Background
Turkology (Turcology, Turkologie) is a complex of humanities sciences studying languages, history, literature, folklore, culture, and ethnology of people speaking Turkic languages and Turkic peoples in chronological and comparative context. This includes ethnic groups from the Sakha in East Siberia to the Balkan Turks and Gagauz in Moldova.
Turko-Mongol (or Turkic-Mongol) is a modern designation for various nomads who were subjects of the Mongol Empire. Being progressively Turkified in terms of language and identity following the Mongol conquests, they derived their ethnic and cultural origins from steppes of Central Asia. Among the most important Turco-Mongol kingdoms were the Chagatai Khanate and Golden Horde.
Turanid race, or South Siberian race, is an anthropological term, originally intended to cover populations of Central Asia and Kazakhstan associated with the spread of the Turanian languages (a now obsolete term), which are the combination of the Uralic and Altaic families (hence also “Ural–Altaic race”).
The latter usage implies the existence of a Turanid racial type or “minor race”, a subtype of the Europid (Caucasian) race with Mongoloid admixtures, situated at the boundary of the distribution of the Mongoloid and Europid “great races”.
According to Augustus Henry Keane the Mongolic type included the following races: Tibetans, Burmese, Tai, Koreans, Japanese, Lu-Chu, Finno-Tatars and Malays. Keane said the following peoples are mixed Mongolo-Caucasic varieties: Anatolian Turks, Uzbegs, and Tajiks of Turkestan. Keane said the Kazaks are intermediate between the Túrki and Mongolian races. Keane said the Mongolian race is best represented by the Buriats.
Historically, Central Asia has been a crossroad between West and East Eurasian people leading to the current high population genetic admixture and diversity. Early physical analyses have unanimously concluded that the Scythians, even those in the east (e.g. the Pazyryk region), possessed predominantly “Europioid” features, although mixed ‘Euro-mongoloid” phenotypes also occur, depending on site and period. Based on craniofacial data, the Scythians were believed to be of mixed Euro-Mongoloid origin.
Caucasian race (also Caucasoid or Europid) is the general physical type of some or all of the populations of Europe, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, Western Asia, Central Asia and South Asia. The term was used in biological anthropology for many people from these regions, without regard necessarily to skin tone.
The term “Caucasian race” was coined by the German philosopher Christoph Meiners in his The Outline of History of Mankind (1785). The name “Caucasian” derived from the Southern Caucasus region (or what is now the countries of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia), because he considered the people of this region to be the archetype for the grouping.
While anthropologists generally consider the Cro-Magnons, who emerged during the Upper Paleolithic, as the earliest or prototype representatives of the Caucasoid race, proponents of the multiregional origin of modern humans argue that Caucasoid traits emerged prior to the Cro-Magnon, and are present in the Skhul and Qafzeh hominids or in the Neanderthals.
Carleton Coon (1962), for example, considered the Skhul IV specimen as a proto-Caucasoid. He further argued that the Caucasoid race is of dual origin, consisting of Upper Paleolithic types (mixture of Homo sapiens and Neanderthals) and Mediterranean types (purely Homo sapiens).
The Armenoid in physical anthropology is a subtype of the Caucasian race. “The countries of the northern part of Western Asia, namely Anatolia (Turkey), the Caucasus, Iran, and the Levant are the center of distribution” of the Armenoid Race. Armenoids, also known as the “true” Caucasians, were said to be found throughout Eurasia. However, the largest concentrations occurred within Anatolia, Transcaucasia and Mesopotamia.
According to the Italian geographer and anthropologist Renato Biasutti (1878-1965) “It has long been believed by physical anthropologists that the quintessence of Near Eastern brachycephaly is to be found in the Armenians; the racial term Armenoid being named for them. The Armenians have long been established in the territory which is now only partly theirs; they had, before the arrival of the Turks, a powerful kingdom, which covered most of the territory between the Gulf of Alexandretta and the Caucasus.”
The Turkic languages constitute a language family of at least 35 languages, spoken by Turkic peoples across a vast area from Southeastern Europe and the Mediterranean to Siberia and Western China, and are proposed to be part of the controversial Altaic language family.
The Proto-Turkic language is the hypothetical proto-language of the family of Turkic languages that predates the separation of the Turkic peoples and separation into Oghuz and Oghur branches. Their prehistoric point of origin was the hypothetical Proto-Turkic region of the Far East including North China and Inner Mongolia.
A separate Turkic family is believed to have existed since approximately 4500-4000 BCE though its separation into its modern branches may have taken as recently as 500 BCE. Its speakers are usually connected with the early archaeological horizon of west and central Siberia, and in the region south of it.
The earliest known texts in a Turkic language are the eighth century Orkhon inscriptions by the Göktürks, recording the Old Turkic language, which were discovered in 1889 in the Orkhon Valley in Mongolia. They were deciphered in 1893 by the Danish linguist Vilhelm Thomsen in a scholarly race with his rival, the Germano-Russian linguist Wilhelm Radloff. However, Radloff was the first to publish the inscriptions.
With the Turkic expansion during the Early Middle Ages (c. 6th–11th centuries), Turkic languages, in the course of just a few centuries, spread across Central Asia, from Siberia to the Mediterranean. Various elements from the Turkic languages have passed into Persian, Hindustani, Russian, Chinese, and to a lesser extent Arabic.
It is generally agreed that the first Turkic people lived in a region extending from Central Asia to Siberia with the majority of them living in China historically. Historically they were established after the 6th century BCE.
The earliest separate Turkic peoples appeared on the peripheries of the late Xiongnu confederation (contemporaneous with the Chinese Han Dynasty). Turkic people may be related to the Xiongnu, Dingling and Tiele people. Genetics research from 2003 confirms the studies indicating that the Turkic people originated from the same area and so are related with the Xiongnu, an ancient nomadic-based people who formed a state or confederation located north of China.
After defeating the previously dominant Yuezhi in the 2nd century BC, Xiongnu became a dominant power on the steppes of central and eastern Asia. They were active in regions of what is now southern Siberia, Mongolia, Southern Mongolia, Gansu and Xinjiang. Relations between early Chinese dynasties and the Xiongnu were complex, with repeated periods of military conflict and intrigue alternating with exchanges of tribute, trade, and marriage treaties.
An early reference to the Xiongnu was by Sima Qian who wrote about the Xiongnu in the Shiji (c. 100 BCE), drawing a distinct line between the settled Huaxia people (Chinese) to the pastoral nomads (Xiongnu), characterizing it as two polar groups in the sense of a civilization versus an uncivilized society.
Sources from the pre-Han eras often classified the Xiongnu as the Hu people, even though this was more a blanket term for nomadic people in general; it only became an ethnonym for the Xiongnu during the Han.
The Hun hordes of Attila, who invaded and conquered much of Europe in the 5th century, might have been Turkic and descendants of the Xiongnu. Some scholars argue that the Huns were one of the earlier Turkic tribes, while others argue that they were of Mongolic origin.
Linguistic studies by Otto Maenchen-Helfen suggest that while many Hun proper names may have been Turkic in origin, the language used by the Huns in Europe was too little documented to be classified, and was more likely an Indo-European language.
In the 6th century, 400 years after the collapse of northern Xiongnu power in Inner Asia, leadership of the Turkic peoples was taken over by the Göktürks. Formerly in the Xiongnu nomadic confederation, the Göktürks inherited their traditions and administrative experience. From 552 to 745, Göktürk leadership united the nomadic Turkic tribes into the Göktürk Empire. This was the first known political entity to be called “Turk”.
The Seljuk Turks from the 11th century invaded Anatolia, ultimately resulting in permanent Turkic settlement there. However, the arrival of Seljuk Turks also brought the Turkish language and Islam into Anatolia, which started the Turkification, the assimilation of individuals, entities, or cultures into the various historical Turkish states and cultures, especially the Ottoman Empire, of various peoples in the region.
As the Turkish states developed and grew there were many instances of this assimilation, voluntary and involuntary, including the Anatolian, Balkan, Caucasian and Middle Eastern peoples from different ethnic origins, such as the Albanians, Arabs, Armenians, Circassians, Greeks, Jews, Romani, various Slavic peoples, Iranian peoples such as Kurds, as well as Lazs from all the regions of the Ottoman Empire and Iran.
An early form of Turkification occurred in the time of the Seljuk Empire among the indigenous peoples of Anatolia, involving religious conversion, cultural and linguistic assimilation, and interethnic relationships.
The Ottoman beylik united Anatolia, which had been previously divided among dozens of small Anatolian beyliks, starting from the late 13th century and created the Ottoman Empire. Turkish identity strengthened with the rise of nationalism under the Ottoman Empire, and the migration of some 7–9 million Turkish Muslim refugees from the lost territories of the Caucasus, Crimea, Balkans, and the Mediterranean islands into Anatolia and Eastern Thrace during the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire.
A study involving mitochondrial analysis of a Byzantine-era population, whose samples were gathered from excavations in the archaeological site of Sagalassos, found that the samples had close genetic affinity with modern Turkish and Balkan populations. During their research on leukemia, a group of Armenian scientists observed high genetic matching between Turks, Kurds, and Armenians.
A “Turanid race” was widely known as a Europid subtype in European literature of the period. Eickstedt’s Turanid race is represented in Siberia among the peoples of the Altay region. This race, he writes, corresponds in his classification to Deniker’s “Turkic-Tatar” (or “Turanian”) race and to Haddon’s “Turkic”.
Grey Wolf (the mother wolf Asena) was the main symbol of the ancient Turks. Asena is the name of a she-wolf associated with a Göktürk ethnogenic myth “full of shamanic symbolism.” Legend tells of a young boy who survived a battle; a female wolf finds the injured child and nurses him back to health.
The wolf, impregnated by the boy, escapes her enemies by crossing the Western Sea to a cave near Gaochang, an ancient Tocharian oasis city built on the northern rim of the inhospitable Taklamakan Desert in Xinjiang, China, giving birth to ten half-wolf, half-human boys.
Of these, Ashina becomes their leader and instaures the Ashina clan, which ruled over the Göktürk and other Turkic nomadic empires. Ashina was a tribe and the ruling dynasty of the ancient Turks who rose to prominence in the mid-6th century when their leader, Bumin Khan, revolted against the Rouran.
The recent re-reading of the Bugut inscription, the oldest inscription of the Ashina dynasty, written in Sogdian, by a Japanese team of philologists has suggested that the name, known only with the Chinese transcription of Ashina, was in fact Ashinas. It is in fact known in later Arabic sources under this form. Likewise the use of an Iranian tongue, such as Sogdian and later Persian in Transoxiana, as the written language, does not mean that everyone was a Sogdian who used it.
Findley assumes that the Ashina probably comes from one of the Saka languages of central Asia and means “blue”, gök in Turkic, the color identified with the east, so that Göktürk, another name for the Turk empire, meant the “Turks of the East”. This is seconded by the Hungarian researcher András Róna-Tas, who finds it plausible “that we are dealing with a royal family and clan of Saka origin”.
European literature concerning the “Turanid race” was absorbed by the Ottoman elite, and was partly even translated into Ottoman Turkish, contributing to the idea of an essence of “Turkishness” (Türklük) the honour of which came to be protected under Turkish law until the revision of article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code in April 2008.
Creation of modern Turkey and the situation today
Ottomanism was a concept which developed prior to the First Constitutional Era, the period of constitutional monarchy from the promulgation of the Kanûn-ı Esâsî (meaning “Basic Law” or “Essential Law” in Ottoman Turkish, written by members of the Young Ottomans, on 23 November 1876 until 13 February 1878.
Its proponents believed that it could solve the social issues that the empire was facing. Ottomanism was strongly influenced by thinkers such as Montesquieu and Rousseau and the French Revolution. It promoted the equality among the millets.
The idea originated amongst the Young Ottomans in areas such as the acceptance of all separate ethnicities in the Empire, regardless of their religion, to Ottomans and to equal their civil rights. Put simply, Ottomanism stated that all subjects were equal before the law.
The essence of the millet system was not dismantled, but secular organizations and policies were applied. Primary education, conscription, head tax and military service were to be applied to non-Muslims and Muslims alike.
The Reformation Edict of 1856 which promised full equality regardless of religion, and the Ottoman Nationality Law of 1869, which created a common Ottoman citizenship irrespective of religious or ethnic affiliation were precursors to Ottomanism.
Ottomanism was rejected by many in the non-Muslim millets and by many Muslims. To the former, it was perceived as a step towards dismantling their traditional privileges. Meanwhile, the Muslims saw it as the elimination of their own superior position.
There were claims that Ottomanism was a reaction to the Tanzimat, the era of intensive restructuring of the Ottoman Empire by the bureaucratic elite. The inauguration of the Ottoman Parliament contributed to the spirit of reform, as all millets were represented in this bicameral assembly.
The era ended with the suspension of the Ottoman parliament and the constitution by sultan Abdülhamid II, with which he restored his own absolute monarchy. In the year of 1877 Abdul Hamid II came into power in the Ottoman government. Since there were plans to establish a parliament in the Ottoman empire in 1876, Hamid II had to use the excuse of war to suspend parliament in order to maintain his position and used his own personal authority to establish an autocracy.
During the time of his reign from 1877–1908 Hamid II diminished a lot of the military and institutions of the Ottoman empire because he was paranoid of being overthrown. In the summer of 1908, officers in the Ottoman army that opposed Abdul Hamid II because of their firm roots in Ottomanism threatened to revolt if he did not step down. Abdul Hamid II was forced to step down from office.
Turkish nationalism is a political ideology that promotes and glorifies the Turkish people, as either a national, ethnic, or linguistic group. The pan-Turkism movement emerged among the Turkic intellectuals of the Russian Empire and Ottoman Empire, with the aim of cultural and political unification of all Turkic peoples in 1880s.
It is a racist and chauvinistic movement, and has tended to be a movement viewed with suspicion by many, often perceived as nothing else but a new form of Turkish imperial ambition. It began with the Turanian Society founded in 1839, followed in 1908 with the Turkish Society, which later expanded into the Turkish Hearth and eventually expanded to include ideologies such as Pan-Turanism and Pan-Turkism.
The idea of a Turanid race came to play a role of some significance in Pan-Turkism or “Turanism” in the late 19th to 20th century. Turanism, or Pan-Turanism, is a political movement for the union of all Turanian peoples. It implies not merely the unity of all Turkic peoples (as in Pan-Turkism), but also the unification of a wider Turanid race, also known as the controversial Uralo-Altaic race, believed to include all peoples speaking “Turanian languages”.
The idea of a Turanic family of languages and Turanic people was put forward and promoted by the German linguist Max Müller. In his lectures on the “Science of Language”, he applied the name Turanian to the “nomadic races of Asia as opposed to the agricultural or Aryan races”. Traditional history cites its early origins amongst Ottoman officers and intelligentsia studying and residing in 1870s Imperial Germany.
The Ural–Altaic linguistic hypothesis inspired the emergence of Turkish, Hungarian, Japanese and Korean branches of the Turanian Society in the 1920s and 1930s. Originally suggested in the 19th century, the hypothesis enjoyed wide acceptance among linguists into the mid 20th century. Since the 1960s, it has been controversial and rejected.
In the research literature, the term “Pan-Turkism” is used to describe the idea of political, cultural and ethnic unity of all Turkic-speaking people. Turanism is a closely related movement but a more general term than Turkism, since Turkism applies only to the Turkic peoples.
However, researchers and politicians engaged in the field of Turkic ideology have used these terms interchangeably in a multitude of sources and literature. The term “Turkism” started to be used with a prefix “Pan” (from Greek pan = all), for a “Panturkism”. While the various Turkic peoples often share historical, cultural and linguistic roots, the rising of a pan-Turkic political movement is a phenomenon only of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Pan-Turkism as a political philosophy first appeared among European statesmen, writers and scholars. Paksoy noted that “Pan-Turanianism or pan-Turkism” was formulated and initiated in Europe about the time of the Russian occupation of Tashkent in 1865. From the outset European sponsored pan-Turkism was anti-Persian.
European literature concerning the “Turanid race” was absorbed by the Ottoman elite, and was partly even translated into Ottoman Turkish, contributing to the idea of an essence of “Turkishness” (Türklük) the honour of which came to be protected under Turkish law until the revision of article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code in April 2008.
The most influential of these sources were Histoire Générale des Huns, des Turcs, des Mongoles, et autres Tartares Occidenteaux (1756–1758) by Joseph de Guignes (1721–1800), and Sketches of Central Asia (1867) by Ármin Vámbéry (1832–1913), which was on the common origins of Turkic groups as belonging to one race, but subdivided according to physical traits and customs.
The first European book on a comprehensive history of the Turks was written in France in the 1700 century by De Guignes entitled “Histoire Generale des Huns, Turcs, des Mongols [General History of the Huns, Turks, Mongols]” (Paris, 1763-1768). It was this book that introduced the notion that Huns, Turks and Mongols were somehow one single race.
This is strictly speaking untrue and a vast over-simplification at best. It resembles the silly arguments of the pan-Aryanists of the 1930s and 1940s who argued that Iranians and Germans were one race due to a common Indo-European origin.
More significant was the European introduction of a pan-Turkic state. This was first suggested by the German general Count Helmuth Von Moltke (1800-1891) in 1842 who recommended to the Ottoman Turks that their empire shift its attention from Europe to Asia, where millions of people of Turkish stock lived under foreign rules, and to unite them in a vast empire”.
He was the first to suggest to the Turks that they turn their gaze “to Asia” – meaning Iran and Russia. The Count was encouraging the Turks to conquer Iran and the Turkic-speaking regions of Russia. This “suggestion” was clearly aimed against the Iranians and the Russians. This is interesting as the Russians were to promote their own brand of anti-Persian pan-Turkism in the Caucasus.
The idea of forming a pan-Turk empire was also proposed by Arminius (Hermann) Vambery (1832-1913), a Hungarian Professor, philologist and traveler who worked an as advisor to the Ottoman Sultan in 1857-1863. It was Vambery who formally proposed the notion of a pan-Turk superstate to his Turkish hosts and the Ottoman Sultan in Istanbul.
Hungarian Turanism is a Hungarian nationalist ideology which stresses the alleged origins of the Hungarian people in the steppes of Central Asia (“Turan”) and the affinity of the Hungarians with Asian peoples such as the Turkic people. It gained wide currency on the Hungarian political right in the years between the two world wars. In the half-century before World War I, some Hungarians sought to encourage Pan-Turanianism as a means of uniting Turks and Hungarians against the Slavs and Pan-Slavism.
Vambery specifically stated to the Sultan that they [the Turks] could form a political entity stretching from the Altai Mountains in Eastern Asia to the Bosphorus. His proposal was in essence this: Turkic-speakers in Central Asia (except Persian speaking Tajikestan), the Caucasus, Iran and Anatolia were to be molded into a Turkic superstate with its capital in Istanbul, Ottoman Turkey.
Vambery also introduced his Turkish hosts to Central Asia and the Caucasus through a series of lectures and books. His aim was to encourage his hosts to adopt his philosophy of pan-Turkism. He contributed in the spreading of Turanian ideas among Turkish people.
Originally the orientalist Vámbéry was in the employ of Lord Palmerston of the British Foreign office. Vámbéry’s mission was to create an anti-Slavic racialist movement among the Turks that would divert the Russians from the “Great Game” which they were playing against Britain in Persia and Central Asia.
The first writer was Poland’s Konstanty Borzecki (1826-1876) who had emigrated from Poland to Turkey, converted to Islam and assumed the name of Mustafa Jellaledin Pasha. Borzecki wrote a book entitled “Les Turcs Anciens et Modernes [The Ancient and Modern Turks]”. Borzecki made the following claims that the sources of modern civilization are traced to the Turks and that the Turks have had a major influence on the development of European history and languages.
In reality Turks and Iranians have worked together over the centuries to create what is known as Turco-Persian or Persianate civilizations, but Pan-Turkism as defined by its European founders, seeks to create distance between Turkic and Iranic peoples.
The composite Turko-Persian tradition was a variant of Islamic culture. It was Persianate in that it was centered on a lettered tradition of Iranian origin; it was Turkic insofar as it was for many generations patronized by rulers of Turkic background; it was Islamic in that Islamic notions of virtue, permanence, and excellence infused discourse about public issues as well as the religious affairs of the Muslims, who were the presiding elite.
Turan is the Persian name for a region around Central Asia, literally meaning “the land of the Tur”. As described below, the original Turanians are an Iranian tribe of the Avestan age. As a people the “Turanian” are one of the two Iranian peoples both descending from the Persian Fereydun but with different domains and often at war with each other.
In fact according to the Shahnameh’s account, at least 1,500 years later after the Avesta, the nomadic tribes who inhabited these lands were ruled by Tūr, who was the emperor Fereydun’s elder son. The association with Turks is also primarily based on the Shahnameh’s geographical account where Turkification of Central Asia was partially completed during that time.
Tur/Turaj (Tuzh in Middle Persian) is the son of emperor Fereydun in ancient Iranian mythology. In the Shahnameh, he is identified with the Turks although culturally there is no relationship between Turanians of the Shahnameh and the culture of ancient Turks.
The second book that made the greatest impact was by David Leon Cahun (1841-1900) entitled: “Introduction a l’Histoire de l’Asie, Turcs, et Mongols, des Origines a 1405 [History of the Turks and Mongols]”, published in 1896. This was published just 2 years after 1894, the same year in which the Franco-Russian Treaty was signed.
Cahun’s book became a popular (if not standard) comprehensive western publication of the history of the Mongols and Turks. Cahun glorified Turco-Mongol conquerors such as Tamerlane and Ghengis Khan as “supermen” and characterized the Mongols and Turks as members of a “racial aristocracy”.
According to Cahun, the Turks, Mongols and Huns were a superior race. In a sense, Cahun is (like Vamberry and Borzecki) one of the European ancestors of Pan-Turkism. Note Hussein Nihal Atsiz who in 1950 defined a pan-Turkist as “a Turk who believes in the superiority of the Turkish race”.
The book stressed the role of Turks in “carrying civilization to Europe”, as a part of the greater “Turanid race” that included the Uralic and Altaic speaking peoples more generally. There was also an ideology of Hungarian Turanism. Cahun placed a heavy emphasis on drafting pan-Turkism as an anti-Islamic philosophy.
A more recent example is Muhsu Yazicioglu of the MHP (Milli Hereket Parti [Nationalist Action Party]) of Turkey who wrote in 1996 that “We firmly believe in the theory of superior race…Turkishness is an essence (cevher) comprised of religion and race…The Turkish race is more precious than all others.” Little do Atsiz and Yazicioglu realize that much of the violent and racist natures of their beliefs have been born out of the minds of non-Turkish thinkers.
What is also highly significant is the emphasis on the anti-Islamic aspect of the pan-Turk racialist concept. Cahun proposed that the Arabs had poisoned them [the Turks] with their hypocritical Quran, denationalized and weakened them, and thus prevented the building of a great Turkish world empire.
But Cahun’s book went much further. He concluded that the Turks are the major proponents of culture, arts and sciences in world civilization. This is especially interesting as for the first time a European writer deliberately omits mention of the role of ancient Iranian or later Islamic civilization and attributes their achievements to a mythical pan-Turk race.
Other European (French) writings of note were Alphons de Lamartine’s (1790-1869) “Histoire de la Turquie [History of Turkey]” (Paris, 1854) and Pierre Loti’s (1850-1923) novel “Aziyade” (Paris, 1913). By the way, Pierre Loti was the pseudonym of Louis Marie Julien Viaud. Loti is recognized by French scholarship today as having been “le pere de la Turcophilie Francaise” [the father of French Turcophilism].
This was not out of love or admiration for the Turks – pan-Turkism was (and is) a political and geopolitical tool. This fact is so transparent that even the late sociologist, writer, poet and pan-Turk activist, Ziya Gokalp, who was a Kurd born in Diyarbakir, Eastern Turkey, is on record as having admitted that Cahun’s book was written as if to encourage the ideal of pan-Turkism.
What is especially important to note is that Czarist Russia widely spread Cahun’s work in their popular and academic literature – this had a major impact in the former Iranian territories of Arran/Albania or the Caucasian khanates (Shirvan, Baku, Sheki, Nakhchevan, etc.).
Britain also produced texts introducing pan-Turk ideology. Sir Denison Ross of the intelligence Department of the British Naval Staff published “A Manual on the Turanians and Pan-Turanianism” in Oxford in 1918. This was mainly based on Vambery’s German text “Turkenvolk [Turkish Peoples]” which had been printed in Leipzig in 1885.
Of special interest is the understanding by British thinkers in using pan-Turkism to dismember and destroy Iran as a state. This was observed by E.J.W. Gibb who openly wrote in the early 1900s that it is much regretted that [the Ottoman sultan] Suleiman and his successors did not turn their serious attention to gathering under their wing those large bodies of their fellow-Turks who still remained subjects of the Shahs of Persia.
Gökalp was born Mehmed Ziya (1876-1924), but he later, after the 1908 Young Turk Revolution that reinstated constitutionalism in the Ottoman Empire, adopted the pen name Gökalp (“sky hero”), which he retained for the rest of his life.
Gökalp redefined pan-Turkism as a cultural, academic, philosophical and political concept advocating the unity and freedom of Turkic peoples. As a sociologist, Ziya Gökalp was influential in the negation of Islamism, pan-Islamism, and Ottomanism as ideological, cultural, and sociological identifiers.
Gökalp advocated a re-Turkification of the Ottoman Empire, by promoting Turkish language and culture to all Ottoman citizenry. His thought, which popularized Pan-Turkism and Turanism, has been described as a “cult of nationalism and modernization”. His 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.
It is now very clear that both the Czarist Russians and Imperial Britain had realized the powerful potential of using pan-Turkism to challenge the existence of the Iranian state, and to attack the Iranian cultural legacy in the Caucasus and Central Asia.
A well-known newspaper columnist and political figure, Gökalp was a primary ideologue of the Committee of Union and Progress. His views of “nation”, and the ways in which they have informed the development of the modern Turkish state, have made for a controversial legacy. Many historians and sociologists have suggested that his brand of nationalism contributed to the Armenian Genocide.
Turanian Society, a society founded in 1839 by Tatars, aiming at uniting the various Turkic peoples of the Russian Empire, was one of the earliest forerunners for modern Pan-Turkism and Turanism. The name is derived from Turan, an ancient Persian name for the land to the East of Iran where many Turkic peoples live, and Turan, the goal of an all Turks uniting state.
Ottomanism enjoyed a revival during the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, which overthrew Sultan Abdul Hamid II, and during the Second Constitutional Era, but lost most of its adherents during the First Balkan War of 1912–1913. This allowed Turkish nationalism into power.
The political party of the Young Turks, Ittihad ve Teraki (the Turkish Committee of Union and Progress), espoused the notion of Turanism, a mythic glorification of Turkish ethnic identity, and was devoted to restoring the Ottoman Empire’s shattered national pride.
The 1913 coup d’état in the Ottoman Empire (January 23, 1913), also known as the Bab-ı Ali coup, resulted in the grand vizier Kamil Pasha being driven from power and the replacement of Minister of War Nazım Pasha by İsmail Enver. The Three Pashas, also known as the dictatorial triumvirate, consisting of the Ottoman minister of war, Ismail Enver (1881–1922); the minister of the interior, Mehmed Talaat (1874–1921); and the minister of the Navy, Ahmed Djemal (1872–1922), took control of the late Ottoman government.
It effectively ended the London Peace Conference and marked a significant point in the Ottoman government’s progress towards centralization as these three men became the de facto rulers of the Ottoman Empire until its dissolution in 1918 following World War I.
The Three Pashas were members of the Committee of Union and Progress, a party with goals of creating a “Pan-Turkish” state, which meant, in the words of Enver Pasha, who became the Minister of War and acting Commander-in-Chief of the Ottoman Empire, “relocating the dhimmi”, the non-Muslim population of the Ottoman Empire.
Enver Pasha was a leader of the 1908 Young Turk Revolution, and is seen as one of the principal orchestrators of the Armenian Genocide and the Assyrian Genocide. He was the main leader of the Ottoman Empire in both Balkan Wars and World War I. Enver had only once the control of any military activity (Battle of Sarıkamış), and left the Third Army in ruins. The First Suez Offensive and Arab Revolt are Ahmed Djemal’s most significant failures.
The Young Turk leaders saw Pan-Turkist ideologies as a way to reclaim the prestige that the Ottoman Empire once held. In 1914, in the context of World War I, a Yeni Turan (New Turanian Society) was formed in Istanbul and supported by both Bolsheviks and the German Empire. This project had a strong Islamist agenda and aimed also at non-Turanian Muslims of Central Asia.
The Pan-Turkist ideologies is a direct cause for the Armenian Genocide, the Greek genocide and the Assyrian Genocide, in which Enver Pasha, one of the most significant early exponents of pan-Turkism, was involved. this as an attempt to remove non-Turkic and non-Muslim minorities from the late Ottoman Empire by ethnic cleansing in order to foster a new Pan-Turkish state.
The Three Pashas were the principal players in the Ottoman-German Alliance and the Ottoman Empire’s entry into World War I on the side of the Central Powers. One of the three, Ahmed Djemal, was opposed to an alliance with Germany, and French and Russian diplomacy attempted to keep the Ottoman Empire out of the war, but Germany was agitating for a commitment.
Finally, on 29 October, the point of no return was reached when Admiral Wilhelm Souchon took SMS Goeben, SMS Breslau and a squadron of Turkish warships into the Black Sea and raided the Russian ports of Odessa, Sevastopol and Theodosia. It was claimed that Ahmed Djemal agreed in early October 1914 to authorize Admiral Souchon to launch a pre-emptive strike.
After the Fall of the Ottoman Empire, Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) came to power. He spoke positively about the Pan-Turkic view and he wanted to forge closer relationships with other Turkish states in Central Asia and the West. He introduced Hilaire de Barenton’s Sun Language Theory into Turkish political and educational circles in 1935, at the high point of attempts to “cleanse” the Turkish language of foreign influence. Turkish researchers at the time also came up with the idea that Early Sumerians were proto-Turks.
Kemalism, also known as Atatürkism, or the Six Arrows, is the founding ideology of Turkey. Kemalism, as it was implemented by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, was defined by sweeping political, social, cultural and religious reforms designed to separate the new state of Turkey from its Ottoman tradition and embrace a Westernized way of living, including the establishment of democracy, civil and political equality for women, secularism, state support of the sciences and free education, many of which were first introduced to Turkey during Atatürk’s presidency in his reforms.
Many of the root ideas of Kemalism began during the late Ottoman Empire under various reforms to avoid the imminent collapse of the Empire, beginning chiefly in the early 19th-century Tanzimat reforms.
The mid-century Young Ottomans attempted to create the ideology of Ottoman nationalism, or Ottomanism, to quell the rising ethnic nationalism in the Empire and introduce limited democracy for the first time while maintaining Islamist influences. In the early 20th century, Young Turks abandoned Ottoman nationalism in favor of early Turkish nationalism, while adopting a secular political outlook.
After the demise of the Ottoman Empire, Atatürk, influenced by both the Young Ottomans and the Young Turks, as well as by their successes and failures, led the declaration of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, borrowing from the earlier movements’ ideas of secularism and Turkish nationalism, while bringing about for the first time free education, women’s rights, and other reforms that have been enshrined by later leaders into guidelines for government of Turkey.
Generally, the concept of Turkism was interpreted by Tsarist Russian circles as overwhelmingly political, irredentist and aggressive. After the revolution of 1917, the attitude to Türkism did not differ from the attitude of the Imperial powers. At the 10th congress of Bolshevik Communist Party in 1921 was formulated the official doctrine where the party “condemned Panturkism as a sloping to the bourgeois-democratic nationalism”.
Russia, China and Iran, claim that they perceive Panturkism as nothing else but a new form of Turkish imperial ambition. Some see it as downright racist, particularly when considering the associated racial and historical teachings. Critics also believe that the concept of Pan-Turkism is flawed because of the distinct dialects among each different Turkic people, which sometimes led to problems of understanding between people speaking different Turkic language.
In the 1940s, the Pan-Turkist also absorbed Nazi propaganda. Nihal Atsız, a prominent ideologue, advocated Nazi doctrines while advocating a Hitler-style haircut and mustache. Alparslan Türkeş, a leading Pan-Turkist took a pro-Hitler position during the war and established close connections with Nazi leaders in Germany.
Several pan-Turkic groups in Europe seemed to have maintained ties with Nazi Germany or its supporters at the start of the war, if not earlier. The Turco-Tatars in Romania had cooperated with the Iron Guard, a Nazi inspired organization.
Although Turkish government archives for the period of WWII have not been released, the level of contact can be ascertained from accurately German archives. During the early days of the War, publicly and officially, the government of Turkey maintained strict neutrality however there had been official and semi-official contacts. In practice, however, there have been confidential semi-official contacts between both Germany and in Turkey, since 1941.
There was also great sympathy for Germany in Turkey at the time. A ten-year Turco-German ‘Treaty of Friendship’ was signed in Ankara on 18 January. A series of official and semi-official meeting of German ambassador to Ankara, Franz von Papen, and several other German officials on one side and Turkish officials including General H.E. Erkilet, himself of Tatar origin and frequent contributor to pan-Turk journals took place in the second half of 1941 and early months of 1942. Others included from the Turkish were General Ali Fuad Erdem, and Nuri Pasha, the brother of Enver Pasha, who is a romantic figure fore pan-Turkists.
While Erkilet discussed military contingencies, Nuri Pasha offered the Germans his plans for creating independent states which were to be allies but not satellites of Turkey. These states were to be formed from the Turkic speaking population in Crimea, Azerbaijan, Central Asia, northwest Iran and northern Iraq.
Nuri Pasha himself offered to assist with propaganda activities to this effect. However, Turkey had also a fear for Turkic minorities of the USSR and told von Papen that it could not join Germany until the USSR was crushed. The Turkish government was possibly apprehensive of the USSR’s might. Thus various pressures failed to bring the Turkish government to join the war during the period.
At less official levels emigrants from Turkic groups in the Soviet Union played a crucial role in some of the negotiations and contacts of Turkey and Germany. Among these were pan-Turkish activists such as Zeki Velidi Togan, Mammed Amin Rasulzade, Mirza Bala, Ahmet CafarOglu, Sayid Shamil and Ayaz Ishaki.
Several Tatars, organized military units of Turkic speakers in Turco-Tatar and Caucasian regions from the prisoner of wars and these joined the war against the USSR, generally fighting as guerrillas. Many of them imbued with hopes of independence and several of these units aspired for a pan-Turkic union.
The units which were continuously reinforced numbered several hundred thousands of people of Turkic origin. What is clear is that Turkey adopted a cautious approach at the government level, however pan-Turkist groups were exasperated by the Turkish government’s inaction and by what they manifestly regarded as the waste of a golden opportunity in the realization of the goals of pan-Turkism.
Hüseyin Nihâl Atsız (1905-1975) was a prominent Turkish nationalist writer, novelist, poet and philosopher. Nihâl Atsız was a fervent supporter of the pan-Turkist or Turanism ideology. He is author of over 30 books and numerous articles. He was in strong opposition to the government of İsmet İnönü, which he criticized for co-operating with the communists. He was accused of plotting to overthrow the government.
Nihâl Atsız is foremost known for his nationalist views, his active campaign against Turkish communists, and his embracing of shamanistic ancient Turkic traditions. He is among the authors that influenced the Turkish nationalist movement known as the Grey Wolfes movement (translated as “idealist”), a nationalist movement later associated to Alparslan Türkeş (and which was a break with Atsız’s previous ideology of Turkism, on the grounds that it reconciles with Islam instead of denouncing it as “Arab religion”).
Atsız worked on Turkism as an ideologue and activist but never joined any party or political group because he considered politics to be a way to corruption. He and his comrades published several Turkist magazines such as Ötüken, Yeni Hayat and Orkun. He wrote strong articles which criticized the government of İsmet İnönü and his alleged tolerance of communism in the country.
The views of Nihâl Atsız concerning the Jews radically changed after 1945. In 1934, he had written that “the Jew” was among “the internal enemies of Turkey”. In 1947, he praised the Jewish people for setting an example of strong nationalism (Zionism): indeed, the Jews manage “to get back the land they had lost 2,000 years ago and to revive Hebrew which has remained only in the books and turn into a spoken language.” Twenty years later, after the Six-day war, Atsız staunchly supported the Israeli point of view.
Turanism forms an important aspect of the ideology of the Turkish Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), a far-right conservative political party in Turkey whose members are informally known as Grey Wolves, a Turkish ultra-nationalist and neo-fascist youth organization.
In the 2002 general elections, the party had lost its 129 seats as it had won only 8.34% of the national vote (2,619,450 votes). In the 2007 general elections, the party won 14.29% of the national vote (5,004,003 votes) with 71 seats becoming the third political group in the parliament. In the 2011 general elections, the party polled 13.01% (5,585,513 votes) and won 53 seats, remaining the third largest parliamentary group.
The Idealist Youth, commonly known as Grey Wolves, is the “unofficial militant arm” of the Nationalist Movement Party. The Grey Wolves have been accused of terrorism. According to Turkish authorities, the organization carried out 694 murders during the late-1970s political violence in Turkey, between 1974 and 1980. However, imprisoned Grey Wolves members were offered amnesty if they accepted to fight the Kurdish separatism and the PKK, and Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA).
The MHP is strongly opposed to Kurdish separatists, namely the PKK. The paramilitary wing of the Grey Wolves has been utilized by the Turkish intelligence services to assassinate PKK leaders. The fact that Counter-Guerrilla had engaged in torture was confirmed by Talat Turhan, a former Turkish colonel.
At the time of the military coup of September 12, 1980, led by general Kenan Evren (who was also the leader of Counter-Guerrilla) there were some 1,700 Grey Wolves organizations, with about 200,000 registered members and a million sympathizers.
Grey Wolves, also known as Commandos conducted assassinations against left-wing intellectuals and academics in Turkey. The torturing and killing of many left-wing partisans and sympathizers are among their crimes. Grey Wolves, besides assassinations and bombings, also participated in massacres of minority community members in Çorum and in Maraş.
Alparslan Türkeş (born Hüseyin Feyzullah, 1917-1997) was a Turkish nationalist politician who was the founder and former president of the NMP party. He represented the far right of the Turkish political spectrum, and was court-martialed on the charges of “fascist and racist activities” in 1945, with the charges being dismissed in 1947.
In 1965, nationalist politician Türkeş gained control of the conservative rural Republican Villagers Nation Party (CKMP) formed in 1958. During an Extraordinary Great Congress held at Adana in Turkey on 8–9 February 1969, Türkeş changed the name of the party to the MHP. Türkeş served as Deputy Prime Minister in right-wing National Front cabinets.
He has been the spiritual leader of the Idealism Schools Foundation of Culture and Art. His followers consider him to be one of the leading icons of the Turkish nationalist movement. He was called Başbuğ (“Leader”) by his devotees. He led the vanguard of anti-communism in Turkey; he was a founding member of the Counter-Guerrilla, the Turkish Gladio.
He attained notoriety as the spokesman of the 27 May 1960 coup d’état against the government of then prime minister Adnan Menderes, who was later executed after a trial following this coup. However Colonel Türkeş was expelled by an internal coup within the junta. He later joined the Republican Villager Nation Party (CKMP) and was elected its chairman. In 1969 the CKMP was renamed the MHP).
Through the far-right MHP, Türkeş took the rightist views of his predecessors like Nihal Atsız, who is known for his explicitly racist views and transformed them into a powerful political force. In 1965, Türkeş released a political pamphlet titled “Dokuz Işık Doktrini” (Nine Lights Doctrine).
This text listed nine basic principles which formed the basis of the nationalist ideology. These were nationalism, idealism, moralism, societalism, scientism, independentism, ruralism, progressivism, populism, industrialism, and technologism.
Pan-Turkic ideas and “re-unification” movements have been popular since the collapse of the Soviet Union in Central Asian and other Turkic countries. Turkey has become a major business partner to many Central Asian Turkic states, helping with the reform of higher education, the introduction of the Latin alphabet, economic development and commerce. However, these efforts have not met the expectations of either the Turkic states nor the Pan-Turkist sentiment in Turkey.
The Turkic Council or, in full, the Cooperation Council of Turkic-Speaking States (CCTS) , is an international organization comprising Turkic countries. It was founded on 3 October 2009 in Nakhchivan. The General Secretariat is in İstanbul, Turkey. The member countries are Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkey, however, the remaining Turkic States, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, are expected to join soon.
Pan-Turkism and nationalist historiography has been used to deny the identity of Armenians and Kurds. At the same time, various revisionist claims were made on ancient peoples of the region and beyond. Various groups including Parthians, Scythians, Sumerians, Indians, Akkadians, Elamites, Anzani, Kassites, Carians, Protohittites, Hittites, Mittani, Hurrians, and others have been claimed as of Turkic origin by nationalist writers.
Apparently pan-Turkists who “later became the ideologists of the racist movements of the present times, were rather pleased with the idea of affiliating Sumerians and Hittites to Turkish. Another conspiracy theory and propaganda misrepresenting historical facts, developed under government sponsorship in those days, held that all great civilizations—Chinese, Indian, Muslim, even ancient Egyptian, and Etruscan—were of Turkish origin”.
Clive Foss, Professor of Ancient History at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, has done extensive archeological work in Turkey and is an expert on ancient Armenian coinage. In his article,”The Turkish View of Armenian History: A Vanishing Nation”, he notes that the Turkish government had been “systematically changing the names of villages to make them more Turkish. Any name which does not have a meaning in Turkish, or does not sound Turkish, whatever its origin, is replaced by a banal name assigned by a bureau in Ankara, with no respect to local conditions or traditions”.
He also notes that the Turkish government: “presented ambiguously, without clear identification of their builders, or as examples of the influence of the superiority of Turkish architecture. In all this, a clear line is evident: the Armenian presence is to be consigned, as far as possible, to oblivion”.
Among the books he criticizes, Foss notes that the book written in Turkey by Cemal Anadol and titled 1982: The Armenian File in the Light of History claims that the Iranian Scythians and Parthians as Turks. At the same time, Cemal Anadol claims that Armenians welcomed the Turks in the region, their language is a mixture with no roots, their alphabet is mixed, with 11 characters being from ancient Turkic alphabet.
Clive Foss states that to call the Turkish revisionism on Armenian history as “historical revisionism” is an understatement, noting that “Turkish writings have been tendentious: history has been viewed as performing a useful service, proving or supporting a point of view, and so it is treated as something flexible which can be manipulated at will”.
He concludes with: “The notion, which seems well established in Turkey, that the Armenians were a wandering tribe without a home, who never had a state of their own, is of course entirely without foundation in fact. The logical consequence of the commonly expressed view of the Armenians is that they have no place in Turkey, and never did.
The result would be the same if the viewpoint were expressed first, and the history written to order. In a sense, something like this seems to have happened, for most Turks who grew up under the Republic were educated to believe in the ultimate priority of Turks in all parts of history, and to ignore Armenians all together; they had been clearly cosigned to oblivion.”
Although it was possible for Armenians to achieve status and wealth in the Ottoman Empire, as a community they were never accorded more than “second-class citizen” status and were regarded as fundamentally alien to the Muslim character of Ottoman society. In 1895, revolts among the Armenian subjects of the Ottoman Empire lead to Sultan Abdul Hamid’s decision to massacre tens of thousands of Armenians in the Hamidian massacres.
Article 301 of the Turkish penal code, which is perceived as being contrary to notion of freedom of speech, states “The person who publicly denigrates the Turkish Nation, the Republic of Turkey, the Grand National Assembly of Turkey, the Government of the Republic of Turkey and the judicial organs of the State, shall be punished with imprisonment of six months to two years. but also it can be only with permission of the minister of justice”
Nationalists within the judicial system have used Article 301 to initiate trials against people like Nobel-prize-winning Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish novelist Elif Şafak, and the late Hrant Dink for supporting the theories of the Armenian Genocide. In May 2007, a law was put into effect allowing Turkey to block Web sites that are deemed insulting to Atatürk.
Neo-Ottomanism is a Turkish political ideology that, in its broadest sense, promotes greater political engagement of the modern Republic of Turkey within regions formerly under the rule of the Ottoman Empire, its predecessor state.
It has been used to describe Turkish foreign policy under the Justice and Development Party which took power in 2002 under prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Neo-Ottomanism is a dramatic shift from the traditional Turkish foreign policy of the Kemalist ideology, which emphasized looking westward towards Europe with the goal of avoiding the instability and sectarianism of the Middle East.
The shift away from this concept in Turkish foreign policy under Turgut Özal’s government has been described as the first step towards neo-Ottomanism. Ahmet Davutoğlu, Turkish foreign minister since 2009 and “head architect” of the new foreign policy, has however rejected the term “neo-Ottomanism” to describe his country’s new foreign policy.
The Turkish-led Ottoman Empire was an influential global power which, at its peak, controlled the Balkans, most of the modern-day Middle East, most of North Africa and the Caucasus. Neo-Ottomanist foreign policy encourages increased engagement in these regions as part of Turkey’s growing regional influence. Turkey uses its soft power to achieve its goals.
This foreign policy contributed to an improvement in Turkey’s relations with its neighbors, particularly with Iraq, Iran and Syria. However Turkey’s relations with Israel, its traditional ally, suffered, especially after the 2008–09 Gaza War, and the 2010 Gaza flotilla raid.
Turkey’s new foreign policy started a debate, principally in the Western media, as to whether Turkey is undergoing an “axis shift”; in other words whether it is drifting away from the West and heading towards the Middle East and Asia. Such fears appear more frequently in Western media when Turkish tensions with Israel rise. President Abdullah Gul dismissed claims that Turkey has shifted its foreign policy axis.
The Ideology, Founders and Objectives of Pan-Turkism
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