Pan-Turkish Rally in Istanbul - March 2009. Image via Wikipedia
Kizil Elma: Gökalp’s Pan-Turkism, Rehmat Ali’s Pak Asia and Iqbal’s Pan-Islamism
The aim of all Turks is to unite with the Turkic borders. History is affording us today the last opportunity. In order for the Islamic world not to be forever fragmented it is necessary that the campaign against Karabagh be not allowed to abate. As a matter of fact drive the point home in Azeri circles that the campaign should be pursued with greater determination and severity
Enver Pasha: The nemesis of Kamal Pasha. Image via Wikipedia
Turanism or Pan-Turkism is a political movement aiming to unite the various Turkic peoples into a modern political state. 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.
“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 historical theory developed under government sponsorship in those days held that all great civilizations — Chinese, Pakistani, Muslim, even ancient Egyptian and Etruscan — were of Turkish origin.
Mr. Ahmadinejad is a Pan-Turkist. Gökalp in Turkey is one of the greatest Pan-Turks.
- As a spokesman for Turkish nationalism, Gökalp greatly influenced the politicians and writers of his generation.
- Gökalp has been characterized as “the father of Turkish nationalism”, and even “the Grand Master of Turkism”.
- Gökalp’s thought figured prominently in the political landscape of the Republic of Turkey, which emerged from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire around the time of his death. His influence resonated in diverse ways
- His best-known works include the verse collection K?z?l Elma (1915; “The Red Apple”). The title poem deals with an ancient Turkish myth in which universal sovereignty, symbolized in the apple, devolves on the Turks.
- Some of his essays have been collected and translated into English by Niyazi Berkes in Turkish Nationalism and Western Civilization: Selected Essays of Ziya Gökalp (1959)
Gazi Kö?kü'ndeki Ziya Gökalp büstü, Diyarbak?r.Image via Wikipedia
Alama Iqbal has described Gokalp and included his peoms in Reconstruction of Islamic Thought. “Added to the verses quoted from the Qur’an and references to them, in the present work, are a good number of quite significant observations and statements embodying Allama’s rare insight into the Qur’an born of his peculiarly perceptive and deep study of it. These are to be found scattered all over the work, except in Lecture VII, where one would notice just one observation and complete absence of passages from the Qur’an, possibly because it was originally addressed to a non-Muslim audience. About sixty-five of these observations and statements have been listed in the general Index under: ‘observations and statements based on’ as a sub-entry of the ‘Qur’an’.
Of the other works quoted from in the Reconstruction, forty-nine that I could work out and later list in the Index, about fifteen are by Muslim authors, mostly mystics and mystic poets. Passages from these Muslim works, originally in Arabic, Persian or Turkish, have been given, with the single exception of Rumi’s Mathnawi, in their first-ever English translation by Allama Iqbal. Notable among these are passages from Fakhr al-Din al-Razi‘s Al Mabahith al Mashriqiyah and Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindis Maktubat and, above all, Ziya Gokalp‘s Turkish poems, which the Allama was able to render into English from their German version by August Fischer in his Aus der religiosen Reformbewegung in der Turkei (Leipzig, 1922).”
Map depicting the Ottoman Empire at its greatest extent, in 1683. Image via Wikipedia
r. Tajammal Hussain talking about Pakistan says that “India as a Mahabharata entity never existed–IVC is a separate thing, you must also keep in mind our language and ethnic aspect is distinct from rest of old British India, here we are not talking of who came first but as through evolution a state and empire came into being,and so emerged the IVC,with influx of the Turanean races from the north, hence the traces of their languages,insignia and customs. Most of older races/tribes in Pakistan,are Turkish ethnically when European powers failed Enver Pasha in post WW1 time. I was because he was uniting the Pan-Turanean races under one flag,the KIZIL ELMA CONCEPT. “Afghanistan” is the old Khorassan,an area always part of old IVC, as it is the Basin of our main river. Yes today the Arab has re emerged as a power courtesy the oil, could you high light why their script is known as Khat e Kufa?
Image via Wikipedia
The various Turkic peoples share historical, cultural, religious and linguistic roots. The rise of the Pan-Turkic political movement has been around for a while. It runs parallel with European developments like Pan-Slavism and Pan-Germanism or even Pan-Arabism.
The fall of the multi-cultural and multi-ethnic population of the Ottoman Empire was influenced by emerging Islamic nationalism of the Young Turks. Many tried to replace the lost empire with a new Turkish commonwealth.
The most significant exponents of pan-Turkism and the was Enver Pasha, the Minister of War and acting Commander-in-Chief of the Ottoman Empire during World War I. He later became one of the strongest proponents and a great leaders of the Basmachi movement in Central Asia during the Russian Civil War. He was trying to create a united Turkestan, while Kemal Pasha did not support the unity of the Muslims.
The dissolution of the Soviet Union in the late 20th century put new life into those who wanted the unity of the Turkic peoples extending from Istanbul to Karachi. The majority of the Turkic peoples were suddenly again able to travel and conduct business as partners in political alliances. They are forming these with a vengeance, as if time is running out.
With the new Islamic government which has come to power in Ankara, Turkey has become a major business partner to many Central Asian Turkic states. Ankara has helped with the reform of higher education, the introduction of the Latin alphabet, economic development and commerce. Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan are struggling to adopted the Latin alphabet, while the Turkmen and Uzbek alphabets need to be reconciled with the rest. The efforts to combine the people have met the expectations of neither the Turkic states nor the Pan-Turkist sentiment in Turkey.
Abulfaz Elchibey, of Azerbaijan, whose presidency was toppled by a small group of soldiers after the Turkish government refused to intervene.
Other authors have described Ziya Gökalp as follows.
Ziya Gökalp Grab in Istanbul. Image via Wikipedia
Ziya used the writings of Dukheim to repudiate secularism as a disuniting factor and proposed religion as a uniting force–all concepts found in Alama Iqbal‘s Reconstruction of Islamic Thought (“Aik ho Muslim haram kee pasbani keh liyeh, Neel keh sahil seh ta ba khak e Kashghar”). Amazingly Ziya and Iqbal were both students of Nietzsche. Iqbal however denied that he had been influenced by Nietzsche–rather he claimed that his writings were influenced by Surah e Nafas out of the Quran. Informed by his reading of Émile Durkheim, Gökalp concluded that Western liberalism, as a social system, was inferior to solidarism, because liberalism encouraged individualism, which in turn diminished the integrity of the state. Durkheim, whose work Gökalp himself translated into Turkish, perceived religion as a means of unifying a population socially, and even “religion as society’s worship of itself”. Durkheim’s assertion that the life of the group was more important than the life of the individual, this was a concept readily adopted by Gökalp. 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.
The Encyclopedia Bratinca describes Ziya as follows: Ziya Gökalp, pseudonym of Mehmed Ziya (b. March 23, 1876, Diyarbak?r, Ottoman Empire [now in Turkey]—d. Oct. 25, 1924, Constantinople [now Istanbul], Turkey), sociologist, writer, and poet, one of the most important intellectuals and spokesmen of the Turkish nationalist movement. While Gökalp was a student at the Constantinople Veterinary School, his active membership in a secret revolutionary society led to his imprisonment. After the Young Turk revolution in 1908, he took part in the underground Committee of Union and Progress in Salonika (now Thessaloníki, Greece) and settled there as a philosophy and sociology teacher in a secondary school. He played a major role as an intellectual leader in this organization, which later virtually ruled the country.
During that period he contributed to the avant-garde periodicals Genç Kalemler (“The Young Pens”) and Yeni Mecmua (“New Magazine”), both vehicles for the dissemination of revolutionary nationalist ideas. In 1912 he was appointed to the chair of sociology at the University of Istanbul. At first Gökalp espoused the ideas of Pan-Turkism, an ideology that aspired to unite the Turkish-speaking peoples of the world. Later, however, he limited his dream to an ideology that essentially embraced only the Turks of the Ottoman Empire and was concerned with the modernization and Westernization of the Turkish nation.
In many ways, He was influenced by Alama Iqbal and Nietzsche:
- Gökalp’s work, in the context of the decline of the Ottoman Empire, was instrumental in the development of Turkish national identity, which he himself referred to even then as Turkishness. He believed that a nation must have a “shared consciousness” in order to survive, that “the individual becomes a genuine personality only as he becomes a genuine representative of his culture”. He believed that a modern state must become homogeneous in terms of culture, religion, and national identity. This conception of national identity was augmented by his belief in the primacy of Turkishness, as a unifying virtue. In a 1911 article, he suggested that “Turks are the ‘supermen’ imagined by the German philosopher Nietzsche”. He proceeds to lay out the three echelons of pan-Turkist identity that he envisions:
- the Turks in the Republic of Turkey, a nation according to cultural and other criteria;
- the Oghuz Turks, referring also to the Turkmens of Azerbayjan, Iran and Khwarizm who… essentially have one common culture which is the same as that of the Turks of Turkey–all these four forming Oghuzistan;
- more distant, Turkic-speaking peoples, such as the Yakuts, Kirghiz, Uzbeks, Kipchaks and Tatars, possessed of a traditional linguistic and ethnic unity, having affinity–but not identity–with the Turkish culture.
- The second stage was “Oghuzism”, and the final stage would be the “Turanism” that he and other nationalist poets had been promoting since before World War I. While this broad conception of “Turkishness”, of pan-Turkism, often embraced what Gökalp
Map showing countries and autonomous subdivisions with an official Turkic language.Image via Wikipedia
Chaudry Rehmat Ali had similar ideas about Pakistan–first uniting the diverse provinces and then creating Pak Asia uniting all of Central Asia and Turkey in a tight embrace. Current Turkish philosophers also share the same vision. Dr. Tajammal defines the Pakistani history as follows. Kufa is post Islamic creation of name, as is Basra and Baghdad. The Chinese too were ruled by the Turks, Europeans faced them in all ages, all old Turkish geographic area’s strangely have numbers assigned to them. Mian Nur Mohammad Kalhora had a collected a library of over 600,000 books. They were given to the new creation called the house of Pir Pagara (The Rashidi family) by the new rulers–The Talburs, now called Talpurs. I have always stated that our past is now rotting in libraries of St. Petersburg, German Universities, in Paris, as well as in British libraries. The American universities in the last 30 years or so have bought out a large number of books too, the left overs. Being collector myself I am well aware of these facts however my resources cannot be matched with their purchasing powers. We must create awareness on this aspect. Only the old books can substantiate,our glorious past now hijacked by the Hindu pundit.
The Encyclopedia Britannica describes his growth and intellectualism.
Although he was interested in developing his countrymen’s awareness of Turkish history, customs, and beliefs, he thought that the Turkish nation could adopt many of the ways of Western civilization without destroying its Turkish heritage… He was elected a member of the Parliament of the new Turkish republic in 1923 but died soon after. As a spokesman for Turkish nationalism, Gökalp greatly influenced the politicians and writers of his generation. His best-known works include the verse collection K?z?l Elma (1915; “The Red Apple”). The title poem deals with an ancient Turkish myth in which universal sovereignty, symbolized in the apple, devolves on the Turks. Works:
- Mohammad Taqi Zehtabi (a member of Pishevari’s pro-Soviet movement in 1946) wrote: Tarikh e Direen e Torkan e Iran [The Ancient History of the Turks of Iran]. This book routinely falsifies references and relies on pan-Turk and Soviet-era literature to revise history. Download this book in 13 parts in pdf: Zehtabi-01, Zehtabi-02,
- Zehtabi-03, Zehtabi-04, Zehtabi-05, Zehtabi-06, Zehtabi-07, Zehtabi-08, Zehtabi-09, Zehtabi-10, Zehtabi-11, Zehtabi-12, Zehtabi-13.
- Firooz Mansouri book review of Javad hayat’s book on Turkic Languages in Iran(in persian in pdf)
- Dr. Alireza Asgharzadeh’s ”Iran and the Cahllenge of Diversity” in 2007: This book falsifies references and relies on pan-Turk and Soviet-era literature as well as anti-
- Semitic writers such as Nasser Pourpirar to revise history. See analysis of Dr. Asgharzadeh’s book by Azargoshnasp (An analysis of the Book by Dr. Alireza Asgharzadeh in pdf) and Kaveh Farrokh’s analysis of Dr. Asgharzadeh’s text. Download this book in pdf: Iran and the Challenge of Diversity: Islamic Fundamentalism, Aryanist Racism,and Democratic Struggles (2007).
- George Bournoutian, review of The Azerbaijani Turks: Power and Identity Under Russian Rule, by Audrey L. Altstadt, in the Armenian Review 45, no. 3 (Autumn 1992), pp. 63-69 (pdf). This book is noteworthy for its selective references and its reliance on pan-Turk and Soviet-era literature.
- Reviews of Brenda Shaffer’s “Borders and Brethren: Iran and the Challenge of Azerbaijani Identity“. Evan Siegal’s review in Iranian Studies, Volume 37, Issue 1 March 2004 , pages 140 – 143 (pdf) see longer version of Siegel’s review (click here). Touraj Atabaki’s review in Slavic Review, 63:1 (2004) (pdf).
