Mehmet Ziya Gökalp (born Mehmed Ziya, 23 March 1876 – 25 October 1924) was a Turkish sociologist, writer, poet, and politician. After the 1908 Young Turk Revolution that reinstated constitutionalism in the Ottoman Empire, he adopted the pen name Gökalp ("celestial hero"), which he retained for the rest of his life. As a sociologist, Ziya Gökalp was influential in the negation of Islamism, pan-Islamism, and Ottomanism as ideological, cultural, and sociological identifiers. In a 1936 publication, sociologist Niyazi Berkes described Gökalp as "the real founder of Turkish sociology, since he was not a mere translator or interpreter of foreign sociology".
Gökalp's work was particularly influential in shaping the reforms of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk; his influence figured prominently in the development of Kemalism, and its legacy in the modern Republic of Turkey. Influenced by contemporary European thought, particularly by the sociological view of Émile Durkheim, Gökalp rejected both the Ottomanism and Islamism in favor of Turkish nationalism. He advocated a Turkification of the Ottoman Empire, by promoting Turkish language and culture to all Ottoman citizenry. He found Greeks, Armenians and Jews to be a foreign body in the national Turkish state. His thought, which popularized Pan-Turkism and Turanism, has been described as a "cult of nationalism and modernization". His nationalist ideals espoused a de-identification with Ottoman Turkey's nearby Arab neighbors, instead advocating for a super-national Turkish (or pan-Turkic) identity with "a territorial Northeast-orientation [to] Turkic peoples".
Early life
Mehmet Ziya was born in Diyarbakır of the Ottoman Empire on 23 March 1876 to Muhammad Tefvik Bey and Zeliha Hanım. He was the second son of the family. He, specifically his maternal family, was of Kurdish origin by some sources. Ziya described his paternal family as Syrian Turkmen. His father was an Ottoman bureaucrat and responsible for publishing the Salname of Diyarbakır. He had a close relationship with his uncle, who would have liked to have seen Ziya marry his daughter. His uncle was religious and opposed Ziya's interactions with Abdullah Cevdet, who was an atheist. Diyarbakır was a "cultural frontier", having been ruled by Arabs and Persians until the 16th century, and featuring "conflicting national traditions" among the local populations of Turks, Kurds, and Armenians. This cultural environment has often been suggested to have informed his sense of national identity; later in his life, when political detractors suggested that he was of Kurdish extraction, Gökalp responded that while he was certain of patrilineal Turkish racial heritage, this was insignificant: "I learned through my sociological studies that nationality is based solely on upbringing."
Gökalp attempted suicide in early 1895 after an existential crisis caused by his discovery of materialism. Cevdet, who was a doctor, rescued him, which he would lament later as Gökalp became a Turkist ideologue. After attending primary and secondary education in Diyarbakır, he settled in Istanbul, in 1895. There, he attended veterinary school and became involved in underground revolutionary nationalist politics for which he served ten months in prison. He developed relationships with many figures of the revolutionary underground in this period, abandoned his veterinary studies, and became a member of the underground revolutionary group, the Society of Union and Progress (CUP).
Career
The revolutionary currents of Constantinople at the time were extremely varied; the unpopularity of the Abdul Hamid II regime had by this time awakened diverse revolutionary sentiment in Constantinople. He inaugurated the first CUP office in Diyarbakır in July 1908. In September 1909 he moved to Selanik, where he became a member of the CUP Central Committee in 1910. There he cofounded a literary and cultural journal, Genç Kalemler. While residing in Salonika, Talaat Pasha was often a guest in his house, where they delved into political discussions. It was also during his stay in Selanik that he began using the penname Gökalp and his future role within the CUP was to be determined. In 1912, he moved back to Constantinople, as did the CUP. Gökalp was one of the regular contributors of the political magazine İslam Mecmuası from 1914 to 1918 and the military journal Harp Mecmuası between 1915 and 1918.
After World War I, he was arrested for his involvement in the Committee of Union and Progress and exiled to Malta for two years between 1919 and 1921.