groups of Kurdish origin, leading some of Gökalp's political opponents to assert that he was of Kurdish lineage. His father, Tevfik, was director of the provincial archives and editor of the official gazette. Gökalp's education incorporated both Western and Islamic values. Along with religious instruction by family elders, he received a secular education in a military junior high school and a state senior high school in Diyarbekir. He then entered the veterinary college in Constantinople (now Istanbul), but was expelled in his second year for his membership in the secret Society for Union and Progress. After a brief imprisonment he was exiled to Diyarbekir, where he continued his avid reading in the natural sciences, philosophy, sociology, politics, and pedagogy, and resumed his study of Islamic philosophy, especially Sufism.

Gökalp became secretary of the Chamber of Commerce (1902) and the assistant secretary general of the Provincial Council (1904) of Diyarbekir. In 1908 the Committee for Union and Progress (CUP) appointed Gökalp inspector of its organizations in Diyarbekir, Van, and Bitlis while he continued to serve as inspector of elementary education for the provincial government. In 1910, he became a member of the Central Committee (CC) of the Union and Progress Party and went to Salonika, where he taught sociology at the party school, directed the party's youth department, and continued writing and lecturing. In 1912, after the removal of the CC headquarters to Constantinople, Gökalp was named the first professor of sociology at Darülfünün (now Istanbul University). He was exiled to Malta following dissolution of the last Ottoman parliament in 1919. There he conducted a "one-man university" for the distinguished exiles, many of whom joined the Kemalist nationalist resistance in Anatolia. Upon his release from Malta in 1921, Gökalp returned to Diyarbekir, taught at the secondary school and the teachers' seminary, and continued to publish. He was elected to the Second Grand National Assembly (1923 - 1927) as a deputy from Diyarbekir, served on the parliamentary committee on national education, and participated in the preparation of the 1924 constitution.

Gökalp did not participate in practical politics in the narrow sense. He was a thinker and writer with a profound sense of responsibility for the public good. He was foremost a social and political theoretician, a public educator, and a formulator of Unionist and Kemalist modernizing reforms. Gökalp was the intellectual leader of modern Turkish nationalism in the transition from the multi-ethnic Ottoman Empire to the nation-state of the Turkish republic, despite the distance between his thinking and that of the Ottomanist Unionists and the Republican Kemalists. He was the acknowledged mentor of these two movements, although both developed into authoritarian, one-party regimes.

Gökalp's "social idealism" was an attempt at a reconciliation of cultural Turkism, ethical Islam, and European corporatism. His nationalism was based on language, subjective self-identification, socialization, and acculturation in a distinct Turkish culture that was to interact peacefully with other Western cultures. Gökalp called for modernizing reforms in Islamic thought and institutions, the essence of which was a reduction of Islam - for centuries the state religion of the Ottoman Turkish society - into a body of moral norms and codes of social behavior based on the nonorthodox Sufi (mystic) form of Islam. As a follower of Auguste Comte and Emile Durkheim, Gökalp took a lay attitude toward Islam, both in the narrow sense of separation of state and religion and in the wider sense of primacy of rational, scientific thought over nonsecular thought.

Perhaps the more important influence of European corporatist thought on Gökalp's own thinking was the rejection of the individualism of liberal capitalism (without rejecting capitalism in general) and of the Marxist categories of class struggle and classless society. Gökalp followed Durkheim in believing that society is composed not of egoistic individuals or warring classes, but of interdependent occupational groups working harmoniously for the public good. This approach enabled him to take both a sociological view of society and an ideological stand against liberal and socialist politics. His form of "populism" viewed society as an organic whole and called for political representation of interests through occupational corporations, in which capital and labor were integrated and the social being of the individual was realized.

The racist-fascist Kemalist movement of the 1940s, the fascist Nationalist Action Party (1960s - 1980), and the Nationalist Work Party tried to interpret Gökalp's thought in a fascist manner. Meanwhile, mainstream Kemalism remained within the confines of Gökalp's corporatism, and his thought continues to dominate Turkish social and political thinking via Kemalism, which remains the official ideology and hegemonic public philosophy of contemporary Turkey.

Bibliography

Gökalp, Ziya. The Principles of Turkism, translated by Robert Devereux. Leiden, Netherlands: E.J. Brill, 1968.

Gökalp, Ziya. Turkish Nationalism and Western Civilization: Selected Essays of Ziya Gökalp, translated by Niyazi Berkes. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981.

Heyd, Uriel. Foundations of Turkish Nationalism: The Life andTeachings of Ziya Gökalp. Westport, CT: Hyperion, 1979.

Parla, Taha. The Social and Political Thought of Ziya Gökalp. Leiden, Netherlands: E.J. Brill, 1985.

— TAHA PARLA