1. INTRODUCTION

This study includes the reading and questioning of scientific sources in different disciplines and the works of “nationalist” ideology and sociological observations.

In the study, there are determinations that the theories of the nation conceived in Western modernity are not agreed on, do not comply with historical and social realities, and there are contradictions within themselves, and that there are no such problems in the Islamic nation view. 

In the study, it is explained that the relationship of the concept of nation with religion and the state differs according to civilizations.

Within this study, which is mainly carried out in the West and especially in Turkey, the meaning of the concept of Turk before Western modernity is also investigated and revealed, and the extent of the destruction in the following period is shown.

The views and attitudes of nationalist ideologies in the West and in Turkey regarding religion are also included in the content of this study.

Despite all its deficiencies, this study can be considered to be of interest to all Muslim societies, since it also includes an Islamic perspective on issues such as the state, nation, race and language.

Another feature of the study that should be noted is that if an idea or a statesman's thought is found to be harmful, it is evaluated by looking at the paradigm of the period in which he lived, instead of accusation or defense, as a requirement of objectivity. The paradigm in the period when ‘nation’ theories were produced was “Modernization” in the West and "Westernization" in the East.

 

2. FROM ISLAMIC CIVILIZATION AND NATIONALITY TO WESTERN CIVILIZATION AND NATIONALITY

The feature that is partially seen in the early stages of the Islamism, Ottomanism and Turkism movements that emerged in the last periods of the Ottoman Empire's loss of power, and completely in the others, is ‘admiration for the West'. This feature was clearly expressed by the Turkist leaders Ziya Gökalp, Ahmet Ağaoğlu, Hamdullah Suphi Tanrıöver and the people who made the “Turkish Revolution”, as in other movements of thought.  The suggestions of Gökalp, “desire to take the European civilization in a complete and systematic way”; Ağaoğlu, “Leaving the defeated Islamic civilization and taking the victorious European civilization as it is, with its good and bad aspects”; Tanrıöver “to be the defender of Europeanness, the representative of Europeanness and sincerely Occidental” and the statement of the then prime minister İsmet İnönü that the reforms were made “so that we would not be different from the Westerners” is in the same vein (Gökalp, 1976a: 102; Ağaoğlu, 1972: 8-17; Tanrıöver, 2000b: 9, 93; İnönü, 1987: 209). Due to the civilization's desire for Westernization, the "modern" (contemporary) norms of the West have been accepted in the understanding of ‘nation’.     

One of the first Turkists, Yusuf Akçura, defended the idea of “bringing a Turkish political nationality based on a race”, even though he predicted that it would cause many Muslim tribes to leave the Ottoman Empire in the early 1900s. He stated that there was no such idea in the old Turkish states nor in the Ottoman state until that time, and he showed that the Turkish youth learned the German language and history as the possible reason for the emergence of that idea (Akçura, 1987: 23). Akçura and Ahmet Ferit (Tek) learned and adopted Turkishness from their teacher Albert Sorel during their studentship at Paris University. Their classmate, Yahya Kemal Beyatlı, states that there are a few Turks in the class and says, “Two Turkish students who discovered a new horizon in Turkishness with the charm of these lessons, one is Yusuf Akçura and the other is Ahmet Ferit” (Beyatlı, 1970: 13-14).

Hamdullah Suphi Tanrıöver, who came to the post of general chairman of the Turkish Hearths in 1912 and held that position for a total of thirty-four years, said that “nationality principles” spread to the whole world after the French Revolution, with Napoleon's campaigns. Tanrıöver stated that we had difficulty in accepting that idea, “Due to our upbringing that rejects nationality, as being Arab, Albanian, Turkish and all Muslim nations,” but eventually we adopted it (Tanrıöver, 2000a: 137-138). Tanrıöver found this quote to be accurate and took part in the “Turkist” movement as one of the most active defenders of it.

Enver Pasha, the man of action in the Committee of Union and Progress of Turkism, fled to Germany with some of the executives of the Committee of Union and Progress, as he was one of those who brought Turkey into the World War I and led to occupation of Turkey. The name of the association he founded in Germany is “Revolutionary Islamic Union/İhtilalci İslam Birliği” and the name of the publication is “Liva el-İslam”. Enver Pasha, who took a lesson from the experiences, complained in an article in that journal that “the nationality fashion was taken in the way that the Europeans wanted to impose on us, without thinking about whether it would harm us or not”. In that article, Pasha complained that claims of a nation independent from Islam, such as being Turkish, Arab, Albanian, Circassian, Bosnian, were made (Enver Paşa, 1921).

Ziya Gökalp, the most important ideologist of Turkism, also said that Western references, especially the works of Guignes and Léon Cahun, had an impact on the birth and development of Turkism (Gökalp, 1976a: 1-6).

Among the first Turkists, such as Abdülkadir Inan, Abdullah Battal Taymas, Ahmet Ağaoğlu, Ahmet Caferoğlu, Hüseyinzade Ali Turan, İsmail Gaspıralı, Reşit Rahmeti Arat, Sadri Maksudi Arsal, and Zeki Velidî Togan, the references for Turkish thinkers coming from abroad was Westerners.  

Westerners, mostly Jewish, such as Arminius Vambery and Constantin Borzecki (Mustafa Celaleddin Pasha), David Léon Cahun, G. N. Potanin, Gyula Németh, Joseph de Guignes, J. R. Apselin, Julius Klaproth, M. A. Castréen, Moiz Kohen (Munis Tekinalp), N.I. İlminskiy, N. M. Yadrintsev, N. Y. Bichurin, P. S. Palas, Sandor Csoma, V. I. Verbitskiy, Vilhelm Thomsen, Wilhelm Barthold, Wilhelm Radlof are the main pioneers of the new “scientific” Turkish solution.  

Prof. Dr. Arminius Vambery, of Jewish origin, is considered by some to be one of the greatest Turcologists of all time. This person, after staying in Mehmed Sadik Rıfat Pasha's mansion in Istanbul for four years under the pseudonym "Reşat Efendi", made a three-year journey to Turkestan (1862-1865). A comprehensive work, written after his journeys, was published in London in 1864. Cemal Kutay evaluated Vambery's journey in his work called “Fake Dervish/Sahte Derviş”. On the other hand, Mim Kemal Öke showed his activities during his stay in Istanbul and his connections with Zionism in his work named “Vambery: The Life Story of an Interstate Spy with Documents”. After his journey to Turkestan, Vambery was interested in Turkishness until his death (d.1913), and he sent most of his studies and lecture notes to the Turkish Hearths. Prof. Dr. Mehmet Eröz, one of the important members of the ideology of Turkish nationalism, also accepts Vambery's spread of ideology and says that that ideology called “Panturkism” was supported by the British in order to prevent the Russians from advancing in Central Asia. Eröz adds that the British were very afraid that this ideology would later be promoted by the Germans as well (Eröz, 1977: 289-290). Indeed, later on, the Turkist Union and Progress came under German influence and brought the Ottoman Empire into the World War I.

Eröz may be right in saying that the purpose of the British was to prevent the Russian advance. But in the meantime, it should be considered that they wanted to disintegrate the Ottoman Empire. The prediction of Yusuf Akçura, one of the first Turkists, that if that ideology were realized, that the Ottoman Empire would disintegrate was given above from his own work. The British, as well as supporting Turkism through Vambery, seems to have attempted to disintegrate the Ottoman Empire by provoking Arabism through Lawrence and Kurdishism through E. W. C. Noel. (Kral Abdullah, 2006: 62-176; Öke, 1989: 26-43).

Another state where there is information in the sources that it works for the same purposes is France. The statement of Hamdullah Suphi Tanrıöver, one of the Turkist leaders, that the armies of Napoleon spread nationalism, was mentioned above. When Napoleon abolished the Venetian state and settled in the Septinsular Republic belonging to this state, he accelerated the nationalist provocations directed against the Greeks and all the Balkans. In order to achieve this, in the order he gave to his commanders, he said, “Do your best to win the people's hearts. If the people have a tendency to independence, fuel that feeling.” When he heard that the commanders were carrying out this task successfully, he said, “The nationality bigotry that started to swell will be stronger than the religious bigotry” (Karal, 1947: 105).

Indeed, the “nationality bigotry”, first spread by France and then encouraged by British, dragged the Ottoman Empire into disintegration, as the Turkist Yusuf Akçura said. What came with that ideology, as explained by the above-mentioned words of the early Turkists, is the “nation” understanding of Western modernity.

  

3. THE CONCEPT OF ‘NATION’ IN WESTERN MODERNITY

Since the Renaissance-Reform period, the secular-laicistic trend in Europe has developed day by day. In that process, it is recognized that the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648 provided for the transition to the nation-state form as the basic unit in the international system (Dursun, 2006: 142). With the French Revolution in July 1789, “nation” as a secular concept was used in an official declaration to give people a new sense of belonging. After declaring that sovereignty belongs to the nation in Article 3 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of the French Revolution, this principle was strengthened with the following sentence: “No delegation, no individual can exercise an authority that does not clearly come from the nation” (Ateş, 1997: 185).

It is very interesting that the concept of nation was tried to be defined in the West after that term was introduced and used. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of the French Revolution is dated 1789. It means that at the end of the eighteenth century. The studies to define the concept of “nation” started in the nineteenth century (Jaffrelot, 1998).  This means that they first took refuge in a term that they had not yet clarified, and then realized that they encountered a difficult problem for themselves in the definition studies. That problem has been expressed with the question "What is a nation" and a satisfactory answer has not been given until today because it is defined in different ways by many different thinkers.

It is possible to divide the theories of nation produced in the West into two groups, namely “land law” (citizenship) and "law of blood” (unity in racial origin and native language). The most obvious representative of the former is French nationalism, and the latter is German nationalism. 

Since the citizenship-based understanding explains the nation with political boundaries, it is not satisfactory in explaining the connection of the population with the time before the current state and with the extensions of the population that transcend the political boundaries. In addition, in the event of the collapse of the existing state, it results in the absence of any commonality among its people. In fact, if the state and citizens do not share common goals with each other, there may not be a need to be a separate state from others. Then, in this understanding, it does not seem logical to talk about a strong nation and a state with a secure future.

The understanding based on unity in race and native language shows the nation was present in ancient times and still continues, and it ignores the mass participation in the intervening period. It also makes it doubtful whether each individual belongs to that nation or not.

One of the features seen in this understanding is to explain the nation with some anthropometric criteria. However, it is very rare for an individual to see all the characteristics of the race to which he belongs. Straight-blond hair, gray-blue eyes, light skin, and dolichocephalic head are shown as the racial characteristics of the Swedes, who are mostly seen just as “an example”. In an anthropometric study conducted in the Swedish army, it was determined that only 11% of the soldiers had these characteristics (Güvenç, 1996: 45). 

For Western, Central and Southern Europe, the racial attribution does not fit at all. Because the influx of very crowded tribes that brought forth feudalism, completely blended the population. The Vandals, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Burgundians and the coming Germanic tribes settled in different regions and integrated with the indigenous peoples. There were very few women from their own tribes with them. All tribal men except chiefs married Latin women (Renan, 1946: 102).The Vandal in North Africa, the Visigoth in Spain, the Burgundian in South-Western Gaul, the Ostrogoth in Italy, and then the Lombard kingdoms, which were established in the imperial lands after the fall of the Roman Empire, were the results of the union of those Germanic tribes with the native tribes. Vikings and Varangians, as (Norman) tribes from the northern Scandinavian countries, formed another mass blend in Europe. The word “Normandy”, which is used as the name of a region of France today, is inherited from these Norman tribes (Özyüksel, 1997: 29-36).  Central Asian Avars, Bulgars, Huns, Kipchaks, Onugurs and Pechenegs and Caucasian Alans also came to Europe and took part in the same blend (Dayı, 2013b: 102).

Another feature seen in this understanding is the definition of the nation according to the native language, as the German philosopher Herder insisted (Smith, 2004: 123). Nowadays, this principle is being abandoned due to the intense demands of the states from their own people. Because there is almost no country of which population has only one native language. 113 out of 194 member states of the United Nations have more than one official language, one of which is the “general official language” of that country (Milliyet blog, 2013).

Some linguistic similarities between nations were also used as evidence of “coming from an origin” through Comparative Linguistics, but over time it was understood that this was not accurate. Because the changes observed in the nations have revealed that the language cannot be a genealogical indicator. The most obvious examples of this are the Russians, the Germans and the Bulgarians. Russians, who used to speak Swedish as a Norman tribe, now speak Russian, a Slavic language (Barthold, 1975: 81-82). The Germans spoke Slavic a few centuries ago. Ernest Renan, who gave this example, said that “the instances are too many to count” (Renan, 1946: 115). Another example is the Bulgarians. Bulgarians, who originated in Central Asia, used to speak Turkish, but today their language is from the Slavic language group. The abundance of such examples justifies the warning of the philosopher of language Ferdinand de Saussure that racial origin cannot be found in Comparative Linguistics (Saussure, 1998: 28, 276).

As can be seen, none of the Western theories could explain the concept of nation. For this reason, Ernest Gellner and Eric J. Hobsbawm, who are among the thinkers who are distant to that concept, describe this concept, which is completely new to the West, as “invented” and Benedict Anderson as “imagined” (Hobsbawm, 1995: 24; Anderson, 1995: 20). Even Ernest Renan, one of the thinkers who adopted the concept of nation, showed inconsistencies with all definitions by making selections from different societies (Renan, 1946: 105-106). Hugh Seton-Watson, who also adopted the concept of nation, had to say, “I have to admit that no 'scientific definition' can be made for the nation, but there is a phenomenon, and it continues to exist” (Anderson, 1995: 17).

In the meantime, it should be noted that, based on the suggestions of Montesquieu and Jean Jacques Rousseau, each of the Western and Westernizing states has been trying to establish a homogeneous nation-building for a long time. Montesquieu draws attention to the fact that the social institution was first built by the chiefs of the republic, and then that institution determined the chiefs of the republic; Rousseau also said that the state had to establish a certain foundation for itself in order to gain solidity (Rousseau, 1986: 78, 88). Rousseau's advice was: “The first rule we must follow is of national character, every people has or must have a personality, if it lacks it, we must set to work to give it that”  (Smith, 2004: 123). The efforts to create a nation with that “social engineering” mentality were also explained by the founders of Italy and Poland: The following words of Massimo d'Azeglio in the first session of the Parliament, after the Italian unity was established, are quite interesting: “We created Italy, now we must create Italians.” Colonel Pilsudski, who was the savior of Poland, said with the same mentality, “It is not the nation that creates the state, but the state that creates the nation” (Hobsbawm, 1995: 62).

While the ideologues of the nation-state model gave the state the authority/task of “creating a nation”, they were also looking for opportunities to become involved in religion. Because Christianity, like Islam, being an international religion, was not suitable for being national, neither by citizenship nor by race and language criteria. However, nationalism regards almost every identity shared with others as a danger that can destroy national identity over time. For this, different methods have been applied. The important philosopher of German nationalism, Johan Gottlieb Fichte, rejected “the parts of St. Paul of Jewish origin” in the Bible and introduced the parts of John as the “True Bible”. The Italian philosopher Giuseppe Mazzini said that Italians should make a major reform in Catholicism that will surpass Protestantism (Baron, 2007: 60-75). French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau ruled that there could not be a “national religion” in the West as before, and stipulated that existing religions should not prevent “civic duties” (Rousseau, 1986: 199-210). This logic may have an effect on the extreme secularism of France, which defines the nation on the basis of citizenship.

The “nation-builder” approaches listed can be called trying to create the nation of the state. Those efforts did not yield the expected results in any country. Additional disintegration tendencies have been added to the many disintegration that has occurred, and the following question has occupied the minds of many Westernized philosophers, such as Immanuel Wallerstein's: “When everyone who lives in a country is effectively integrated, does the ‘nation’ redefine itself in such a way that it recreates its own ‘marginals’?” (Wallerstein, 2003: 126).

What actually happened is not the national marginalization of the integrated masses. While the “intellectuals” are trying to create an artificial “homogeneous nation” to the state with forced explanations and impositions, they are dragging the real nation into disintegration, which has developed with the integrations in the natural course of history.

Ernest Gellner's statement that “the state has certainly emerged without the help of the nation” summarizes the state of Western nation theories. The relationship of the Islamic nation understanding with religion and the state is completely different. 

  

4. THE CONCEPT OF ‘NATION’ IN ISLAMIC CIVILIZATION

From the explanations above, it is understood that in Western modernity, either the complete replacement of the old state system (revolution) or the establishment of a new state (state-building) and then the existence of a nation-building policy suitable for that renewed state.

The opposite of that state-priority structuring can be seen in Islam. In the first period of Islam, a nation was formed that started from Mecca and spread gradually, then when the need arose, a state was established at the end of a consultation in Medina. When this feature is taken into consideration, it is seen that the relationship between nation and state in Islamic understanding is not the state building a nation, but the nation building a state. In other words, the logic of the state of the nation, not the nation of the state, is essential. In this case, Muslims do not need to be puzzled by the question “What is a nation?”, like Western theorists. Two more reasons can be given for this, one in terms of time and the other in terms of meaning. In terms of time, the term ‘nation’ was used in Islam eleven centuries before it was first used in the West. In terms of meaning, the concept of ‘nation’ in Islam is clearly related to religion.

In Islam, ‘nation’ primarily means ‘religion’ and ‘Truth’ is a valid term for religion as well as for superstitions. It is seen that only the term ‘religion’ is used while describing the differences in faith in the Qur'an, and it is also used as the nation of a prophet. The meaning in the second option is slightly wider. In the explanations compiled and quoted from various sources by the tafsir scholar Elmalılı Hamdi Yazır, “nation means the path one takes,” which can be right or wrong. In this respect, religion, sharia and nation have the same meaning. On the other hand, they have some nuance differences in meaning. According to those differences, they are expressed as religion in terms of creed and belief, sharia in terms of deeds and practices, and nation in social terms. In that case, nation as a concept is the union of a religion and a society that believes in it. As a matter of fact, in Ottoman Turkish, “nation means both religion, sect, and all those who belong to a religion or sect” (Devellioğlu, 1978: 775). This means that when “nation” is mentioned in Islamic literature, a sociological aspect is added to religion, which is a belief system.

After all, ‘nation’ as an Islamic concept is irrelevant to both citizenship law and blood law, which are the ‘nation’ theories of Western modernity. In other words, it cannot be degraded to the meaning of the people within the borders of a state, the people speaking the same mother tongue, the people of the same ancestry, or the community of people with the same anthropometric characteristics. Islam does not tolerate trying to destroy and homogenize the stated differences between people. On the contrary, it encourages us to accept and even respect differences, so to speak. Because the language and color differences in people are shown as "verses of Allah" in the Qur'an (Quran, 30/22).

The feature seen in this kind of understanding of nation is that tribal identities within the national body can be used freely, provided that they are not for the purpose of glorification or humiliation. Bilal (r.a) and Salman (r.a) can be shown as examples of people who were known by the names of tribes in the time of the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh). These two persons were referred to as Bilal-i Habeshi and Salman-i Farisi by emphasizing their tribes, and they received love from both the Prophet and his companions because of their taqwa.

Unlimited by the state, race and native language, the “nation of Islam” means all Muslim societies from various tribes with separate native languages. The common language of this nation was Arabic. Over time, when Islam spread to very large areas, different languages became centralized in different regions and became a common language, and tribes united within the framework of any common language became known as “nation” according to that language. Within this context, it is seen that three languages, namely Arabic, Persian and Turkish, are centralized. These three languages were mentioned as "three languages" in the older literature (Devellioğlu, 1978: 257). The feature that immediately draws attention here is that the common religion-common language criteria dominate, far from the language-race understanding that excludes religion in the West. Thus, the concept of “Turk” expressed the combination of different ethnic origin and different native language Muslim tribes using Turkish as a common language.

Actually, the very old term 'Turk' has never been the name of a race in any period of history (the same situation is valid for other “nations” as can be understood from the lines above, but as the title suggests, the concept of Turk is emphasized in this article). It was the biggest damage to the integrity of the nation, both inside and outside the borders of Turkey, when it was given such a meaning by the influence of the West. In fact, it can be said that the countries that suffered the most in the adoption of the concept of “nation” according to Western modernity are Islamic countries, especially Turkey. Because the abandonment of the concept of nation in Islamic civilization renders the unity of Muslim tribes with different native languages and different ethnic origins meaningless within a “nation-state” expressed in the logic of Western modernity. The sentences of complaint used by the Turkist Enver Pasha when he saw that result were given above. That dire result would not be surprising when the concept of 'Turk', conceived in Western modernity and imposed on Turkey, is compared with the concept of historical-natural Turk.

 

5. THEORETICAL INCONSISTENCES OF WESTERN MODERNITY IN THE CONCEPT OF ‘TURK’

It was shown above that Western philosophers have not been able to clarify the concept of the nation in their secular civilization since the seventeenth century, since it does not fit into the structure of almost any country. It is seen that the concept of nation is dragged into the same chaos in the Islamic world, which has passed to Western civilization. This situation has become much more complicated especially for Turkey. The reason for this situation is that in the historical-existence field of the Turks, there are many changes and additions that cannot be compared with those in other societies, both in terms of place (homeland), social environment, lifestyle (from nomadism to residence, from animal husbandry to farming and commerce) and in terms of faith. It is a state of expedition that affects all material and spiritual aspects of social life. It can even be said that the Turkish nation was formed in an expeditionary state, as opposed to the resident state of other nations. Therefore, the concept of 'Turk', which was prepared according to the norms of Western modernity, could not be clarified. Each of the “nationalist/nationalitarian” ideological thought systems, which are still referred to as “Turkist-Turanist, Ataturkist-Kemalist, Anatolianist”, has a distinct Turkish understanding.

 

5.1. Turkist-Turanist Views

The concept of “Turk” of which “foundations” was accepted as systematized by Ziya Gökalp (1876-1924) and became the most widespread one in Turkey, was introduced by philosophers within the Turkist framework. This understanding is ‘Turanist’ in nature, whether it is stated separately or not. Since it is also processed in educational institutions, those who do not follow the “nationalist” line have learned the concept of “Turk” within this framework. Under the headline of “From Islamic Civilization and Nationality to Western Civilization and Nationality”, it was shown directly from the accounts of the first Turkist ideologues that this view was based mainly on the concepts of “nation and Turk” produced in Western modernity. Ziya Gökalp's influence on this view becoming official in Turkey and becoming an ideology that some people enthusiastically adhere to is indisputable. After Gökalp, two movements of thought emerged that followed him but had some differences in nuance. In this respect, it would be beneficial to deal with the issue with a triple classification.

 

5.1.1. Basic Turkist-Turanist View

Ziya Gökalp, who was in the Islamist-Ottomanist line with the influence of his family until his high school years in his hometown of Diyarbakır; it was his Greek-born teacher, Dr Yorgi, who was an atheist who caused the most effective change in Gökalp’s life. Yorgi, who guided Gökalp to positivist philosophy, suggested to him when they met again during his university years in Istanbul that a “Turkish Revolution” was needed, and that “Turkish sociology and Turkish psychology” should be built on them. Gökalp, who conveyed this advice as “My Teacher's Will”, says that he started to learn those sciences “in order to examine the sociology and psychology of the Turkish nation” (Gökalp, 1973: 11-16). 

Gökalp is introduced as “the greatest Turkish and Islamic philosopher of the 20th century” in the Turkish Encyclopedia (Tansel, 1969). It was influential in the views of the Committee of Union and Progress in the Ottoman period, and of the People's Party (CHP) in the Republican period. He also served as a member of parliament from these parties. His political influence in the Republican period was also high before he became a member of parliament. In fact, Falih Rıfkı Atay, who was in the Turkist team that planned the new political line, states that they were influenced by Gökalp’s ideas in the journal named Küçük Mecmua, which he published in Diyarbakır: “We can say that Ziya Gökalp was managing us from Diyarbakır with that journal” (Korkmaz, 1994: 55-59, 241).

The names of Westerners, who were Gökalp's references of information about Turkishness, were listed above. When his own works are examined, it is understood that the basis in the fields of sociology and philosophy is the French philosopher Auguste Comte, the French sociologist Emile Durkheim, the German philosopher Wilhelm Friedrich Nietzsche, and the British philosopher Herbert Spencer, who adapted Darwin's evolutionist view to sociology, and the French philosopher Alfred Fouillée.

Writers who interpret Gökalp claim that he does not think based on race, based on his words such as “there are races in horses”. The situation that overlooked by those writers is that he made a distinction between “race based on anatomy and race based on lineage-language”, while he was not very popular with the first(?), he was very adhered to the second. This is evident in the following statements:

“In this way, we will understand ‘language family’ from the term ‘tribe’, and we will understand ‘types showing anatomical similarities’ from the word ‘race’. In that case, a tribe would mean a nation that lived as a “community speaking the same language” in a very old time and then dispersed. As for the race, it remains only the anatomical types of which members are not found collectively in one place and scattered among all nations. The 'race' that is honored to be affiliated with today is certainly not an anatomical type, but a tribe based on language and history. Is not the language community, that is, nationality, a branch of this group?” (Gökalp, 1974a: 67-68).

As it is known, racial theories position nations under race umbrellas according to their various characteristics; The names of various nations are counted within the body of each of the races such as Slavic, Latin, Semitic, Ural-Altaic. Gökalp does not find any of those categories appropriate for Turks. He is very extreme in his attitude. He expresses this extremism in his last book, “History of Turkish Civilization/Türk Medeniyeti Tarihi”: 

“Some authors consider Turks as 'Altaic' or 'Ural-Altaic' race because some of their institutions or words are common... Races are some examples of anatomy that are distinguished by their long or flat skull, their hair, beard and mustache being black or brown... While looking for the kinship of the Turks, kinship should not be sought through them, relying on some common institutions of the civilizational groups... Turks did not belong to the Altaic race or the Ural-Altaic race. The Turks had lived with them for a long time, either politically or in terms of civilization. The apparent similarities of the Turks with them are the results of this common life... Turks are a separate race. They are not separated from one of the other races… Ancient Turks cannot have origins because they are a separate race. Turks have been an independent race since prehistoric times. They are too numerous to constitute a separate race.”

Gökalp also produces a structuring theory for the Turks, which he claims to exist as itself, without any kinship with any group, since the hunting period:

“The Turkish family first took the form of ‘ancestry’, then ‘paternal family’, and finally ‘conjugal family’. There was ‘maternal lineage’ in the hunting age. The maternal lineage expanded. Later, the paternal lineage formed and merged with the others. These forms of this family are symmetrical with the period when the society was tribal. Both maternal and paternal lineages also split and expanded. This family example is also symmetrical with ‘Tudun’.

Later, lineages were also divided, giving rise to paternal families. Finally, the conjugal family came into being from the division of the paternal families. The conjugal family will take its full and true form with the new family law” (Gökalp, 1974b: 25-27, 324).

The understanding of the Turkish race based on anatomical difference is also seen in Gökalp, in contradiction to his explanations given above. Gökalp did not find a scientific approach to show Turks as members of the yellow race. The reason for this is that he describes the Turks as “whiter and more beautiful than the Aryans” (Gökalp, 1976a: 51). 

It is too many to cover the contradictions in subjects such as language, religion, culture and civilization, beyond a single article. Despite the racial explanations above, it is also possible to show Turkishness based on language and culture (Gökalp, 1973: 229; 1974a: 67). Aside from the interesting fact that he made such contradictions, it is even more interesting that those contradictions went unnoticed.

Focusing his studies on Turkishness on pre-Islamic Central Asian societies, Gökalp's evaluation of the Ottoman Empire in the name of Turkishness is completely negative. He said:

“The Ottoman example was thrown into the field of imperialism, which was harmful to the culture and life of the Turks, became cosmopolitan, saw class interests above national interests... All governing cosmopolitans constituted the ‘Ottoman class’, and the ruled Turks constituted the ‘Turkish class’. These two classes did not like each other. The Ottoman class saw itself as the dominant nation and looked at the Turks it ruled as a captive nation” (Gökalp, 1976a: 33). “The Turks were in great captivity” (Gökalp, 1976b: 56). “The distinguished people in the Ottoman Empire were traitors to the nation” (Gökalp, 1977c: 49).

Although there is Islam in Gökalp's understanding of religion, he took a stance in favor of reducing its influence in social life. For example, during the Second Constitutional Era, he ensured that Muslim women were not obliged to wear hijab and that the Shaykh al-Islām and the Minister of Foundations were removed from the government. He proposed to consider whether it is possible for the fiqh provisions of social life to be based on custom rather than a definitive rule. He argued that the adhan should be read in Turkish in the Turkish homeland and asked the Caliph not to resort to fatwas in making laws. He claimed that the law was separate from religion and that it was left to the state with the authority to prepare it according to custom (Erişirgil, 1951: 166-178, 208-209; Gökalp, 1981; 1976b: 11, 28, 33).

For a while, he defended the idea that “If the national ideals of the Turkists are Turkishness, then the ideal of the ummah is Islam” (Islamic Union)  (Gökalp, 1974a: 40). He abandoned that idea in 1923 and explained the reason as follows:

“Once upon a time, the ideal of Islamic Union was thought to ensure the independence of Muslim tribes and the liberation of Islamic countries from colonization. However, practical experience has shown that the Islamic union gave birth to reactionary movements such as theocracy and clericalism, and also because it is against the awakening of national ideals and national consciences in the Islamic world, it prevents the progress of Muslim tribes as well as hinders their independence. Because preventing the opening of the national conscience in the Islamic world means preventing the independence of Muslim nations. Theocracy and clericalism events are the biggest reasons for societies to lag behind and even to regress” (Gökalp, 1977b: 60).

In another article he wrote in the same year, he wrote, “The Ottoman ideal was destroyed and the Turkish ideal took its place. In that case, he suggested that all laws, all organizations, all institutions, in short, all values ​​need to change according to this new ideal? and suggested that a “genuine revolution” should be made that would make “radical” changes not only in form but also in values (Gökalp, 1977a: 54).

Since Gökalp's views have influenced almost all variants of Turkish nationalism, it will be necessary to return to him occasionally when examining others.

 

5.1.2. Fully Racist Turkist-Turanist View

The main leaders of this movement are Nihal Atsız (1905-1975), Nejdet Sançar (1910-1975) and Reha Oğuz Türkkan (1920-2010). Although they are followers of Gökalp, they are more extreme in their commitment to the concept of race.

After stating that a general definition of the nation has not been made, Atsız attempts to define the Turkish nation specifically and says:

“For Turks, nationality is first and foremost a matter of blood. In other words, the man who will say 'I am Turk' must be from the 'Turkish' generation. The Turkish generation is the Turks who are known and famous on history. A Saka living in an icy part of Siberia or a Kipchak living in Lithuania is a Turk. Saka's language may seem strange to us, Lithuanian Kipchak may have forgotten his native language and speaks in Lithuanian language. But they are Turk because their blood are from Turks. This is why we feel close to them. But even if a person of foreign blood does not know any language other than Turkish, he is not a Turk…There is no other way out to be a Turk than to have Turkish blood.”

Atsız, who uses the phrase "who has Turkish blood" when describing Turks, states that even those who consider themselves “Turk” may not have that blood. So, how will it be understood whether people who consider themselves as Turk are actually Turk or not? Atsız also shows the way to understand this: “Those who are like Turks are not Turks, even if they think that their father, a few generations later, is nothing but a Turk and they think they are Turks. Because being a Turk is not only a spiritual-moral, but also something material (physical, physiological, physiognomic and anthropological). From these statements of Atsız, we see that he gives priority to certain physical characteristics in order to be “true Turk”, and that he finds language only of secondary importance. However, Atsız defends a completely different view three pages ahead of the same book.

Articles were published in “some newspapers and journals” that the race to which the Turks belonged and the race to which the Mongols belonged were different. According to this claim, “Turks are not of the Yellow Mongolian race, but of the white Aryan race”. Atsız emphasizes language while objecting to this: “Today, groups of people are no longer classified according to colors, but according to languages.” In the lines after this sentence, he continues to write his racist-based ideas again (Atsız, 1992c: 140-147).

Atsız, who opposes the depiction of the Hittites and the Turks of Turkey as the ancestors of the Turks with a racist logic, gives the following interesting information: “It is doubtful that they are even brachycephalic. Because Köprülüzade Fuad told me that the two Hatti heads dug out of the ground were destroyed by an anthropology specialist because they were not brachycephalic” (Atsız, 1992b: 94).

Atsız sees all nations as enemies to be fought. The fact that tribes in Turkey such as Abkhaz, Albanian, Bosnian, Chechen, Circassian, Georgian, Kurdish, Laz, Lezgi and Pomak physically resemble Turks; not as a sign of kinship, but as a feature that increases the danger by saying, “The most dangerous of all snakes is the one with the same color as where it stands” (Atsız, 1992c: 140-143).

Nejdet Sançar also says that race is indispensable in the definition of Turks:

“The Turkish nation, like some nations today, did not come into being with the blend of various races. The Turkish nation is the piece of work of a single lineage. That lineage is also the Turkish lineage… Turkism, as the national ideal of the supreme Turkish lineage, is a sublime idea with a definite goal and boundaries. Turanism and Turkish racism are the two basic principles of this sublime idea.”

Sançar also addressed Gökalp's claim of an independent “Turkish race”, which has existed since prehistoric times without any kinship with any race, and said, “The Great God created the Turks as a whole, as a nation.” Sançar, who tried to prove that Atatürk was a Turkist-Turanist by taking the narrations from Esat Mahmut Bozkurt and Afet Inan, saying, “It is one of the national characteristics of Atatürk,” praises the efforts to determine whether people are Turkish by measuring their skulls during his time. In another article, he says that the enemies of Turkism are trying to “attribute Atatürk's work in the field of anthropology to Turkism by making up ‘racism’”. (Sançar, 1976: 17, 36, 45, 49, 186-192). However, both his characterization of those anthropological measurements as "national characteristics" and Atsız's use of the brachycephalic skull criterion given above show that the subject is not an attribution made by others. 

Reha Oğuz Türkkan also advocated racial superiority and used the slogan “Turkish race above all races”. In an article that started with “Turkish Mothers, We are Hopeful For You”; he admonished that “Turkish babies should know that they are from the race of wolves, while they are still in the cradle, unable to speak or knowing anything, and that they are from other races, an eagle and a Turk...”  (Türkkan, 1939).

Those in this group, who define ‘Turk’ with such classifications, even objected to each other's Turkishness. Reha Oğuz Türkkan, while parting ways with İsmet Rasin, who is a Turkist like himself, said that he was actually Albanian and said, “I could not practice racism and Turkism with a person whose lineage does not conform to our principles” (Türkkan, 1943: 115). Other Turkists in the same ecole said that Türkkan was not a Turk either. Atsız, who put a picture of Türkkan in the middle of his article for those who do not know him, wanted to show that Türkkan “does not have the Turkish type” via this picture.  According to Atsız, Türkkan is Armenian from his mother's side, and that's why Turkists call him “Armenian blood/Ermenikan”. According to another racist Rıza Nur, Türkkan is actually Kurdish and should be called “Reha Kürtkan/Reha Kurdish blood”.

The leaders of this view accepted that Islam had become the national religion of the Turks (Atsız, 1992d: 101; Sançar, 1976: 18-19). Although they did not comment much on matters of faith, the leader of the movement, Nihal Atsız, stated that he was a disbeliever and that he found Islam harmful for the Turks. According to him, Islam caused the Turks to fight each other. What he say in this issue:

“Is it because they defend Islam alone against many nations, or is it because they believe unconditionally in the Qur'an, the meaning of which they do not understand? The Turks were the only nation that accepted Islam with bigotry. Just as there is a solidarity between Muslim and Christian Arabs, it has not been seen that Albanians, who became Muslims long after the Turks, had a religious war with their Christian cognates. Bosnians, that is, Muslim Serbs or Croats, also lived without religious conflicts with Orthodox Serbs and Catholic Croats.

As for the Turks, the situation has changed: This custom of the Karakhanids, who started to fight the Buddhist Uyghurs as soon as they became Muslims in the tenth century, has continued throughout history. Not only that, but the cause of Sunnism and Shiism prevented both the waste of national energy and the formation of political Turkish unity by making the Turks fight as two armies for centuries.”

According to Atsız, the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) conveyed his thoughts in the form of religion in order to prevent the widespread immorality among Arabs. That is why such things should not be believed. He expresses his views as follows:

“The Qur'an is the instruction of Muhammad... The Prophet, seeing the moral depravity around him, sought solutions; there is no need to be a bigot and to believe in some fairy tales in order to see that he retreated to the mountains to take precautions and lived far away from people, and that he opposed the Arab idolatry by accepting the idea of "Monotheism", which came to the Jews from ancient Egypt, with his mind and emotion and to accept the beliefs that came from ancient Sumer and Egypt and passed on to other nations through the Jews as divine truth” (Atsız, 1992c: 493-511).

Because of such views, the members of this movement were described as “Deficient Turkists” by their friends who believed in Islam. Nejdet Sançar accused other Turkists, who call themselves deficient Turkists, of trickery. According to Sançar, their talk of religion is to get votes. Because religion is considered as coin of the realm in politics (Sançar, 1976: 48-49).

As a result, it is understood that the members of this movement were greatly influenced by racism and secularism, which are the paradigmal scales of “nationalist” ideologies in Western modernity.

 

5.1.3. Turkist-Turanist View Synthesized with Islam

In the 1970s, there were debates among nationalists such as “Are you Turkish or Are you Muslim?” as Islamic values came to the fore with the participation of religious families in the nationalist community. Thereupon, in the 1980s, some academicians and philosophers developed a view known as the “Turkish-Islamic Synthesis”, possibly in order to prevent a disintegration.

Prof. Dr. Süleyman Yalçın (born: 1926), one of the initiators of this view, introduced that synthesis as “Turkish tribes have been the representatives of a new and unique culture for centuries by adapting some pre-Islamic customs and traditions to Islamic life”. Yalçın counted Modu Chanyu, Bilge Qaghan and Mustafa Kemal, some Muslim Turkish religious scholars, philosophers, poets, and composers as Turkish statesmen in that culture, and he worked on the thesis that “the same blood nobility, the same emotion and belief continue by maintaining their fight”.

One of the biggest religious mistakes of Turkish-Islamic Synthesis is to distinguish between Turkish and non-Turkish even among religious scholars, which is present in Yalçın's words above. As a matter of fact, subsequently in the article, he said, “We have a sense of belonging to the same nation as a Turk from Bukhara, Azerbaijan and Crimea, with our roots in our first homeland in Central Asia, with the physical characteristics of our ancestry from there, and with our language and belief understanding” (Yalçın, 1988: 191-192). As you can see, the statements emphasize the “physical characters of the lineage from Central Asia” and have racist logic that Gökalp has committed and that Atsız et al. have defended with persistence and enthusiasm.

İbrahim Kafesoğlu (1914-1984), one of the pioneers of this movement, says in his previous writings that Turks are closer to Greek thought than Semitic; he showed that the reason for this was the material, measure, logic and utilitarianism in the character of Greek thought, while the belief in prophecy and miracles was the basis of Semitic thought (Kafesoğlu, 1977: 327). After adopting the “Turkish-Islamic Synthesis” view, he argued that Turks, like Süleyman Yalçın, were different from other Muslim societies in terms of religion and belief:

“In the history of sciences, due to the success of understanding and explaining the Greek idea and philosophical works properly, thereby opening the way for positive science in the field of Islamic and world thought; Fârâbî (death 950), who is known as the ‘Second Master’ after Aristotle, is the first Islamic philosopher to establish a philosophical system that can be called original with his divinity, ‘profusio’, ‘emanatio’ and ‘Faculte sanctifice’ theories, his remarkable views in the fields of nature and politics and he was also a ‘Turk’... The groundbreaking Muhammad Farabi (Al-Pharabius in the West) started with Ibn Sinâ (Avicenna in the West, death 1037), who is also a Turkish culture physician and philosopher from Transoxiana... The most important issue pioneered by Farabi, who was followed for centuries in the West, is to reconcile religion and philosophy (reason and faith). Although this extraordinary intellectual move (A. Guillaume R. Walzer) slowed down due to Ghazali's attacks on philosophy, (Kafesoğlu, 1985: 176-179).

Three names are highlighted with some features in these words of Kafesoğlu. These are Farabi who is a “Turk”, Avicenna who is from “Turkish culture” although he is not a Turk, and Ghazali, whose ethnic identity is not specified but neither Turk nor from this culture. The intellectual characteristics of these individuals, shown by Kafesoğlu, are that the first two, one of whom is Turkish and the other from “Turkish culture”, are the philosophers who understand and explain Greek philosophy best, and that they reconcile philosophy and religion (reason and faith); On the other hand, Ghazali, who is outside of Turkish culture, attacked philosophy and “decelerated this extraordinary intellectual move”.

As a paradigm factor, Durkheim’s view that every society has its own religion, some of the people in this movement, who seem to respect his opinion, show the Maturidi sect, which is a branch of Sunnism as “Turkish Islam”, some show the Yasawi sect and some show Alevism (Dayı, 2013a: 319-331). However, as with other Muslims, there are Sunnis, Shiites, Alevis and those from various sects among Turks.

 

5.2. Ataturkist-Kemalist View

The term “Ataturk nationalism” used by those who define themselves as “Ataturkist, Kemalist and Nationalist” is expressed in both the “First” and the 2nd article of the 1982 Constitution. However, in the life of Mustafa Kemal (1881-1938), during the National Pact, there were four different understandings of “nation”: religion, then, secular with a significant Gökalp-influenced, then, secular but wide-ranging unification, and finally, race-based.

Understanding in the National Pact is the Islamic nation understanding that has been going on for a long time. After the National Pact, his first choice was nationalism systematized by Ziya Gökalp. Gökalp's influence was stated above with the explanation of Falih Rıfkı Atay under the title of “Turkist-Turanist View”. After Gökalp's death, Mustafa Kemal personally studied the ‘theories of the nation in the West’ by working with Afet Inan.

It is understood that he got the first definition of nation in that period from Ernest Renan. Because both of them introduced the nation with elements such as having a common past, wanting unity in the future, unity in joy and worry. The difference is that while Renan did not see religion as a sufficient basis for the formation of the nation, Mustafa Kemal said that religion had no positive effect on the formation of the Turkish nation, even loosening national ties and numbing the national enthusiasm (Renan, 1946: 116; İnan, 1969: 21). This shows that Kemal Pasha was more influenced by secularism, which was the paradigm of the period, compared to Ernest Renan. However, in this definition, it refers to a unification-based nation by counting the different native language tribes in Anatolia by name. Apart from the fact that it does not accept the effect of religion in that combination, that view is suitable for explaining Turkey's social structure. During this period, he said, “The people of Turkey, who founded the Turkish Republic, are called the ‘Turkish nation’”. The thesis, quoted above, that Islam “numbing the national enthusiasm” was covered in an article by Gökalp in the semi-official newspaper Hâkimiyet-i Millîye while he was a member of parliament in the 2nd Parliament. In that article, Gökalp showed the Islamic union as “against the awakening of nationality and national consciences in the Islamic world” (Gökalp, 1977b). Gökalp's article belongs to year of 1923, and Mustafa Kemal's words above belong to year of 1929. In fact, that view dates back to ancient times. Léon Cahun (1841-1900), one of the writers who were influenced by the first Turkists, claimed that Islam had a negative effect on the Turks (Timur, 1986: 113-114).

Kemal Pasha abandoned the Renan-influenced unionist understanding of nation after a while, and switched to a race-based view with the “Sun Language” theory, which he named himself, based on Comparative Linguistics. The reason for this is a new theory born in the West. According to that theory, all languages in the world are derived from a single language. Kemal Pasha also claimed that the basic language was Turkish and tried to prove it. In fact, according to Ahmet Cevat Emre, a member of the Turkish Language Association at the time, Kemal Pasha, in his own words, said, “The Turkish race is our brachycephalic and chymotric (short skull, wavy hair) race… Raiders who came out of Turkestan for centuries… He also made a will to continue the race-based definition of the Turkish race, which also took the name Aryen (homo alpinus) (Emre, 1956: 91).

Thus, it is understood that Pasha abandoned the first three of his views on the nation and tried to impose it on the whole world in the first Turkish Language Congresses, and continued the Turkish assertive Sun Language theory, which spread civilization, which was the basis of race and language, which was the basis of almost all languages, until his death. The aim of the “Anthropological Studies” conducted by the Turkish Historical Society under the presidency of Prof. Dr. Afet Inan, with the “approval and encouragement” of the Pasha, was “to determine the racial characteristics of the Turkish nation”. Inan stated that in that study, which lasted from June 19, 1937 to December 31, 1937, they made anthropometric measurements, including head structure, on 64,000 people (İnan, 1947: 66-79).

Sadri Maksudi Arsal, one of the first Turkists, also made introductions about Turks with anatomical criteria by quoting the French anthropologist Jean Deniker (Arsal, 1972: 37).

After the death of Pasha, who abandoned his first three views on the nation, the Sun Language Theory with anthropometric measurements was also out of Turkey’s agenda. Even one of his colleagues, Falih Rıfkı Atay, said, “I never believed in this theory” (Atay, 1999: 158). Afterwards, it was “Turkism” systematized by Gökalp, which continued to be officially valid.

Successive reforms made during the period of Mustafa Kemal, the first president of Turkey who took the surname “Atatürk” in 1934; As can be seen in the statement of İsmet İnönü, the first prime minister of the period, given above under the headline of “From Islamic Civilization and Nationality to Western Civilization and Nationality", so that there is no difference with the Westerners. Western world view and lifestyle preference has already been a state policy that has progressed step by step since the Tulip Era. The same purpose was pursued in the regulations of the last periods of Sultan Mahmut II and the Tanzimat and Second Constitutional Era periods. However, in terms of the views and attitudes of the nationalist movements that this article deals with, some practices that were started in the Republican period and then abandoned are very important. For example, the Turkish adhan practice, which continued from 1932 to the Democrat Party government in 1950, is a nationalist intervention in religion, not a secular one. That practice, in Ziya Gökalp's poem titled “Vatan”, the most important ideologist of Turkism; It is inspired by the lines of “Adhan is read in Turkish language in the mosque of a country / ... The Qur’an is read in Turkish language in the school of a country / O Turkish son, that is your homeland” (Gökalp, 1976b: 11). This practice was of the nature of “reform in religion”.

Ziya Gökalp’s proposal that only custom is valid in worldly matters; Yusuf Akçura's opinion that Islam needs to be changed in order to serve the unification of Turks; Hamdullah Suphi Tanrıöver's talk of the necessity of a religious reform; A committee headed by Fuat Köprülü, one of the famous Turkists, worked towards reforms in worship, and Falih Rıfkı Atay, one of Mustafa Kemal's closest friends, said, "Kemalism is actually a great and fundamental religious reform... Kemalism abolished all the provisions of the verse, except the prayers. If Atatürk was alive, there would be no doubt that there would be a worship reform”, which shows that the prevailing logic of the nationalists at that time was to change the universal Islam for Turkey (Gökalp, 1981: 24-25; Akçura,1987: 31-35; Tanrıöver, 2000a: 129-133; Dayı, 2013a: 223; Atay, 1999: 61-62).

In addition to these, there have been attempts by some influential people to declare Kemal Pasha as “GodTurk” and to establish a positivist religion called “Kamalism”, which took place in the “Kemalist” literature as a manifestation of the dream of completely destroying Islam (Dayı, 2013a: 228-236; Aykut, 1936: 3, 36-38, 79).

 

5.3. Anatolianist Views

It is possible to divide the understanding of nation based on Anatolia into two groups, one is secular and the other is religious.

 

5.3.1. Secular Anatolianist View

Those who adopt this view defend the thesis of a “nation” formed by the combination of the Oghuz and ancient Anatolian peoples in terms of ancestry and culture. Its main representatives are Cevat Fehmi Kabaağaçlı (1890-1973), Sabahattin Eyüboğlu (1908-1973), Azra Erhat (1915-1982) and Niyazi Öktem (born 1944).

Members of this view do not care about religion and tribes in Central Asia, they pay more attention to the peoples and culture of Anatolia before the Turks. Cevat Fehmi Kabaağaçlı even expressed the names of the settlements as they were in the ancient period. Since he had been fishing for a while in Bodrum, which he loved so much, he used the pseudonym “The Fisherman of Halicarnassus” in his writings, referring to the ancient name of that town.

Sabahattin Eyüboğlu and Azra Erhat showed interest in ancient Anatolian and Greek works and made many translations from them.

Niyazi Öktem, like other members of this view, argues that the nomadic culture of the Oghuz people from Central Asia did not contribute much to the settled life in Anatolia. He especially finds it unnecessary for the Huns to be counted among the ancestors because they have no relations with Anatolia, and he asks, “Attila's army did not leave a single descent in Anatolia, why do we embrace Attila?” He has another question about ethnicity: He stated that according to Western historians, 300,000-400,000 Oghuz came to Anatolia, and according to Turkish historians such as Mükrimin Halil Yınanç and Osman Turan, between 600,000 and 1,000,000; On the other hand, he says that there were 4-5 million people living in Anatolia at that time, and he asks, “Since there was no massacre, where are they?” He counts individuals such as Thales, Anaximenes, Anaximander, Herodotus, Homer, Pir Sultan Abdal, Haji Bektash Veli as the ancestors of today's Anatolians and highlights the lineage blend (Öktem, 2007).

Although this view is correct in terms of the blend of lineages, it has remained alien to the evolution of Turkish society, as it does not take into account the Islamization in religion and Turkishization in the language in the historical process. For this reason, it did not attract much attention from the public and the state.

 

5.3.2. Religious Anatolianist View

While the religious Anatolianist view attaches great importance to Islam, it defends the thesis of a “Turkish nation” consisting only of Muslim Oghuzes in Anatolia and excludes those in Central Asia, just like the secular Anatolianists. The main representatives of this view are Nurettin Topçu (1909-1975), Mehmet Kaplan (1915-1986) and Remzi Oğuz Arık (1899-1954). Just like secular Anatolians, they treat the “nation” with a geographer's approach. As a matter of fact, one of Remzi Oğuz Arık's works is titled “From Geography to Homeland/Coğrafyadan Vatana”. Mehmet Kaplan also states that they took the “geography of Turkey as a positive basis” for their understanding of nationalism, the victory of 1071 Battle of Manzikert as the beginning of the national history, and the culture developed by the Turks in Anatolia as a national culture (Kaplan, 1970: 37-39).

Although they highly esteem Islam, they also have an anthropometric approach. Nurettin Topçu, who is the leader of the movement, sees the greatness of the sultans, whom he praises as “the great founders of our state like the Lightnings and Conquerors”, in their carrying an “Islamic spirit” (Topçu, 1978b: 31-33). He accepts the beginning of the nation as “the settlement of Oghuz tribes, separated from the ‘Turkish’ race, as Muslims in Anatolia”. He objects that Islamists see all Muslims as one nation based only on religious unity, as they do not see the influence of the land (homeland). Gökalp, on the other hand, gives extreme importance to language and objects to seeing all Turkish speaking tribes as one nation. He bases his objection on the examples that the British and Americans are separate nations despite speaking the same language, and that the Swiss are a nation, united by a legal bond, despite their different native languages. Topçu, who accepts that he is united with the ancient peoples of Anatolia, even with a few lines, says that because those peoples are farmers, their horizons of thought are wide and he sees this as a factor that deepens the Turkish intellectual life. Despite all this, he cannot help but resort to anthropometric criterias. He says that there are “material resemblances such as the shape of his head, the shape of his face, and the look of their eyes” among the members of this nation. According to him, the “pointed-faced, plier-like-nose, green-eyed individuals” seen next to the dark-faced Turks in Anatolia are also different in terms of nationality: He says, “Those who think that the deep will of the person who left me with their face and physiological characteristics does not leave me, cannot bear the responsibility of their past” (Topçu, 1978a: 39-51). With these features, it is seen that the Anatolian-based religious Turkists cannot fully embrace the people by making physiological distinctions among Muslims.

The first of the Anatolian movements spoke of a secular culture and based the nation on the ancient Anatolian peoples, who are considered the foundations of Western philosophy, rather than the Muslim people; and the other, since it includes anthropometric criteria, it is understood that both cannot escape the paradigm of Western modernity.

6. THE RACIAL ORIGIN COMPLEX OF WESTERN MODERNITY IN THE CONCEPT OF 'TURK'

The question of origin is a scientific mystery not only for nations but also for tribes. For example, even the tribe and origin of the Ottoman dynasty, which is one of the subjects that historians are most busy with, cannot be determined exactly. There is disagreement even among historians, three of whom are Turkists, such as Fuat Köprülü, Zeki Velidî Togan and Faruk Sümer. Köprülü argued that they were Kayi-Oghuz and Togan was Kayi-Mongol. Sümer saw that they were Kayi “doubtful but not impossible” (Taneri, 1978: 96-97). The reason why Sümer found him suspicious is that the first historian to say that the Ottomans were from the Kayi tribe was Yazici-oglu Ali. Sümer thinks that it was determined that that person made some additions with the feelings of the tribe, and that with those feelings, he may have connected the Ottomans to the Kayi tribe, which was shown as the most honorable of the Oghuzs. He says that the use of the Kayi stamp by the Ottomans could be to increase their prestige (Sümer, 1999: 188).  If the question of origin is so complex even for such an important dynasty, it is certain that it will not be possible for an ordinary dynasty.    

The situation of Yakut, Kyrgyz, Uzbek, Kipchak, Tatar and Oghuz people, whom Ziya Gokalp describes as “Turkish tribes”, is also quite complex even in the Turkist scientific community (Gökalp, 1976a: 22).

Yakuts: This tribe, whose past is not known much, did not participate in the known historical life of the Turks (Öztuna, 1977: 30).  Due to the shaman belief and language similarity, they are considered 'Turk'.

Kyrghyzs: Barthold, one of the foreign Turcologists, is of the opinion that the Kyrghyzs are not Turks (Barthold, 1975: 44). One of the Turkists, İbrahim Kafesoğlu also states that the Kyrgyz people are not shown to be of Turkish origin in the old sources (Kafesoğlu, 1977; 119).

Uzbeks: Faruk Sümer shows today's Uzbeks, East Turkistanis, Karakalpaks and Kazakhs as new tribes born from the Turkish-Mongolian blend (Sümer, 1999: 2, 161).

Kipchaks: Faruk Sümer says that although Kipchak, Karluk and Uyghurs were Turkish tribes in the past, they formed a new tribe by blending with them after the Mongol invasion (Sümer, 1999: 2, 161). İbrahim Kafesoğlu also mentions that some scientists do not see the Kipchaks as Turks (Kafesoğlu, 1977: 167).

Tatars: Barthold is of the opinion that the Tatars are probably not Turks (Barthold, 1975: 46). Faruk Sümer also stated that Tatars are not Turks and even Turks call Mongols Tatars (Sümer, 1999: 28).

Oghuz Turks: İbrahim Kafesoğlu is of the opinion that the name Oghuz is not an “ethnically” name of a tribe, but a name taken later by several tribes acting together (Kafesoğlu, 1977: 130). Faruk Sümer says that the word ‘Turk’ was not a nation name before, but a tribe or dynasty that established a state like Hun or Uyghur (their states: First Turkic Khaganate). According to Sümer, there was no kinship between these Turks and Oghuzes, and they had fought fierce battles with each other (Sümer, 1999: 23-24). Indeed, these wars are frequently mentioned in the Orkhon inscriptions. Especially the following sentences in the Bilge Qaghan monument confirm the thesis of Sümer by showing the distinction between Turks and Oghuz for that time:

“I went on an expedition to the Oghuzs. The first army was on a military expedition. The second army was at homeland. Three Oghuz armies raided. They came (at us) to subdue (us) by saying, ‘The (Turkish) infantry is corrupted’. Half their army went to loot our home, half their army came to fight. We were few, we were in bad shape… Because God gave strength, I speared and scattered the enemy there. Because God commanded, because I worked and earned, the Turkish people also won. If I had not led and worked so hard with my brother and had not been successful, the Turkish people would have died, they would have disappeared” (Tekin, 2010: 63).

In addition, Gökalp says that the Kazakhs are not a specific mass in their own right, but are formed by the merger of fugitives from each province (Gökalp, 1974b: 15).

As a result, Yakuts, who “never participated in the known periods of Turkish history”, just because of their linguistic similarity; On the other hand, the Kipchaks took the places conquered by the Seljuks in the Caucasus and Anatolia from their control with great massacres and gave them to Georgia (Albayrak, 2003: 104); Despite the fact that the Pechenegs from the Oghuz tribe of the Turks took the area from their control and gave it to Byzantium (Öztuna, 1977: 227), the Turks are accepted and adopted all of this.  

There are also explanations that the Sumerians, Etruscans and Indians are Turkish in origin, while the Lithuanians, Mongols, Manchus and Donghus are related nations. On the other hand, Muslim tribes such as Abkhaz, Albanian, Bosnian, Chechen, Circassian, Georgian, Kurdish, Laz, Pomak and Zaza, who have sacrificed with their lives and blood in every page of Turkey's history and every inch of its geography, are not even mentioned as relatives.  However, they are in almost every family with the adjectives of “mother, niece, bride, groom”.

It is seen that the sense of “belonging”, which is often emphasized for nationality, will not work unilaterally. As Amiran Kurtkan stated, the main thing is to have a sense of “belonging together” (Kurtkan, 1976: 4). Although there has been a commonality in this sense throughout history, the basis for the disappearance of this sense has been created with the understanding of the Western type of ‘nation’.

 

7. FIRST OBJECTION TO THE ARTIFICIALLY BUILT CONCEPT OF 'TURK'

The common feature of all the above-mentioned “Turkish” understandings is that they do not mention Muslim tribes such as Abkhaz, Albanian, Bosnian, Chechen, Circassian, Georgian, Kurdish, Laz, Pomak and Zaza within the Turkish nation, but marginalize them. In this respect, it is understood that the goal of these movements, which are common in not accepting the nation as it is, is nation-building, just like in Western modernity, that is, to create an imaginary homogeneous nation for the state. As a matter of fact, for the purpose of building a new nation, which was the Western paradigm of the period, the statement of Yusuf Akçura, one of the first Turkists, under the title of “From Islamic Civilization and Nationality to Western Civilization and Nationality”, “to bring about a Turkish political nationality based on race” is just an example.

Yahya Kemal Beyatlı is probably the first person to say that the concept of 'Turk' on the basis of one native language and race is wrong. Unfortunately, his warnings were ignored. The fact that he did not write a scholarly work dealing with the issue of nation in all its aspects may also play a role in this situation. He expressed his ideas on this subject in a few sentences in some of his books and in conversations transcribed by others.

Yahya Kemal, who said that there were mistakes in the Turkism movement “from the very beginning”, especially objected to the basis of race by saying:

“Especially, the fact that the theory of race is almost always wrong, always baseless, and always inflated has caused the local people in Anatolia, Rumelia and Istanbul to forget or even ignore their own past. For this reason, there is neither a proper history book nor a beautiful poem from the current of the Turkish family (Turkism)” (Başer, 2006: 65).

Yahya Kemal, like all -isms, described Pan-Turkism and Pan-Turanism as “Western originated and artificial”. His objection to the "Turkish nation" in the Turkist imagination was not only on the basis of race but also on the basis of its content and single native language. The Turkish nation is a nation that has been embodied since the Middle Ages with the combination of Turkish, Kurdish, Circassian, Albanian and Bosnian units, who belong to one religion and one sect and who consider Turkish a common language” (Beyatlı, 1970: 65). Only two mistakes are noticeable in this sentence. One of these is the emphasis on “a sect” and the other is the use of the term ‘Turk’ as the name of one of the elements that make up that nation, although the term ‘Turk’ is used for the name of the nation, which is a combination of Muslim tribes with different languages (it would have been necessary to say “Turkmen” for that element). The first of these mistakes must have arisen from the fact that one of the Ottoman's opponents was Iran, and the other from the effect of a widespread misuse by Turkist ideologues.  Otherwise, he openly stated that the entire nation, in its current form, is called Turk, regardless of ethnicity and native language. Otherwise, he openly stated that the entire nation is called 'Turk' in its current form, regardless of ethnicity and native language. In order to fully clarify this issue, it is necessary to take a look at the situations before and after the subject of Islam.

 

8. THE HISTORICAL-NATURAL CONCEPT OF ‘TURK’

Epics are important in terms of introducing the understanding when they were formed. It is seen in the oldest known version of the Oghuz Khagan Epic that three children, each from a father and two different mothers, are only considered a beginning for the Oghuz tribe. The beginning of the formation of the tribes other than the Oghuz is that Oguz Khagan gave names to some people. These individuals are random soldiers who have had any success in the army. In addition, although they were not affiliated with Oguz Khagan at the beginning, they were included in the union voluntarily or by force, later on (Ergin, 1970).

The version of the same epic in the Islamic period is also unrelated to the logic of unity of origin. In the “History of the Oghuzs and Turks” section of Rashid al-Din Hamadani's (1245-1318) Persian work called “Câmi'üt Tevârih”, which is a world history, the transition to “One Allah” belief is taken for the beginning of Turkish history. As reported by this historian; since his birth, Oguz Khagan as he grew up called his mother and all his acquaintances, from his father to the women he married, to faith and worship in Allah, and parted ways with those who did not follow these messages. Other remarkable points in the narratives are that after Oguz became Khagan, he did not accommodate those who did not accept this belief, even if they were his own descendants, and drove them out of the country. Another issue is that when he came to “Kurdistan”, representatives from the people of Diyarbakir, Erbil, Mosul and Baghdad came to him and became a “province” (Togan, 1972). In this narrative, it is understood that the Kurds and different tribes united with the Oghuzes and became a nation on the basis of Islam.

Of course, it is necessary to examine this issue with historical documents. As it is known, the term “Turk”, which may suggest that it could be the name of a nation, was first used in Orkhon inscriptions erected in the First Turkic Khaganate in 730 AD. However, it is not clear whether the Turkish name on those monuments is the name of a dynasty, a tribe, or a nation to cover the whole. Because, on the eastern front of the Kul Tigin monument, expressions such as “When the blue sky above and the rain ground below were made, human beings were made between the two. My ancestors Bumin Qaghan and Istämi Qaghan sat on human beings. they held and arranged the Turkish province and customs by sitting” (Tekin, 2010: 25) refer to moral-based socio-political regulations that are far from race. As a matter of fact, Prof. Dr. Faruk Sümer, who has a Turkist view, says that the term Turk was originally not a nation name, but a clan or dynasty name (Sümer, 1999: 23-24). Prof. Dr. İbrahim Kafesoğlu, who has a Turkist view, also, considering that the word ‘Turk’ was used as a state name for the first time by the First Turkic Khaganate; He says that this name is not an “ethnic” name specific to a particular community, but begins as a political name, and that the term “Turkish nation” refers only to the masses under the rule of the Khan. Kafesoğlu talks about two types of social structures called “Tribe” and “Culture” for the first formation of Turkishness while emphasizing the lineage and language bond for tribe, he mentions that there is no such bond in the culture formed by mergers (Kafesoğlu, 1977: 27, 132, 204). The linguist Prof. Dr. Ahmet Caferoglu, who is also of the Turkist view, also considers the structures of “Tribü” for the same periods, “Süyök” and “Klan”, as well as their combination, and notes that the languages of these social groups that united and formed Turkishness are different. Caferoğlu says that even the Chepni and Turkish nomads in Anatolia, one of the largest branches of the Oghuzs, have their own separate languages (Caferoğlu, 1984: 61).

As seen in the three examples above, it can be seen even between the lines of Turkist academicians that the concept of Turk is not based on ancestry and native language. However, the fact that the same people still use terms such as “Turkish race, Turkish descent, Turkish origin” and talk about “single native language” (Kafesoğlu, 1977: 27-33; 1985: 176, 179, 190; Sümer, 1999: 25, 126, 161) must be due to an ideological compulsion. Because to say that the Turkish nation is not racially based and has multiple native languages contradicts the thesis of Ziya Gökalp, who systematized Turkism according to Western norms. According to Gökalp, the Turkish nation is an independent race, descended from a Turkish family that is not related to any race, and is whiter than the Aryans (Gökalp, 1974b: 25-27, 324; 1976a: 51). His view of language is as follows: “Turan has a province, it has only one language, who says there is another language has a different goal” (Gökalp, 1976b: 18). However, it is an undeniable fact that there are many native languages in every part of the geography that Gökalp calls “Turan”, and also in Turkey, of course.

Even Abu al-Ghazi Bahadur, who, because he is of Mongolian origin, constructed a genealogy by showing Turks an imaginary person named Mongol Khan from their 'ancestor'; He says that the term 'Turk' as the name of the nation is used to refer to the association of Oghuz people who came to Transoxiana for the first time and people from other tribes who came to the same region. According to Khan, Tajiks used the term 'Turk' for the first time as the name of the nation (Ebülgazi, n.d.: 57-58). Barthold also emphasizes that it was used by the Arabs for the first time in the same period and in the same region, while attributing this name to a wider social base; He states that the recently known meaning of the word ‘Turk’ must be the work of Muslim tribes (Barthold, 1975: 41). Faruk Sümer also states that the word "Turk" did not have such a broad meaning "among Turkish-speaking cultures" in the early days, and that the Turks learned this broad meaning of the name Turk from the tribes of the Near East (Sümer, 1999: 2).

As a result, it is understood that the term “Turk”, the content of which is unknown but quite old, started to be collected for the first time in Transoxiana as the name of the nation, and was given in the Middle East to the masses who would later establish the states of Seljuk, Aq Qoyunlu, Qara Qoyunlu, Ayyubid, Ottoman and Republic of Turkey. The social unity that was formed at that time consisted mainly of Oghuzes (Turkmen), Caucasian tribes and Kurds. Later, when they moved to Rumelia, Albanians, Bosnians and Pomaks were added to the same structure. All Turkish conquests and states in the area extending from the vicinity of the Caspian Sea to the interior of Europe, including today's Republic of Turkey, are the work of this combination. Especially when the mergers in Transoxiana are taken into account, it is understood that the nation first started to form and then the state was established. The concept of Turk, as the name of a nation, embraced the tribes in Central Asia with the principles of common language and common religion (Islam).

Bernard Lewis also described the unification in Islam with a common language despite different languages:

“Arabic, Persian, and Turkish defined the cultural identity of the major regions of Middle Eastern Islam and provided a significant moral and cultural unity to their educated classes. While the general population spoke many local languages and dialects, the intellectuals had a common literary language, a common classical tradition, and through these, common customs, codes of conduct and respect” (Lewis, n.d.: 142).

Of course, the common classical tradition, customs, code of conduct and respect were also spread to the common people through the intellectuals. Since the people were already living together, they were automatically integrated with the customs and traditions they formed by being influenced by each other, and having blood ties through marriages. The name of this integration is nationalization. It was stated above under the heading “The Concept of Nation in Islamic Civilization” that the Arabic, Persian and Turkish languages cited by Lewis were also called "three languages" in the old texts because of these characteristics.

During the period from the Great Seljuks to the rule of the Turkist Union and Progress in the Ottoman Empire, the tribal identities of the Muslims were not seen as a separation. Persons belonging to different tribes, just as in the examples of Bilal ibn Rabah and Salman the Persian in the time of the Prophet (pbuh); In the Ottoman Empire, they were mentioned with their tribal identities, as in the examples of Abaza Mehmed Pasha, Bosnian Ahmet Pasha, Çerkes Mehmed Pasha, Gürcü Halil Rifat Pasha, Professor Tacuddin Kurdi. This situation enabled each of the Muslim tribes in the social structure to adopt the state and live together as a single nation. As can be seen in the example of Sharafkhan below, they also had the consciousness of being a “Turk” with the understanding of that time.

 

9. THOSE WHO ARE MARGINALIZED BY ARTIFICIAL CONCEPT OF ‘TURK’

It has been explained above that the term “Turk” was used for the first time as a nation name for the unity of Muslim tribes in the Transoxiana region with different ethnic origins and different languages, but using Turkish as a common language. A brief look at the roles of these tribes in Turkish history will reveal what a great trust and solidarity arose between them and the Oghuz (Turkmen) they united with. It should be useful to draw a little more attention to the Kurds in history, since the terrorist organization, which is waging an armed struggle in Turkey today in a “separatist” direction, emerged from within the Kurds.

The unity of the Kurds and the Oghuzs dates back to the foundation years of the Great Seljuk Empire. According to the information given by Minorsky, Kurd Ahmet bin al-Zahhak killed a Byzantine general walking towards the region in 1031 and he stopped the advance. After the establishment of the state under the rule of Tughril in 1040, there were also massive participations. Minorsky describes Kurdish participation by counting tribal names; It is reported that a group of Kurds participated in Sultan Malik-Shah's Syria campaign, Malik-Shah allocated a region to the Kurds because of their loyalty to the state, and Sancar, one of the later sultans, called that region “Kurdistan” (Minorsky, 1988).

Orhan Türkdoğan also emphasizes that there was a significant number of Kurds in the army of Sultan Alp Arslan during his campaign to Merv and Harzem in the winter of 1065-1066. At that time, even most of the Oghuzs, who were the own tribe of the Seljuk rulers, were not subject to the state. Türkdoğan says that those who settled down from the Oghuzes were subject to the state, while those who were nomadic were rebels and adhered to their own yabghu (Türkdoğan, n.d.: 443). According to the information Zeki Velidi Togan mostly cites from one of the Seljuk historians, Imad al-Katib, one of the Kurdish chiefs, Vahsudan bin Mohammed, was affiliated with Tughril Bey, the founder of the Seljuk State. One of his grandchildren, Emir Ahmedil, was in the court of Sultan Mohammed, the son of Sultan Malik-Shah. After Ahmedil was killed by the Batiniyyas in 1116, his son Aksungur became the governor of Meraga. Aksungur, who served in some high positions in the state, was successful in suppressing the rebellions and ensuring the unity of the state. In fact, he and some Kurdish emirs carried out the administration of a large part of the state in the capacity of Atabeg in times of crisis. Just like his father, he was killed by the Batiniyyas in 1133. Then his son Nusrat al-Din Arslan Aba Has Bey served Sultan Mesud (Togan, 1940).  

In the Oguznama of Rashid al-Din Hamadani's history, which was written in the 13th-14th century, it is stated that the Kurdish chiefs came and became a province by being attached to Oghuz Khagan. Sharafkhan Bidlisi (Kurd), who became the Emir of Bitlis in the 16th century, also showed the Kurds in the entourage of Oghuz Khagan in his work called Sharafnama. He even said that Oguz Khagan sent a delegation to the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh), and that delegation was led by a Kurdish chief named Bugduz (Şeref Han, 1990: 24). According to the Seljuknama written in the 16th century, ten thousand Kurdish soldiers participated in the Manzikert campaign (Ahmed bin Mahmud, 1977: 94). 

Also, in Selçukname, it is explained that Ahsartan, one of the Caucasian lords, came and joined to Alp Arslan and became a Muslim (Ahmed bin Mahmud, 1977: 76-77). Circassians in the Caucasus were an elite society that trained and educated the Golden Horde (Turkish) princes (Bala, 1988). Arabs called Mamluk Circassians and Ayyubid Kurds “Oghuz” (Sümer, 1999: 160, 403). Circassian Mamluks in Egypt, although their language is Circassian and their social base is Arab, gave importance to Turkish, wrote Turkish poems, and respected Turkish scholars (Lewis, n.d.: 79, 83). The French writer Claude Farrére mentioned the Ottoman soldier who fought in Siege of Plevna by consuming four horses in one day, as a Turk of Circassian race (Grigoriantz, n.d.: 114). Georgian Ferah Ali Pasha made many of the Chechen, Circassian, Nogai etc. Caucasian tribes become Muslims and adhered to the Ottomans by making himself popular with his piety, and fought with them against the Russians (Ahmed Cevdet Paşa, 1972: C. 3. 239-324).    

Albanians, Bosnians and Pomaks, who joined the Ottoman Empire during the transition to Rumelia, also provided very important services as statesmen, scientists and soldiers. Muslim Albanians have accepted being Turkish and Muslim as synonymous enough to swear, “If I lie, I will not be fortunate to be a Turk” (Yalçınkaya, 26.05.2009). The Bosnians, who served as front-line guards for centuries during the Ottoman period, defined themselves as “Turchin” (Turk) until the 1990s (Babuna, 2000: 93). Ahmad Pasha al-Jazzar, who defended the Acre fortress in Egypt against Napoleon, was also Bosnian, as were many Akinji lords and troops (Ahmed Cevdet Paşa, 1972: C. 1. 410). The Pomaks, who did not accept the withdrawal of the Ottoman soldiers from their regions as a result of the Treaty of San Stefano with the Russians, continued to fight against the Russians and gave many martyrs (Dede, 1978: 15-43).

From the letters and telegrams of Ahmed Muhtar Pasha and the Commander of the Eleskirt Party Tatlıoğlu Ferik Mehmet, it is understood that the Chechen, Circassian, Kumyk, Kurdish and Lezgins tribes in Anatolia formed troops and fought under the command of the state (Gazi Ahmet Muhtar Paşa, 1985: C. 1: 159; C. 2: 43). The resistance of the Laz against the enemy in the World War I on Of and Çaykara, is also epic (Albayrak, 2004: 55).

Early Ottoman historians such as Oruç Bey, Aşıkpaşazade and İbn Kemal used the terms Ottoman-Turkish-Muslim synonymously. The concept of ‘Turk’ has been used in the same sense by the Westerners. For example, for centuries, both Arabs and Europeans called the masses “Ottoman” as “Turks”. An English author unintentionally translated all the “Ottoman” words in an article by Namık Kemal (1840-1888) into English as “Turk” (Berkes, 1965: 168). 

World-famous Turkish historian Kemal Karpat also explains that during the Ottoman period, Muslim people of different ethnic origins and different mother tongues in Anatolia and Rumelia united in the Turkish identity by using Turkish as a common language and he draws attention to the fact that nationalization is not embodied by race, but by culture, history, political experience and living together in the Ottoman geography (Karpat, 2010: 15). 

All these shows how strong it is that Muslim tribes of different ethnic origins and different native languages in Anatolia and Rumelia united and became a nation under the name “Turk”. Even the Mongol attacks, the Crusades, the World War I and the occupation of the country could not break this unity. As a result, it is understood that the Western Turks, some of which are made up of the social groups mentioned above, are more strongly nationalized than the Eastern Turks, which are composed of groups such as Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Uzbek, and Uyghur. In Turkey, especially official sociology and official history; Various understandings of Turkishness prepared according to the norms of Western modernity and the new nation building attempt designed according to them have marginalized the Muslim tribes, many of whom are mentioned above. Despite this, a strong sense of unity still exists among the people.  

 

10. CONCLUSION

Mass migrations that have dispersed and re-blended societies all over the world, lasting for centuries and being permanent, already invalidate the racist view of the unity of origin. Masses of different ethnicities blended with each other were integrated with each other long before the transition to “modern” periods. That integration includes religion as well as all kinds of social ties. The secular nation theories produced in Western modernity have artificially disrupted that natural integration in almost all aspects.

Paul Kennedy shows secularism as a means of national unification against religious disintegration. A page after defending this thesis, he states that there were many wars in the secular nation-building process in Europe and that the British hate the Spanish, the Swedes hate the Danes, the Dutch hate the Habsburgs (Kennedy, 1990: 83-84). Even that explanation alone reveals that the understanding of the nation in terms of ethnicity breeds more hostilities. As a matter of fact, later on, the desire for separation of different ethnic groups within many “nation-states”, namely “nations” according to the modern understanding, began. In this regard, Kennedy must be right in terms of the fact that Western nations are on a secular basis.

As Hugh Seton-Watson, quoted above under the title of “The Concept of Nation in Western Modernity”, said, the nation cannot be defined. The reason for this is the approach that Scientificity should be ‘generally accepted’. However, each nation has different structural characteristics. For the definition of nation, this situation does not change, even if only the secular categories of the historical existence area are addressed. In other words, it is necessary to identify special categories for each nation (Mengüşoğlu, 2000: 197-210).

Especially since the formation of the Turkish nation, as explained under the title of “Theoretical Inconsistencies of Western Modernity in the Concept of ‘Turk’”, the historical existence area developed with a complete expedition experienced with changes in both material and spiritual aspects, it can never be fit into the generally accepted assertive definitions. Even examining a few of the many categories in that field does not fit the race-based nation.

Time category: When the structuring called 'nation' is looked at from the point of view of history, the togetherness in the past is evaluated; within this respect, any kind of draw in the distant or recent past has almost the same importance. For example, an ancient union with a Kazakh or Kyrgyz has the same meaning of a recent union with a Circassian, Kurdish, etc. However, Kazakh and Kyrgyz are given more importance with the search for “language and origin” of Western modernity. However, when the time category in the field of historical existence is evaluated together with its past, present and future, it is concluded that the opposite situation is more important, that is, togetherness with Circassians, Kurds, etc.

Mutual Influence Category: Tribes with different ethnic origins and different languages have formed a common culture by being influenced by each other due to the fact that they have lived together for centuries.

Space Category: The same geography was conquered by the mentioned tribes and a “homeland” was established together. These peoples, being intertwined through intense marriages, have to live together in the same homeland, now and tomorrow.

As it is seen, the categories in line with the secular/laicistic logic of modernity are insufficient to explain the Turkish nationalization described above. Moreover, as explained throughout this article, the most important factor in this nationalization is Islam. As even the most secular thinkers cannot object, the most important value in the whole world throughout the Middle Ages has been religion. Moreover, the consciousness of the nation is much older in the Islamic society than in the West, has an Islamic content, as explained in this article under the title of “The Concept of Nation in Islamic Civilization”, and Turkish is one of the three languages used as a common language in the Islamic world.

After all, as Cemil Meriç said: “It was Islam that brought all the races of this country into one race, one human, one heart” (Meriç, 1992: 179). In that case, the field of existence of the Western nations in terms of religion is secularism, and the realm of existence of the Turkish nation is Islam (Dayı, 2013b: 432-433). That value is still strong in the eyes of the people. In a survey conducted by the A&G research company in 2010, the answer to the question 'what keeps you together' is also ‘religion’ (Düzel, 26.01.2010). This means that Yahya Kemal Beyatlı seems right in his words expressing his objection to artificial ‘Turk’ constructivism, saying that the Turkish state cannot live in full health unless it is reshaped with the essence of the original Muslim layer (Beyatlı, 1970: 57).

The secular understanding of the nation based on language and ancestry, which was inculcated by the West and eventually accepted, made the intellectuals at least forget about this area of existence of the Turk. Cemil Meriç explains this situation as follows: “Europe has been following the same aim since the Tanzimat: Killing the sacred of Turkish intellectuals. Sacred, that is, Islam... Turning its eternal enemy into an ‘ethnic’ dust heap” (Meriç, 1992: 174). Earlier in this article, it was reported from their own writings that Turkist leaders also learned Turkish identity from the Westerners. After all, as Etienne Copeaux said, “Turkish historiography and linguistics are the children of Western orientalism and they are products of it” (Copeaux, 2000: 25).

Descartes says that excessive interest in distant geographies and ancient histories will leave people ignorant of their own era and homeland (Descartes, 1994: 11). The race and native language-based nation paradigm seen in the nation definitions of Western modernity has unfortunately alienated the Turkish intellectuals from Anatolia and Rumelia by concentrating them centuries ago in Central Asia.

In this case, it should be appropriate for the state to abandon the creation of its own dream nation and accept the existing nation with all its differences, that is, to switch from the understanding of the nation of the state to the understanding of the state of the nation. What is worth wishing for on that path is the restoration of the original meaning of the concept of 'Turk' in history. This may be difficult to accept. But at least, it seems easy to understand that it is a single nation with the extensions of different ethnic origins and different native language tribes outside the borders of the country. Because apart from the history to be told correctly, it is enough for everyone to be in front of their current friends, neighbors and especially relatives.

 

REFERENCES

Ağaoğlu, A. (1972). Üç Medeniyet. İstanbul: Devlet Kitapları.

Ahmed bin Mahmud. (1977). Selçuk-Name I. (Prepared by) Erdoğan Merçil. İstanbul: Tercüman Yayınları.1001 Temel Eser.

Ahmed Cevdet Paşa. (1972). Tarih-i Cevdet Cilt 1, 3. İstanbul: Üçdal Neşriyat.

Akçura, Y. (1987). Üç Tarz-ı Siyaset. Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Yayınları.

Albayrak, H. (2003). Tarih Boyunca Doğu Karadeniz’de Etnik Yapılanmalar ve Pontus. İstanbul: Babıâli Kitaplığı. 

Albayrak, H. (2004). 1. Dünya Savaşında Doğu Karadeniz Muharebesi ve Of Direnişi. İstanbul: Yesevi Yayıncılık.

Anderson, B. (1995).   Hayali Cemaatler - Milliyetçiliğin Kökenleri ve Yayılması. Translated by İskender Savaşır. İstanbul: Metis Yayınları.

Arsal, S. M. (1972). Milliyet Duygusunun Sosyolojik Esasları. İstanbul: Ötüken Yayınevi.

Atay, F. R. (1999). Çankaya IV. İstanbul. A gift to the readers of Cumhuriyet newspaper

Ateş, T. (1997). Siyasal Tarih. İstanbul: Der Yayınları.

Atsız, N. (1992a). İçimizdeki Şeytan – En Sinsi Tehlike - Hesap Böyle Verilir. İstanbul: Baysan Basım ve Yayın Sanayi A. Ş.

Atsız, N. (1992b). Makaleler I. İstanbul: Baysan Basım ve Yayın Sanayi A.Ş.

Atsız, N. (1992c). Makaleler III. İstanbul: Baysan Basım ve Yayın Sanayi A.Ş.

Atsız, N. (1992d). Türk Ülküsü. İstanbul: Baysan Basım ve Yayın Sanayi A.Ş.

Aykut, Ş. (1936). Kamâlizm. İstanbul: Muallim Ahmet Halit Kitap Evi Yayınları.

Babuna, A. (2000). Bir Ulusun Doğuşu Geçmişten Günümüze Boşnaklar. Translated by Hayati Torun. İstanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları.

Bala, M. (1988). “Çerkesler.” İslam Ansiklopedisi Cilt 3. İstanbul: Millî Eğitim Basımevi.

Baron, S. W. (2007). Modern Nationalism and Religion. Translated by Mehmet Özay, İstanbul: Açılım Kitap.

Barthold, W. (1975). Orta Asya Türk Tarihi Hakkında Dersler. Ankara: Kültür Bakanlığı Yayınları.

Başer, S. (2006). Yahya Kemal’de Türk Müslümanlığı. Sakarya: Sakarya Valiliği Kültür Yayınları.

Berkes, N. (1965). Batıcılık, Ulusçuluk ve Toplumsal Devrimler. İstanbul: Yön Yayınları,

Beyatlı, Y.K. (1970). Eğil Dağlar. İstanbul: Devlet Kitapları.

Caferoğlu, A. (1984). Türk Dili Tarihi. İstanbul: Enderun Kitabevi.

Copeaux, E. (2000). From Turkish History Thesis to Turkish-Islamic Synthesis in History Textbooks (1931–1993). Translated by Ali Berktay. İstanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları.

Dayı, H. (2013a). Batı’dan İthal Milliyetçiliğin Dinle Kavgası, İstanbul: Akis Kitap Yayınları.

Dayı, H. (2013b). Batı’dan İthal Milliyetçilik ve Ötekileştirdikleri. İstanbul; Akis Kitap Yayınları.

Dede, A. (1978). Balkanlarda Türk İstiklal Hareketleri. İstanbul: Türk Dünyası Yayınları.

Descartes, R. (1994). Metot Üzerine Konuşma. Translated by K. Tahir Sel. İstanbul: Sosyal Yayınlar.

Devellioğlu, F. (1978). Osmanlıca-Türkçe Ansiklopedik Lûgat. Ankara:  Doğuş Ltd. Şti. Matbaası.

Dursun, D. (2006). Siyaset Bilimi. İstanbul: Beta Basım Yayım

Düzel, N. (26.01.2010). “Pazartesi Konuşmaları.” İstanbul: Taraf gazetesi.

Ebülgazi Bahadır Han. (n.d.). Şecere-i Terakime (Türklerin Soy Kütüğü). Translated by Muharrem Ergin, İstanbul: Tercüman 1001 Temel Eser Yayınları.

Emre, A. C. (1956). Atatürk’ün Tarih Tezi ve İnkılâp Hedefi. İstanbul:  Ekin Basımevi.

Enver Paşa. (1921). “Dikkat Edelim Aldanmayalım.” Şu İngilizler Canımı Çok Sıkıyor. (Compiled by) Murat Çulcu. vd. (2009). İstanbul: Destek Yayınları. 132.   

Ergin, M. (1970).  Oğuz Kağan Destanı. İstanbul: Devlet Kitapları.

Erişirgil, M. E. (1951). Bir Fikir Adamının Romanı: Ziya Gökalp. İstanbul: İnkılâp Kitabevi.

Eröz, M. (1977). Türk Kültürü Araştırmaları.  İstanbul: Kutluğ Yayınları.

Gazi Ahmet Muhtar Paşa. (1985). Anadolu’da Rus Muharebesi 1876–1877. İstanbul: Petek Yayınları.

Gellner, E. (1992). Nations and Nationalism. Translated by Büşra Ersanlı Behar ve Günay Göksu Özdoğan. İstanbul: İnsan Yayınları.

Gökalp, Z. (1973). Terbiyenin Sosyal ve Kültürel Temelleri. (Prepared by) Rıza Kardaş. İstanbul: Başbakanlık Kültür Müsteşarlığı 1000 Temel Eser Yayınları.

Gökalp, Z. (1974a). Türkleşmek– İslamlaşmak– Muasırlaşmak. İstanbul: Türk Kültür Yayını.

Gökalp, Z. (1974b). Türk Medeniyeti Tarihi. İstanbul: Türk Kültür Yayını.

Gökalp, Z. (1976a). Türkçülüğün Esasları. İstanbul: Kültür Bakanlığı Yayınları.

Gökalp, Z. (1976b). Yeni Hayat-Doğru Yol. Ankara: Kültür Bakanlığı Yayınları.

Gökalp, Z. (1977a). “Derunî Hayat.” Ziya Gökalp Makaleler IV. (Prepared by) Ferit Ragıp Tuncor. Ankara: Kültür Bakanlığı Yayınları. 50-54.

Gökalp, Z. (1977b). “Millî Vicdanı Kuvvetlendirmek.” Ziya Gökalp Makaleler IV. (Prepared by) Ferit Ragıp Tuncor. Ankara: Kültür Bakanlığı Yayınları. 54-60.

Gökalp, Z. (1977c). “Türk Harsı ve Osmanlı Medeniyeti.”  Ziya Gökalp Makaleler IV. (Prepared by) Ferit Ragıp Tuncor. Ankara: Kültür Bakanlığı Yayınları. 44-50.

Gökalp, Z. (1981). “İçtima-î Usul-ü Fıkh.” Makaleler VIII. (Prepared by) Ferit Ragıp Tuncor. Ankara: Kültür Bakanlığı Yayınları. 24-25.

Grigoriantz, A. (n.d.). Kafkasya Halkları. Translated by Doğan Yurdakul, İstanbul: Yeni Binyıl Yayınları.

Güvenç, B. (1996). İnsan ve Kültür. İstanbul: Remzi Kitabevi.

Hobsbawm, E. J. (1995). Nations and Nationalism from 1780 to the Present, “Program, Myth, and Reality.” Translated by Osman Akınhay. İstanbul: Ayrıntı Yayınları.

İnan, A. (1947). Türkiye Halkının Antropolojik Karakterleri ve Türkiye Tarihi. Ankara:Türk Tarih Kurumu Yayınları.  

İnan, A. (1969). Medenî Bilgiler ve M. Kemal Atatürk’ten El Yazıları, Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Yayınları.

İnönü, İ. (1987). Hatıralar 2. Ankara:  Bilgi Yayınevi.

Jaffrelot, C. (1998). “Some Nation Theories.” Nations and Nationalisms. (Compiled by) Jean Leca. Translated by Siren İdemen. İstanbul: Metis Yayınları. 54.

Kafesoğlu, İ. (1977). Türk Milli Kültürü. Ankara: Türk Kültürünü Araştırma Enstitüsü Yayınları.

Kafesoğlu, İ. (1985). Türk-İslam Sentezi. İstanbul: Aydınlar Ocağı Yayını. 

Kaplan, M. (1970). Nesillerin Ruhu. İstanbul: Hareket Yayınları.

Karagöz, İ. (2010). “Millet”. Dinî Kavramlar Sözlüğü. (Prepared by) İsmail Karagöz. Ankara: Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı Yayınları.

Karal, E. Z. (1947). Osmanlı Tarihi Cilt 5. Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Yayını.

Karpat, H. K. (2010). Elites and Religion from the Ottomans to the Present. Translated by Güneş Ayas. İstanbul: TİMAŞ Yayınları.

Kennedy, P. (1990). The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. Translated by Birtane Karanakçı. Ankara: Türkiye İş Bankası Kültür Yayınları.

Korkmaz, A. (1994). Ziya Gökalp Aksiyonu Meşrutiyet ve Cumhuriyet Üzerindeki Tesirleri. İstanbul: Millî Eğitim Bakanlığı Yayınları.

Kral Abdullah.  (2009). Why We Revolted Against the Ottomans. Translated by Halit Özkan. İstanbul: Klasik Yayınları.

Kur’an-ı Kerim. 

Kurtkan, A. (1976).Genel Sosyoloji. İstanbul: İstanbul Üniversitesi İktisat Fakültesi Yayınları.

Lewis, B. (n.d.). Middle East: Translated by Mehmet Harmancı. İstanbul: Yeni Binyıl Yayınları.

Mengüşoğlu, T. (2000). Felsefeye Giriş. İstanbul: Remzi Kitabevi.

Meriç, C. (1992). Bu Ülke. (Prepared by) Mahmut Ali Meriç. İstanbul: İletişim Yayınları,

Milliyet blog; “Dünyada Anadil ve Resmî Dil Uygulamaları”  http://blog.milliyet.com.tr/dunyada-anadil-ve-resmi-dil-uygulamalari/Blog/?BlogNo=268861, (Last Accessed: 10.12.2013).

Mınorsky, V. (1988). “Kürtler.” İslam Ansiklopedisi Cilt 6. İstanbul: Milli Eğitim Basımevi.

Öke, M. K. (1989). İngiliz Ajanı Binbaşı E. W. C. Noel’in “Kürdistan Misyonu (1919).” İstanbul: Boğaziçi Yayınları.

 (2007). “Millet Öğesinin Dayanması Gereken Bilimsel, Tarihsel Veriler ve Analizi.” II. Beyin Fırtınaları Toplantısı Tutanağı. (Compiled by) Abdullah Kılıç. İstanbul: Avrasya Bir Vakfı.

Öztuna, Y. (1977). Büyük Türkiye Tarihi Cilt 1. İstanbul: Ötüken Yayınevi.  

Özyüksel, M.  (1997). Feodalite ve Osmanlı Toplumu. İstanbul: Der Yayınları.

Renan, E. (1946). Nutuklar ve Konferanslar. Translated by Ziya İshan. Ankara: Milli Eğitim Bakanlığı Yayınları.

Rousseau, J. J. (1986). Toplum Sözleşmesi. Translated by Turhan Ilgaz. İstanbul: Kırmızı Yayınları.

Saussure, F. (1998). Genel Dilbilim Dersleri. Translated by Berke Vardar. İstanbul: Multilingual Yayınları.

Sançar, N. (1976). Türkçülük Üzerine Makaleler. Ankara: Töre-Devlet Yayınevi. 

Smith, A. D. (2004). National Identity. Translated by Bahadır Sina Şener. İstanbul: İletişim Yayınları.

Sümer, F. (1999). Oğuzlar (Türkmenler). İstanbul: Türk Dünyası Araştırmalar Vakfı Yayınları.

Şeref Han. (1990). Şerefname Kürt Tarihi. Translated by M. Emin Bozarslan. İstanbul: Hasat Yayınları.

Taneri, A. (1978). Osmanlı Devleti’nin Kuruluş Döneminde Hükümdarlık Kurumunun Gelişmesi ve Saray Hayatı-Teşkilatı. Ankara: Ankara Üniversitesi Dil ve Tarih-Coğrafya Fakültesi Yayınları.

Tanrıöver, H. S. (2000a). Dağ Yolu I. Ankara: Kültür Bakanlığı Yayınları.

Tanrıöver, H. S. (2000b). Dağyolu II. Ankara: Kültür Bakanlığı Yayınları.

Tansel, F. A. (1969). “Gökalp Mehmet Ziya.” Türk Ansiklopedisi Cilt 17. Ankara: Millî Eğitim Basımevi.

Tekin, T. (2010). Orhon Yazıtları. Ankara: Türk Dil Kurumu Yayınları.

Timur, T. (1986). Osmanlı Kimliği. İstanbul: Hil Yayınları.

Togan, Z. V. (1940). “Aksungur al-Ahmedîlî.” İslam Ansiklopedisi Cilt 1. İstanbul: Millî Eğitim Basımevi.

Togan, Z. V. (1972). Oğuz Destanı. İstanbul: Ahmet Sait Matbaası.

Topçu, N. (1978a).  Milliyetçiliğimizin Esasları. İstanbul: Dergâh Yayınları.

Topçu, N. (1978b). Yarınki Türkiye. İstanbul: Dergâh Yayınları,

Türkdoğan, O. (n.d.).  Türk Tarihinin Sosyolojisi 1. Ankara: Hasret Yayınları.

Türkkan, R. O. (1943). Kuyruk Acısı. İstanbul: Bozkurtçu Yayınları.

Türkkan, R. O. (1939). “Türk Anaları! Sizden Bekliyoruz.” İstanbul: Bozkurt dergisi. Sayı 1.

Wallerstein, I.  (2003). The End of the World We Know. Translated by Tuncay Birkan. İstanbul: Metis Yayınları.

Yalçınkaya, A. (26.05.2009). “Kosova’da Arnavut Yemini: Mos qofsha turk.” İstanbul: Önce Vatan gazetesi.

Yalçın, S. (1988). “Aydınlar Ocağı ve Türk-İslam Sentezi.” Meselelerimiz dergisi. Sayı 3. İstanbul: Aydınlar Ocağı Yayınları.

Yazır, E. M. H. (1992). Hak Dini Kur’an Dili Cilt 1. İstanbul: Azim Dağıtım.

Yılmaz, S. (2005). “Armin Vâmbéry’nin Türkistan Seyahatnamesi ve Karakalpak Türklerine Dair Kayıtlar.” Belleten. Cilt LXIX. 255. Ankara: Atatürk Kültür Dil ve Tarih Yüksek Kurumu Yayını.