The sociologist who argued nationality comes from upbringing, not blood
Ziya Gökalp, often called the true founder of Turkish sociology, helped move the late Ottoman elite away from Islamic and imperial identities toward Turkish nationalism. His ideas fed directly into Atatürk's reforms. When rivals whispered about his Kurdish roots, he replied that his research showed nationality depends solely on how a person is raised.
He was born Mehmed Ziya in Diyarbakır on 23 March 1876, the second son of an Ottoman official who published the city's yearbook. Some sources describe his mother's family as Kurdish, while he called his father's side Syrian Turkmen. Diyarbakır was a cultural borderland with Turkish, Kurdish and Armenian communities, an environment often credited with shaping his thinking about identity. A religious uncle disapproved of his friendship with Abdullah Cevdet, an atheist doctor.
In 1895 he moved to Istanbul to study veterinary science, but underground nationalist politics soon took over; he spent ten months in prison, dropped his studies, and joined the revolutionary Committee of Union and Progress. After the 1908 Young Turk Revolution restored constitutional rule, he opened the committee's first office in Diyarbakır, joined its central committee in Salonika in 1910, co-founded the journal Genç Kalemler, and hosted Talaat Pasha for political talks. There he adopted the pen name Gökalp, meaning celestial hero.
Drawing heavily on Émile Durkheim, he rejected both Ottomanism and Islamism as foundations for the state and promoted Turkish language and culture for all citizens. His programme popularised Pan-Turkism and Turanism and looked northeast toward Turkic peoples rather than to Arab neighbours. It was also exclusionary: he regarded Greeks, Armenians and Jews as foreign bodies in a Turkish national state. Critics have described his outlook as a cult of nationalism and modernisation.
After the First World War he was arrested for his role in the committee and exiled to Malta from 1919 to 1921, where he drafted his Principles of Turkism, published in 1923. Denied his old university chair, he taught in Diyarbakır and ran a small weekly that gained a national readership. From late 1922 he directed publication and translation at the Ministry of Education and sat in the Grand National Assembly, shaping school curricula that blended Turkish culture, modern science and European languages with Persian, Arabic and the Quran. He died on 25 October 1924.
Source: Ziya Gökalp
