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 AN ANALYSIS OF AHMED VEFİK’S POLITICAL THOUGHT: A

July 2022

Keywords: Ahmed Vefik Pasha, Turkism, Late Ottoman Empire, Ottoman
Political Thought, Turkish Nationalism
This thesis focuses on Ahmed Vefik Pasha’s (1823?-1891) political thought by examining
his two major works, Fezleke-i Târîh-i ‘Osmânî and Lehce-i ‘Osmânî, to
discuss the argument, first put forth by the first Turkist intellectuals, such as Ziya
Gökalp and Yusuf Akçura and later followed by biographers and historians, such as
Zeki Pakalın and Fevziye Abdullah Tansel, that Ahmed Vefik was one of the first
Turkish nationalists in the late Ottoman Empire. In this sense, it locates Ahmed
Vefik’s political thought in a period in which a nascent Turkism nationalism flourished
on a cultural level by juxtaposing Ahmed Vefik’s ideas on the Turkish language
and history with those of Ziya Gökalp and Yusuf Akçura. Thus, this thesis argues
that Ahmed Vefik was a cultural Turkist, rather than a political one, as coined by
Gökalp and Akçura. While doing so, this study also problematizes the periodization
of Turkish nationalism in literature by tracing the origins of Turkish nationalism
earlier than the Young Turk Period in the cultural sphere.
iv
ÖZET
AHMED VEFİK’İN SİYÂSÎ DÜŞÜNCESİNİN BİR TAHLÎLİ: TÜRKÇÜ BİR
PAŞA?

Anahtar Kelimeler: Ahmed Vefik Paşa, Türkçülük, Türk milliyetçiliği, Osmanlı
siyasi düşüncesi, Geç Osmanlı İmparatorluğu
Bu çalışma, Ahmed Vefik Paşa (1823?-1891)’nın Lehce-i ’Osmânî ve Fezleke-i Târîhi
’Osmânî eserlerini inceleyerek onun siyâsî düşüncelerine odaklanmaktadır. Çalışmanın
amacı, evvela Ziya Gökalp ve Yusuf Akçura gibi ilk Türkçüler tarafından
ileri sürülen, sonrasında Zeki Pakalın ve Fevziye Abdullah Tansel gibi tarihçi ve
biyografi yazarları tarafından takip edilen Vefik Paşa’nın Türkçü olduğuna dair
argümanın geçerliliğini tartışmaktır. Bu bağlamda, Ahmed Vefik’in Türk dili ve
tarihi üzerine olan düşüncelerini Ziya Gökalp ve Yusuf Akçura’nın dilde ve tarih
yazımında Türkçülüğü ile mukayese ederek Ahmed Vefik’in siyâsî değil, tıpkı Gökalp
ve Akçura’nın nitelendirdiği gibi, kültürel bir Türkçü olduğu sonucuna ulaşmaktadır.
Böylece, bu çalışma Ahmed Vefik’in Türkçülüğünü kültürel bir zemine oturtarak
Türk milliyetçiliğini Jön Türklerle başlatan literatürü problematize etmektedir.
v
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I owe a debt of gratitude to several individuals and institutions whose support and
assistance I received while writing this thesis. First of all, I am grateful to the
History Department at Sabancı University for providing me with the opportunity
and environment to produce this thesis.
I would also like to express my sincere gratitude to my advisor, Ayşe Hoca, who
encouraged me in the first place by recommending that I should turn the paper I
wrote for her class into a thesis. She listened to my ideas, including the extreme
ones, always with patience. Her comments and suggestions shaped this thesis from
cover to cover.
I would like to thank İlker and Akşin Hocalar for accepting my invitation to participate
in my thesis defense jury. Their insightful comments and valuable criticism
helped me to improve this thesis by correcting and clarifying significant points.
I am also thankful to the Scientific and Technological Research Institution of Turkey
(TÜBİTAK) for their financial support. Although money does not mean everything,
it still means a lot. The scholarship I received from the TÜBİTAK Directorate of
Science Fellowships and Grant Programme (BİDEB) provided a considerable relief
from my financial burden.
Of course, I am grateful to my family most: my father, Nurullah, my mother, Gülay,
and my sister, Ecem Tuğçe. They were always willing -even more than me- for me
to pursue a graduate degree. This thesis could not have been completed without
their patience, support and love.
Lastly, it goes without saying that all the mistakes in this work are mine.
vi.
vii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. INTRODUCTION. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.1. Theoretical Background and Issues of Turkish Nationalism . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.2. Scholarship on Turkish Nationalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
1.3. Scholarship on Ahmed Vefik . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
1.4. Research Question and the Aims of the Thesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
1.5. Sources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
1.6. Overview of Chapters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
2. DEFINING TURKISM, AND AHMED VEFIK AS A TURKIST 24
2.1. Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
2.2. Ziya Gökalp’s Turkism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
2.3. Yusuf Akçura’s Turkism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
2.4. Turkism in Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
2.5. Turkism in Historiography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
2.6. Ahmed Vefik as a Turkist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
3. A BRIEF BIOGRAPHY OF AHMED VEFİK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
3.1. Ahmed Vefik’s Ethnic Origins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
3.2. Ahmed Vefik’s Rise in Bureaucracy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
3.3. Anecdotes Describing Ahmed Vefik’s Patriotism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
3.4. Ahmed Vefik’s Intellectual Thought . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
4. AHMED VEFİK’S POLITICAL THOUGHT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
4.1. Fezleke-i Târîh-i ‘Osmânî . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
4.2. Lehce-i ‘Osmânî . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
5. CONCLUSION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
BIBLIOGRAPHY. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
viii
1. INTRODUCTION
Ahmed Vefik Pasha (b.1823 - d.1891) was a high-ranking Tanzîmât bureaucrat who
served as the Ambassador to Iran and France, the Minister of Education, the Chairman
of the first Ottoman parliament and the Grand Vizier, respectively. He was
considered one of the first Turkists in the Ottoman Empire by the most prominent
Turkist intellectuals of both the Second Constitutional Period and the Republican
Era, such as Ziya Gökalp, Yusuf Akçura, Hüseyin Nihâl Atsız and Hüseyin Nâmık
Orkun. Besides his translation of Abu al-Ghazi Bahadur Khan’s Şecere-i Türkî,
these intellectuals cited the Pasha’s dictionary, Lehce-i ’Osmânî, as evidence for
his Turkism. Since the scholars writing on Ahmed Vefik have almost completely
repeated this argument, this Turkist image of Vefik Pasha created by the Turkists
persisted in the literature on Ahmed Vefik until today.
However, the consideration of Ahmed Vefik as a Turkist stands in stark contrast to
the scholarship on Turkish nationalism that locates the birth of Turkish nationalism
in the Young Turk Period (1908-1914), if not later. How could Ahmed Vefik, who
produced his works between 1847 and 1882, be a Turkist, then? The contradiction
between the two pieces of literature is a result of the lack of differentiation between
cultural and political Turkism. In this sense, while examining Ahmed Vefik’s perception
of the Turkish language and history in the light of those of Gökalp and Akçura,
this thesis makes a differentiation between cultural and political Turkism. Thus, it
argues that although Turkish nationalism had not been politicized in Ahmed Vefik’s
thought, he played a significant role in creating cultural Turkism through his
publications on Turkish history, literature and folklore.
1
1.1 Theoretical Background and Issues of Turkish Nationalism
In contrast to the premordialist1 depiction of nations as natural (and hence timeless)
entities, modernist accounts of nationalism locate the emergence of nations in
a certain place and time, late 18th-century Western Europe, and claim that nations
are the inventions of the ideology of nationalism.2 Although Smith challenges
this formulation of “no nation without nationalism”3 by tracing the formations of
nations back to ethnies,4 he agrees with the modernist scholars that nationalism
-as a political ideology or doctrine- is a modern phenomenon in the sense that
it “ideologized and politicised in the modern epoch”.5 In short, both modernists
and ethno-symbolist accounts of nationalism argue that nationalism is a product of
modernity.
I find Miroslav Hroch’s division of the development of national movements into three
phases particularly useful in understanding the emergence of Turkish nationalism
in the late Ottoman Empire. According to Hroch, the beginning of every national
revival is characterized by intellectuals’ study of their language, culture and history.
6 In this sense, Hroch calls the first phase, Phase A, as “the period of scholarly
interest”.7 While Phase A is completely cultural in the form of literary and folkloric
studies lacking any political implications, it turns into a political campaign in
Phase B to diffuse national consciousness among the masses, which Hroch calls “the
period of patriotic agitation”.8 Lastly, in Phase C, mass support -of course, not by
all members of the nation- for the national movement emerges, which may or may
not result in creating a nation-state. Although Phase A remains only at the individual
level lacking an organizational basis, the national movement acquires “a firm
1In order to avoid essentialism, it is important to note that primordialism is “not a theory but an umbrella
term” used for those thinkers who believed that nationality (hence nations) was something given, namely
a priori. Umut Özkırımlı, Theories of Nationalism: A Critical Introduction (London: Macmillan Press,
2000), 64.
2See, for example, E.J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1992), 3; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on
the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, (London: Verso, 1991), 4.
3Hobsbawm argues that “...nationalism comes before nations. Nations do not make states and nationalism
but the other way around.” Nations and Nationalism Since 1780, 10.
4A. D. Smith, “When is a Nation”, Geopolitics 7, no. 2 (2002): 15.
5Ibid., 16.
6Miroslav Hroch, Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1985), 22.
7Ibid., 23.
8Ibid., 23.
2
organizational structure extending over the whole territory” in Phase C.9 Although
the studies on Turkish nationalism mostly focus on Phase B, namely the Young
Turk regime (1908-1918), and Phase C, namely the period of the War of Independence
(1919-1923) that culminate with the establishment of the Turkish Republic
and afterwards, Phase A of Turkish nationalism is missing in the literature.
The major concern of this thesis is Phase A of Turkish nationalism, in which a
distinct Turkish-national identity emerged. Although Hobsbawm avoids using the
word “nationalism” for Phase A,10 I call the crystallization phase of Turkish nationalism,
in line with Gökalp and Akçura’s coinage, cultural Turkism. However, I
still differentiate it from political Turkism in the sense that it was not turned into
a modern ideology during this period yet. Just as Hroch argues that “the dissemination
of an awareness of the linguistic, cultural and social attributes” of a group
emerges in Phase A,11 Phase A of Turkish nationalism witnesses the beginning of
research on Turkish culture, mostly in the form of showing its origins and developments.
I locate this period, the emergence of cultural Turkism, in the second half
of the 19th century, when publications on Turkish history and language started.
Considering his publications on the Turkish language, history and folklore, I argue
that Ahmed Vefik Pasha was an important figure in the process of making cultural
Turkish nationalism.
In this thesis, Ottomanism is understood as an ideology of “political pragmatism”12
to prevent the dissolution of the empire, rather than simply an “imperial supranationalism”
13 that creates equality between non-Muslims and Muslims based on
the idea of Ottoman citizenship -followed in the Reform Edict of 1856, the 1869
Citizenship Law and the Constitution of 1876. More specifically, by Ottomanism,
I refer to “an uneasy mix of the old ideology (Ottoman culture and Islam) and
modern nationalism”14 as defined by Abu-El-Haj based on Mardin’s interpretation
of the Young Ottoman ideology. Thus, in contrast to the interpretations of the last
9Hroch, Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe, 23.
10Hobsbawm, Hroch, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780, 12.
11Miroslav Hroch, “From the National Movement to the Fully-formed Nation: The Nation Building Process
in Europe,” in Mapping the Nation, ed. Gopal Balakrishnan (New York: Verso, 1996), 81.
12Akşin Somel, “Osmanlı Reform Çağında Osmanlıcılık Düşüncesi (1839-1913),” in Modern Türkiyede Siyasi
Düşünce I: Tanzimat ve Cumhuriyet’in Birikimi, ed. Mehmet Ö. Alkan (İstanbul: İletişim Yayınları,
2001), 92.
13Selim Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman
Empire 1876-1909 (New York: I.B. Tauris, 1998), 46.
14Rifa’at ‘Ali Abou-El-Haj, Formation of the Modern State: The Ottoman Empire, Sixteenth to Eighteenth
Centuries (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2005), 69.
3
decades of the Empire as being caught between the three grand ideologies,15 this
thesis does not treat Ottomanism, Islamism and Turkism as competing ideologies.
Instead, just as in the case of cross-cutting cleavages where political (Ottoman),
religious (Islam) and ethnic (Turkish) identities coincided in the same person, I argue
that these three ideologies co-existed in the minds of the Turkish-Muslim elites
of the 19th-century Ottoman Empire, most notably Nâmık Kemâl and Ali Suâvi,
along with Ahmed Vefik.16 In this respect, I find Ali Kemâl’s answer to Akçura’s Üç
Tarz-ı Siyâset quite significant, in which he states that it is not possible to separate
Turkishness, Islam and Ottomanism from each other.17 Thus, in line with Hanioğlu,
I claim that the three grand ideologies of the 19th century were not monolithic and
impervious, but had “fluid and blurred boundaries”.18
In this sense, this thesis does not treat Turkish nationalism as “the last viable option”
that emerged after the collapse of Ottomanism and lastly Islamism during the Balkan
Wars to save the empire.19 Rather, it traces the origins of Turkish nationalism,
thereby locating Ahmed Vefik’s cultural Turkism in its context, to what has been
called Ottomanism. Although Şerif Mardin’s emphasis on the Islamic element in
Ottomanism has been followed by historians in the case of the Young Ottomans20 or
Abdülhamid II,21 his emphasis on the Turkish component in Ottomanism22 has been
disregarded in literature.23 I argue that Ottomanism includes not only Islamism but
also the seeds of cultural Turkism in itself in the sense that it shares the premise
15Carter Vaughn Findley, “The Advent of Ideology in the Islamic Middle East (Part II),” Studia Islamica
no. 56 (1982): 159.
16Ahmed Cevdet’s İkdam in 1896 describes this co-existince in the following words: “Din cihetiyle İslâm,
heyet-i ictimâiyemiz cihetiyle Osmanlı, kavmiyet cihetiyle Türk’üz.”
17“Bizim’çûn Türk’ü İslam’dan, İslâm’ı Türk’den, Türk ve İslâm’ı Osmânlılık’dan, Osmânlılığı Türk’den, İslâm’dan
ayırmak, vahdeti teslîs eylemek muhâldir.” Ali Kemal, “Cevâbımız,” in Üç Tarz-ı Siyâset (İstanbul,
Ötüken Neşriyat, 2020), 42.
18Şükrü Hanioğlu, “Turkism and the Young Turks, 1889-1908” in Turkey Beyond Nationalism: Towards
Post-nationalist Identities ed. Hans-Lukas Kieser (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2006), 4.
19For such an interpretation, see, for example Umut Uzer, An Intellectual History of Turkish Nationalism:
Between Turkish Ethnicity and Islamic Identity (Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press), 2.
20Mümtaz’er Türköne, Siyasi İdeoloji Olarak İslamcılığın Doğuşu (İstanbul: Etkileşim Yayınları, 2014), 40.
Although Mardin does not call the Young Ottomans Islamist, Türköne argues that Islamism was politicized
in Namık Kemal, Ziya Pasha and Ali Suavi’s thought.
21Benjamin C. Fortna, Imperial Classroom: Islam, the State, and Education in the Late Ottoman Empire
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 12.
22While differentiating the element of Turkishness in Ottomanism from the Turkish nationalism of the
Committee of Union and Progress, Mardin writes that “for someone who believes in Ottomanism, Turks
as the founders of the empire had a special place.” Şerif Mardin, Jön Türklerin Siyasi Fikirleri 1895-1908
(İstanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2008), 154.
23Even Selim Deringil, who writes that “Ottoman identity assumed an increasingly Turkish character during
the reign of Abdülhamid II” (The Well-Protected Domains, 11), considers the Sultan’s interest in Turkish
origins of the dynasty just another example of “an obsession with dynastic legitimation”, thereby not
separating this emphasis on the Turkishness of the empire from the Sultan’s use of Islamic symbolism in
increasing his political legitimacy (Ibid., 32-33).
4
that Turks constitute the core element in the Empire. In this sense, Ottomanism in
its concept of equality requires, as Arai puts it, “a negative aspect demanding the
assimilation of minorities”24 because the ruling nation (millet-i hâkîme) was not just
the Muslims but ethnically Turkish Muslims in the minds of the late 19th-century
Turkish intellectuals.
There were three reasons for the intertwining of Turkism with Ottomanism. The
first reason was the same as the late emergence of political Turkish nationalism.
While political Greek, Bulgarian, Albanian and Armenian nationalisms emerged in
the 19th century, their Turkish counterpart had to wait until the turn of the 20th
century. The reason for Turkish nationalism being a latecomer was not the late
formation of the Turkish bourgeoisie, as a modernist interpretation of nationalism
would suggest, but its different raison d’être from other nationalisms in the empire:
Turkish nationalism did not emerge with, nor ever had, the aim of creating an
independent Turkish (nation-) state by seceding from the Ottoman Empire. This
was, as Lewis puts it, a result of the Turkish elite’s perception of themselves as “the
masters of the Empire”.25 The implication of this perception was the consideration of
the Ottoman Empire as a “Turkish” one.26 In this sense, as in Gellner’s definition of
nationalism defined as “primarily a political principle, which holds that the political
and the national unit should be congruent”,27 Turkish elites believed that their
political and national unit was already in harmony as long as the Ottoman Empire
continued to exist. Therefore, just as other nationalisms, Turkish nationalism was
seen as another catalyst for the dissolution of the empire by the Turkish intelligentsia
in the context of the 19th-century Ottoman Empire.
Thus, the second reason for the convergence of Ottomanism and Turkism was the
multi-ethnic structure of the empire. The challenges of following political Turkism
in an empire are obvious. In other words, before the establishment of a nation-state,
that is to say, the Turkish Republic in 1923, it was not possible to follow a policy of
Turkish nationalism, at least in the political sphere. This can be observed even in
the writings of the first Turkist intellectuals. In 1904, while Yusuf Akçura in his Üç
Tarz-ı Siyâset leaves out Ottomanism as a viable option but stays undecided between
the applicability of Islamism and Turkism, Ahmed Ferit, who would later become
the president of Türk Ocağı (Turkish Hearths), in his response to Akçura argues that
24Masami Arai, Turkish Nationalism in the Young Turk Era (Leiden: Brill, 1992), 2.
25Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 344-45.
26Umut Uzer, “The Genealogy of Turkish Nationalism,” in Symbiotic Antagonisms: Competing Nationalisms
in Turkey, ed. Ayşe Kaduoğlu and E. Fuat Keyman (Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press, 2011),
107.
27Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), 1.
5
Ottomanism is still the most useful policy.28 In this sense, it can be argued that
even the first Turkists were followers of Ottomanism until the demise of the empire,
again, at least in the political sphere.29 However, the distinction between cultural
and political Turkism is crucial here: although Turkism as a political programme
did not exist, Turkism in the cultural sphere began to flourish in the second half of
the 19th-century Ottoman Empire. In other words, as a result of the incompatibility
of empire and nationalism, just as Turkism emerged much earlier than is commonly
held in the cultural level, Ottomanism persisted much later than is usually assumed
in the political level.30
Thirdly, since these grand ideologies of the 19th century, Ottomanism, Islamism
and Turkism, aimed “to save the Empire from disintegration” after all, it should not
be surprising that the proponents of these ideologies were also pragmatists creating
strategic alliances with the supporter of other ideologies whenever the opportunity
arises. In this respect, Ahmet Ferit justifies his support for Ottomanism with the
following words: "I don’t know if there is a better job other than seeking opportunities
in politics.31 In other words, here, again it is important to emphasize that
Ottomanism is not understood as creating an Ottoman nation based on citizenship,
but rather as actions for saving the empire from disintegration.32 In this sense, this
led to its co-existence with Turkism.
In 1908, Ahmed Rıza writes that “non-Turks, despite being Ottomans, were not
as interested in the maintenance of this [Ottoman] government as Turks were.”33
In the same year, Turkish intellectuals’ suspicion of non-Turks for the integrity
of the empire is much clearer in another Unionist, Hüseyin Cahid, who defines
millet-i hâkime (the ruling nation) with the following words: “Whatever is said, in
this country, the dominant nation is the Turks, and it will be the Turks alone.”34
28Ahmet Ferit, “Bir Mektup” in Üç Tarz-ı Siyâset (İstanbul, Ötüken Neşriyat, 2020), 124.
29Similarly, Tunalı Hilmi Beğ, who would later become a proponent of Turkism, while putting a special emphasis
on Turks in the Empire argues in 1902 that Ottomanization does not mean Turkification by writing
“Türkiyelilik Osmanlılıktır, Osmanlılık Türkiyeliliktir”. For the coexistence of Ottomanism and Turkism
in Tunalı Hilmi’s thought, see Can Ulusoy, “Bir Jön Türk Olarak Tunalı Hilmi ve Siyasi Düşüncesi” (MA
diss., İstanbul Üniversitesi, 2009), 95-103.
30Hanioğlu, “Turkism and the Young Turks, 1889-1908,” in Turkey Beyond Nationalism: Towards Postnationalist
Identities, ed. Hans-Lukas Kieser (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2006) 19.
31“Bilmem siyâsi işlerde fırsatları kollamaktan daha doğru, daha faydalı bir meslek var mıdır?” Ahmet Ferit,
“Bir Mektup” in Üç Tarz-ı Siyâset, 126.
32Recently, Alp Eren Topal makes a critique of such use of Ottomanism. See Alp Eren Topal, “Ottomanism
in History and Historiography: Fortunes of a Concept,” in Narrated Empires: Perceptions of Late Habsburg
and Ottoman Multinationalism ed. Johanna Chovanec and Olof Heilo (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021),
77-98.
33Quoted in Hanioğlu, “Turkism and the Young Turks, 1889-1908,” 17.
34Quoted in ibid., 19.
6
I demonstrate that it is possible to find the signs of the change in the meaning of
millet-i hâkime from Muslims to Turks, hence a nascent Turkish nationalism, during
the second half of the 19th century in which the Turkishness of the Empire began to
be stressed. Although this thesis does not go so far as to argue that Ottomanism was
a veil for hiding Turkish nationalism, as Hanioğlu puts for the case of the Committee
of Union and Progress (CUP henceforth), it argues, mostly based on the two seminal
works in the Turkish intellectual history, The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought
and The Politicization of Islam, the ground for the emergence of political Turkism
is formed by the contemporaries of Ahmed Vefik, most notably in the ideology of
the Young Ottomans with Nâmık Kemâl and Ali Suâvi.
Rather than reading him simply as an Ottoman liberal whose conception of the
homeland was “constitutional nationalism in which all citizens, non-Muslim and
Muslim alike, would voice a common will through a democratically elected parliament”
35 Karpat argues that “for ‘Ottoman’ in Nâmık Kemâl’s thinking was already
synonymous with ‘Muslim and ‘Turk’ and excluded non-Muslims.”36 Indeed, Kemâl
not only expresses his patriotism with reference to ghaza37 or legitimizes the idea of
a limited government based on Islamic notions, such as meshveret and bay’ah ,38 but
also allocated a privileged position for the Turks in his patriotism. In this respect,
as Mardin shows, Kemâl uses the word “Ottoman” exchangeably with “Turk” when
he refers to the glorious Ottoman past. In his article, for example, in the first issue
of Hürriyet, Hubbü’l-vatan mine’l-iman published in 1868, he praises the Turks for
raising important scholars after using the word “Ottoman blood”.39
Nâmık Kemâl’s emphasis on the Turkishness of the empire is much clear in his emphasis
on the spread of Turkish, or assimilation of the minority languages including
those of Muslims, for creating unity in the Empire. In his letter dated 1878, after
stating that Arabs already spread their languages through which they presented
their Arabness to the world, Kemâl writes that “While we, if we can, need to annihilate
all languages in our country except Turkish, are we going to give Albanians,
35Howard Eissenstat, “Modernization, Imperial Nationalism, and the Ethnicization of Confessional Identity
in the Late Ottoman Empire” in Nationalizing Empires, ed. Stefan Berger and Alexei Miller (Budapest:
Central University Press, 2015), 447.
36Kemal H. Karpat, The Politicization of Islam: Reconstructing Identity, State, Faith, and Community in
the Late Ottoman State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 132. In this sense, Karpat implies
that Kemâl not only simply protested against the privileges of non-Muslims granted by the Great Powers
because the government gave them equal rights, but also the equality between non-Muslims and Muslims.
37Şerif Mardin, The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought: A Study in the Modernization of Turkish Political
Ideas (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 329.
38Namık Kemal, Sürgünde Muhalefet: Namık Kemal’in Hürriyet Gazetesi I, trans. Alp Eren Topal (İstanbul:
Vakıfbank Kültür Yayınları, 2019), 67.
39“Türkler o millet değil midir ki medreselerinde Farabîler, İbn Sinalar, Gazaliler, Zemahşerîler tevsî-i marifet
eylemiştir.” Namık Kemal, Sürgünde Muhalefet: Namık Kemal’in Hürriyet Gazetesi I, 47.
7
Lazes and Kurds a spiritual weapon to create dissidence by letting them adopt their
own alphabet?”40 In another letter from the same year regarding the change of the
Ottoman script, Kemâl writes:
“What will be our benefit when we spread our script to Albanians and so
forth? Are we going to create Albanian and Laz nationalisms? Indeed,
it is not possible to spread our language among Greeks or Bulgarians;
however, it is surely possible for Albanians and Lazes, namely, Muslims.
If we establish suitable schools for this purpose and carry out our deficient
regulation of public education [probably means the Regulation on
Public Education of 1869], Laz and Albanian languages will be almost
forgotten in twenty years... Our purpose is to properly write our letters,
our language, not Albanian, Laz, Gypsy language and so forth.”41
By “our language”, Kemâl obviously refers to Turkish. More importantly, he was
certainly aware of the role of language in creating nationalism: he argues that
language may be the greatest obstacle -perhaps greater than religion- against the
unity of the empire.42 He believes that even to keep Muslims within the empire is
not possible only by appealing to Islam, they should be prevented from developing
their own national language by creating a new Ottoman-Arabic script. In this
sense, it is significant that he does not mention Arabs in the second latter because
they already had their own national language and Kemâl implies that they will
not part of the empire. What is significant is that he proposes the use of Turkish
while eliminating others whenever possible. If a language has the power to create
national consciousness among the masses, does not the spread of Turkish among
non-Turks signify an Ottoman unity through Turkification? As Karpat puts it,
“The Ottoman Empire thus was on its way to becoming a Turkish homeland, in the
view of intellectuals such as Kemal.”43 In this sense, although, as Mardin indicates,
Kemâl uses different words while expressing his allegiance to vatan (the fatherland),
such as Türk and Osmanlı, I argue that this was not because Kemâl “was not entirely
40Translations are mine. “Elimizden gelse, memleketimizde mevcut olan lisânların Türkçeden mâ’adâ
kâffesini mağvetmeğe çalışmak iktizâ ederken, Arnavudlara, Lazlara, Kürdlere birer elifbâ ta’yini ile, ellerine
şikâk için bir silâh-ı ma’nevî mi teslim edelim?” Namık Kemal, Namık Kemal’in Husûsî Mektupları II,
trans. Fevziye Abdullah Tansel (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Yayınlar, 2013), 231.
41Ibid., 244.
42“Almanya hükemâsından meşhur Leibniz, ‘Bana bir güzel elifbâ, sana bir güzel lisân ve o kuvvet ile bir
güzel millet yapayım’ demiş. Lisân bir kavmin diğerine inkılâbını men’ için belki diyânetten bile daha
metîn bir seddir.” Ibid., 231.
43Karpat, The Politicization of Islam, 333.
8
clear as to what the fatherland consisted of”44 but because he did not separate “the
Turk” from “the Ottoman”, thereby using these words interchangeably.
Just as Nâmık Kemâl, Ali Suâvi emphasizes the Turkishness of the Empire. In 1868,
Ali Suavi clearly calls the Ottoman Empire a “Turkish state”45 and presents its 600
years-long history as evidence of the greatness of the Turkish nation.46 Similar
to Kemâl, he uses not only the words “Turk” and “Islam” but also “Ottoman”
interchangeably. However, as he tells it himself, Ali Suâvi was not a supporter of
Turkism, which he considers a form of racism that exists in the West, but perhaps
of Islamism. In this respect, it is possible to differentiate political Turkism from
cultural Turkism by arguing that Turkish nationalism was not politicized in Ali
Suâvi’s thought. Yet, on the other hand, he writes in his work, Khiva, published in
1873, to remind “Ottomans of their obligations towards the Khiva Turks who ‘are
from our faith, our people and our family.”47 He was also proud of being a member
of a nation that attempts to unify all Muslims.48 More importantly, Suâvi implies
that the Turks are the constitutive element of the Empire by using the word Turks
to refer to the Ottomans.49 In this sense, although it was argued that the reason
for Young Ottomans’ calling the Ottoman Empire “Turkistan” was a result of the
naming of the empire as “La Turquie” in the West, just as they were coined as
“Young Turks” (Türkistan’ın Erbâb-ı Şebâbı), they in fact considered the empire as
a Turkish one. In other words, it was not only the Bulgarians in the Balkans who
considered Ottoman Empire as a Turkish state in the 1860s50 but also the Turkish
intelligentsia.
In addition to the Ottoman intelligentsia, it is possible to observe the Turkishness
of the empire through a change in the meaning of millet-i hâkime in the thoughts
of the Ottoman ruling class, such as Mehmed Emin Âli Pasha, Mustafa Fazıl Pasha
and even Sultan Abdulhamid II. One of the architects of Ottomanism and the target
of the Young Ottoman opposition, Âli Pasha, then the Foreign Minister, in his
letter dated 1862 and written in French, to Mehmed Cemil Pasha, the Ottoman
Ambassador in Paris, comments on the particular role of the Turks as the unifying
44Mardin, The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought, 327-28.
45Hüseyin Çelik, Ali Suavi ve Dönemi (İstanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2021), 440.
46Ibid., 443.
47David Kushner, The Rise of Turkish Nationalism (London: Frank Cass, 1977), 42.
48Çelik, Ali Suavi ve Dönemi, 441.
49Ibid., 436-37.
50Kemal H. Karpat, “The Transformation of the Ottoman State,” International Journal of Middle East
Studies 3, no. 3 (July 1972), 251.
9
element in the Empire with the following words: “If we study in-depth and without
bias the spirit and the state of the different nationalities who constitute the population
of Turkey, we will end up being convinced that it is only the Turks who can
serve as a link between them. If the Turks are left to themselves or want to submit
them into the domination of one them or thinks, or think of creating something like
a confederation, it would be chaos and civil war in perpetuity.”51 Thus, Âli Pasha
implies that the existence of the Ottoman empire rests on the loyalty of the Turks.
In a similar vein, the following palace memorandum by Sultan Hamid shows that
he considers the Turks as both the founders and core element of the empire:
“[t]he great Ottoman state was founded on faith, after Yavuz Selim absorbed
the caliphate. But since the original state was established by
Turks, in reality, this is a Turkish state [devlet-i Türkîdir; Türkî in the
sense of “Turkish,” not “Turkic”]. Since the exalted Osman established
this sublime state it has stood on four principles; the ruler [dynasty]
is Ottoman, the administration is Turkish, the faith is Islam, and the
capital is Istanbul. The weakening or dismissal of any of these principles
will affect the foundation of the state.”52
Lastly, the Turkishness of the empire in the case of the change in the meaning of
millet-i hâkime from Muslims to Turks can be observed in Mustafa Fazıl Pasha’s
famous letter to Abdülaziz dated 1866. While the Pasha uses the phrase “mileli
müslime ve gayr-i müslime” in referring to the deterioration of morality in the
Empire, he uses the word “millet-i hâkime” when he talks about those who can work
for the government. In other words, he does use the words “millet-i hâkime” and
“milel-i mahkûme” to differentiate the Muslims of the Empire from those Christians.
More importantly, right after he writes “we, Turks, are not like the old Greeks of
Istanbul...” he tells the Sultan that if this government continues, it will not be difficult
to find good men from “millet-i hâkime” for the service of the government.53 This
suggests that Mustafa Fazıl refers to the Turks by “millet-i hâkime”.
51Bernard Lewis, “Ali Pasha on Nationalism,” Middle Eastern Studies 10, no. 1 (Jan. 1974): 78.
52Quoted in Karpat, Politicization of Islam, 336.
53Namık Kemal, Sürgünde Muhalefet: Namık Kemal’in Hürriyet Gazetesi I, 438.
10
1.2 Scholarship on Turkish Nationalism
Although there is no disagreement in the literature on Turkish nationalism that the
establishment of the Republic of Turkey as a nation-state in 1923 was a result of a
pre-existing Turkish nationalism, there is no consensus on the timing of Turkish nationalism.
Three periods are mostly given by scholars: the Hamidian Era, the CUP
after 1902, and the Young Turk Period (1908-1914). However, it can be claimed
that the literature mostly focuses on the Second Constitutional Period, namely the
period of politicization of Turkish nationalism, thereby disregarding the period in
which the ground for such politicization was prepared. On the other hand, some historians
still hold that the Young Turks were not Turkist but Islamist or Ottomanist
until the end of the empire. In this respect, the traditional view that locates the
birth of Turkish nationalism after the Balkan Wars continues to exert influence in
literature.54 In short, the differentiation between political Turkism and cultural
Turkism, except for Hanioğlu’s work, is still missing in most of the literature.
One of the first major studies on the emergence of Turkish nationalism belongs to
David Kushner who in his seminal work, The Rise of Turkish Nationalism, published
in 1977 demonstrates that a nationalist vocabulary existed in the Hamidian
press (1876-1908) before the Young Turk Period (1908-1914) in the form of “a new
orientation towards the Ottomans’ original homeland and its present-day Turkish
peoples.”55 In addition to the works of European orientalists, such as Joseph De
Guignes’ Histoire générale des Huns, des Turcs, des Mongoles, et autres Tatares occidentaux,
Kushner claims that the Ottomans’ political contact with Central Asian
Turks played a significant role in the formation Turkist thought.56 Despite the convincing
evidence presented by Kushner, Masami Arai, in his work of 1992, argues
that “the idea of an Ottoman nation was superseded by the emerging Turkish nationalism”
during the Young Turk period (1908-1914), not the Hamidian era, by looking
at the Turkish nationalist journals, such as Genç Kalemler and Türk Yurdu and
the activities of nationalist organizations, such as Türk Derneği and Türk Ocağı.57
While Jacob Landau in his Pan-Turkism: From Irredentism to Cooperation published
in 1995 agrees with Arai on the timing of Turkish nationalism, as different
than the aforementioned works, he not only includes the Tatar and Azerbaijani in-
54See, for example, Umut Uzer, An Intelectual History of Turkish Nationalism (Salt Lake City: University
of Utah Press, 2016), 7.
55Kushner, The Rise of Turkish Nationalism, 43.
56Ibid., 11.
57Arai, Turkish Nationalism in the Young Turk Era, 4.
11
tellectuals in the picture, such as Ismail Gasprinski and Ali Hüseyinzâde, but also
covers a longer period which includes the Turkists of the Republican period, such as
Rıza Nur, Atsız and Türkkan by looking at periodicals, such as Bozkurt, Tanrıdağ,
Çınaraltı, Orkun and Ötüken.58
On the other hand, some scholars, similar to the prevalent view in Turkish historiography,
assert that Turkish nationalism emerged much later than the Young Turk
period. For example, François Georgeon, in his study of 1980 on Yusuf Akçura,
argues the Young Turks were not influenced by nationalism until 1908.59 He in fact
goes so far as to write that Ottomanism was the official policy of the government
even in 191160 and the policies of the CUP approached Turkish nationalism only
after the Balkan Wars.61 In a similar vein, more recently, Shissler finds the description
of the Young Turks as Turkish nationalists problematic. Although she agrees
that the CUP implemented Turkification policies during the Second Constitutional
period, Shissler argues that it was a result of “the desire to create a state of formally
equal citizens with strong loyalty to the Ottoman state, regardless of background
and to do this in the context of a fully constitutional and representative regime.”62
In line with Shissler, Hasan Kayalı depicts the Young Turks as liberals whose aim
was to create a “civic territorial, indeed revolutionary democratic, Ottoman political
community.63 He considers the view that the CUP committed to Turkish nationalism
as a “generalization that has survived without critical scrutiny”64 because
“for most Muslims the notion of belonging to a nation (much less to a nationstate)
had no meaning at the time”65 and argues that the CUP followed a policy
of Ottomanism.66 Yet, when Ottomanism failed after the Unionist Coup in 1913,
the argument follows, the Young Turks turned to Islamism, rather than Turkism,
though Ottomanism was still intact: “Islam became the pillar of the supranational
ideology of Ottomanism, with religion imparting a new sense of homogeneity and
58Jacob M. Landau, Pan-Turkism: From Irredentism to Cooperation (London: C. Hurst, 1995), 90-92.
59François Georgeon, Türk Milliyetçiliğinin Kökenleri: Yusuf Akçura (İstanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yayınları, 1996),
41.
60Ibid., 64.
61Ibid., 65.
62A. Holly Shissler, Between Two Empires: Ahmet Ağaoğlu and the New Turkey (London: I.B. Tauris, 2002),
15.
63Hasan Kayalı, Arabs and Young Turks: Ottomanism, Arabism, and Islamism in the Ottoman Empire,
1908-1918 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 9.
64Ibid., 3.
65Ibid., 3.
66Ibid., 14.
12
solidarity”67 More recently, despite being aware of the emphasis on the Turkish language
in the Ottoman modernity, Howard Eissenstat argues that the Young Turks
followed liberal Ottomanism.68 In line with Shissler and Kayalı, he interprets the
CUP’s Turkification policies as “an attempt to rationalize the state and create a
sense of shared Ottoman identity.”69 He argues that the CUP employed an Islamic,
rather than Turkist, discourse in its propaganda when it tried to gather support
from the Turkic peoples of the Russian Empire.70
Gingeras also claims that the existence of several Turkists, such as Gökalp, in the
cadres of the CUP does not necessarily mean that the CUP was a Turkist movement.
In contrast, he asserts that Ottomanism as the inclusion of all members of the empire
and “Islamic nationalism” as creating loyalties among Muslims continued to remain
as a central tenet in the CUP’s programme.71 In fact, it is possible to find Gingeras’
concept “Islamic nationalism” in detail in Erik-Jan Zürcher’s writings. Zürcher calls
the Young Turk ideology “Muslim nationalism”. Accordingly, the CUP’s conception
of the homeland is to consist not only of Turks but all the Ottoman Muslims. Thus,
the CUP’s political programme ethnicized the religion in the sense that ethnicity
was determined by religious affiliation.72 In fact, the idea of Islamic nationalism can
be traced back to Niyazi Berkes who considers the ideology of the Young Ottomans,
instead of that of the Young Turks, as “an amalgamation of constitutionalism and
religious nationalism”.73 Berkes argues that “Namık Kemal’s ideology of patriotism
was pan-Ottomanism with Islamist ‘nationalism’ at its base.”74 Moreover, this
“Islamic nationalism” includes anti-Western and anti-Christian sentiments.75
In contrast, Şükrü Hanioğlu claims that the CUP adopted Turkism after the
Congress of 1902.76 He gives the replacement of the word “Ottoman” with “Turk”
67Kayalı, Arabs and Young Turks, 15.
68Eissenstat, “Modernization, Imperial Nationalism, and the Ethnicization of Confessional Identity in the
Late Ottoman Empire,” 455.
69Eissenstat, “Modernization, Imperial Nationalism, and the Ethnicization of Confessional Identity in the
Late Ottoman Empire,” 456.
70Ibid., 458.
71Ryan Gingeras, Fall of Sultante: The Great War and the End of The Ottoman Empire, 1908-1922 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2016), 47.
72Erik Jan Zürcher, “Young Turks, Ottoman Muslims and Turkish Nationalists: Identity Politics 1908-1938,”
in Ottoman Past and Today’s Turkey, ed Kemal H. Karpat (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 842.
73Niyazi Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey (London: C. Hurst Co., 1998), 159.
74Ibid., 221.
75Ibid., 218.
76M. Şükrü Hanioğlu, The Preparation for a Revolution: The Young Turks, 1902-1908 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2001), 39.
13
between 1902 and 1907 in the committee’s journals, most notably in Türk, as evidence
of the CUP’s Turkism.77 However, according to Hanioğlu, the CUP had to
disguise its Turkism due to political opportunism.78 Therefore, during the two years
preceding the Revolution of 1908, there was a change in the CUP’s discourse: the
word “Ottoman”, instead of “Turk”, more frequently appeared in the CUP’s publications.
Hanioğlu argues that since the CUP saw Turkism, Ottomanism and Islamism
as a tool for “the salvation of the empire, it used these three ideologies interchangeably
in its discourse.79 In other words, according to Hanioğlu, the CUP did not
opt for Islamism: Islam was a manifestation of the committee’s anti-imperialism80
and “a protonationalist device in the CUP’s propaganda.”81 More importantly, Hanioğlu
argues that the CUP’s Ottomanism in fact “cast the Turks as the dominant
nation of the empire.”82 In other words, Hanioğlu writes that the CUP sold its non-
Turkish alliances “Turkism as a form of Ottomanism”83 In this sense, in contrast to
the commonly held argument, Hanioğlu does not see Ottomanism and Turkism as
two distinct, if not opposite, ideologies. Instead, quite significantly, he argues that
Turkism was not “a clear-cut break” from Ottomanism but its new interpretation
“that attributes a “centrifugal role to the Turkish ethnic group within the Ottoman
whole.”84
Although Feroz Ahmad criticizes Hanioğlu’s use of the word millet as the equivalent
of the “nation” instead of a religious community by writing that “the vocabulary
of nationalism scarcely existed in the Turkish or the Arabic or the Kurdish language
of that period”,85 he argues, similar to Hanioğlu, that Ottomanism, Islamism
and Turkism co-existed in the Ottoman imperial ideology even after the Balkan
Wars.86 However, Ahmad also claims that Turkism became more dominant -and
more ethnocentric- after the succession of Albanians. Ahmad also differentiates
Pan-Turkism from Turkish nationalism by arguing that the defeat in World War I
caused the emergence of Turkish nationalism centered around the Turks in Anato-
77Hanioğlu, The Preparation for a Revolution, 296.
78Ibid., 296.
79Ibid., 296.
80Ibid., 303.
81Ibid., 306.
82Hanioğlu, “Turkism and the Young Turks, 1889-1908,” 14.
83Ibid., 15.
84Ibid., 4.
85Feroz Ahmad, The American Historical Review 101, no. 5 (1996): 1589. https://doi.org/10.2307/2170282
86Feroz Ahmad, The Young Turks: The Committee of Union and Progress in Turkish Politics (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1969), 154.
14
lia.87 According Ahmad, the CUP’s support for Pan-Turkism was not only a result
of its reconciliation with pan-Islamism but also the influence of Turkic émigrés in
the party.
Despite the fact that the Young Turks were heavily influenced by the Young Ottomans,
none of the aforementioned studies attempt to trace the continuity between
the Young Turk ideology and that of the Young Ottomans. In other words, while
focusing on the Young Turk ideology to locate the emergence of Turkish nationalism,
these studies disregard the predecessors of the Young Turks. However, Karpat and
Mardin not only show the Islamic origins in the ideology of the Young Ottomans
but also argue that the necessary ground for the emergence of Turkish nationalism
was set up by the Young Ottomans.
Karpat argues that while the modern Turkish national identity is developed by
during the period between 1870 and 1908, it was politicized in the form of Turkish
nationalism during the Young Turk Era and the Republic.88 In other words, the
Young Ottomans not only played a vital role in paving the way for the constitutional
regime of I876, but also “developed the concepts of fatherland (vatan), political
identity, and loyalty to the state within the framework of the Ottoman-Muslim
culture.” Thus, according to Karpat, the Young Ottomans “formed the psychological
foundations of the nascent Turkish nationalism”.89 In this sense, Karpat argues that
Turkish nationalism was already born when the CUP was formed in 1889.90 While
Karpat asserts that Young Ottomans laid the foundations of, or prepared the setting
for, Turkish nationalism, Şerif Mardin goes further by referring to the ideology of
the Young Ottomans as “protonationalism.”91 Yet, he does not elaborate on what
he means by protonationalism, just as he does not do so for using Pan-Islamism in
referring to the same ideology.92 However, similar to Karpat, Mardin claims that
Turkish nationalism that developed during the twentieth century must be traced
back to the ideas of the Young Ottomans, most notably Nâmık Kemâl.93
87Feroz Ahmad, The Young Turks, 155.
88Kemal Karpat, “Historical Continuity and Identity Change or How to be Modern Muslim, Ottoman, and
Turk,” in Ottoman Past and Today’s Turkey, ed. Kemal Karpat (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 2.
89Karpat, “The Transformation of the Ottoman State,” 279.
90Ibid., 280.
91Mardin, The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought, 248.
92Ibid., 61.
93Ibid., 336.
15
1.3 Scholarship on Ahmed Vefik
The works written about Ahmed Vefik Pasha are both quantitatively and qualitatively
quite limited. Moreover, most of them focus on Ahmed Vefik Pasha’s life,
rather than on his intellectual thought. The biographies of Ahmed Vefik written
by Zeki Pakalın and Yalçın Toker mostly include long quotations either from contemporaries
or from scholars writing on the Pasha. However, there are almost no
argumentation or interpretations put forward at the end of their quotations. For
example, although there are passages allocated for the intellectual side of Ahmed
Vefik including the quotations from the Turkist scholars of the Republican Era,
such as Hüseyin Namık Orkun, Pakalın does not discuss the validity of the arguments
in these quotations.94 In fact, both Toker and Pakalın repeat the claims of
the Turkist intellectuals, such as Gökalp and Akçura with regard to Ahmed Vefik’s
political thought. Toker argues that Ahmed Vefik both made one of the first
steps in Turkism in language by demonstrating the Turkish origins of the words
in Ottoman Turkish and introducing the various dialects of Turkish in his Lehce-i
‘Osmânî and shed light on the history before the Ottoman by translating Abu alghazi
Bahadur Khan’s Şecere-i Türkî from Chagatai Turkish to Anatolian Turkish,
namely Ottoman Turkish.95 In this sense, these works hardly go beyond the level
of journalistic reports, failing to meet the standards of historical biography. In a
similar vein, despite including valuable information from both written sources in
the form of tezkire and oral sources in the form of anecdotes regarding Ahmed Vefik
found in contemporary accounts, the chapter on Ahmed Vefik in İbnülemin Mahmud
Kemal İnal’s biographical work (hâl tercümesi) on the Ottoman grand viziers
of the 19th-century, Son Sadrazamlar, does not reach any possible conclusion by
making connections between the facts that it provides as a result of its encyclopedic
character.96
The theses on Ahmed Vefik were also written in a descriptive manner. In dealing
with Ahmed Vefik’s political thoughts, they do not go beyond the Pasha’s Turkist
image created by Turkist intellectuals, thereby suffering from the lack of any critical
examination of Ahmed Vefik’s works. For example, Madendağ in her MA thesis,
Ahmed Vefik Paşa ve Türkçülük, regards Ahmed Vefik as one of the first Turkists
based on his dictionary and translation of Şecere-i Türkî.97 She claims that Ahmed
94Mehmet Zeki Pakalın, Ahmed Vefik Paşa (İstanbul: Divan Kitap, 2018), 217.
95Yalçın Toker, Ahmet Vefik Paşa (İstanbul: Toker Yayınları, 1998), 32-34.
96İbnülemin Mahmut Kemal İnal, Son Sadrazamlar (İstanbul: Dergâh Yayınları, 1982), 651.
97Gülten Madendağ, "Ahmed Vefik Paşa ve Türkçülük” (MA diss., Mustafa Kemal Üniversitesi, 2009), 75.
16
Vefik showed that Turkish words constitute the core of the Ottoman language and
aimed to “stop the invasion of foreign words” in the Turkish language in his Lehcei
‘Osmânî.98 She argues that Vefik Pasha’s translation of Şecere-i Türkî showing
the history of Turks demonstrates that he possessed an understanding of national
history.99 In a similar vein, Alpaslan in his MA dissertation, 19. Yüzyılda Bir
Osmanlı Bürokratı: Ahmed Vefik Paşa, asserts that Ahmed Vefik attempted to
prevent Turkish words from disappearing in Ottoman Turkish in Lehce-i ‘Osmâni
which was the pioneer of the dictionaries allocating space for Turkish words.100 He
writes that Ahmed Vefik introduced both Chagatai and Turkish history in Central
Asia to the Ottomans through his translation of Şecere-i Türkî.101
Bahriye Çeri in her Ph.D. thesis, the most comprehensive work on Ahmed Vefik,
touches upon an important point by writing that Ahmed Vefik stresses the Turkish
element in the Ottoman civilization.102 According to Çeri, this emphasis on the
Turkish element is most clear in Vefik Pasha’s perception of the Turkish language.
In this sense, she defines Lehce-i ‘Osmânî as the dictionary of the language the
people speak103 by arguing that it gave special importance to Turkish words in his
Lehce-i ‘Osmânî.104 More importantly, she writes that Ahmed Vefik considered the
Ottoman language as a dialect of the Turkish language.105 She claims that the reason
for Ahmed Vefik’s translation of Şecere-i Türkî work might have been Abu al-Ghazi
Bahadur Khan’s use of Turkish without Arabic and Persian words.106 Although
she writes that Fezleke-i Târîh-i ‘Osmânî allocates little space for the history of
the Turks before their arrival in Anatolia because Ahmed Vefik aimed to write an
Ottoman history,107 she argues, in the chapter Ahmed Vefik Paşa’nın Türkçülüğü,
that Ahmed Vefik does not start the Turkish history with the Ottomans, but sees
the Ottoman history as a continuation of the Turkish history.108
98Madendağ, "Ahmed Vefik Paşa ve Türkçülük”, 64.
99Ibid., 62.
100Oğuzhan Alpaslan, “19. Yüzyılda Bir Osmanlı Aydını ve Bürokratı: Ahmed Vefik Paşa” (MA diss.,
Hacettepe Üniversitesi, 2002), 94.
101Ibid., 91.
102Bahriye Çeri, “Ahmed Vefik Paşa: Devir-Şahsiyet-Eser,” (PhD diss., Hacettepe Üniversitesi, 1997), 298.
103Ibid., 155
104Ibid., 156.
105Ibid., 288.
106Ibid., 116.
107Ibid., 127.
108Ibid., 300.
17
Although both Kushner and Lewis also follow the argument put forward by Gökalp
and Akçura on Ahmed Vefik, they support their arguments with evidence from
Ahmed Vefik’s works. Kushner argues that Ahmed Vefik indicated that “Ottoman
was nothing but one of many Turkic languages” by calling his dictionary “The Ottoman
Dialect” (Lehce-i ‘Osmânî ).109 Moreover, according to Kushner, Ahmed
Vefik distinguished Turkish words from those Arabic and Persian in the Ottoman
language, thereby playing a significant role in the reforming of Ottoman Turkish during
the Hamidian Era, and gave information regarding other Turkic dialects. Lastly,
Kushner claims that Ahmed Vefik’s translation of Şecere-i Türkî was evidence of
the Ottoman intellectuals’ interest in the Chagatai language.110 In a similar vein,
Lewis in his classical work writes that Ahmed Vefik for the first time stressed that
“the Turks and their language were not merely Ottoman, but were the western-most
branch of a great and ancient family stretching across Asia to the Pacific.”111 However,
Lewis does not use the word nationalist for Ahmed Vefik. Rather he considers
him among the Ottoman Muslims who developed “the first signs of a Turkish national
consciousness.” The problem with Lewis’s argument is that he does not dwell
upon the difference between ethnic consciousness and nationalism.
Fevziye Abdullah Tansel produced three significant articles, published in Belleten
between 1964 and 1965, on Ahmed Vefik’s life and works, from which this thesis
greatly benefited in writing of Ahmed Vefik’s biography. She considers Vefik Pasha
“extremely nationalist (müfrit derecede milliyet-perver)”.112 Tansel writes that since
contemporary dictionaries only include Arabic and Persian words, Ahmed Vefik’s
allocation of Turkish words in a separate part of his Lehce-i ’Osmâni was something
unprecedented at that time.113 In this sense, Tansel considers it the first dictionary
of Anatolian Turkish.114 Tansel also claims Ahmed Vefik used the Turkish words,
phrases and idioms used by the people, rather than those in Arabic and Persian
which do not circulate in spoken language, in his translations of plays in French.115
Regarding Vefik Pasha’s Fezleke-i Târîh-i ‘Osmânî, she argues that Ahmed Vefik
wrote the first history textbook in European style which served as a model for its
successors. However, Tansel does not cite this book as a sign of the Pasha’s Turkism.
109Kushner, The Rise of Turkish Nationalism, 59.
110Ibid., 59.
111Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey, 347.
112Fevziye Abdullah Tansel, “Ahmed Vefik Paşa’nın Şahsiyeti’nin Teşekkülü, Husûsi Hayatı ve Muhtelif
Karakterleri,” Belleten 29, no. 113 (January 1965): 145.
113Fevziye Abdullah Tansel, “Ahmed Vefik Paşa’nın Eserleri,” Belleten 28, no. 110 (April 1964): 253.
114Tansel, “Ahmed Vefik Paşa’nın Şahsiyeti’nin Teşekkülü, Husûsi Hayatı ve Muhtelif Karakterleri,” 144-45.
115Tansel, “Ahmed Vefik Paşa’nın Eserleri,” 265.
18
Instead, Tansel argues that Ahmed Vefik, even before Süleyman Pasha, made the
first step for Turkism in History in a period in which Ottomanism was prevalent
by translating Abu al-Ghazi Bahadur Khan’s Şecere-i Türkî from Chagatai into
Ottoman Turkish.116
Ahmet Kabaklı also considers Ahmed Vefik as the pioneer of the ideas of Turkism,
Turkish nationalism and simple Turkish while emphasizing Ahmed Vefik’s knowledge
of the Turkish language and history.117 However, although Kabaklı praises Ahmed
Vefik’s use of simple language in his translations of plays in French,118 Ahmet Hamdi
Tanpınar in Ondokuzuncu Asır Türk Edebiyatı Tarihi finds Ahmed Vefik’s language
arbitrary and consider him as reckless in using the language.119
After Gökalp and Akçura, the consideration of Ahmed Vefik as one of the first
Turkish nationalists dates back to Mehmed Fuad Köprülü’s study of 1928.120 After
describing the most prominent members of the Young Ottomans -Şinâsi, Ziya Pasha
and Nâmık Kemâl- as the supporters of creating a national language through the
simplification of Ottoman Turkish (Sâde Türkçe), Köprülü cites Ahmed Vefik, along
with Süleyman Pasha and Ali Suâvi, among those who attempted to create the basis
of Turkish nationalism.121 According to Köprülü, Vefik Pasha was familiar with
the Orientalists and Turkology studies in Europe and was knowledgeable about
Turkish history and languages, which made him an “extreme nationalist (müfrit
milliyetçi)”.122 He calls Lehce-i ‘Osmânî the first dictionary of Anatolian Turkish
and claims that Ahmed Vefik attempted to translate123 Şecere-i Türkî to show that
Turkish history starts before the Ottoman Empire. More importantly, Köprülü
writes that Ahmed Vefik demonstrated that the Turks of Anatolia are a branch of
the great Turkish nation. Lastly, by referring to Namık Kemâl’s critique of Ahmed
Vefik’s language, Köprülü argues that even Namık Kemâl could not grasp some of
116Fevziye Abdullah Tansel, “Ahmed Vefik Paşa (3 Haziran 1823 – 2 Nisan 1891),” Belleten 28, no. 109
(January 1964): 138.
117Ahmet Kabaklı, Türk Edebiyatı Tarihi I (İstanbul: Türk Edebiyatı Yayınları, 1971), 506.
118Ibid., 507.
119Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, 19uncu Asır Türk Edebiyatı Tarihi (İstanbul: Çağlayan Kitabevi, 1988), 287.
120Despite his well-known Turkish nationalism, since I consider Köprülü as foremost a historian, rather than
a Turkist, I shared his thoughts on Ahmed Vefik in the section on literature review, instead of the section
on Gökalp and Akçura’s defining Ahmed Vefik as Turkist.
121Köprülü-zâde Mehmed Fu’ad, Milli Edebiyat Cereyanının İlk Mübeşşirleri ve Dîvân-ı Türkî-i Basit (İstanbul:
Kesit, 2018), 52.
122Ibid., 52.
123Köprülü uses the phrase “tercümeye kalkmak” because Ahmed Vefik could not complete the serialization
of the translation in Tasvir-i Efkâr.
19
Ahmed Vefik’s ideas.124
İlber Ortaylı writes that “Ahmed Vefik was not a Turkish nationalist, but he believed
that the fundamental element in the empire is the Turks.”125 On the other hand,
however, Ortaylı also claims that Ahmed Vefik showed Turkism in his behaviors, just
as he approached Turkish history and language from a non-Islamic point of view.
More importantly, Ortaylı argues that Ahmed Vefik insisted on the superiority of
Turkish both in governance and education. Lastly, Ortaylı also adds that Ahmed
Vefik believed that the Ottoman economy would survive if a protectionist economy
was implemented as a result of the influence of the economic theories developed in
Europe on him.126 Yet Ortaylı does not support any of his claims with any evidence.
1.4 Research Question and the Aims of the Thesis
Although the works written on the history of Turkish nationalism start with the period
after Ahmed Vefik’s death, the literature on Ahmed Vefik has a strong tendency
to consider him as a Turkist. How could Ahmed Vefik be a Turkist if Turkish nationalism
emerged after 1908, if not later? I argue that the gap between the two pieces
of literature is a result of the lack of differentiation between cultural and political
Turkism. In other words, although the idea of nationalism had not been turned into
a political ideology in Ahmed Vefik’s thought, he can be considered, just as Gökalp
and Akçura suggest, a cultural Turkist in the sense that he contributed to the emergence
of political Turkism through his publications on the Turkish language, history
and folklore. More specifically, Ahmed Vefik’s Lehce-i ‘Osmânî prepares both the
cultural and scientific ground for the Turkists’ aim for the unification of Turkic
peoples by considering these Turkic peoples as part of the Turkish nation based on
language. I demonstrate that similar to Gökalp and Akçura’s division of Turks into
branches in terms of geography, such as Northern and Eastern Turks, Ahmed Vefik
divides Turks into West (Garb Türkleri) and East (Şark Türkleri) by claiming that
Chagatai and Ottoman are dialects of the Turkish language. However, while doing
so, I also emphasize that Ahmed Vefik was not the first scholar who put forward the
idea that both Chagatai and Ottoman are Turkish. Just as the Young Ottomans
call the Ottoman language Turkish before Vefik Pasha, the relationship between
Chagatai and Ottoman Turkish was already known by contemporaries as a result
124Köprülü-zâde, Milli Edebiyat Cereyanının İlk Mübeşşirleri, 53.
125İlber Ortaylı, İmparatorluğun En Uzun Yüzyılı (İstanbul: Timaş, 2012), 269.
126Ibid., 269.
20
of the studies of orientalists on Turkic languages. Moreover, against the argument
that Lehce-i ‘Osmânî has a separate part for Turkish words, I demonstrate that
Ahmed Vefik divides his dictionary into two parts: while the first part includes
Turkish along with Italian, French and Greek words, the second part is allocated for
Arabic and Persian words. Lastly, I argue that although Lehce-i ‘Osmânî serves the
Turkist aim for the simplification of Ottoman Turkish by including the words used
in colloquial Turkish, such as sınık, it also diverges from this principle by including
archaic or Turkic words, such as kargış.
While Lehce-i ‘Osmânî conforms to the principles of Turkism in Language in many
respects, I demonstrate that Fezleke-i Târih-i ‘Osmânî stands in stark contrast to
Turkist historiography. In fact, Fezleke-i Târih-i ‘Osmânî bears the features of the
Ottoman histories criticized by Gökalp and Akçura. First, apart from the sentence
in the preface, Ahmed Vefik does not designate the members of the Ottoman dynasty
as Turk. Secondly, Vefik’s Ottoman history lacks the Turkish myths of origins
in the form of the genealogy of the Ottoman Empire that connects the Ottoman
Turks with those in Central Asia through Osman Beg to Oghuz Khan. In this respect,
Fezleke-i Târih-i ‘Osmânî, allocates a smaller space for pre-Ottoman Turkish
history compared to both contemporary and pre-19th century Ottoman histories.
Moreover, in contrast to Lehce-i ‘Osmânî, Ahmed Vefik does not consider Tatars
(Mongols), most notably Genghis Khan and Timur, as fellow Turks but as enemies
of the Ottomans. I argue that the lack of Turkism in Fezleke-i Târih-i ‘Osmânî
can be associated with its audience: it was written as a textbook to be read by the
pupils of Rüşdiyye schools where both Muslim and non-Muslim children received
their education. In this respect, I demonstrate that Fezleke-i Târih-i ‘Osmânî is
a dynasty-oriented history in which the Ottoman state is depicted as omnipotent.
Moreover, the publication date of the textbook coincides with the two developments
in 1869 which can be considered as milestones in the emergence of Ottomanism:
the Citizenship Law and the Regulation of Public Education. However, in contrast
to these documents, I also emphasize that since there is no emphasis on equality
between Muslims and non-Muslims, Vefik’s textbook does not promote a form of
Ottomanism that espouses equality among all Ottomans based on citizenship.
1.5 Sources
The main sources of this thesis are Ahmed Vefik’s Fezleke-i Târîh-i ‘Osmânî and
Lehce-i ‘Osmânî. While I used Fezleke-i Târîh-i ‘Osmânî ‘s copy of 1906 transcribed
21
and published by Boğaziçi Yayınları throughout the thesis, I also consulted the copy
of 1886 found in the library of Türk Tarih Kurumu (Turkish Historical Society) to
see the differences between the two copies. Similarly, while using Lehce-i ‘Osmânî ’s
copy of 1890 transcribed and published by Türk Dil Kurumu (Turkish Language
Association), I also consulted its copy dated 1888 and preserved in the library of
the Toronto University.
Besides these two works, I greatly used Ziya Gökalp’s Türkçülüğün Esasları published
by Anadolu Üniversitesi Yayınları and Akçura’s Üç Tarz-ı Siyâset and
Türkçülüğün Tarihi published by Ötüken Neşriyât in understanding Turkism. Although
I also used Robert Devereux’s translation of Türkçülüğün Esasları (The
Principles of Turkism), I raised for the discussion some of the terminology that Devereux
used, most notably his translation of the word Türk as Turkic in certain occasions.
Moreover, I benefited from Gökalp’s essays translated and edited by Niyazi
Berkes and I gave references to Gökalp’s collection of poems found in Kızılelma and
Altın Işık recently published by Ötüken to particularly show the difference between
Turkism and Turanism. In addition to these primary sources, one of the major
secondary sources of the thesis was Francois Georgeon’s intellectual monography of
Yusuf Akçura, Türk Milliyetçiliğinin Kökenleri: Yusuf Akçura (1876-1935), published
by Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, from which I immensely benefited.
The thesis also relied on eyewitness accounts, most notably memoirs, in writing
Ahmed Vefik’s biography. I mostly used the accounts of Ahmed Vefik’s Englishspeaking
contemporaries, George Washburn’s Fifty Years in Constantinople and
Recollections of Robert College, Austen Henry Layard’s Autobiography and Letters
from His Childhood Until His as H.M. Ambassador in Madrid and Edwin Pears’
Forty Years in Constantinople to depict Ahmed Vefik’s character. As secondary
sources, despite including some mistakes which were later corrected by Ömer Faruk
Akün in his entry on Ahmed Vefik in TDV İslam Ansiklopedisi, Fevziye Abdullah
Tansel’s three articles published in Belleten between 1964 and 1965 greatly shaped
the second chapter of the thesis by providing a significant amount of information
both on Ahmed Vefik’s life and his works.
Lastly, I consulted the writings of Ahmed Vefik’s contemporaries, most notably
Nâmık Kemâl and Ali Suâvî, to compare their vocabularies with that of Ahmed
Vefik. Thus, I used Kemâl’s essays published in Hürriyet, transcribed by Alp Eren
Topal and published by Vakıfbank Kültür Yayınları as Sürgünde Muhalefet Namık
Kemal’in Hürriyet Gazetesi, and his letters, Namık Kemal’in Husûsi Mektupları,
transcribed by Fevziye Abdullah Tansel and published by Turkish Historical Society.
For Ali Suâvi’s intellectual thought, I immensely benefited from Hüseyin Çelik’s
22
work, Ali Suavî ve Dönemi published by İletişim Yayınları.
1.6 Overview of Chapters
This thesis consists of three chapters. The first chapter focuses on Ziya Gökalp and
Yusuf Akçura’s definition of Turkism, respectively. After I begin the chapter with
a discussion on the issue of translating the words Türkçülük, Türk and Türkî from
Turkish to English, I look at the major components of Gökalp and Akçura’s ideology.
In the second part of the first chapter, I particularly dwell upon how Gökalp and
Akçura perceived Turkish history and language. Lastly, I examine the reasons given
by Gökalp and Akçura for considering Ahmed Vefik as a Turkist.
The second chapter focuses on the developments that might have shaped Ahmed
Vefik’s thoughts. I look at his family background, including the discussion on his
ethnicity, the education he received and the posts he assumed, such as in the Translation
Bureau. After discussing the anecdotes depicting Ahmed Vefik as a patriot,
in the last part of the chapter, I make an overview of Ahmed Vefik’s intellectual
thought with a focus on his opinions on constitutionalism in the light of his relationship
with the Young Ottomans and touch upon the works of certain Orientalists
on Turkish history and language in the 19th century, which probably influenced the
development of Ahmed Vefik’s cultural Turkism.
The third chapter of the thesis aims to juxtapose Ahmed Vefik’s thoughts on Turkish
history and language with those of Gökalp and Akçura by offering a close reading
of Fezleke-i Târîh-i ‘Osmânî and Lehce-i ‘Osmânî. Thus, besides his definitions of
the nation, this chapter also deals with how Ahmed Vefik perceives the Turkmen,
Tatar, Uzbek and Mongol in these works to see to what extent his perception of
these people bears similarities with Gökalp and Akçura’s idea of Bütün Türklük
(Whole Turkishness).
The last chapter concludes with thoughts on how to locate Ahmed Vefik’s place
in the history of Turkish nationalism. In this chapter, I re-emphasize the difference
between cultural and political Turkism while associating Vefik Pasha with the
former. While doing so, I also draw attention to the fluid and blurred boundaries
between Ottomanism, Islamism and Turkism in the late 19th century by showing
the examples from the vocabulary of Ahmed Vefik and his contemporaries.
23
2. DEFINING TURKISM, AND AHMED VEFIK AS A TURKIST
This chapter begins with a discussion on translating the words Türkçülük and Türk
into English. While these words have been translated as “Pan-Turkism” and “Turkic”
in literature, since they distort what the contemporary Turkists meant, I argue
that these translations are not accurate. In the second part of the chapter, I examine
the definitions of Turkism given by Ziya Gökalp and Yusuf Akçura, respectively,
by focusing on their definitions of the nation and nationhood. In the third and
fourth parts, I focus on the Turkist understanding of Turkish history and the Turkish
language. I demonstrate that both Gökalp and Akçura consider the different
Turkic languages as the dialects of the Turkish language and support the creation of
a common literary language for all Turkic peoples by simplifying Ottoman Turkish
based on “Istanbul Turkish” (İstanbul Türkçesi). Similarly, both Turkists criticize
Ottoman historiography for not allocating any space for pre-Ottoman Turkish history.
In the last part of the chapter, I examine the Turkists’ reasons for considering
Ahmed Vefik as a Turkist. I indicate that while both Gökalp and Akçura cite the
Pasha’s Lehce-i ’Osmânî as evidence for his Turkism in the sense that it envisions a
Turkish unity based on language, they do not mention his Fezleke-i Târîh-i ‘Osmânî
at all.
2.1 Terminology
In parallel to other pan-nationalisms, such as Pan-Germanism and Pan-Slavism, the
word Türkçülük, which literally means Turkism, is often translated into English as
Pan-Turkism. Thus, “Turkism” has been generally used together with the prefix
“pan-” as “Pan-Turkism”1 in referring to the irredentist ideology aiming for the
1See, for example, Serge A. Zenkovsky’s Pan-Turkism and Islam in Russia (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1960); Jacob Landau’s Pan-Turkism: From Irredentism to Cooperation (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1995); and James H. Meyer’s Turks Across Empires: Marketing Muslim Identity in the
Russian-Ottoman Borderlands, 1856-1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). It is interesting to
24
cultural, political and geographical unification of “Turkic” peoples.2 However, in the
context of Turkism in the Ottoman Empire and later in Turkey, Robert Devereux’s
translation of the word Türkçülük as “Turkism”3 is more accurate for two reasons.
First, although the intellectuals whose definitions of Turkism will be examined here
knew the word “pan-Turquisme” from French,4 they did not call their ideology Pan-
Türkçülük but simply Türkçülük in their writings. Given Gökalp and Akçura’s
residence in the Ottoman Empire and the Russian Empire, respectively, they must
have experienced the pan-nationalist winds of the late 19th and the early 20th
centuries, most notably that of Pan-Slavism.
Secondly, and more importantly, although both Landau and Shissler differentiate
Turkism and Pan-Turkism,5 I argue that Türkçülük already involves a significant
degree of irredentism in -and since- its birth,6 hence the prefix “Pan-” becomes
redundant. It is possible to differentiate Türkçülük from Turkish nationalism -
hence Turkism and Pan-Turkism- today or after the establishment of the Turkish
Republic in the sense that the latter does not necessarily transcend the borders
of Turkey. However, the two went hand in hand in the 19th-century Ottoman
Empire. In other words, there was no such difference between pan-nationalism and
nationalism in the Ottoman context because Turkish nationalism, as I try to show
throughout the chapter, emerged at the same time with an interest in outside Turks.7
Indeed, although the degree of their interest in “Outside Turks” changed over time,
the intellectuals whose definitions of Turkism will be examined in this paper -Ziya
Gökalp and Yusuf Akçura- define Türkçülük with reference to those Turkic people
living outside the Ottoman Empire or Turkey, thereby including irredentist claims
to a certain extent. For these two reasons, I prefer to use the word Turkism for
note that while Landau and Meyer translate the word Türkçülük as Pan-Turkism, they translate the word
Türklük as Turkism. The latter translation is particularly inaccurate because Türklük means Turkishness
in English.
2Jala Garibova, “A Pan-Turkic Dream: Language Unification of Turks” in Handbook of Language and
Ethnic Identity: The Success-Failure Continuum in Language and Ethnic Identity Efforts, edited by Joshua
Fishman, Ofelia Garcia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 269.
3Ziya Gökalp, The Principles of Turkism, trans. Robert Devereaux (Leiden: Brill, 1968).
4For example, Yusuf Akçura in his Üç Tarz-ı Siyâset (Three Types of Policy) written in 1904 uses the word
Panturquisme in parenthesis in referring to the policy of creating a Turkish nation based on race: “Irk
üzerine müstenid bir Türk milliyet-i siyâsiyyesi (Panturquisme) teşkil etmek.” Yusuf Akçura, Üç Tarz-ı
Siyâset (İstanbul: Ötüken Neşriyat, 2020), 15.
5Shissler, Between Two Empires: Ahmet Ağaoğlu and New Turkey, 20.
6Both Georgeon and Meyer argue that pan-Turkism was a creation of Türk Yurdu first published in 1911.
Meyer, Turks Across Empires, 4.
7Although the reason for this coincidence is beyond the scope of the paper, it would suffice to say that this is
probably related, besides other Pan-nationalisms, to the impact the Turkology studies made by orientalists
who considered Turks, Tatars and even Mongols as part of the same race, and called these nations “Turk”.
For example, Joseph De Guignes’s Mémoire Historique sur L’origine des Huns et des Turcs in 1754,
and Arthur Lumley Davids’s A Grammar of the Turkish Language with a Preliminary Discourse on the
Language and Literature of the Turkish Nations: Copious Vocabulary, Dialogues, A Collection influenced
the intellectuals in the Ottoman Empire, such as Ali Suâvi and Mustafa Celâleddin Pasha.
25
the translation of Türkçülük throughout the paper. In a similar vein, since these
intellectuals called themselves Türkçü, I will use the word “Turkist” for referring to
them.8
Another issue of translation from Turkish to English is the distinction between the
words “Turkish” and “Turkic”. Today, in general, while “Turkish” means “related
to Turkey”, “Turkic” refers to a much broader Turkic-speaking world. However,
there was no such difference in contemporary Ottoman Turkish. For this reason,
none of the 20th-century Turkist intellectuals use the word “Turkic”, but “Turkish”
(Türk) in their writings in referring to the Turkic peoples of Central Asia. Although
today the word “Turkic” has an equivalent in Turkish as “Türkî ”, this word meant
"Turkish" in contemporary works. In this sense, I find both Robert Devereux’s
translation of the word Türk as Turkic and James Meyer’s use of Turkic in place
of Turkish quite problematic.9 These translations wrongly imply that these Turkist
intellectuals had a differentiation in their minds between the Turks living in the
Ottoman Empire and the Turkic-speaking peoples of Central Asia. In fact, not
only did these Turkist intellectuals deliberately use the word “Turkish” for Turkic
peoples to emphasize the similarity among them, thereby justifying their claim for
both cultural and political unification of these peoples based on common ethnic and
linguistic features. They also believed in these common features by describing them
as scientifically proven facts and believed in this unity of all Turks by considering it
as “a historical fact” in the sense that it was achieved in the past.10
The last issue is the difference between Turkism and Turanism. The Turkic peoples
in the definitions of Turkism made by Gökalp and Akçura include Tatars, Kazakhs,
Turkmens, Uzbeks, Uyghurs, Qirghiz, Qıbchaks and Azeris.11 In this sense,
Turkism has a narrower range than that of Turanism which embraces not only Turkic
people but also Hungarians, Mongols and Finns once known as the Ural-Altaic
ethno-language group.12 This distinction is important because although the Turk-
8The suffixes “-cu, -çi, -çü” implies the meaning of “commitment” and “support” in certain nouns, such
as Sol (Left) and sol-cu (leftist) in Turkish. In this sense, the word Türkçü literally means “someone
committed to Turk” or simply “the supporter of Turk”. Although Gökalp uses “Türkçülük and “Türkçü”
instead of “Türk milliyetçiliği” (Turkish nationalism) or "Türk milliyetçisi" (Turkish nationalist), Akçura
sometimes uses these words interchangeably.
9Although there is not such a word as Türkî but only Türk in the original text, in his translation of
Türkçülüğün Esasları, Robert Devereux uses the word “Turkic” when Gökalp refers to Turkic-speaking
peoples (See, for example, the pages 19 and 21). James Meyer argues that “the word Turk in Turkish
and other Turkic languages can be rendered as either ‘Turkish’ or ‘Turkic’ in English” and he translates
Türk Yurdu as “Turkic Homeland”. However, I believe that the translation of the word “Turk” as “Turkic”
is problematic because these Turkist intellectuals did not make a distinction between Turkish people (or
Turks) -namely, those living in Turkey- and Turkic peoples living in Central Asia in their writings.
10For example, Gökalp argues that “the ideal of Turan was once a reality rather than a phantom, for it
became a reality when Mete united all Turks, then known as Huns.” The Principles of Turkism, 20.
11Landau, Pan-Turkism, 7.
12The Ural-Altaic hypothesis in the 19th century considered Turkic and Mongolic languages as “Altaic” and
26
ist intellectuals of the Ottoman Empire and the early Turkish Republic used the
word “Turan” on many occasions, they did not refer to a unification of Turanian
peoples, which includes Magyars, Finns, Koreans and Japanese, but to a great Turkish
homeland where all Turkic people lives together as a single political unit. For
example, Gökalp argues that no linguistic relationship among “the so-called Altaic
race” has not been proven yet, leaving aside the Ural-Altaic group.13 Accordingly,
“the only scientifically established fact is that various Turkish speaking peoples such
as Yakuts, Kirghizes, Uzbeks, Kipchaks, Tatars and Oghuz have a linguistic and,
traditionally, an ethnic unity.”14 Therefore, he “restricts the word Turan to Greater
Turkistan, which includes all branches of Turks.”15 In this sense, when Gökalp in his
well-known poems Turan and Kızıl Destan says “The homeland is neither Turkey
nor Turkestan for Turks / The Homeland is a great and eternal country: Turan.”16
and “The enemy country will be ruined / Turkey will grow and will become Turan”
17 , he does not refer to a cultural or political unity of Turanian people but to
the great fatherland of all Turks.18
grouped Finnish and Hungarian languages as “Ural” while arguing for a common descent between these
two language families. In 1855, Friedrich Max Müller in his The Languages of the Seat of War in the
East called them “Turanian” which provided a “scientific legitimacy” to Turanism in both the 19th and
20th centuries. However, the Ural-Altaic hypothesis is no longer valid as it has been rejected by many
linguists since the 1960s. See, for example, R. M. W. Dixon’s The Rise and Fall of Languages (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997).
13Gökalp, The Principles of Turkism, 40. Gökalp’s rejection of Turks’ relation to Ural-Altaic peoples might
be related to his emphasis on the adaptation of Western civilization by the Turkish nation. In other words,
he might have not been happy with seeing the Turks associated with “the Yellow race”.
14Although Gökalp uses the word “Turkish” (“Türkçe konuşan Yakut, Özbek. . . ”) Robert Devereux wrongly
translates it as “Turkic-speaking” because Gökalp does not make such a differentiation between Turkish
and Turkic people.
15Gökalp, The Principles of Turkism, 19.
16“Vatan ne Türkiye’dir Türklere ne Türkistan / Vatan büyük ve müebbet bir ülkedir: Turan” Ziya Gökalp,
Kızılelma (İstanbul: Ötüken Neşriyat, 2015), 18.
17“Düşmanın ülkesi viran olacak / Türkiye büyüyüp Turan olacak” Ibid., 141.
18Similarly, the word “Turan” is widely used by other contemporary Turkists, such as Ömer Seyfeddin’s
Yarınki Turan Devleti (Tomorrow’s Turan State) and Mehmed Emin Yurdakul’s Turana Doğru (Towards
Turan) and Halide Edib’s Yeni Turan (New Turan).
27
2.2 Ziya Gökalp’s Turkism
In the first systematic work on Turkism,19 Türkçülüğün Esasları (the Principles
of Turkism), published in 1923, Ziya Gökalp defines Turkism as “ to exalt the
Turkish nation.”20 By “to exalt”, Gökalp implies the improvement of both moral
and material conditions of the nation, and by “nation” he means “a community
that has a common language, religion, moral and aesthetic values.”21 In this sense,
For Gökalp, hars (culture) is the most important criterion for defining a nation.22
This conception of culture consists of language and religion together with moral
codes and aesthetic values. Thus, Gökalp excludes race, geography, political unity,
and even Renan’s concept of personal will (volition) in his definition of nation. He
believes the factors defining one’s nationality, namely the elements included in one’s
culture, are not influenced by race. He justifies his emphasis on culture over race
by arguing that “a man wants to live with the people with whom he shares the
same language and religion, rather than with those with whom he shares the same
blood.”23 It is because a man’s personality is not shaped by his genetic features,
but by his terbiye (upbringing)24 received from the society in which he was raised.25
Hence, Gökalp claims that genealogy is not sought for people but horses.26
Although Gökalp does not give a detailed definition for the word terbiye, perhaps
considering it straightforward, it can be inferred that it refers to the cultural impact
of a society on the development of an individual’s character, or simply one’s
socialization, at an early age. In other words, it is the process in which society cul-
19Although François Georgeon argues that Yusuf Akçura’s Üç Tarz-ı Siyâset written in 1904 is the first
systematical work on Turkism (Türk Milliyetçiliğinin Kökenleri, 48) and considers Akçura as the father of
Turkism (Ibid., 73), Akçura’s article was a preliminary -yet definitely important- discussion on the benefits
and applicability of Turkism in the Ottoman context. Since Gökalp systematizes Turkism by showing its
program in education, economy, art, history and literature, The Principles of Turkism should be considered
as the first systematic work on Turkism. However, Ismail Gasprinsky’s Tercüman first published in 1883
predate the writings of both Akçura and Gökalp by making him the first Turkist writer we have known.
20“Türkçülük, Türk milletini yükseltmek demektir.” Ziya Gökalp, Türkçülüğün Esasları (Eskişehir: Anadolu
Üniversitesi Yayınları, 2019), 13.
21“Bu ifadelerden anlaşıldı ki, millet; ne ırkî, ne kavmî, ne coğrafî, ne siyâsî ne de irâdî bir zümredir. Millet;
lisanca, dince, ahlakça ve bediiyatça müşterek olan, yani aynı terbiyeyi almış fertlerden mürekkep olan bir
zümredir.” Ibid., 19.
22“Türk köylüsü onu, ‘dili dilime uyan, dini dinime uyan’ diye tarif eder.” Ibid., 19.
23“Filhakika, bir adam kanca müşterek bulunduğu insanlarda ziyade, dilde ve dinde müşterek bulunduğu
insanlarla yaşamak ister.” Ibid., 19.
24Although Devereux translates the word terbiye as education, I found Niyazi Berkes’s translation of the
word as upbringing more accurate because Gökalp means the socialization of a person at an early age by
the family rather than the official education that person receives in schools.
25“Çünkü insanî şahsiyetimiz bedenimizde değil, ruhumuzdadır. Maddi meziyetlerimiz ırkımızdan geliyorsa,
manevi meziyetlerimiz de terbiyesini aldığımız cemiyetden geliyor.” Ibid., 19.
26“Filhakika, atlarda şecere aramak lazımdır.” Ibid., 20.
28
turally shapes an individual’s thoughts and behaviors. Gökalp believes that people
are born as lâictimâ’î (non-social) creatures27 and they acquire “linguistic, religious,
ethical, aesthetic, political, legal or economic values” through upbringing. Therefore,
nationality is something learned, namely the learning of the culture of the
society that they were born into: it incorporates language, religion, moral and aesthetic
values.28 Since it is this terbiye, rather than genealogy, that determines one’s
nationality, Gökalp considers those whose ancestors came from Albania or Arabia
but received Turkish upbringing as Turks. Thus, Gökalp concludes that “we should
recognize those who call themselves Turk as Turk.”29 In this sense, as an answer
to his political opponents who called him Kurd because he was from Diyarbakır,
Gökalp wrote in 1923 that “. . . I have learned also that I am racially a Turk, since
the two grandfathers of my father came a few generations ago from Çermik, which
is a Turkish area. However, I would not hesitate to believe that I am Turk even if I
had discovered that my grandfathers came from the Kurdish or Arab areas; because
I learned through my sociological studies that nationality is based solely on upbringing.”
30 However, the fact that Gökalp was not a racist does not mean that his
nationalism was completely inclusive, or liberal. Even if Gökalp clearly states that
legal Turkism aims to create a modern state with modern law and democracy,31 his
nationalism is solely built on culture as language and religion are the main pillars. In
this sense, in contrast to Berkes and Parla’s description of Gökalp’s nationalism as
“Westernist”32 and “universalist”,33 it is important to note that Gökalp’s Turkism
is closer to the ethnic form of nationalism rather than to the civic one, considering
its emphasis on language and religion.
In fact, according to Gökalp religion is one of the two components creating the
nation because, just as language, it creates common sentiments among the members
of the nation: “Religion is the most important factor in the creation of national
consciousness as it unites men through common sentiments and beliefs. It is because
27Ziya Gökalp, The Principles of Turkism, 13.
28“Görülüyor ki Türk olmak için, yalnız Türk kanı taşımak kâfi değildir. Türk olmak için her şeyden evvel
Türk harsı ile terbiye görmek ve Türk mefkûresi için çalışmak şarttır. Bu şartları haiz olmayanlara kanca
ve ırkça Türk olsalar bile ’Türk’ ünvanı veremeyiz.” Ziya Gökalp, “Türk Kimdir?” Makaleler IX: Yeni Gün
- Yeni Türkiye - Cumhuriyet Gazetelerindeki Yazılar (İstanbul: Kültür Bakanlığı Yayınları, 1980), 33.
29"Milliyet de, din gibi ’kalben tastik ve lisanen ikrar’ şartlarına bağlıdır. Lisaniyle ’Türküm’ deyen ve
samimi olarak kalbinde bu kanaati taşıyan herkes Türktür.” Ibid., 37.
30Niyazi Berkes, Turkish Nationalism and Western Civilization: Selected Essays of Ziya Gökalp (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1959), 44.
31Ziya Gökalp, The Principles of Turkism, 118
32Niyazi Berkes, “Ziya Gökalp: His Contribution to Turkish Nationalism,” The Middle East Journal 8, no.
4 (Autumn 1954): 376.
33Taha Parla, The Social and Political Thought of Ziya Gökalp, (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1985), 22.
29
of this that genuinely religious men are those who have national fervor, and those
genuine nationalists are those who believe in the eternity of faith.”34 Thus, he even
does not see any difference between a devout Muslim and a Turkish nationalist.
In this sense, Gökalp rejects the main premise of secularism that religion must be
relegated to the personal realm because, as Davison puts it, for Gökalp “religion is
not simply a private matter; it remains a primary part of Turkish national culture.”35
Gökalp also argues that upbringing removes irâde (personal will) from the determination
of one’s nationality, thereby excluding the element of volition in the definition
of nation. Gökalp believes that once a person absorbs the values of his society
through upbringing, it is not possible for that person to adopt the culture of another
society. Since upbringing begins in the cradle through the learning of the mother
tongue and “man receives his most genuine and most inner sentiments during his
primary upbringing”,36 a person who lives in a foreign society feels miserable because
he does not share any common sentiment with other people.37 In other words,
a person cannot feel a sense of belonging to the nation whose upbringing he did not
receive. Thus, in contrast to Renan who used the metaphor of “daily plebiscite” in
Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? to depict the emergence and the continuation of nations,
Gökalp believes that individuals are not free to choose their nationality: they belong
to the nation they were born in. Moreover, Gökalp rejects the subjective component
of the nation by arguing that man is a reflection of his society. As Heyd puts
it, Gökalp believed that an individual “unwittingly” obeys the ideals of his society
rather than following his own will.38 In this sense, upbringing determines which
mefkûre (ideal) a person will embrace:39 A person can work, and even sacrifice his
life, only for the national ideal of the society whose upbringing he received.40 In
other words, those who did not receive a Turkish upbringing would not -and cannotserve
the national ideals of the Turkish nation. Since the deeds done for the Turkish
nation are the indicator of one’s Türklük (Turkishness),41 it follows that those who
34Berkes, Turkish Nationalism and Western Civilization, 192-93.
35Andrew Davison, “Secularization and Modernization in Turkey: The Ideas of Ziya Gökalp,” Economy and
Society 24, no. 2 (1995): 213.
36Gökalp, The Principles of Turkism, 15.
37Ibid., 14-15.
38Uriel Heyd, Foundations of Turkish Nationalism: The Life and Teachings of Ziya Gökalp (London: Luzac,
1950), 56.
39“Normal bir insan hangi milletin terbiyesini almışsa, ancak onun mefkûresine çalışabilir.” Gökalp,
Türkçülüğün Esasları, 23.
40“Bundan dolayıdır ki, insan terbiyesi ile büyüdüğü cemiyetin mefkûresi uğruna hayatını feda edebilir.”
Ibid., 20.
41"Her ferdin Türklüğe olan samimi merbutiyeti, millî mefkûrelere sarf edeceği faaliyetlerle, fedakârlıklarla
ölçülecektir... Hakiki Türk, Türkçülük için büyük fedakarlıklarda bulunandır.” Gökalp, Makaleler IX, 37.
30
did not receive a Turkish upbringing cannot be called Turk as they would not make
any sacrifice for the sake of the Turkish nation.
Lastly, Gökalp excludes geography and political unity from his definition of the
nation. By giving the example of the Oghuz Turks scattered in Turkey, Azerbaijan,
Iran and Khwarazm, Gökalp argues that even if the members of a nation do not live
in the same territory, they are still part of the same nation as long as they share
a common language and culture.42 In his poem Millet (Nation), he says “Don’t
call me Oghuz, Kayı, Ottoman / I am a Turk, this name is above all titles / There
is no Uzbek, Kyrgyz, Kazan (Tatars) / Turkish nation is one entity which cannot
be divided.”43 Although Gökalp later narrows down the boundaries of Turkism to
an ideal of culturally uniting only the Oghuz Turks, namely “Turkmens” living in
Turkey, Azerbaijan, Iran, and Khwarazm, thereby not including Uzbeks, Kyrgyz,
and Tatars,44 this was probably not because he gave up considering the Turkic
peoples of Central Asia as Turks, but because he adopted Turkism to the realities
of the time after the establishment of the Turkish Republic.45 In other words, he
realizes the difficulty of the unification of all Turks, but continues to see the Turkic
peoples living in the Caucasus, the Volga region and Central Asia as part of the same
nation: “The word Turk has become today a name which is applied only the Turks of
Turkey. Those who share the Turkish culture will, of course, also use this name.”46
In fact, Gökalp divides the Turkish nation into three branches: Türkiye Türkleri
(Turks of Turkey), Şark Türkleri (Eastern Turks) and Şimal Türkleri (Northern
Turks).47 In this respect, there are two main branches of Turkish languages: one
spoken in Turkey, the other spoken in the East, namely in Central Asia. As I will
show in Chapter 4 on Ahmed Vefik’s political thought, Gökalp’s categorization of
the Turks and their language bears considerable similarities with that of Ahmed
Vefik.
42Gökalp, The Principles of Turkism, 14.
43“Deme bana Oğuz, Kayı, Osmanlı / Türk’üm, bu ad her unvandan üstündür / Yoktur Özbek, Nogay,
Kırgız, Kazanlı / Türk milleti bir bölünmez bütündür.” Ziya Gökalp, Yeni Hayat, (İstanbul: Ötüken
Neşriyat, 2019) 28.
44Gökalp, The Principles of Turkism, 17.
45Writing in 1923, Gökalp considers Turanism, namely the unification of all Turkic peoples, as “a distant
ideal” of Turkism. Accordingly, the first and the close ideal of Turkism is to culturally -not politicallyunite
the Oghuz Turks consisted of “Turkmens” in Turkey, Azerbaijan, Iran and Khwarezm. Gökalp, The
Principles of Turkism, 18-19.
46Gökalp, The Principles of Turkism, 19. Devereux wrongly translates “Türk harsı” (Turkish culture) as
“the Turkish culture of Turkey”.
47Ibid., 10.
31
2.3 Yusuf Akçura’s Turkism
Yusuf Akçura in his article Three Types of Policy (Üç Tarz-ı Siyâset) published in
the newspaper Türk in Cairo in 1904 examines the potential benefits and the political
applicability of Turkism along with Ottomanism (Osmanlıcılık) and Islamism
(İslâmcılık) for the Ottoman context in terms of strengthening and progressing the
empire, or simply creating an identity based on which loyalty emerges among its
subjects. Although Akçura was torn between Turkism and Islamism in the final
analysis,48 this essay was deemed as the manifesto of Turkism,49 and Akçura was
considered as the creator of Turkism in literature. In fact, Akçura, as a man of practice,
evaluates Turkism with its advantages and disadvantages in a realist tone.50
Yet, the importance of Three Types of Policy lies in the fact that it is the first
text that discusses Turkism as a possible -or alternative to other grand ideologies of
Ottomanism and Islamism- option for keeping the Ottoman Empire intact.
In this essay, Akçura defines Turkism as “the policy of creating a Turkish nation
based on race”.51 Thanks to this policy, Turks in the Ottoman Empire would be
united not only based on religion, but also racial ties. Moreover, those non-Turkish
Muslims who have been Turkified to some extent would assimilate into Turkishness
more, and those who have not been assimilated into Turkishness at all but do not
possess any national conscience would be Turkified, as well.52 However, Akçura’s
Turkism was not limited to the borders of the Ottoman Empire: the most beneficial
aspect of this policy for the Empire was “to create a great political nation securing
its existence among other great nations by uniting Turks, who spread into most of
Asia and Eastern part of Europe, sharing the common language, race, customs and
even religion, in which the Ottoman Empire as the strongest, the most developed
48In this essay, Akçura by looking at the Ottomanist policies of the past clearly argues that the policy of
creating an Ottoman nation is a futile attempt now. Regarding Islamism, he considers the European states
as a great obstacle against the realization of creating a unity based on Islam. He writes that he thought his
answer to the question that which of the three policies is both the most beneficial and applicable is Turkism.
Yet, he realizes that Turk means only Western Turks, namely Ottoman Turks: there is no Eastern Turks,
namely those living in Central Asia, in the minds of Western Turks. In the last sentence of the essay, he
remains undecided between Islamism and Turkism by asking the following question: “Which one among
the policies of Islamism and Turkism is more beneficial and applicable for the Ottoman Empire?” Yusuf
Akçura, Üç Tarz-ı Siyâset (İstanbul: Ötüken Neşriyat, 2020), 40-41.
49Français Georgeon, Türk Milliyetçiliğinin Kökenleri, 34 and 39. Even Gökalp argued that Akçura defended
“the idea of Turkish unity” in Üç Tarz-ı Siyâset. Gökalp, The Principles of Turkism, 7.
50Zenkovsky Pan-Turkism and Islam in Russia, 38.
51“Irk üzerine müstenid bir Türk milliyet-i siyâsiyyesi.” Akçura, Üç Tarz-ı Siyâset, 21.
52“Tevhîd-i Etrâk siyasetindeki fevâide gelince, memâlik-i Osmâniyye’deki Türkler hem dînî, hem ırkî revâbıt
ile pek sıkı, yalnız dînî olmakdan sıkı birleşecek, ve esasen Türk olmadığı hâlde bir dereceye kadar
Türkleşmiş anâsır-ı sâire-i Müslime daha ziyâde Türklüğe temessül edecek ve henüz hiç temessül itmemiş
ve fakat vicdân-ı milliyeleri bulunmayan anâsır da Türkleşdirilebilecekdi.” Akçura, Üç Tarz-ı Siyâset, 37.
32
and civilized among Turkish societies would play the leading role.”53 In this sense,
compared to Gökalp’s broad definition of Turkism as “to advance the Turkish nation”,
Akçura has a more specific definition of Turkism with more irredentist and
ethnic tones.
It is important to note that Akçura does not use the word Türkçülük in Three
Types of Policy yet. Instead, he refers to this ideology simply as “the unification of
Turks” (Tevhîd-i Etrâk) or the policy of Turkishness (Türklük siyâseti) throughout
the essay.54 However, in his History of Turkism (Türkçülün Tarihi)55 written in
1928, Akçura also uses “Turkish nationalism” (Türk milliyetçiliği) interchangeably
with “Turkism” suggesting that he sees non-irredentist Turkish nationalism with
Turkism -that he defined as the unification of all Turks in 1904- as the same ideology
in 1928.56
Indeed, just as Gökalp, Akçura took a distance towards irredentism just after the
establishment of the Republic. In Siyaset ve İktisât (Politics and Economics) published
in 1924, Akçura divides Turkism into two: imperialist Turkism and democratic
Turkism.57 Accordingly, while the former recognizes the right for nationhood of every
nation, the latter infringes upon this basic right of nations. In other words,
democratic Turkism supports other nations’ right to nationhood as much as it does
for the right of Turks. Since “Turks’ power is barely enough for their existence,
democratic Turkism does not aim to rule over other nations, which would cause a
decrease in the strength of Turks.”58 While democratic nationalism is humanitarian
and defensive in character, imperialist nationalism is aggressive and expansionist. In
this sense, Akçura considers nationalism in Europe as imperialist because they were
in favor of increasing only the strength of their nations at the expense of others. For
example, “Russia defended the rights of Slavs both inside and outside the empire,
but it did not respect even basic human rights of Finnish, Georgian, Armenian and
Turkish people who lived in the same empire.”59 This policy of imperialism failed
53“Lâkin asl büyük fâide, dilleri, ırkları, âdetleri ve hatta ekseriyyetin dinleri bile bir olan ve Asya kıt’asının
büyük kısmıyla Avrupa cihet-i şarkiyyesine yayılmış bulunan Türklerin birleşmesine ve böylece diğer büyük
milliyetler arasında, muhâfaza-i vücûd idebilecek azîm bir milliyet-i siyâsiyye teşkil eylemelerine hidmet
idilecek ve işbu büyük hey’etde Türk cem’iyyetlerinin en kavî, en müterakkî ve en mütemeddini olduğu’yçün
Devlet-i Osmâniyye en mühim rolü oynayacaktı.” Akçura, Üç Tarz-ı Siyâset, 37.
54Ibid., 21.
55This long article was written for the almanac called Türk Yılı 1928 published by Turkish Hearts (Türk
Ocakları) in 1928 in which Akçura divides the history of Turkism into different phases.
56Yusuf Akçura, Türkçülüğün Tarihi (İstanbul: Ötüken Neşriyat, 2019), 98.
57Yusuf Akçura, Siyaset ve İktisat (İstanbul: Ötüken Neşriyat, 2020), 28.
58Ibid., 29.
59Ibid., 28.
33
both in Russia and Germany by causing the collapse of these empires. In short,
Akçura justifies democratic nationalism by not only considering the claim for nationhood
as a “natural” right of each nation but also by arguing that imperialist
Turkism “would harm most of Turks who are dependent on other nations”. In other
words, just in the case of Three Types of Policy, Akçura takes a realist stance and
considers the policy of imperialist Turkism as impossible. Akçura concludes that he
has always been a supporter of democratic Turkism.60 In this respect, similar to
that of Gökalp, it can be said that Akçura adopted his thoughts to the contemporary
conditions of the newly established republic by focusing on the cultural unification,
rather than the geographical one, of Turkic peoples.
In the article written in 1914, Akçura defines the nation in the following way: “A
nation is a race, a language and tradition.”61 However, Akçura does not attribute
“tradition” the role that Gökalp attributes to culture as the primary characteristic
of a nation. In History of Turkism, Akçura leaves out “tradition” in his definition
and defines the nation as “a community with a shared conscience emerging from the
unity of race and language.”62 Unfortunately, Akçura does not elaborate on what he
means by “the shared conscience”. However, since this “shared conscience” emerges
as a result of the common language and race, Akçura’s emphasis on language and
race as the two main elements creating a nation is obvious. Yet, again, it is not
completely clear what he means by “race” (ırk) neither in Three Types of Policy nor
in History of Turkism. François Georgeon argues that rather than signifying “a group
of people sharing common physical and physiological characteristics” as in the sense
of the word in modern Turkish, Akçura’s usage of race implies “a group of people
having common cultural heritage” as it is used by the modern anthropologist.63 In
other words, Georgeon suggests that Akçura did not have a racist understanding of
nationhood. However, on the other hand, as Georgeon claims, Akçura’s thought was
influenced by German scholars.64 Indeed, Akçura’s definition of the nation is closer
to German Volk.65 Before giving his abovementioned definition of the nation, Akçura
60Akçura, Siyaset ve İktisat, 30
61“Millet bir ırk, bir lisan, bir ananedir.” Georgeon, Türk Milliyetçiliğinin Kökenleri, 43.
62“Millet, ırk ve lisanın esâsen birliğinden dolayı ictâmî vicdanında vahdet hasıl olmuş bir cemiyet-i
beşeriyyedir.” Akçura, Türkçülüğün Tarihi, 17.
63Georgeon, Türk Milliyetçiliğinin Kökenleri, 43-44.
64Ibid., 117.
65It seems that Akçura’s thought on the economy was also heavily influenced by a German model, a national
political economy, developed by Friedrich List. In addition to blaming its political aspects for being under
the influence of French imperialism, Akçura criticizes the liberal policies of the Tanzîmât in economy
and he supports a protectionist economy called “Millî İktisâd” (National Economy) (Georgeon, Türk
Milliyetçiliğinin Kökenleri, 95). Akçura’s sympathy for German Empire can be best observed in his article
Almanya, İngiltere, Türkiye ve Âlem-i İslâm written in 1910, in which Akçura argues that Germany, in
contrast to Britain and France that seized the Ottoman Egypt, Algeria and Tunisia, did not have any
34
summarizes the main factors taken into account in explaining the emergence and
existence of nations by the Germans, French and Italians respectively. Accordingly,
Germans describe a nation with race (ırk) and language (lisân), which Akçura calls
“historical necessity” (târîhî mecburiyet).66 These two, race and language, also exist
in Akçura’s definition of nationhood. Lastly, the phrase “historical necessity” clearly
suggests that Akçura emphasizes objective factors over subjective factors, such as
personal will, in the creation and the existence of nations.
In Three Types of Policy (1904), Akçura seems to be aware of the difference between
nation and race: he uses the word milliyet or millet in referring to the nation. For
example, he associates the idea of creating an Ottoman nation with the French principle
of nationhood based on personal will instead of lineage and race.67 Therefore,
it seems that by “race”, Akçura does not mean a nation, but a community with
ethnic ties. In this sense, he defines Turkism as “the policy of creating a Turkish
nation based on race”. Similarly, in the first issue of Türk Yurdu (Turkish Homeland)
in 1911, he defines the target audience of the journal as “the Turkish race”.68
In The History of Turkism (1928), he obviously possesses the words “Türk milleti”
and “Türk milliyeti” in his vocabulary, but he prefers to use the word “ırk” when he
defines Turks.69 Therefore, compared to Gökalp’s definition of nationhood grounded
solely on culture by rejecting any ethnic element, there is an emphasis on ethnicity
by Akçura. However, he was not a racist, as Georgeon claims: in defining Turkism
in Three Types of Policy, similar to Gökalp’s acceptance of ethnically non-Turks
with Turkish culture as Turks, Akçura includes those non-Turks who have been
Turkified in the unification of Turks. In other words, Akçura accepts those who are
not ethnically Turkish as Turk if they are Turkified to a certain extent. Similarly,
Landau emphasizes the fact that race is not the sole element in Akçura’s definition
of the nation by arguing that Akçura considered “Turks as one indivisible entity,
with evident signs of both cultural ties (language, history, customs) and material
bonds (blood, race).”70 In short, although it is even equal to culture in terms of
importance, ethnicity is not the only element in Akçura’s definition of nation.
political demand for Ottoman lands. Accordingly, Germany would protect the Ottoman Sultan and lands
against other states. Georgeon, Türk Milliyetçiliğinin Kökenleri, 149.
66Akçura, Türkçülüğün Tarihi, 17.
67“O zamanlar Avrupa’da milliyet efkârı Fransa İhtilal-i Kebîriyle, nesebî ve ırkî olmakdan ziyâde, taleb-i
vicdânîye müstenid Fransız kaidesini esâs-ı milliyyet kabul ediyordu.” Akçura, Üç Tarz-ı Siyaset, 16.
68“Risale Türk ırkının mümkün olduğu kadar tarafından okunup anlanarak istifade bir tarzda yazılacaktır.”
Arai, Turkish Nationalism in Young Turk Era, 49. Just as Devereux and Meyer, Arai translate the word
“Türk ırkı” (Turkish race) as “Turkic poeple” as if Akçura differentiates Turkic people from Turks.
69Akçura, Türkçülüğün Tarihi, 15.
70Landau, Pan-Turkism, 45.
35
Akçura defines Turks as “those nations (kavimler) or tribes (kabileler) who come
from the same race (ırk), sometimes called Turk-Tatar and sometimes called Turk-
Tatar-Mongol by ethnologists and linguists, having quite similar customs and language,
and their histories mixed.”71 Akçura’s inclusion of Mongols is not a coincidence
because, just as Gökalp, he considers Genghis Khan (along with Timur) not
only a Turk but also the greatest hero of Turkish history. In this sense, Akçura also
considers Mongol history as part of a grand Turkish history.72 Akçura writes that
“In addition to those from Kazan, Azerbaijan... etc. called as Tatars, Kyrgyz and
Yakuts are included in this definition of Turks.”73 Since it does not mention other
Turkic peoples, such as Uzbeks and Kazakhs, Akçura’s definition of Turks is less
clear than that of Gökalp.74 However, in his article called “Turkishness” (Türklük)75
written in 1912, it is more possible to understand Akçura’s conception of “Whole
Turkishness” (Bütün Türklük) influenced by Gasprinski.76 Akçura divides Turks into
five branches: “This grand whole of 45-50 million people is composed of Ottoman
Turks, Azeri (Caucasian) Turks, Crimean Turks, Northern Turks and Eastern Turks
(Kazakhstan, core Turkestan and Eastern Turkestan).”77 Thus, similar to Gökalp’s
conception of three main branches of Turks -Western Turks, namely those Turks living
in the Ottoman Empire, and Eastern Turks in “Turkestan”, namely those living
within the borders of the Russian Empire and China, and Northern Turks- Akçura
envisions a broader Turkish world. Moreover, Akçura shares Gökalp’s conception
of Turkish history: the homeland of Turks is Turkestan (Central Asia) from which
they migrated all over the world; therefore, Turks have a common ancestry, which I
will dwell on in the chapter on Turkism in Historiography.
71“Türkler dediğimiz zaman, etnografya, filolocya ve tarih müntesiplerinin bazan ‘Türk-Tatar’, bazan ‘Türk-
Tatar-Moğol’ diye yâd ettikleri bir ırktan gelme, âdetleri, dilleri birbirine pek yakın, târihî hayatları birbirine
karışmış olan kavim ve kabîlelerin mecmû’unu murâd ediyoruz.” Akçura, Türkçülüğün Tarihi, 15.
72Georgeon, Türk Milliyetçiliğinin Kökenleri, 81.
73“Bu cihetle İranlı ve Avrupalı bazı muharrirlerin, ve onlara uyarak bazı Osmanlı muharirlerinin Tatar
dedikleri Kazanlılar, Âzerbaycanlılar... ilh. ile beraber, Kırgızlar Yakutlar da ‘Türkler’ tabirinin içinde
demektir.” Akçura, Türkçülüğün Tarihi, 15.
74Just as Gökalp, Akçura was not a supporter of Turanism as the idea of uniting Turanian people. Français
Georgeon, Türk Milliyetçiliğinin Kökenleri, 50.
75In addition to its primary meaning as “being a Turk”, such as the idea of Turkishness (Türklük fikri) in
explaining the emergence of national consciousness among Turks, Turkishness is also used by Akçura in
referring to the “the World of Turkishness” or “Turkish World” (Türklük Âlemi) as all of the lands where
Turks live in.
76Similar to the meaning of Türk Dünyası (Turkish World), Akçura by this word -which is frequently used
in History of Turkism- means all Turks from different part of the world as a single entity.
77“45-50 milyonluk bu azim kitle, Osmanlı Türkleri, Azeri (Kafkas) Türkleri, Kırım Türkleri, Şimal Türkleri
ve Şark Türkleri (Kazakistan asıl Türkistan ve Şarki Türkistan) denilen beş zümrenin terkibinden hasıl
olur.” Georgeon, Türk Milliyetçiliğinin Kökenleri, 160.
36
2.4 Turkism in Language
According to Akçura, the creator of the idea of “Whole Turkishness” that envisions a
broader Turkish world was İsmail Gasprinski who argued in his newspaper Tercüman
(The Interpreter) -published between 1883 and 1918 in Bahcesarai in the Crimeafor
the first time that “there were no Kazan Tatars nor Central Asian Taranchis, but
Turks with one religion and one language.”78 Gasprinski was a Crimean Tatar intellectual
who sowed the seeds of “Turkic nationalism”79 in Russia through his works
based on the principle “Dilde, fikirde, işte birlik” (Unity in language, thought and
action).80 Similar to Akçura’s categorization of Turks into five branches, Gasprinski
divides the Turkish language into four: “There are four great Turkish accents
(şive): The first one is Chagatai, later Kazan accent, and later Azerbaijan and Ottoman
accents.”81 The most important aspect of Gasprinski’s Turkism was to create
a common Turkish language for all Turkic peoples.82 He summarizes his aim in
the following words: “A porter and a waterman in Istanbul should understand a
camel-driver and a shepherd in Eastern Turkestan.”83 In this sense, Akçura writes
that “Tercüman advised Turks to learn Umûmî Türkçe (public Turkish) over local
Turkish dialects.” This “public Turkish” was Türk edebî dili (literary Turkish)
created by Gasprinski through the simplification of the Ottoman language by eliminating
foreign, namely Arabic and Persian, words.84 Akçura, influenced not only by
Gasprinski but probably also by Şinâsi and Nâmık Kemâl, supported the simplification
of Ottoman Turkish: Just as Gasprinski did in Tercümân, Akçura encouraged
to use of plain Turkish in Türk Yurdu.85 It was probably the case that Akçura’s
conception of Bütün Türklük was influenced by Gasprinski’s ideas on the Turkish
78Georgeon, Türk Milliyetçiliğinin Kökenleri, 163.
79The reason for the use of “Turkic nationalism” instead of “Turkism” by Zenkovsky might be related with his
consideration of Gasprinski also a pan-Islamist. Zenkovsky argues that “by the unity, he meant the unity of
all Russian Moslems, but since the majority of Russia’s Moslems were Turkic peoples, Gasprinsky’s appeal
for their religious unification amounted to an appeal for the national rallying of Russian Turks.” Although
it is true that Gasprinsk created not only “ethnic consciousness” but also “religious self-identification”
among Turkic peoples of Russia, Kırımlı argues that Gaspıralı “never renounced extra-territorial ethnic
(Turkic) and religious (Islamic) identities, affiliations and allegiances.” Hakan Kırımlı, “The ‘Young Tatar’
Movement in the Crimea, 1905-1909,” Cahiers du Monde russe et soviétique 34, no. 4 (Oct-Dec. 1993),
554.
80Serge A. Zenkovsky’s Pan-Turkism and Islam in Russia 32.
81Ataalp Kadir Pınarer, “İsmail Gaspıralı ve Kırım Tatar Millî Hareketi” (PhD Diss., İstanbul University,
2014), 245.
82Shissler, Between Two Empires, 130.
83Pınarer, “İsmail Gaspıralı ve Kırım Tatar Millî Hareketi” 244.
84Nadir Devlet, Rusya Türklerinin Millî Mücadele Tarihi (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 2014), 27-28.
85Arai, Turkish Nationalism in the Young Turk Era, 49.
37
language and its dialects, towards whom he shows great respect and admiration.86
The creation of a common language through a simplification of Ottoman Turkish
was a common theme both in Gökalp’s and Akçura’s thoughts. In other words,
Akçura was not the only Turkist influenced by Gasprinski. Ziya Gökalp in the
Principles of Turkism praises Tercüman in the following way: “Eastern, Western, as
well as Northern, Turks could read and understand Tercümân, which was thus the
living proof that all Turks could unite around the same language.”87 In this sense, the
Turkists emphasized creating cultural unification among the Turkic peoples through
a common language. The Turkists prioritizes the linguistic unification of Turkic
peoples because it was probably seen as a step toward a geographical and political
unification of the Turkic people in the future. Moreover, the Turkists’ method for
simplification of the language was also quite similar, even the same: they accepted
the words used by people as part of the Turkish language. In other words, they did
not try to create new words for replacing those foreign ones by keeping the foreign
words that circulate in the spoken language.
According to Gökalp, “Turkism in Language” (Dilde Türkçülük) aims to create a
common language by making the language written by the elite the language spoken
by the people. Both Gökalp and Akçura believed that this could be achieved through
the simplification, not the purification, of the Ottoman language. The difference
between simplification and purification is that while the former defends retaining
Arabic and Persian words that are part of the popular language, the latter attempts
to replace Arabic and Persian words either with ancient Turkish words or with
new words created from Turkish roots found in Turkic languages, such as Chagatai,
Uzbek, Kirghiz or Tatar. In line with the movement Yeni Lisan (New Language)
started by the authors of the journal Genç Kalemler (Young Pens) in which Gökalp
published some of his poems between 1910 and 1912, Gökalp believes that Arabic
and Persian words that are used by the people “had become Turkish” and considers
the purification of Ottoman Turkish as extremist demands.88 In other words, rather
than eliminating all Arabic and Persian words, the Turkists aim to remove the Arabic
and Persian words that have equivalent in Turkish along with Arabic and Persian
grammatical rules as in the use of constructions. Otherwise, the replacement of the
“natural words” with artificial ones would create “an artificial Turkish”89 because
86Georgeon argues that Akçura was reading Tercüman (Türk Milliyetçiliğinin Kökenleri, 25-26). Gasprinski
also published his articles and letters in Türk Yurdu together with other Turkists, such as Ahmet Ağaoğlu
and Ali Hüseyinzade. Meyer, Turks Across Empires, 160.
87Gökalp, The Principles of Turkism, 5.
88Ibid., 83.
89Ibid., 7.
38
language is not something created by conscious action or individual will, but a living
organism.90 In this respect, Gökalp considers the Ottoman language as “an artificial
amalgam created out of the grammar, syntax and vocabulary of three languages:
Arabic, Persian and Turkish.”91 For this reason, the Ottoman language is not a
spoken language: it only exists in the writings of the elite.
Gökalp gives two reasons for his rejection of the purification in the language. First,
he argues that in contrast to the elite’s use of the Arabic and Persian words interchangeably
with their Turkish equivalents, the Arabic and Persian words included in
the spoken language of the people have no equivalents in Turkish: “when the people
adopt an Arabic or Persian word, they discard entirely its Turkish equivalent.”92
Thus, the people unconsciously protect the nature of the language by following the
principle that there must be one word for each meaning.93 Since language is a living
organism, it is futile to revive the “ancient fossilized Turkish words as substitutes
for those that are discarded.”94 Secondly, Gökalp argues that it is not possible to
know the real origins of the ancient Turkish words that the purifiers suggested for
replacing the foreign words in Turkish. He asserts that “it has been proven scientifically
that many current words which we accept as driving from Turkish roots
actually rendered old Turkish from Chinese, Mongolian, Tungus and even Hindi and
Persian.”95 However, even if these roots were Turkish, what matters is whether the
people adopted them or not: “To a Turkist, every word used and recognized by the
people is a national word.”96 Thus, Gökalp concludes that it is the job of philologists
and linguists, not of Turkists, to search for the roots of words.97 In a sense,
Gökalp has an inclusivist view on language that accepts the foreign words used by
the people as Turkish.
90Gökalp, The Principles of Turkism, 22.
91Ibid., 23.
92Ibid., 77.
93Ibid., 79.
94Ibid., 93.
95Ibid., 81-82.
96Ibid., 83.
97Ibid., 83.
39
2.5 Turkism in Historiography
Similar to the opposition between the Ottoman language spoken by the elite and the
plain Turkish spoken by the people, Ziya Gökalp creates a dichotomy between the
names Turk and Ottoman, or between Turkishness and Ottomanness: "Although
Turks are the main element among the nations constituting the empire, ’Ottoman’
does not mean ’Turk’."98 According to Gökalp, there was a clash between “the Ottoman
class” and “the Turkish nation”: “The Ottoman class regarded itself as superior”
over the Turkish nation over which it ruled. In fact, Gökalp even argues that
Turkishness was humiliated by “the Ottoman class”: the Ottoman called the Turk
“the stupid Turk”.99 Gökalp creates the clash between the Ottoman and the Turk
based on the dichotomy between the cosmopolitan elite versus the common people
with the national culture dichotomy. For example, in explaining the emergence
of the Shi’a Islam among “the Turkmens” through the dichotomy between the Ottoman
and the Turk, Gökalp argues that “Sultan’s slaves -conscripted boys from the
palace-” were preferred over Turkmen, thereby creating alienation among Turkmens
from the Sultan and leading to the establishment of a separate house of worship.100
More importantly, he explains the difference between “the Ottoman class” and “the
Sunni Turks” based on his conception of culture and civilization: The Sunni Turks
preserved their own national culture against the cosmopolitan Ottoman civilization.
101 Similarly, he claims that “the Ottoman elite disdained the peasant as a stupid
Turk” and labeled the Anatolian townsmen as tashralı.102 Thus, in addition to
cosmopolitanism versus national culture, Gökalp creates the dichotomy between the
Ottoman and the Turk also based on the elite versus the common people dichotomy.
Unfortunately, Gökalp does not elaborate on what he means by “the Ottoman class”.
In fact, he does not contextualize but only generalizes whenever he refers to this
dichotomy. For this reason, it is not possible to know whether “the Ottoman class”
refers solely to the Ottoman elites, namely the bureaucrats or the members of the
palace, or the Ottoman dynasty itself, or to both. However, it is important at
this point to note that Gökalp considers the Ottoman empire and the Ottoman
dynasty as Turkish in character: In explaining the reason for the emergence of
98Ziya Gökalp, Makaleler I: Diyarbekir - Peyman - Volkan Gazetelerindeki Yazılar (İstanbul: Millî Eğitim
Basımevi, 1976), 57.
99Gökalp, The Principles of Turkism, 28.
100Ibid., 29.
101Ibid., 29.
102Ibid., 35.
40
Turkish nationalism later than other nationalisms in the Ottoman Empire, he argues
that “the Ottoman state was formed by the Turks themselves.”103 Although he
defines Turkishness based on culture, Gökalp might have differentiated the dynasty
from the elites, whom he calls devshirme, in this respect. Yet, whether he makes
such differentiation or not, Gökalp implies that although the Ottoman dynasty was
Turkish and the Turks were the only nation constituting the Empire,104 the dynasty
not only rejected its Turkish origins but also perceived being Turk as something
humiliating. Moreover, as a result of the ruling elite’s rejection of Turkishness, the
Turkish nation did not have its name until recently. While criticizing the Ottomanist
policies of the Tânzîmat, Gökalp argues that although the name of the nation is
Turk,105 Tânzimâtists called it “Ottoman”. Moreover, the elite forced the Turkish
nation to believe that they are Ottoman: “The wretched Turk, afraid of losing his
fatherland, was thus forced to say ‘By God, I am not a Turk. I do not belong to any
social group except the Ottoman one.’”106 In other words, the Ottoman dynasty not
only rejected its Turkish origins but also forced the Turkish people to do so.
Although Akçura does not go too far as Gökalp, he still criticizes the lack of interest
in Turkishness in the Ottoman Empire. He writes that he had not encountered
“the words Turk, Turkishness, Turkish nation or Turkish nationality” even in the
writings of the Tanzîmât.107 Akçura argues that despite there was interest in Turkish
history and language during this period, the word nation (millet) had a vague and
general meaning because both the Tanzîmât reformers and the Young Ottomans
were supporters of Ottomanism.108 In other words, Akçura claims that the Ottoman
elite used the word “millet” (nation) to refer to “Muslims, non-Muslims, Turks and
non-Turks”, namely all of the Sultan’s subjects, in the 19th century.109 Interestingly,
this narrative that the Ottoman ruling class did not call themselves Turk shared by
Gökalp and Akçura is almost repeated in the literature. Bernard Lewis, for example,
argues that “the word Turk was used only to denote the nomads and peasants of
Anatolia.”110 Indeed, it was argued that the word “Turk” had negative connotations,
103Berkes, Turkish Nationalism and Western Civilization: Selected Essays of Ziya Gökalp, 72.
104Gökalp, The Principles of Turkism, 73.
105Ibid., 17.
106Ibid., 35-36.
107Akçura, Türkçülüğün Tarihi, 30.
108Ibid., 29.
109Ibid., 29.
110Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 333. However,
I believe that there is a need for a more nuanced history of the meaning of the word Turk. For example, in
the early Ottoman chronicles, the word Turk had not been used with derogatory connotations. In addition
to calling the language they speak “Turkish” (Türkî ), the early Ottomans referred to themselves as “Turk”
41
such as ignorant or uneducated.111 Even Kushner who produced one of the most
important works on the emergence of Turkish nationalism agrees with Lewis by
arguing that “the term ‘Turk’ was used occasionally, but only to designate the
ignorant nomad or peasant of Anatolia, often with a derogatory connotation” until
the 19th century.112
The implication of the rejection of Turkishness by the ruling elite in the history
writing in the Ottoman Empire was the following: there was no Turkish history but
only Ottoman history. To put it differently, Turkish history before the Ottoman
Empire was not known until the late 19th century. According to Gökalp, it was first
Süleyman Hüsnü Pasha with his Târih-i Âlem made the Ottoman public “aware that
the Huns of European history were Hiung-nu of Chinese history, the first forefathers
of the Turks, and that Oghuz Khan must have been Mete, the founder of the Hiungnu
state.”113 In other words, Gökalp argues that the great Turkish heroes who lived
before the Ottoman Empire were dismissed in history books. This was not surprising
when the Ottoman elite’s disfavor for Turkishness is considered. In short, Gökalp,
who glorifies Turkish history before Islam by praising the culture of the ancient
Turks as egalitarian114 and considers Modu Chanyu, Attila and Genghis Khan as
the great Turkish conquerors,115 was not satisfied with the Ottoman history writing.
Akçura’s thoughts on the Ottoman history writing also share certain similarities with
that of Gökalp. In Üç Tarz-ı Siyaset, Akçura claims that most of the Turks do not
remember their national past. By “most of the Turks” Akçura means the Ottoman
Turks because he believes that the Ottoman Turks, in contrast to the Northern
Turks, had not developed a national consciousness yet.116 According to Akçura, the
Ottoman Turks do not know the Eastern Turks: “The military and political history
of Turks only consists of Murad Hüdavendigâr, Mehmed the Conqueror, Selîm, Ibni
Kemâl, Nef’î, Bâkî, Evliyâ Çelebi and Kemâl, but not Oghuz, Genghis, Timur,
even more than “Ottoman” and they even traced their origins back to Central Asia, most notably to the
Oghuz Turks. This usage of “Turk” was not only limited to the members of the Ottoman dynasty but it
was also used in referring to the Ottoman soldiers and the subjects of the Ottoman rulers. Moreover, it is
interesting that although the word Turk was used extensively in the Hamidian press including a newspaper
with the title Türk, well before the writings of Akçura and Gökalp, both Turkists believed that there was
no interest in Turkishness.
111See, for example, Nikki R. Keddie. “Pan-Islam as Proto-Nationalism” Journal of Modern History 41, no.
1 (March 1969), 17.
112David Kushner, The Rise of Turkish Nationalism, 2.
113Gökalp, The Principles of Turkism, 4.
114Heyd, Foundations of Turkish Nationalism, 112-114.
115Ibid., 112.
116Georgeon, Türk Milliyetçiliğinin Kökenleri, 80.
42
Ulugh Beg, Al-Farabi, Ibn Sına, Al-Taftazani and Ali-Shir Nava’i.”117 Of course,
the Ottoman historiography was the major factor in this ignorance about the great
Turkish heroes.
Akçura blames the Ottoman historiography for lacking emphasis on the Turkish
origins of the empire, namely that of the Ottoman dynasty. In this respect, he
harshly criticizes the Ottoman history written by Târîh-i Osmânî Encümeni in his
article Küçük Muhtıra published in 1913 in Türk Yurdu. Interestingly, although this
committee of Ottoman history includes some members, such as Necip Asım and
Ahmed Midhat whom Akçura consider later as Turkist in his History of Turkism,
Akçura writes there is no mention of the word Turk in this Ottoman history: “There
are Greeks, Serbians, Bulgarians, Tatars and Mongols, but not Turks.”118 Akçura
claims that even when there is a need for the use of the name Turk in explaining the
origins of the Ottoman dynasty, the historians of the Ottoman history use the words
Oghuz and Turkmen instead of Turk. Although Akçura asks how the historians of
a work “that is expected to be serious and scientific” can be ignorant of the history
of Turkestan -namely, the history of the Turks before the Ottoman Empire- this
is, of course, a rhetorical question. He implies that not mentioning the Turks was
a deliberate choice: the historians in the committee avoid using the word “Turk”.
Lastly, since he considers Tatars and Mongols as part of the Turks,119 Akçura did
not seem happy with the phrases “Tatar incursions” and “Mongol invasions” in the
text.
In contrast to Gökalp, Akçura comes up with an alternative periodization of Turkish
history. Accordingly, Turkish history should be divided into the four periods: 1)
Turkish civilizations until the Mongol Empire; 2) The unification of Turkish tribes
under the Mongol rule; 3) the states that emerged after the dissolution of the Mongol
Empire; 4) The awakenings of the Turks during the contemporary period.120 Thus,
Akçura not only considers Genghis Khan as the greatest hero in Turkish history, but
also builds his periodization of Turkish history based on him. As Georgeon suggests,
this conception of Turkish history was also in stark contrast to the Ottoman history
writing in which the Mongols called Tatars were narrated as the enemy. Indeed,
Akçura criticizes contemporary history books for showing Genghis Khan and Timur
117Akçura, Üç Tarz-ı Siyâset, 40.
118Georgeon, Türk Milliyetçiliğinin Kökenleri, 193.
119Yusuf Akçura, Müverrih Léon Cahun ve Muallim Berthold’a Göre Cengiz Han (İstanbul: Ötüken, 2020),
21-22.
120Georgeon, Türk Milliyetçiliğinin Kökenleri, 81.
43
as barbarians.121 However, it is not clear which books that Akçura refers to: Does
he also include Ahmed Vefik’s history book that was used in rüşdiyye schools from
1869 to 1905?
To summarize, both Turkists criticize contemporary Ottoman history writing for
not allocating any space for Turkish history before the Ottoman Empire. In this
respect, it is interesting that neither Gökalp nor Akçura mentions Ahmed Vefik’s
Ottoman history, Fezleke-i Târîh-i ’Osmânî. In other words, it is not possible to
know whether Ahmed Vefik’s history was also included in this harsh criticism or
not. As I will show in Chapter 4, the Pasha’s Ottoman history shares considerable
similarities with the pre-19th-century Ottoman tevârih (histories); however, Ahmed
Vefik puts even less emphasis on the Turkishness of the Ottoman dynasty than on
the one that existed in these previous histories. In short, Ahmed Vefik’s history also
lacks the emphasis on the Turkishness of the Ottoman Empire.
2.6 Ahmed Vefik as a Turkist
Akçura can be considered as the first scholar who raised the question of Ahmed
Vefik’s Turkism by asking the following question regarding the relationship between
the Pasha’s Lehce-i ’Osmânî and the idea of the unity of all Turks in his article
Üç Tarz-ı Siyâset: “I do not know if deceased Ahmed Vefik Efendi with his Lehce
and aim of writing pure Turkish have played with this grandiose dream?”122 Akçura
considers the Pasha’s Turkism as a possibility because he writes that he had not
encountered the idea of Turkish unity neither in the Tanzîmât nor in the Young
Ottomans.123 In other words, Akçura writing in 1904, claims that the idea of tevhîdi
etrâk (the unity of Turks) is a recent phenomenon. Although he does not deem
Ahmed Vefik as one of the followers of the policy of Turkism, it is still significant
that Ahmed Vefik is the only name that Akçura gives in his discussion of Turkism
throughout the article.
However, 24 years later, Akçura seems much sure about the Pasha’s Turkism in
his Türkçülüğün Tarihi. He begins the section Lisanda Bütün Türkçülüğün İlk
Emâreleri (The First Signs of Complete Turkism in Language) with Ahmed Vefik
121Georgeon, Türk Milliyetçiliğinin Kökenleri, 83.
122“Bilmem merhum Vefik Paşa Lehce’siyle, sâf Türkçe yazmak ârzûsuyla bu yüksek hayâl arkasında birâz
olsun dolaşmış mıdır?” Akçura, Üç Tarz-ı Siyaset, 21.
123“Tanzimat ve Genç Osmanlılık hareketlerinde de, ‘Türkleri birleşdirmek’ fikrinin varlığına dâir hiç bir
nişâneye rast gelmedim.” Ibid., 21.
44
Pasha’s works. Akçura not only considers Lehce-i ’Osmânî as a “Turkish” dictionary
but also presents its preface as the evidence for Ahmed Vefik’s envision of Bütün
Türklük.124 After sharing the last paragraph of the preface where Ahmed Vefik classifies
“Turkish” languages, Akçura claims that the preface of the dictionary shows
us that Ahmed Vefik, just as all Turkists, saw a very broad Turkish unity (Türk
birliği) through language.125 In other words, according to Akçura, Ahmed Vefik
showed that there are different Turkish dialects, other than Ottoman Turkish, and
encouraged scholars to examine them.126 In this sense, he considers Ahmed Vefik’s
dictionary as a service to Turkism in the sense that it played a role in the emergence
of the idea of Bütün Türklük by conceiving the different branches of Turkish as part
of one grand Turkish language.
Moreover, Akçura argues that Lehce-i ’Osmânî showed the abundance and importance
of the Turkish words that were to disappear in the Ottoman language by
separating them from Arabic and Persian words.127 In other words, Akçura asserts
that Ahmed Vefik’s allocation of a separate part for the Turkish from those
of Arabic and Persian words in his dictionary and he considers it as another sign
of the Pasha’s Turkism in the sense that the Pasha emphasizes the importance of
the Turkish language over those with Arabic and Persian origins. Lastly, Akçura
claims that since Lisanda Türkçülük encourages learning Turkish languages apart
from Ottoman Turkish, Lehce-i ’Osmânî is a valuable work in this respect as it
allocates space for the words from other Turkish languages.
However, here it is important to note, as I will show in Chapter 4, that although
Lehce-i ’Osmânî includes a considerable amount of both Turkic and archaic Turkish
words, the first part of the dictionary was not allocated solely for Turkish words.
In contrast, despite bearing the title of “Includes the words and derivatives whose
origin is not Arabic or Persian” besides Turkish and Western-origin words, the first
part also includes several Arabic and Persian words. And the second part of the
dictionary is solely reserved for Arabic and Persian words. Moreover, even if Lehce
possessed a separate chapter for Turkish as claimed by Akçura, it would mean the
violation of the main principle of Turkism in Language, put forward by Gökalp as
124“Türk lügatı toplama işini Ahmed Vefik Paşa devam ettirdi. . . Paşa’nın Lehce-i ’Osmânî’ye yazdığı kıymetdâr
mukaddime, bütün Türklüğü düşündüğüne delâlet eden bir vesîkadır.” Akçura, Türkçülüğün Tarihi,
33.
125“Şu mukaddimeden Ahmed Vefik Paşa’nın Türk lisanına çok geniş, Bütün Türkçüler gibi baktığı anlaşılıyor...
Hâsılı Ahmed Vefik Paşa, lisân vasıtasıyla çok geniş Türk birliğini görmüş ve göstermiştir,
diyebiliriz.” Ibid., 35.
126Ve Türkçe lisanın Arabca ve Acemce’ye kısmen mağlub olan Osmanlı lehcesinden başka lehceleri olduğunu
meydana koyarak, hakîkî ilim meraklılarının onları tetebbu’una teşvik etmiştir.” Ibid., 35.
127“Vefîk Paşa, Lehce-i ’Osmânî’sinde, ilk defa aslı Arabî ve Fârisi olmayan Türkçe kelimeleri, aslı Arabî
ve Fârisî olanlardan ayırarak ayrı bir cüzü’ hâlinde tertîb etmiştir; ve bu suretle hudutsuz Osmanlı lisan
denizinde gark olmuş kıymetdâr Türkçe kelimelerin çokluğunu ve ehemmiyetini göstermiştir.” Ibid., 35.
45
“to a Turkist every word used and recognized by the people”128 On the other hand,
however, since the first part of Lehce includes the words with non-Turkish origin that
are commonly used in Ottoman Turkish, such as abdest, bakkal, elbet, and jurnal, it
can be said that Lehce-i ’Osmânî conforms to the Turkist principle in the language
in the sense that it accepts Arabic and Persian words used in Ottoman Turkish as
“non-Arabic or non-Persian”.
According to Akçura, Ahmed Vefik’s language that he used in his works was another
evidence of the Pasha’s Turkism. In the context of the Turkists’ emphasis on the
creation of a common literary language for Bütün Türklük through the simplification
of Ottoman Turkish into İstanbul Türkçesi, Akçura argues that the Pasha’s translations
from French into “plain, Istanbul Turkish” implies that “he was a conscious
Turkist.”129 Akçura gives Ahmed Vefik’s adaptation of Fenelon’s Les Aventures de
Télémaque as an example: when Ahmed Vefik was mad at Yusuf Kamil Pasha for
translating this novel into the language of Nergisî and Veysî, he both translated it
into İstanbul Türkçesi and adopted into the Ottoman lifestyle of the time.
Akçura believes that Ahmed Vefik’s Turkism, besides in the field of language, can
also be observed in the field of history. In this respect, he cites Ahmed Vefik’s translation
of Şecere-i Türkî (The Genealogy of Turks), a history of the origins of Mongols
and Turkic tribes including Oghuzs and Tatars written by Abu al-Ghazi Bahadur
Khan in 1663, published partly in Tasvîr-i Efkâr between 1863-1864: “The Pasha,
even when he was an Efendi, transferred Abu Al-Ghazi Bahadur Khan’s Şecere-i
Türk from Chagatai Turkish to Ottoman Turkish.”130 Here, it is important to note
that Akçura does not use the word çevirmek (translate) but aktarmak (transfer),
suggesting that he perceives these two languages as the same.
However, Akçura keeps his caution, at least to some extent, in considering Ahmed
Vefik as a Turkist in History of Turkism, as well by repeating his claim in Üç
Tarz-ı Siyâset that he had not encountered the idea of Turkish unity in the 19th
century: In fact, one does not encounter the words, such as ‘Turk’, ‘Turkishness’
or ‘Turkish nation’ during the Tanzîmât.131 Yet, on the other hand, Akçura claims
that “there were some signs in the fields of language, literature, philology and history
128Gökalp, The Principles of Turkism, 83.
129“Ahmed Vefik Paşa’nın bütün eserleri, kendisinin lisan sahasında çok şuurlu bir Türkçü olduğunu gösterir."
Akçura, Türkçülüğün Tarihi, 36.
130“Paşa, daha Efendi iken, Ebulgâzî Bahadır Han’ın Evşal-i Şecere-i Türkî adlı meşhur eserini Çağatay
Türkçesinden Osmanlı lehçesine tahvil etmiştir.” Ibid., 36.
131“Filvaki Tanzîmât devresinde ‘Türk’ ve ‘Türklük’, ‘Türk milleti’, ‘Türk milliyeti’ gibi ifâdelere tesâdüf
olunmaz ve bugün bu tâbirlerle ifâde olunan mefhumun da o zamanlar emareleri bulunup gösterilemez.”
Ibid., 30.
46
showing that national feeling and thought were not completely missing.”132 In this
sense, he argues that “even Ahmed Vefik, Mustafa Celaleddin and Süleyman Pasha,
whose Turkism was conscience and evident, followed the aims of Ottomanism and
Islamism in the political sphere.”133 In other words, Akçura implies that Turkism in
the 19th century was limited to a cultural sphere in the sense that although there
was an interest in the Turkish language and history, it did not guarantee a Turkish
nationalist political activity. Thus, probably considering the multi-ethnic character
of the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century, Akçura makes an important distinction
between political Turkism and cultural Turkism, which can also be seen in Gökalp’s
thoughts on Vefik.
Gökalp argues that Turkism started as a cultural movement.134 By cultural movement,
he means the studies carried out on Turkish culture. For this reason, Gökalp
refers to cultural Turkism also as scholastic Turkism (ilmî Türkçülük) in the sense
that Turkism first started through the publication of scientific works on Turkish
history and language.135 Gökalp believes that the developments in Turkology, along
with Turkophilia, in Europe influenced the emergence of Turkism in the Ottoman
Empire, such as De Guignes’ History of the Turks, Huns and Mongols and Lumley
Davids’ Grammar of the Turkish Language.136 In other words, this interest
in Turkish history and language emerged in Europe found a reflection among Ottoman
scholars. In this sense, Ahmed Vefik, along with Süleyman Hüsnü Pasha,
was the first “cultural Turkist” who “realized the need to strengthen by linguistic,
cultural and historic solidarities the rudderless nations within the community and
sultanate which had begun to revolt and to educate the youth in accordance with
these new ideals”, thereby strengthening national consciousness.137 Thus, Gökalp
considers Ahmed Vefik Pasha, along with Süleyman Hüsnü Pasha, as the father of
Turkism.138
As an example of the Pasha’s ilmî Türkçülük, Gökalp cites Ahmed Vefik’s the two
works which are also considered as sign of the Pasha’s Turkism by Akçura: Lehce-i
132“Ancak hiss-ü fikr-i millînnin büsbütün mefkud olmadığına dâir lisân, edebiyat, filolacya ve târih sahasında
bâzı emâreler mevcuttur.” Akçura, Türkçülüğün Tarihi, 30.
133“Ahmed Vefik, Mustafa Celaleddin ve Süleyman Paşalar gibi Türkçülükleri şuurlu ve mütebâriz zâtlar bile,
siyâsette ‘milliyet-i Osmâniyye’ ve ‘vahdet-i İslamiyye’ gâyelerine ehemmiyet vermektedirler.” Ibid., 80.
134Gökalp, The Principles of Turkism, 55.
135Devereux translates the phrase İlmî Türkçülük as “scholastic Turkism”. This is an accurate translation
because I believe that Gökalp by the word “ilmî” refers to both the scientific and educational characteristics
of these works.
136Ibid., 2.
137Ibid., 55.
138Ibid.„ 5.
47
’Osmânî and his translation of Şecere-i Türkî. Since Turkism also means serving
the Turkish nation, according to Gökalp, Ahmed Vefik shows concrete examples of
Turkism in the field of science by writing a Turkish dictionary and translating the
history of Turks. In other words, just as Akçura, Gökalp, deems Lehce-i ’Osmânî
as a significant “Turkish” dictionary. He writes that Ahmed Vefik’s dictionary was
one of the two sources that caused him to be a Turkist: “the feelings of Turkism had
first been aroused in me when I was only fifteen years old by Ahmed Vefik Pasha’s
Lehce-i ’Osmânî and Süleyman Pasha’s Târîh-i Âlem.”139 More importantly, in line
with Akçura’s view on Lehce-i ’Osmânî, again, Gökalp argues that Ahmed Vefik for
the first time “proved that the Turkish of Turkey was simply a dialect of general
Turkish and that there were other Turkish dialects.”140 Regarding Ahmed Vefik’s
translation of Şecere-i Türkî, Gökalp, just as Akçura, writes that Ahmed Vefik
translated Şecere-i Türkî “from Eastern Turkish to Istanbul Turkish”.141 According
to Gökalp, this work shows that the Turkish nation existed since ancient times and
they established great empires with high civilizations.
Just as Akçura, Gökalp also emphasizes the Pasha’s usage of Turkish words in his
translations and adaptations of French novels and plays. Regarding his translations
from Moliere, Gökalp argues that Ahmed Vefik not only turned the names of the
characters and places into Turkish but also adapted these plays into Turkish customs.
142 Indeed, Ahmed Vefik changed the French characters into Turkish.143 Considering
Gökalp’s emphasis on the difference between hars (culture) and medeniyet
(civilization), it can be argued that Gökalp interprets Ahmed Vefik’s adaptations as
protection of Turkish culture against the French one.
Lastly, Gökalp argues that Ahmed Vefik also possessed aesthetic Turkism (Bediî
Türkçülük). In the section titled Bediî Türkçülük, Gökalp argues that each nation
has unique tastes stemming from its culture and he believes that Turks possess a
rich tradition in terms of art. Regarding the Pasha’s aesthetic Turkism, Gökalp
gives Ahmed Vefik’s “Turkish style of clothing” and “Turkish furniture” as evidence
of his Turkism.144 He asserts that Ahmed Vefik objected to his wife’s demand for
using foreign furniture at home by saying that “nothing not made by Turks can enter
139Gökalp, The Principles of Turkism, 9.
140Devereux translates the phrase Türk lehçeleri as “Turkic dialects”. Ibid., 3.
141Ibid., 3.
142Ibid., 11.
143Barış Özkul, “Tanzimat Döneminde Tercüme Odasında Yetişen Bir Çevirmen-Aydın: Ahmed Vefik Paşa”
(MA diss., İstanbul University, 2009), 102.
144Gökalp, The Principles of Turkism, 10-11.
48
my house.”145 Although the Pasha’s use of Turkish furniture and other belongings
probably involves some exaggeration in Gökalp’s account, it still might reflect, more
than his taste for Turkish aesthetics, Ahmed Vefik’s support for protectionism in
which the national economy can be strengthened through the consumption of locally
produced goods.146
It is important to note that neither Akçura nor Gökalp consider Ahmed Vefik’s
history of the Ottoman Empire, Fezleke-i Târîh-i ’Osmânî, as a sign of the Pasha’s
Turkism. In fact, both Turkists do not mention Fezleke-i Târîh-i ’Osmânî at all.
For example, although Akçura writes that it is not possible to find whether Ahmed
Vefik looked at history from a Turkist point of view in his Hikmet-i Târih, the
summary of the Pasha’s history lectures given in Darülfünûn (the university), he
does comment on Ahmed Vefik’s Ottoman history. More importantly, both Turkists
mentioned Süleyman Pasha’s Târîh-i ‘Âlem as a monumental work in the emergence
of Turkism in the field of history. Gökalp writes that “it was Süleyman Pasha who
first made us aware that the Huns of European were the Hiung-nu of Chinese history,
the first forefathers of the Turks, and that Oghuz Khan must have been Mete.”147
As Gökalp was aware, the part on the Turkish history in Süleyman Pasha’s book
was mostly from Guignes’s Histoire Generale des Huns, des Mongoles, des Turcs et
des aıtres Tartares occidentaux. As I demonstrate in Chapter 4, Vefik’s Fezleke-i
Târîh-i ’Osmânî, though being a history of the Ottoman Empire, allocated almost
no space for pre-Ottoman history, thereby lacking any elements of cultural Turkism.
In conclusion, both Gökalp and Akçura, who envisions a broader Turkish world, cite
Ahmed Vefik’s Lehce-i ’Osmânî and his translation of Şecere-i Türkî as evidence
for the Pasha’s Turkism in language and history. Although Ahmed Vefik calls his
dictionary “the Ottoman Dialect”, both Turkists consider it as a Turkish dictionary
in the sense that it demonstrates Turkish spoken in Turkey (Türkiye Türkçesi) as
one of the dialects of the general and grand Turkish (umûmî ve büyük Türkçe).148
Indeed, as I show in Chapter 4, similar to the Turkists view of Turkish, Ahmed
Vefik divides the Turkish language into two main branches: Ottoman Turkish in the
West and Chagatai Turkish in the East. Both Turkists also consider Ahmed Vefik’s
translation of Şecere-i Türkî in the sense that it shows Ahmed Vefik’s interest in
Turkish history.
It is important to note that, despite considering him as one of the first Turkist,
145Gökalp, The Principles of Turkism, 3.
146Ortaylı, İmparatorluğun En Uzun Yüzyılı, 269.
147Gökalp, The Principles of Turkism, 4.
148Ibid., 10.
49
both Turkists had a nuanced view of Ahmed Vefik’s Turkism. Akçura’s reserves his
caution on the possibility of Turkism in the 19th century both in Üç Tarz-ı Siyâset
and Türkçülüğün Tarihi. Yet, he still believes that it was possible to find Turkish
national sentiment to some extent. Similarly, Gökalp importantly differentiates
cultural Turkism from political Turkism and associates Ahmed Vefik with the former.
In this sense, he sees the impossibility of Turkist political activism in the context
of a multiethnic empire. Instead of a politicized Turkism, both Gökalp and Akçura
consider Ahmed Vefik’s interest in the origins of Turks, Turkish history and language
-in the form of his translation of Şecere-i Türkî and writing of Lehce-i ‘Osmânî - as
evidence for Ahmed Vefik’s cultural Turkism.
50
3. A BRIEF BIOGRAPHY OF AHMED VEFÐK
This chapter starts with a discussion on Ahmed Vefik’s ethnic origins. Despite his
granddaughter’s claim of Ahmed Vefik’s Turkish origins, I show that contemporaries
agree that Vefik’s grandfather, Nâcî Yahyâ Efendi, was a Bulgarian convert. In the
second part of the chapter, I connect Ahmed Vefik’s rise in bureaucracy with his
privileged background, more specifically the network of his family members and
the education that he received. In the third part, I share the anecdotes depicting
Ahmed Vefik as a patriot. Even if these anecdotes do not include any truth in them
at all, they might have played a role in creating Ahmed Vefik’s Turkist image. More
importantly, I argue that it is not possible to differentiate Ahmed Vefik’s Turkism
from his Ottomanism in the context of a multiethnic Empire. In the final part of
the chapter, I make an overview of Ahmed Vefik’s intellectual thought with a focus
on his opinions on constitutionalism in the light of his relationship with the Young
Ottomans and lastly touch upon the works of certain orientalists on Turkish history
and language in the 19th century, which probably had influence in Ahmed Vefik’s
Fezleke-i Târîh-i Osmânî and Lehce-i Osmânî.
3.1 Ahmed Vefik’s Ethnic Origins
Ahmed Vefik was born into a bureaucrat family in İstanbul in 1823.1 His grandfather,
Bulgarzâde Yahyâ Nâcî Efendi, was a teacher in Mühendishane-i Berrî-i
Hümayûn (the Imperial School of Military Engineering). He was the author of two
significant works in the history of science in the Empire: Risâle-i Hikmet-i Tabiiyye
where he explains the workings of firearms in physics and chemistry and Risâle-
1In fact, Ahmed Vefik’s year of birth is not certain: Different years, ranging from 1818 to 1823, were given
by biographers. Yet, there are two years that are mostly given: While Zeki Pakalın writes that Ahmed
Vefik was born in 1818, İbnülemin Mahmud Kemal İnal gives the year 1823.
51
i Seyyale-i Berkiyye in which he explains the workings of electricity.2 According
to Mehmed Süreyya, Yahyâ Efendi was familiar with the foreign language (lisân-ı
ecnebî ) and became the first Muslim translator of the Imperial Council (Divân-ı
Hümâyûn Tercümanı) in 1821-223 when the Phanariotes’ occupation of this office
was ended after the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence. Although Süreyya
does not give any detail on the foreign languages that Yahya Efendi spoke, considering
his title as the translator of the Sublime Porte, he was probably proficient in
French and Italian, besides the elsine-i selâse, namely Arabic, Persian and Turkish.4
Indeed, Sezai Balcı shows that Yahyâ Efendi with his son, Ruhuddin Efendi, helped
translations of the documents from Greek and French even before he officially became
the dragoman of the court.5 As the translator of the court, Yahyâ Efendi was
in the inner circle of Sultan Mahmud II. However, he occupied this position only
for a month: he was removed from his office because he was “not familiar with the
diplomatic language.”6 In other words, although Yahyâ Efendi knew necessary languages,
he was not well-informed about foreign affairs. Therefore, he was assigned
to give French lessons for raising court translators on 23 April 1821, which led to
the establishment of Tercüme Odası (Translation Office) in the Empire where many
intellectuals of the 19th century were raised.7 Yahyâ Nâcî Efendi died in 1824.8
Despite his grandfather’s title Bulgarzâde (literally means “the son of a Bulgarian”),
there are different claims regarding Ahmed Vefik’s Bulgarian ethnicity. Although
Vefik Pasha’s granddaughter, Hayrünnisa Hanım, and Ömer Faruk Akün reject
Ahmed Vefik’s Bulgarian lineage, contemporary historians, most notably Şânîzâde,
argue that Ahmed Vefik’s grandfather, Yahyâ Efendi, was a convert. According to
İbnülemin, Hayrünnisa Hanım, claims that Ahmed Vefik was not a son of a Bulgarian
engineer but a Turkish and Muslim family in her essay in Tevhîd-i Efkâr
published in 1920.9 However, in 1896, Hayrünnisa Hanım in her essay on Ahmed
Vefik in Mehmed Cemâleddin’s Âyîne-i Zurefâ had accepted Yahyâ Efendi’s con-
2Feza Günergün, “Deneylerle Elektriği Tanıtan Türkçe Bir Eser: Yahya Naci Efendi’nin Risale-i Seyyale-i
Berkiyye’si,” Osmanlı Bilim Araştırmaları 19, no. 1-2 (2007-2008), 19.
3Mehmed Süreyya, Sicill-i Osmanî (İstanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 1996), 1220.
4Christine M. Philliou, Biography of an Empire: Governing Ottomans in an Age of Revolutions (Berkley:
University of California Press, 2010), 11.
5Sezai Balcı, “Osmanlı Devleti’nde Tercümanlık ve Bab-ı Ali Tercüme Odası” (PhD diss., Ankara University,
2006), 83.
6Ibid., 83.
7Ibid., 84.
8Mehmed Süreyya, Sicill-i Osmanî, 1220.
9İbnülemin Mahmut Kemal İnal, Son Sadrazamlar (İstanbul: Dergâh Yayınları, 1982), 651.
52
version.10 In his entry on Ahmed Vefik in İslam Ansiklopedisi, Ömer Faruk Akün
-based on the information given by poet Abdülhak Hamid Tarhan whose father,
historian Hayrullah Efendi, was Ahmed Vefik’s nephew- asserts that Yahya Nâci
Efendi was a member of Tarhanzâde family who was completely Turkish ("özbeöz
Türk").11 However, İbnülemin writes that he heard from Vefik Pasha’s friends that
Ahmed Vefik being aware of coming from a Bulgarian lineage occasionally said to
his close friends that “we (his family) are called Bulgarzâde.”12 Similarly, Şânîzâde
Mehmed Ataullah Efendi’s description, who knew Yahyâ Efendi closely according to
İbnülemin, of Yahyâ Efendi as mühtedi (convert) also supports the claim that Yahyâ
Efendi comes from a Bulgarian family.13 Indeed, Şânizâde’s use of “rumiyülasıl Bulgarzâde”
for Yahyâ Efendi’s origin suggests that he was a member of a Rum millet to
which Bulgarians of the Empire belong. Cevdet Pasha, probably based on Şânîzâde,
in his Târîh-i Cevdet also use the phrase “rumî’ül-asl” for Yahyâ Efendi. Similarly,
both Tansel and Ortaylı assert that Yahyâ Efendi was a Rum in origin.14 These
claims were also supported by contemporaries. A friend of Ahmed Vefik, Austen
Henry Layard, notes that Ahmed Vefik had “a Greek blood in his veins” in his
autobiography.15 Nâmık Kemâl also writes in his letter that although he did not
know Vefik’s father, he met his uncle who was “a bankrupt Rum called the son of
Bulgarian (Bulgaroğlu).”16
Yahyâ Efendi might have had a Phanariot origin considering the fact that the translators
of the Ottoman court were mostly Phanariots who were Orthodox Christian
elites occupying the positions of power, such as the imperial dragoman, dragoman
of the fleet, voyvoda of Wallachia, voyvoda of Moldovia in the Ottoman court from
1660s until the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence in 1821.17 Philliou
10“Büyük pederinin ihtidâsı nasıl bir tetebbu’-ı ‘ilmî netîcesinde mazhar olduğu hidâyet-i Rabbâniye eseri
ise gerek oğlu Rûhu’d-dîn Efendi’nin, gerek hafîdi Ahmed Vefik Paşa’nın salâbet ve hamiyyet-i dîniyyeleri
dahi öyle diyânet-i İslâmiyenin gavamızına vukûflarına mebnî idi.” Mehmed Cemâleddin, Osmanlı Tarih
ve Müverrihleri (İstanbul: Kitabevi, 2003), 115.
11Yet, Akün’s argument that “the Tarhanzâde family while residing in Bulgaria converted to Islam after
losing Islam (İslamiyet’i kaybettikten sonra)” is not clear. He probably implies that the family was already
Muslim and Turkish at the beginning, but first lost their faith and later converted to Islam. Ömer Faruk
Akün, “Ahmet Vefik Paşa” in Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslam Ansiklopedisi 2nd vol. (İstanbul: TDV İslam
Araştırmaları Merkezi, 1989), 143.
12İnal, Son Sadrazamlar, 651.
13Şânî-zâde Mehmed Atâ’ullah Efendi, Şânî-zâde Târîhi (İstanbul: Çamlıca, 2008), 1225.
14İlber Ortaylı, İmparatorluğun En Uzun Yüzyılı, 145.
15The word “Greek” probably means “Rum” here. Austen Henry Layard, Autobiography and Letters from
His Childhood Until His Appointment as H.M. Ambassador at Madrid (London: John Murray, 1903), 93.
16Tansel, “Ahmed Vefik Paşa (3 Haziran 1823- 2 Nisan 1891),” 118.
17Christine Philliou, “Communities on the Verge: Unraveling the Phanariot Ascendancy in Ottoman Governance,”
Comparative Studies in Society and History 51, no. 1 (January 2009): 155.
53
argues that it would be inaccurate to call them “Greek nationals” because several
linguistic groups were included, such as the speakers of Bulgarian, Albanian, Romanian
and Armenian.18 However, the path to becoming a Phanariot prince or
a dragoman required Hellenization, which meant not only “learning Greek letters
but also changing one’s name to fit Greek linguistic and cultural conventions”.19 In
other words, Yahyâ Efendi himself might have been one of these Phanariots and he
might have assumed this position of the court translator after converting to Islam,
considering the fact that he knew Greek and he became the translator of the court
right after the Greek War of Independence.
Since there is no mention of Ahmed Vefik’s Greek-Bulgarian lineage in neither
Gökalp’s nor Akçura’s writings, we do not know whether the Turkists had this
information about Vefik Pasha or not. However, even if they knew that Ahmed Vefik
was not ethnically a Turk, both Turkists would still have deemed Ahmed Vefik
a Turkist by considering their definitions of Turkism. In other words, Ahmed Vefik’s
non-Turkish origin would not have changed Gökalp’s thoughts on him for two
reasons. First, according to Gökalp, it was the culture that determines one’s nationality;
therefore, Ahmed Vefik as a Turkish-speaking Muslim clearly fits Gökalp’s
definition of Turkish nationality based on language and religion. Secondly, Gökalp
claims that deeds done for the Turkish nation are the indicator of one’s Türklük
(Turkishness).20 Again, Ahmed Vefik with his “Turkish” dictionary proving for the
first time that the Turkish of Turkey was simply a dialect of general Turkish is obviously
a great service for the Turkish nation. In this respect, Gökalp would consider
Ahmed Vefik not only a Turkist but also a Turk.
Considering his emphasis on ethnicity in defining the nation, it might be thought at
first that Akçura might not have considered Ahmed Vefik as a Turkist if knew that he
had a non-Turkish origin. However, I argue that Akçura, just as Gökalp, would still
have considered Ahmed Vefik as a Turkist, considering his thoughts on Şemseddin
Sami. In Türkçülüğün Tarihi, Akçura states that Şemseddin Sami was an Albian in
origin (neslen Arnavut’tur), but this does not prevent Akçura from considering him
as one of the most influential Turkists in the history of Turkism. Indeed, according
to Akçura, in addition to translating Orkhon Inscriptions and Kutadgu Bilig to
“Western Turkish”, Şemseddin Sami was following the idea of Bütün Türklük by
writing in the preface of Kâmus-i Türkî that “the Western Turks and the Eastern
18Philliou, “Communities on the Verge," 157.
19Ibid., 170.
20“Her ferdin Türklüğe olan samimi bağlılığı, millî mefkûrelere sarf edeceği faaliyetlerle, fedakârlıklarla
ölçülür.” Gökalp, Makaleler IX, 37.
54
Turks are the one nation.”21 In this sense, despite his emphasis on race in defining
the nation, Akçura agrees with Gökalp that an ethnically non-Turkish person can
be a Turkist because it is not the blood but the deeds that matter. For this reason,
I believe both Turkists would agree with Şânîzâde who claims that “despite coming
from a non-Turkish origin, Ahmed Vefik served for Turkishness more than those
who were Turkish in origin.”22
3.2 Ahmed Vefik’s Rise in Bureaucracy
Ahmed Vefik’s father, Mehmed Ruhuddin Efendi, was both a diplomat and a translator.
23 Since he helped his father, Yahyâ Efendi, in translating documents from
French, he probably learned French at an early age. Thus, he served first as a
clerk and later as a chargé d’affaires in Paris under Reşid Pasha’s ambassadorship.
When he returned to the capital, Ruhuddin Efendi became the translator of the fleet
(Tersane Tercümanı), who was “the second in command to the Kapudan Pasha (Ottoman
admiral)” and “responsible for naval operations, including shipbuilding and
warfare”.24 In this sense, similar to his father, Ruhuddin Efendi ascended a position
that was assumed by Phanariots until 1821. He later became the translator
of the ministry of war (Bâb-ı Serâskeri Tercümanı).25 Compared to his father who
occupied a significant position in the Ottoman court, it can be said that Ruhuddin
Efendi was closer to the top military circles. He died in 1847 when Ahmed Vefik
was 29 years old. Unfortunately, there is no information on Ahmed Vefik’s grandmother
and mother. İnal only notes that Ahmed Vefik’s use of the title esseyid (used
by those coming from Muhammad’s lineage) in his seal might be attributed to his
lineage from his mother, considering the fact that his grandfather was a convert.26
In other words, Ahmed Vefik Pasha comes from a family whose members as the
official translators of the empire were in the inner circles of the Ottoman bureaucracy.
This undoubtedly increased Ahmed Vefik’s cultural capital, considering that
he began to learn new languages from an early age onwards and was able to get
21Akçura, Türkçülüğün Tarihi, 119.
22Şânî-zâde Mehmed Atâ’ullah Efendi, Şânî-zâde Târîhi, 1225.
23Pakalın, Ahmed Vefik Paşa, 19.
24Philliou, Biography of an Empire, 11.
25Mehmed Süreyya, Sicill-i Osmanî, 1400.
26İnal, Son Sadrazamlar, 651.
55
familiarized with the Western culture later. Indeed, coming from such a social class
positively affected Ahmed Vefik’s life and career beginning at an early age. At 16,
before completing his degree in the school that his grandfather taught, the Imperial
School of Military Engineering (Mühendishane-i Berrî-i Hümayûn), he went to Paris
with his father appointed to the Ottoman Embassy in Paris accompanying ambassador
Mustafa Reşid Pasha in 1834.27 Besides completing his high school education
in one of the most prestigious schools in Europe, Lycée Louis-le-Grand, Ahmed Vefik
was able to meet one of the most influential figures of the time, Mustafa Reşid
Pasha, whose support for him was probably another significant factor, besides his
education, in Ahmed Vefik’s rise in the Ottoman bureaucracy.28 Indeed, his appointment
to the head of Supreme Council of Judicial Ordinances (Meclis-i Vâlâ-yı
Ahkâm-i Adliye and Deâvî Nezâreti) occurred under Reşid Pasha’s grand vizierate.
Ahmed Vefik returned to Istanbul in 1837 and began working in the Translation
Bureau (Tercüme Odası) which was established after his grandfather.29 In a sense,
he continued his family tradition of serving as a translator for the Empire. Similar
to his father who had been appointed as a clerk at the embassy at Paris, Ahmed
Vefik was sent to London as the clerk to ambassador Mustafa Şekib Efendi in 1840.
Residing in the two major European capitals and working (or growing up) in the
Translation Bureau provided Ahmed Vefik the opportunity to learn European languages
and followWestern thoughts closely. Austen Henry Layard who meets Ahmed
Vefik in 1839 was surprised by the Pasha’s intellectual knowledge. In his Autobiography,
he praises Ahmed Vefik’s proficiency in French by writing that “he spoke and
wrote like a French man.”30 Moreover, Layard adds that Ahmed Vefik’s “acquaintance
with English and French authors would even have been remarkable in one
who had received the best European education.”31 According to Layard, besides the
British classics, such as William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens and Edward Gibbon,
Ahmed Vefik was also reading major British political economists, such as David
Ricardo, David Hume and Adam Smith.32
Until 1864, Ahmed Vefik Bey occupied significant positions in the Ottoman bureaucracy
for 24 years, such as the memberships in Encümen-i Dâniş and Meclis-i Vâlâ-yı
27Pakalın, Ahmed Vefik Paşa, 21.
28Ömer Faruk Akün, “Ahmet Vefik Paşa” in Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslam Ansiklopedisi 2nd vol. (İstanbul:
TDV İslam Araştırmaları Merkezi, 1989), 144.
29Tansel, “Ahmed Vefik Paşa (3 Haziran 1823-2 Nisan 1981),” 119.
30Layard, Autobiography and Letters, 47.
31Ibid., 47.
32Ibid., 48.
56
Ahkâm-ı Adliye, the ambassador for Iran and the minister of Education with no dismissal
or resignation. However, after his dismissal from the inspectorship position
for Anatolia, Ahmed Vefik’s career witnessed ups and downs with being appointed
from one position to another in short periods of time, including being the Minister
of Justice for two months and the Grand Vizier only for 2 days in his second appointment
to this position.33 From 1864 to his death in 1891, he was dismissed five
times from different positions and did not work for 9 years.34 Considering Ahmed
Vefik’s family’s sale of his library two years later after his death, it can be said that
the Pasha was not able to leave an inheritance behind despite the sale of his lands in
Rumelihisari to Robert College during his lifetime.35 In other words, Ahmed Vefik
had financial difficulty in his last years during the reign of Abdulhamid II under
whom he worked as a Grand Vizier. According to Washburn Ahmed Vefik found
Sultan Hamid as someone with whom working is not possible: “he trusted no one
and really allowed the ministers no initiative in any business.”36 Regarding Sultan
Hamid’s thoughts on Vefik, Pakalın shares the following anecdote: when Ahmed
Vefik died, Sultan Hamid with anger due to Vefik’s sale of the lands to the college
wanted his burial in the graveyard close to the college so that Vefik will hear the
College’s jingle until the doomsday.37
3.3 Anecdotes Describing Ahmed Vefik’s Patriotism
In addition to the death of his patron, Mustafa Reşid Pasha, in 1858 and his tense
relations with Grand Vizier Âlî Pasha,38 the reason for these unstable years between
1864 and 1891 in his career might be related to Ahmed Vefik’s unique character,
considering the fact that the previous chain of dismissals continued under Mahmud
Nedim Pasha’s grand vizierate, as well. Indeed, besides his fame as a successful and
33Tansel, “Ahmed Vefik Paşa (3 Haziran 1823-2 Nisan 1981),” 122.
34Ibid., 127.
35Although Tansel argues that Ahmed Vefik had to sell his lands to the college due to his deteriorated
financial situation, this claim cannot be held because when Ahmed Vefik made the first sale of his land on
2 December 1861 when he just returned from Paris ambassadorship. Thus, the claim that Ahmed Vefik
sold the lands to finance his spending during his ambassadorship in Paris is also false. In other words, the
reason for the sale was probably not financial. Indeed, Washburn in his memoirs writes “Achmet Vefik
Pasha was in no special need of money at that time, but he was a warm friend of the College, and the price
which he asked was very reasonable.” George Washburn, Fifty Years in Constantinople and Recollections
of Robert College (The Riverside Press: Cambridge, 1909), 55.
36Washburn, Fifty Years in Constantinople, 130.
37Pakalın, Ahmed Vefik Paşa, 77.
38Tansel, “Ahmed Vefik Paşa (3 Haziran 1823-2 Nisan 1981),” 120-21.
57
honorable bureaucrat, Ahmed Vefik Pasha was known for his bad temperament.39
In fact, İnal even writes that the Pasha was called crazy (“deli nâmı verilen Ahmed
Vefik Paşa”).40 Although contemporaries’ depiction of Ahmed Vefik as a mad Pasha
was probably related to the Pasha’s sarcasm,41 there are many anecdotes depicting
the Pasha as a quarrelsome man not only against his inferiors but even against his
superiors. The most famous (or infamous?) one is narrated by George Washburn
who attended one of the sessions of the first Ottoman parliament in 1877, in which
Ahmed Vefik was the chairperson: “Among other incidents a green-turbaned descendant
of the Prophet interrupted a speaker and was called to order twice, with
no result. When Achmet Vefik Pasha roared at him, ‘Sous eshek!’ (Shout up, you
donkey!), he dropped into his seat as though he had been shot.”42 İnal narrates that
Ahmed Vefik as the undersecretary to grand vizier Mahmud Nedim Pasha was sitting
in his room all day with the door locked by not giving any answer to the Grand
Vizier.43 In addition to the complaints by the people of Bursa during the Pasha’s
governorship between 1879 and 1882, Ahmed Vefik was also known for his policy of
forcing the state officials and even the people to attend the plays displayed in the
theatre whose construction he had ordered.44 Although Tansel interprets Vefik’s act
as an attempt for educating the people, Cevdet Pasha in his Mârûzât writes that
his arbitrary actions caused the complaints from the people, thereby implying that
Ahmed was a maverick.45
In addition to those describing Ahmed Vefik Pasha’s quarrelsome character, there
are also considerable amounts of anecdotes depicting Ahmed Vefik Pasha’s patriotism.
46 In fact, it seems that his patriotism went hand in hand with his quarrelsome
character, considering his confrontations with the French Emperor and the British
ambassador. Although these mostly orally transmitted accounts of the contemporaries
may not be reliable sources in terms of historical accurateness, they are
important in shedding light not only on the contemporaries’ perception of Ahmed
Vefik Pasha but perhaps also on the creation of his Turkist image later by the Turk-
39Pakalın, Ahmed Vefik Paşa, 45.
40İnal, Son Sadrazamlar, 633.
41Ibid., 726. İnal also narrates that the Pasha told one of his friends that “You can’t imagine what I had to
done to make everyone call myself mad.”
42Washburn, Fifty Years in Constantinople, 119.
43İnal, Son Sadrazamlar, 666.
44Tansel, “Ahmed Vefik Paşa’nın Şahsiyetinin Teşekkülü, Husûsî Hayatı ve Muhtelif Karakterleri,” 154.
45Ahmed Cevdet Paşa, Ma’rûzât (İstanbul: Çağrı Yayınları, 1980), 61.
46In fact, there are many anecdotes depicting Ahmed Vefik’s patriotism, most of which can be found in İnal’s
account. Here, I only shared the most well-known ones.
58
ist intellectuals. Of course, these anecdotes mostly depict the Pasha as an Ottoman
patriot, not as a Turkish nationalist. However, although patriotism can be differentiated
from nationalism in the sense that while the former refers to love for one’s
homeland, the latter refers to the one for the nation, it is not possible to differentiate
Turkism and Ottomanism in the context of a multiethnic empire. In other words, a
Turkist nationalist would not give a different reaction than that of Ahmed Vefik in
the situations depicted below. For this reason, just as Tansel who describes Ahmed
Vefik Pasha as “extremely nationalist” (müfrit derecede milliyet-perver),47 there was
probably no difference between Ahmed Vefik’s Turkism and Ottoman patriotism in
the eyes of the Turkists.
The most popular anecdote about Vefik Pasha’s patriotism belongs to his years in
Paris as the ambassador between 1859 and 1861. Both Pakalın48 and İnal49 narrate
from the Pasha’s contemporaries that since the French ambassador in Istanbul uses
a boat with a similar design to Sultan Abdülaziz’s imperial caique, Ahmed Vefik
orders the construction of a white coach similar to that of Napoleon III. When
his white coach triggers a small-scale political crisis between the French and the
Ottoman foreign ministries, Ahmed Vefik does not step back and forces the French
foreign ministry to remove the ambassador’s boat first. Vefik Pasha’s two anecdotes
including his direct confrontation with the French emperor depict Ahmed Vefik not
as a patriot more than a diplomat: In one of their meetings, Napoleon III told Ahmed
Vefik that “Your empire is shaking”, and the Pasha gives the following reply, which
causes Ahmed Vefik’s dismissal from his office:50 “Our country is located far away
from France; for this reason, it is quite natural that Your Majesty may not receive
true information regarding it. Because I have been in Paris, I am able to closely
observe that it is your empire that is shaking.”51 In the second anecdote, regarding
the upcoming French attack on Damascus, Ahmed Vefik tells the Emperor that
Turkish soldiers will never let French soldiers disembark. Upon hearing these words
with surprise, Napoleon III gives the following reply: “You are, indeed, a patriot,
but you are not a diplomat.”52
Another significant incident showing Vefik Pasha’s patriotism and courage belong
to the year 1845 when the Pasha returned from London and is narrated by a first-
47Tansel, “Ahmed Vefik Paşa’nın Şahsiyetinin Teşekkülü, Husûsî Hayatı ve Muhtelif Karakterleri,” 145.
48Pakalın, Ahmed Vefik Paşa, 28.
49İbnülemin Mahmut Kemal İnal, Son Sadrazamlar, 656.
50Tansel, “Ahmed Vefik Paşa’nın Şahsiyeti’nin Teşekkülü, Husûsî Hayatı ve Muhtelif Karakterleri,” 161.
51İnal, Son Sadrazamlar, 657.
52Ibid., 655.
59
hand account. Layard witnesses a discussion between Ahmed Vefik and the British
ambassador, Stratford Canning, during a dinner in the British Embassy on the
imprisonment of some British subject at Galata by the Turkish police:
“The Effendi attempted to justify the conduct of the Turkish authorities.
Sir Stratrford maintained that they had violated the capitulations
by apprehending a British subject without going through the required
formalities, which, it may be observed, usually enabled the criminal to
effect his escape. The dispute waxed warm, and the expression on the
countenance of the Ambassador announced an approaching storm. Suddenly
striking the table with his fist, he exclaimed: ‘And supposing I
went down myself to Galata with a cawass [kavass] to effect the release
of the prisoner, what would your authorities to do?’ ‘Why,’ replied the
Effendi with his imperturbable calm, ‘they would probably put you and
your cawass in the prison to join him – and they would only be doing
their duty!’ It would be difficult to describe the burst of anger to which
this somewhat audacious answer gave rise.”53
After telling Canning’s disrespectful treatment of Pashas and how powerful a figure
he was in the Porte, Layard argues that none of the Ottoman bureaucrats would have
given such a reply to the Ambassador: “the only one amongst them who ventured to
stand against him, and to brave his frown, was Ahmed Vefyk Effendi.”54 Layard also
adds that this caused Britain’s displeasure of Ahmed Vefik. In this respect, Tansel
argues that the reason for Ahmed Vefik’s failure (?) to become an ambassador to
Britain after working as a clerk there might be related to Ahmed Vefik’s similar
actions.55 Perhaps due to these kinds of actions, Layard considers Ahmed Vefik as
not a practical statesman, compared to Fuad Pasha.56
During his ambassadorship in Tehran, although such a norm existed neither in the
Ottoman nor in the Iranian embassies, Ahmed Vefik Pasha raises the Ottoman
flag up to the flagpole in the embassy without caring about the pressure from the
Iranian foreign ministry.57 Another anecdote showing Ahmed Vefik’s respect for the
53Layard, Autobiography and Letters, 86.
54Ibid., 85-86.
55Tansel, “Ahmed Vefik Paşa (3 Haziran 1823-2 Nisan 1981),” 125.
56Layard, Autobiography and Letters, 93.
57Tansel, “Ahmed Vefik Paşa (3 Haziran 1823-2 Nisan 1981),” 129.
60
Ottoman flag took place during the Ayestafanos Treaty. When Csar Nicolas II came
to Dolmabahçe, an officer from his committee raised the Russian flag in the palace.
Upon realizing this act, Ahmed Vefik left his place in the ceremony and immediately
run to the flagpole to rip down the Russian flag.58
The last anecdote from his years in Paris shows the Pasha’s respect for his religion
instead of his patriotism: İnal narrates that upon hearing the news that a play on
Muhammad would be put on the stage, Ahmed Vefik first demands the cancellation
of the play from the French Foreign Ministry. When his request was not taken
into consideration, Ahmed Vefik himself goes to the scene and prevented it from
playing.59 Ahmed Vefik the Pasha’s attitude towards Islam was probably a result
of the environment in which he was raised. In this respect, the anecdote from
Vefik’s early life given by his friend, A. Henry Layard, is significant: Layard writes
that Ahmed Vefik takes a break for the morning prayer when their reading and
discussion sessions lasted until the sunset in Ruhuddin Efendi’s mansion.60 This was
not peculiar to Ahmed Vefik: “the household was usually astir by the Mohammedan
hour of prayer, at sunrise.”61 Layard also adds that there was no raki served during
the dinners at konak.62
Perhaps the only anecdote that can be interpreted directly as the Pasha’s Turkish
nationalism, rather than his Ottomanism, might be his words on the use of Turkish
in Meclis-i Umûmî. İlber Ortaylı narrates that Ahmed Vefik Pasha told the non-
Turkish-speaking deputies that “Those who are clever enough learn Turkish within
4 years” during the debate on the obligatory use of the Turkish language in the
parliament.63 Although the bureaucratic language of the Empire had always been
Turkish since its foundation, Ahmed Vefik’s insistence on the use of Turkish during
the meetings of the parliament can be evidence for his Turkish national sentiment.
However, as far as Kânûn-ı Esâsî is concerned, it might not be possible to consider
this act as a sign of Vefik Pasha’s Turkish nationalism. In the constitution of 1876,
there were two articles that seems in stark contrast to the Ottomanist policies of
the Empire. The first one was the article stating the religion of the empire as Islam;
the second one was the article stating the language of the empire is Turkish. In
this sense, this incident can also be interpreted as Ahmed Vefik just demanding
58Tansel, “Ahmed Vefik Paşa’nın Şahsiyeti’nin Teşekkülü, Husûsî Hayatı ve Muhtelif Karakterleri,” 172.
59İnal, Son Sadrazamlar, 658.
60Layard, Autobiography and Letters, 52.
61Ibid., 55.
62Ibid., 54.
63İlber Ortaylı, İmparatorluğun En Uzun Yüzyılı, 83.
61
the members of the parliament to observe the constitution. Thus, the problem of
distinguishing Turkism from Ottomanism emerges again.
3.4 Ahmed Vefik’s Intellectual Thought
Lastly, Ahmed Vefik can be considered as an intellectual. Süheyl Ünver’s description
of the Pasha as the most cultured and literate of his time was shared by Ahmed
Vefik’s contemporaries.64 A friend of his, George Washburn, depicts Vefik Pasha
with the following words in his memoirs: “Ahmed Vefik was the most interesting
Turk whom I have ever known – a great linguist, familiar with sixteen languages
and with the classic authors of all Europe. . . ”65 Considering the Pasha’s dictionary,
Lehce-i ’Osmânî, and his library including more than five thousand books and journals,
most of which in European languages66 -which Washburn calls “the best in
Constantinople”- it can certainly be said that Washburn’s description of Ahmed
Vefik as a linguist and a reader familiar with European classics is true. Yet, despite
the existence of the books in Russian and Chinese in the Pasha’s library,67
Washburn’s claim that Ahmed Vefik knew “sixteen languages” is probably an exaggeration.
Still, thanks to both coming from a multilingual family and working
in the Translation Bureau, besides French and English, it was claimed that Ahmed
Vefik knew Italian, Latin and Greek.68 Indeed, A. Henry Layard writes that “he
was a good Turkish, Persian and Greek scholar, and was well versed in Oriental
literature.”69 In the tezkîre showing his appointment to the ambassadorship in Iran,
it was stated that he was familiar with the Iranian language.70
Ahmed Vefik’s intellectual profundity brought him to certain positions in the Ottoman
bureaucracy and the growth of his cultural capital went hand in hand with
his service for the government. In 1845, he was made responsible for preparing the
first Salnâme of the Ottoman Empire and prepared them until 1849.71 He became
64Süheyl Ünver, “Ahmed Vefik Paşa Kütüphanesi,” Türk Kütüphaneciliği 16, no. 1 (March 1967), 26.
65Washburn, Fifty Years in Constantinople, 55.
66Ünver, “Ahmed Vefik Paşa Kütüphanesi,” 28.
67Ibid., 33.
68Sevim Güray, Ahmet Vefik Paşa, (Ankara: Ankara Üniversitesi Basımevi, 1966), 10.
69Layard, Autobiography and Letters, 47.
70Tansel, “Ahmed Vefik Paşa (3 Haziran 1823-2 Nisan 1981),” 128.
71Ibid.,” 135.
62
a member of Encümen-i Dâniş in 1851. In 1852, he wrote one of the first dictionaries
of proverbs in Turkish, Müntehabat-ı Durub-ı Emsal. In 1863, he gave the
first history lesson in the first university (Dârü’l-fünûn) in the Ottoman Empire. It
was probably thanks to these characteristics and experiences that the Pasha was assigned
to write an official history book on the Ottoman Empire in 1869. On 22 July
1876, he was sent to the Science and Industry Exhibition in Petersburg to represent
the Ottoman Empire.72
However, despite his familiarity with Western thoughts and lifestyles from an early
age, Ahmed Vefik is depicted by contemporaries as a “typical Pasha” in terms of
his look in “traditional” clothes, such as wearing a jubbah, or his behaviors, such as
drinking from water from a pitcher. Although the European friends of Ahmed Vefik
mostly possessed an orientalist outlook in their accounts, this depiction of Ahmed
Vefik was also shared by his Muslim friends.73 The reason for Ahmed Vefik’s non-
European character can be found in the environment in which his childhood passed.
Henry Layard, who regularly visited his friend Ahmed Vefik in Ruhuddin Efendi’s
mansion, emphasizes the differences between his friend’s household and its European
counterparts in terms of lifestyle in his autobiography. He writes that the mansion
“was provided with no European luxuries”, such as tables and chairs.74 The meals
were eaten without knives and forks on a tray located on the floor.75 In fact, the
house where Ahmed Vefik was raised was an Ottoman konak in which the floor
is covered with Persian carpets and the walls (dîvân) covered with Bursa silk. In
addition, we understand from Layard’s account that Ahmed Vefik’s unique way
of clothing was a continuation of that of his father who wore a turban and robe.
Lastly, Layard emphasizes a distinction in Ruhuddin Efendi’s household from its
Muslim counterparts: In contrast to the tradition that existed in upper-class Muslim
households, he writes that there were no concubines in the harem and Ruhuddin
Efendi had only one wife. Ahmed Vefik followed his father’s example and married
once at the age of 20.76
Moreover, Ahmed Vefik’s habitus with the features of a traditional Ottoman lifestyle
might have played a role in making not only his behaviors and clothing but also his
intellectual thought “Ottoman”. For example, in the preface he wrote for his translation
of Voltaire’s Micromégas in 1871, Ahmed Vefik writes that he preferred to
72Tansel, “Ahmed Vefik Paşa (3 Haziran 1823-2 Nisan 1981),” 127.
73Tansel, “Ahmed Vefik Paşa’nın Şahsiyeti’nin Teşekkülü, Hususî Hayatı ve Muhtelif Karakterleri,” 130.
74Layard, Autobiography and Letters, 50.
75Ibid., 53.
76Mehmed Cemâleddin, Osmanlı Tarih ve Müverrihleri, 122.
63
translate this work because it was more appropriate to publish compared to other
improper (çirkin) works of this “freak (‘ucûbe).”77 In other words, the Pasha finds the
works of one of the most significant figures of the Enlightenment as morally corrupt.
More importantly, regarding the forms of government, Ahmed Vefik did not share
the same opinions with his European friends. Even Washburn who praises Pasha’s
intellectual features with admiration writes that “his ideas of government were altogether
oriental and I think that Haroon al-Rashid was his ideal for a sovereign.”78
Similarly, Edwin Pears, who was a neighbor of Ahmed Vefik, writes that the reason
for Vefik’s despotic rule as the president in the meetings of parliament was the fact
that the Pasha “considered himself, as he was, very much superior in education and
intelligence to the mass of the deputies.”79 Indeed, it was argued that Ahmed Vefik
was not an ardent supporter of constitutionalism. Although Ahmed Vefik only read
the declaration signed by the Sultan announcing the suspension of the Constitution,
80 he was accused of playing a role in the shutting down of the parliament in
1878, most notably, by Nâmık Kemâl.81 The fact that Ahmed Vefik was infamous
for his despotic rule and mocking the speeches made by the deputies during this
presidency at Meclis82 supports Kemâl’s claim. The Pasha’s relationship with the
Young Ottomans, the first constitutionalist movement formed in 1865 in the empire,
was far from good. Although the Young Ottomans supported Ahmed Vefik against
Âlî Pasha, Ahmed Vefik did not approve of the way that the Young Ottomans opposed
the Âlî Pasha’s government. According to Tansel, Ahmed Vefik, just as the
Young Ottomans, was against Âli Pasha’s autocracy, but he did not support the
opposition.83 According to Tansel, Ahmed Vefik, just as the Young Ottomans, was
against Âli Pasha’s autocracy, but he did not support the opposition.
Layard claims that Ahmed Vefik was one of the opponents of the patron of the Young
Ottomans, Mustafa Reşid Pasha, who was depicted as a miracle by one of the leading
members of the movement, Şinasi, for his role in the proclamation of Tanzîmât
Fermânı (The Edict of Gülhane).84 Although Ahmed Vefik received Mustafa Reşid
Pasha’s patronage in his early years in bureaucracy, their relationship might have
77Tansel, “Ahmed Vefik Paşa’nın Eserleri,” 252.
78Washburn, Fifty Years in Constantinople, 56.
79Edwin Pears, Forty Years in Constantinople (London: H. Jenkins, 1916), 58.
80Tansel, “Ahmed Vefik Paşa’nın Şahsiyetinin Teşekkülü, Husûsî Hayatı ve Muhtelif Karakterleri,” 132.
81Namık Kemal, Namık Kemal’in Husûsî Mektupları II, 386.
82Tansel, “Ahmed Vefik Paşa’nın Şahsiyetinin Teşekkülü, Husûsî Hayatı ve Muhtelif Karakterleri,” 159.
83Tansel, “Ahmed Vefik Paşa (3 Haziran 1823-2 Nisan 1891),” 128.
84Şinâsi, Müntahabat-ı Eş’âr (İstanbul: Bordo Siyah Yayınları, 2004), 58-59.
64
deteriorated later. According to Layard, Ahmed Vefik believed that the administration
should be reformed and purified; however, he found Reşid Pasha’s reforms
“too fast” in executing. Accordingly, Ahmed Vefik thought that the necessary reforms
could only be successful when they are in line with “Turkish and Muslim
lines”, hence they require great prudence and caution.85 Moreover, Layard writes
that Ahmed Vefik believed that “the ancient Turkish political system and institutions,
and the Mussulman religion, contained the element of progress, civilization,
and good and just government if they were only honestly justly developed.”86 In a
similar vein, Francis Galton in 1864 writes that “Although a Greek by a descent,
he is a more orthodox Moslem than Fuad or Aali, and is the head of the reforming
party, whose object is to bring about reform for the purpose of reestablishing the
Turkish empire on the basis on which it stoods in its palmy day, rather than adopt
European customs.”87 In fact, in this sense, Ahmed Vefik seems to agree with the
Young Ottomans who considered the imperial reforms as capitulations to European
dictates and demanded a form of constitutionalism based on Islamic notions.88 Yet,
rather than the goal, it seems that they disagree on the way to achieve the goal.
Although Ahmed Vefik shared with the Young Ottomans the idea that modernization
should be in line with the Muslim character of the Empire,89 the most significant
member of the Young Ottomans, Namık Kemâl, was a harsh critic of Ahmed Vefik.
According to Tansel, among all Tanzîmât writers, Nâmık Kemâl was the only one
who showed dislike for Ahmed Vefik.90 In one of his letters, Nâmık Kemâl criticizes
Ahmed Vefik’s negative thoughts on Voltaire. In another letter written in 1879, he
accuses the Pasha of signing the Treaty of San Stefano as if Ahmed Vefik was the
only responsible figure for the result of the treaty: “How come a man be compelled
to sign a treaty to let Moscow in Istanbul? Cannot he find a stone to break a
head; is not there a tooth in his mouth to bite an arm?”91 At first glance, Nâmık
Kemâl’s intense anger and hatred towards Ahmed Vefik might be attributed to his
accusation that Ahmed Vefik assumed a role, the president of the chamber, which
he did not know anything about and his conviction that the Pasha played a role
in the dissolution of the parliament. However, Nâmık Kemâl’s dislike of Ahmed
85Layard, Autobiography and Letters, 89.
86Ibid., 90.
87Francis Galton, Vacation Tourists and Notes of Travel in 1862-3 (London: Macmillan, 1864), 91.
88M. Şükrü Hanioğlu, A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire (New Jersey: Princeton Press, 2008),
103-104.
89Namık Kemal, Sürgünde Muhalefet: Namık Kemal’in Hürriyet Gazetesi I, 68.
90Tansel, “Ahmed Vefik Paşa (3 Haziran 1823-2 Nisan 1981),” 136.
91Namık Kemal, Namık Kemal’in Husûsî Mektupları II, 388.
65
Vefik goes back to 1876. In his letter written to Abdülhak Hamid on 21 February
1876, Kemâl makes fun of Ahmed Vefik’s spelling by exaggerating and imitating it.92
Kemâl finds Ahmed Vefik’s use of words from Chagatai and his spelling of Turkish
words as if they are in the Chagatai language problematic by believing that making
Ottoman Turkish closer to Chagatai has no use. Despite being one of the forerunners
of the simplification movement in the Ottoman language, Kemâl also harshly
criticizes Ahmed Vefik’s translation of Voltaire’s Microméga: He finds Vefik’s use of
the words, such as tasalanmak (to worry) and umursanmak (to be cared about) as
slang and argues that it is not appropriate to use such words in a literary work.93
Nâmık Kemâl’s criticism shows Ahmed Vefik’s two interests: language and folklore.
Ignacz Kunos who visited Ahmed Vefik in his mansion writes that the Pasha told
him that “if you write the folk words (avâm lügatleri) that you encounter, you
will complete my book [Lehce-i ’Osmânî].”94 Kunos also talks about how Pasha
likes listening to Turkish folk songs (türkü) from his Turkmen concubine, which
shows Ahmed Vefik’s interest in folklore. Vefik Pasha translated Şecere-i Türkî
from Chagatai to Ottoman Turkish and published it as serials in the newspaper
Tasvir-i Efkâr between 28 September 1863 and 23 February 1864. Ahmed Vefik’s
interest in the Turkic languages and histories can be attributed to the influence of
similar studies published in the West beginning with the second half of the 18th
century. Considering Ahmed Vefik’s stay in two major European capital and his
following of the intellectual developments in the West, Ahmed Vefik’s familiarity
with the studies in the fields of orientalism and Turkology is not surprising at all.
In fact, Ahmed Vefik was even a neighbor to Ernest Renan. Washburn writes that
when he witnessed a discussion on the inspiration in the Bible between a German
savant and Ahmed Vefik, he was amazed at the Pasha’s knowledge on the subject
and asked him where he had studied theology. Ahmed Vefik told him that “When I
was ambassador in Paris I lived next door to Renan, we discussed religious questions
almost every day.”95 Although Ahmed Vefik stayed in Paris between 1860 and 1862,
approximately 20 years before Renan’s famous lecture Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? it
is still more than a slight possibility that Ahmed Vefik talked about nations and
nationalism with Renan.
In the second half of the 19th century when Ahmed Vefik produced his two major
works, Fezleke-i Târîh-i ’Osmâni and Lehce-i ’Osmânî, an interest in the Turkish
92Namık Kemal, Namık Kemal’in Husûsî Mektupları I, 427.
93Tansel, “Ahmed Vefik Paşa’nın Eserleri,” 252.
94Ignacz Kunos, Türk Halk Edebiyatı (İstanbul: Tercüman 1001 Temel Eser, 1978), 42-43.
95Washburn, Fifty Years in Constantinople, 56.
66
history and language already emerged in the Ottoman public. In line with Gökalp’s
argument on the emergence of Turkism, Hanioğlu claims that there were two major
works that led to the reconceptualization of defining Turkishness in the Ottoman
Empire:96 Joseph De Guignes’ Histoire générale des Huns, des Turcs, des Mogols
et des autres Tartares Occidentaux, c. avant et dépuis Jésus-Christ jusqu’à Present
published in Paris in 1756 and Arthur Lumley Davids’ A Grammar of the Turkish
Language with a Preliminary Discourse on the Language and Literature of the
Turkish Nations: Copious Vocabulary, Dialogues, A Collection of Extracts in Prose
and Verse, and Lithographed Specimens of Various Ancient and Modern Manuscripts
published in London in 1832. David’s book was translated into French and presented
to Sultan Mahmud II. Mustafa Celâleddin Pasha’s Les Turcs anciens and modernes
published in 1869 in Istanbul tried to disapprove David’s argument that Turkic peoples,
such as Huns and Mongols should be called Turk instead of Tatars by arguing
that Turks as the forerunners of civilization in Europe belong to the “Touro-Aryan”
race.97 In contrast to Celâleddin Pasha, Arminius Vámbéry in his The Journey of
a False Dervish to Central Asia published in 1879 claims that Turks together with
Hungarians, Finns and Estonians constitute a “Turanian” race by showing both linguistic
ties among these groups.98 Vambery’s student, Ignacz Kunos’ notes in his
account that he went to Ahmed Vefik’s mansion with Vambery’s letter suggests that
Ahmed Vefik was a friend of Vambery.99 In the 1870s, the interest of the Ottoman
public opinion in Central Asia had reached such a point that there was news on the
war in Kashgar between Yaqub Beg’s Yettishar, a short-lived Sunni Muslim Turkic
state, and China in the newspaper Basiret.100
96Şükrü Hanioğlu, “Türkçülük,” Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslâm Ansiklopedisi, vol 41, (İstanbul: Türkiye
Diyanet Vakfı İslam Araştırmaları Merkezi, 1989): 551.
97Kushner, The Rise of Turkish Nationalism, 9.
98Ibid., 10.
99Kunos, Türk Halk Edebiyatı, 41.
100Kushner, The Rise of Turkish Nationalism, 11.
67
4. AHMED VEFÐK’S POLITICAL THOUGHT
In this chapter, I examine Fezleke-i Târîh-i ’Osmânî (The Summary of Ottoman
History) and Lehce-i ‘Osmânî (The Ottoman Dialect) by focusing on Ahmed Vefik’s
perception of Turkish history and language. By juxtaposing Vefik’s perception of
Turkish history and language with Turkism in language and history as defined by
Ziya Gökalp and Yusuf Akçura, I demonstrate that although it is not possible to find
any sign of cultural Turkism in Fezleke-i Târih-i Osmânî, Ahmed Vefik’s thoughts on
the Turkish language greatly coincides with those of Ziya Gökalp and Yusuf Akçura
in Lehce-i ‘Osmânî.
4.1 Fezleke-i Târîh-i ‘Osmânî
Fezleke-i Târih-i ’Osmânî (Fezleke henceforth) was a history of the Ottoman Empire
written by Ahmed Vefik Pasha. Although Tansel -based on the copy of Fezleke found
in Ahmed Vefik’s library- notes that it was published in 1863-64,1 the publication
date of the earliest copy of the book that exists today dates to 1869.2 Therefore, the
copy that Tansel encountered in Ahmed Vefik’s library catalog was probably Târîhi
‘Osmâni, which includes the same content as Fezleke, except for the discussion
on the consequences of the removal of Janissaries, because it was published several
years before Fezleke.3 The closing words of the books suggest that both were written
during the reign of Abdülaziz: “Today, Abdülaziz Khan is the sovereign to the land
and the khan to the people (Bugün Abdülaziz Han mülke sultan, millete hakan).”
The copy of 1906 that I used in this thesis only adds to its end that Abdülaziz passed
away in 1277 and Abdülhamid II is now the sultan. However, neither Abdülaziz’s
1Tansel, “Ahmed Vefik Paşa (3 Haziran 1823 – 2 Nisan 1891),” 138.
2Ömer Faruk Akün, “Ahmed Vefik Paşa,” 152.
3Tansel, “Ahmed Vefik Paşa (3 Haziran 1823 – 2 Nisan 1891),” 139.
68
nor Abdülhamid II’s reigns are covered in detail in the book. Compared to the
previous Sultans, Vefik Efendi allocates only a couple of sentences for the reign of
Abdülaziz and barely mentions the name of Abdülhamid II. This supports Akün’s
claim that Fezleke was an edition of Târîh-i ‘Osmâni published in 1863 with small
additions.
Mükrimin Halil Yinanç argues that Fezleke was written as a textbook to be read in
middle schools (rüşdiyye), namely by pupils above 10 years of age.4 This explains
Ahmed Vefik’s use of plain Ottoman Turkish in the book. In contrast to the contemporary
history books which were generally divided into chapters according to
the reigns of the Sultans,5 Fezleke has six chapters (fasl) covering the six centuries
of the empire. In other words, each fasl covers a one-hundred-year period. The
dates are given in Hijri years. For example, the first chapter (fasl-ı evvel) starts
with the reign of Osman Ghazi (r. 699-726) and ends with Yıldırım Bayezid (r. 791-
805). Yet, separate sections (kısım) are given for the reign of each Sultan within
these chapters. At the beginning of each chapter, a list (cedvel) showing the names,
birth dates, the date of enthronement, the reigns and the lifetime of the sultans
are located. This list is followed by a summary (mülâhazat) in which Ahmed Vefik
states which period the relevant chapter will cover. At the end of each chapter, the
Pasha summarizes the major political events that he told in that chapter under the
heading Tetimme. Both the summaries and lists were probably added to make the
history more comprehensible for the children. Although Yinanç claims that Ahmed
Vefik gives information on the organization and civilization of the Ottoman Empire
in each section,6 the book is mostly a history of the wars that the Ottomans fought
with almost no social, economic or cultural aspects of the empire. The literary
and architectural developments are only touched upon in the last section of each
chapter (tetimme) in which the names of important poets and architects of the time
are mentioned, and the change in the political structure is summarized after the
Ottoman conquests of the new lands were given.
Tansel argues that Fezleke was the first history textbook written in European style in
the Ottoman historiography and served as a model for its successors in this respect.7
Similarly, Yinanç claims that Fezleke, just as the history textbooks in European
schools, divides the Ottoman history into the periods, such as foundation, devel-
4Mükrimin Halil Yinanç, “Tanzimat’tan Meşrutiyet’e Kadar Bizde Tarihçilik” in Tanzimat: Yüzüncü Yıl
Münasebetile (İstanbul: Maarif Matbaası, 1940), 577.
5Akşin Somel, The Modernization of the Public Education in the Ottoman Empire, 1839-1908: Islamization,
Autocracy and Discipline (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 195.
6Yinanç, “Tanzimat’tan Meşrutiyet’e Kadar Bizde Tarihçilik,” 577.
7Tansel, “Ahmed Vefik Paşa’nın Şahsiyetinin Teşekkülü, Husûsî Hayatı ve Muhtelif Karakterleri,” 145.
69
opment, maturation and decline, and Ahmed Midhat Efendi, Mansurizade Mustafa
Pasha, Murad Bey ve Abdurrahman Şeref Efendi followed Ahmed Vefik’s periodization
in their works.8 However, there is no such periodization in the copy of the book
dated 1906: the book is divided into chapters, each covering a one-hundred-year
period. In fact, compared to its contemporaries in which the death of Grand Vizier
Sokollu Mehmed Pasha in 1579 was dated as the beginning of the imperial decline,9
it is not possible to encounter any “rise and decline” theme in Fezleke. Moreover,
even if there was a periodization in the first copies of the book, it is not possible
to claim that this constitutes the first example because the periodization of the Ottoman
Empire existed in the mid-16th century and 17th-century mirrors for princes,
as well. The decline theme already began in Gelibolulu Mustafa Âli and Koçi Beg’s
Risâle.10
Yinanç also points out that Fezleke does not reflect Ahmed Vefik’s intellectual profundity
in the sense that it is not written in a scientific manner.11 This is directly
related to the two basic facts both about the author and his audience that should
be kept in mind while reading the text. First, although Ahmed Vefik Pasha was a
member of Encümen-i Dâniş (the Committee of Science) and the first history professor
at the university (Darü’l-fünûn), he was foremost a bureaucrat rather than a
historian or a teacher. Second, Fezleke was written as a textbook for middle school
students, namely the children aged between 10 and 14, thereby having a pedagogical
motive. Owing to these reasons, Fezleke is not a scientific work. In contrast, it
bears considerable similarities with the pre-19th century Ottoman histories in terms
of content and even form. Although the chapters are allocated in line with centuries
in Fezleke, the sections under them are still divided according to the reign of each
Sultans, just like its previous and contemporary counterparts. More importantly,
Vefik Pasha did not share the sources that he consulted while writing his book.
Another common point between Fezleke and both pre-19th century and the
Tanzîmât histories is that they include the role of destiny or the influence of God
in the narrative. For example, fate (tâlî’) plays an important role when the earthquake
facilitated Süleyman Pasha’s conquest of Gallipoli during the reign of Orhan
Ghazi.12 Similarly, the development of the Ottoman polity among other begliks in
8Yinanç, “Tanzimat’tan Meşrutiyet’e Kadar Bizde Tarihçilik,” 577.
9Somel, The Modernization of the Public Education in the Ottoman Empire, 198.
10Douglas A. Howard, “Ottoman Historiography and the Literature of ‘Decline’ of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth
Centuries,” Journal of Asian History 22, no. 1 (1988): 67.
11Yinanç, “Tanzimat’tan Meşrutiyet’e Kadar Bizde Tarihçilik,” 577.
12Ahmet Vefik Paşa, Fezleke-i Tarih-i Osmanî: Bir Eski Zaman Ders Kitabı, trans. Şakir Babacan (İstanbul:
Boğaziçi Yayınları), 66.
70
Anatolia after the fall of Seljukids is explained by God’s grant for the Ottomans:
“although the Ottoman state looked weaker than all of the begliks when the Seljukid
state collapsed, four powerful and prudent rulers emerged in accordance with God’s
help on the Ottoman dynasty since the establishment of the Ottoman state. . . ”13
In this sense, Fezleke is not different from its contemporaries, such as Hayrullah
Efendi’s history written between 1853 and 1865 which involves religious and mystic
elements, in explaining the events.14 . For these reasons, I will neither look at the
historical accurateness of the text nor Vefik Pasha’s conception of history writing,15
but at Ahmed Vefik’s perceptions and interpretations of the Ottoman past, more
specifically in the light of the Pasha’s Turkist image created by the Turkist intellectuals.
In other words, I will focus on how the Pasha considers the pre-Ottoman
Turkish history and situates the Ottoman past in “a broader Turkish history” in
order to see to what extent his perception of Ottoman history shares similarities
with that of the Turkists.
Since Fezleke was written for rüşdiyye schools which were opened in 1847 for the first
time, it is important to look at the context of the Ottoman modernization in education,
or the emergence of public education, during the 19th century. The Tanzîmât
(1839-1876) was a largely state-initiated reform movement in the form of Westernization
-despite its Islamic roots. Raising the civil servants capable of carrying out
the reforms was the aim and -hence the key to the success- of the movement.16
Therefore, one of the motives behind the Ottoman educational modernization was
the need for “administrators equipped with necessary practical and positive knowledge.”
17 In other words, the state associated modernization in education directly
with the modernization of its administrative apparatus. In this respect, the institutions
with different names, such as meclis (council) and encümen (committee)
were created by the state initiative during the reign of Abdülmecid to create public
education and develop policies from primary to higher education.18 Among the
decisions of the first example of such an institution, Meclis-i Muvakkat (Provisional
13“Devlet-i Selçukiyye’nin inkızarında Hükûmet-i Osmaniyye Anadolu’da bulunan beyliklerin cümlesinden
zayıf görünür iken, Mevlay-ı Kadir-i Müteal Hazretlerinin bu Al-i Osman’a bidayet-i zuhurundan beri ihsan
eylediği hüsn-ü tecelli iktizasınca bir sırada dört muktedir ve müdebbir hükümdar zuhur ederek. . . ” Ahmet
Vefik Paşa, Fezleke-i Tarih-i Osmanî, 77.
14Yinanç, “Tanzimat’tan Meşrutiyet’e Kadar Bizde Tarihçilik,” 577.
15In Hikmet-i Tarih, it is possible to find Ahmed Vefik’s perception of history writing. The book was
published in 1863 was a summary of the lectures given by Ahmed Vefik at the university (Darü’l-fünûn)
as the first history professor.
16Halil İnalcık, Tanzimat ve Bulgar Meselesi (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1943), 2
17Somel, The Modernization of the Public Education in the Ottoman Empire, 54.
18Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu, Cem’iyyet-i İlmiyye-i Osmâniyye (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1994),
2168.
71
Council), established by Meclis-i Vâlâ-yı Ahkâm-ı Adliyye (the Supreme Council of
Judicial Ordinances) on 13 March 1845 and turned into (the Minister of Education)
in 1846, was to regulate sıbyân (Qur’an) schools and found rüşdiyye schools and a
university.19
Rüşdiyye schools for which Fezleke was written were first established in Istanbul
in 1847 and gradually expanded to the provinces beginning one year later.20 One
of the aims of the state in promoting public education in the provinces was to
thwart separatism, namely nationalism, among the Christian population.21 In this
respect, while Qur’an schools were established to strengthen Islamic belief among the
Muslim population against the threat of conversion to Orthodox Christianity and to
teach Turkish to non-Turkish Muslims,22 Ottomanism is promoted through mixed
education in rüşdiyye schools after 1856 in the Balkans. For example, when Midhat
Pasha became the governor of the province of Danube, he encouraged the Bulgarian
pupils to enroll in rüşdiyye schools that he reformed, rather than Russian schools,
thereby preventing them from being nationalist indoctrination.23 By receiving the
same education, the boys from different millets were expected to be loyal subjects
of the empire. However, the instruction in Turkish might have also discouraged
non-Turkish students to attend these schools because the non-Muslims and non-
Turkish-speaking Muslims had to know Turkish to enter rüşdiyye schools.
Ahmed Vefik Pasha held significant positions during the process of educational modernization
in the Empire. In this sense, Ahmed Vefik Pasha can be described as an
educator as much as a bureaucrat. In addition to being the Minister of Education in
1872 for six months and in 1878 for twenty-four days, Ahmed Vefik was a member of
Encümen-i Dâniş under Meclis-i Maarif-i Umumiye (the Ministery of Education),
which was responsible for preparing books for Darü’l-fünûn, founded by Mustafa
Reşid Pasha in 1851 and existed until 1862.24 In other words, before writing a history
book for rüşdiyye schools, Ahmed Vefik was a member of the committee that
was translating and preparing books for the students of higher education. In this
sense, he was one of the top figures of Ottoman modernization in education during
the Tanzîmât.
19İhsanoğlu, Cem’iyyet-i İlmiyye-i Osmâniyye, 2168.
20Somel, The Modernization of the Public Education in the Ottoman Empire, 66.
21Ibid., 72.
22Ibid., 75.
23Ibid., 78.
24İhsanoğlu, Cem’iyyet-i İlmiyye-i Osmâniyye, 2169-70.
72
In addition to the nationality or citizenship law of 1869 (Tâbî’iyyet Kânûnu) that
states that “all individuals born of an Ottoman father and an Ottoman mother, or
only an Ottoman father, are Ottoman subjects”25 the first publication date of Fezleke
also coincides with Maarif-i Umûmiye Nizâmnâmesi of 1869 (the Regulation
of Public Education of 1869), which represents a turning point in Ottoman educational
history. One of the main aims of Ottoman state education was to create
loyalty in the form of the teaching of religious and moral values through expanding
Qur’an and rüşdiyye schools from the 1840s onwards until the 1860s.26 However,
according to Akşin Somel, after the Regulation of 1869 “primary education ceased
to be regarded within the realm of religion, and the Ottoman state began to place
more importance on the organization of primary schools and the professional status
of primary instructors.”27 In this sense, although there was still an emphasis on the
need for the improvement of the morality of children,28 the Regulation of 1869 shows
that the priority of the modernist state changed from the social disciplining of its
subjects to raising civil servants for its administration by emphasizing the importance
secular knowledge over a religious one. Compared to the previous regulations
on education, such as the Fermân of 1241 (the Edict of 1825-26), this Nizâmnâme
was a major divergence from the previous education policies of the empire in the
sense that the influence of westernization is clearly felt. In fact, the Regulation of
1869 was prepared under the influence of Jean Victor Duruy, the French Minister of
Education.29 His influence can most notably be seen in the state’s perception of the
function of education: While education is deemed necessary for learning the religious
dogmas in the Edict of 1825-26,30 the necessity of receiving an education is justified
by the need for the development and terakkiyât (progress) of the society (and the
state?) in the Regulation of 1869: “fünûn (science) and maârif (education) were
the basic sources of in the world.”31 In addition to a change of mindset, the words
“terakkiyât” and “sanâyi” (industry) show us the presence of modernity through the
circulation of Western-origin concepts in the 19th-century Ottoman state language.
Indeed, education is deemed crucial to be part of a civilization (dâire-i medeniyet).32
25Feroz Ahmad, Young Turks and the Ottoman Nationalities: Armenians, Greeks, Albanians, Jews and
Arabs, 1908-1914 (Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press), 4.
26Somel, The Modernization of the Public Education in the Ottoman Empire, 58.
27Ibid., 84
28Ibid., 87.
29Ibid., 86.
30Mahmud Cevad İbnü’ş Şeyh Nafi, Maarif-i-Umumiye Nezareti Tarihçe-i Teşkilat ve İcraatı: XIX. Asır
Osmanlı Maarif Tarihi (Ankara: Yeni Türkiye Yayınları, 2001), 3.
31Somel, The Modernization of the Public Education in the Ottoman Empire, 87.
32Nafi, Maarif-i-Umumiye Nezareti Tarihçe-i Teşkilat ve İcraatı, 93.
73
Another difference between the two documents can be found in both the meaning
and the content of education. In the Edict of 1825-26, there is no mention of a Western
form of education: in other words, education is simply associated with learning
religious dogmas (şerâit-i İslamiye ve ‘akaid-i dîniye) instead of some modern sciences
such as chemistry and physics. In a sense, education seems almost synonymous
with religion by carrying on the traditional meaning of the word ‘ilm. However, in
the Regulation of 1869, the meaning of the word ’ilm does not connotate religion but
science (ilm-u maârif ). In addition to this change of meaning in the traditional use
of the word, it is possible to trace a much more important change in the Regulation
of 1869: the mentality of the state on education seems almost completely changed.
As a sign of this change of mentality, the document states that although schools have
been opened to be part of civilization in the last 20 years, there is still a long way to
go because both the numbers and the quality of schools are found insufficient. For
this reason, first, the curriculum must be improved and more competent teachers
should be raised through the establishment of teacher schools both for males and
females (dârülmuallimin ve dârülmuallimat).33 Indeed, education should be organized
“according to the needs of the century” (asrın ihtiyâcâtına göre),34 which can
be read as the needs of modernity. In this sense, the emphasis on the need for the
translation of books, especially from French, is significant.
The change in the state mentality in the Nizâmnâme of 1869 is even more obvious in
the state’s attempt for financing education: except for the primary schools (sıbyan
mektebi), all schools (both the middle and high schools) were going to be financed
by the state treasury. Indeed, in addition to the wages of teachers, the costs for book
translations belong to the state. The reason for financing education directly by the
state can be found in the following sentence of the document: “it is every state’s job
to educate its people (terbiyet-i ‘ammenin istikmali her devlet ve hükûmetin vezâyif-i
mühimmesinden olduğu)”.35 Thus, it can be argued that the Regulation of 1869 was
an attempt for creating a more organized, or under-state control, public education
in the Ottoman Empire because the state considers itself responsible for educating
the society.
Indeed, the Regulation of 1869 was an attempt at the centralization of public education:
both the existing and to be established government, private, foreign and non-
Muslim community schools, both in the capital and in the provinces, were obliged
33Nafi, Maarif-i-Umumiye Nezareti Tarihçe-i Teşkilat ve İcraatı, 97.
34Ibid., 94.
35Ibid., 96.
74
to one law.36 This meant the strengthening of the Ottomanist project “by trying
to integrate Muslim, non-Muslim and foreign schools within a legal framework”.37
First, it continued the policy of mixed education by emphasizing the need for “the
mutual understanding and friendship among the children of different religious communities.”
38 In this respect, the Regulation considered rüşdiyye schools unsuccessful
because of the large number of religious subjects occupying their curriculum.39 For
this reason, the regulation states that except for religious subjects, the state would
have control over the curriculum.40 Moreover, each community has its own religious
teachings, the new schools should be opened for non-Muslim boys, as well. Thus,
they would not be only under state surveillance, but also would be indoctrinated.
In this sense, the centralization of public education not only brought about the establishment
of educational councils in the provinces but also the raising of future
teachers and inspectors, and the standardization of curriculum and perhaps most
notably of textbooks in the Ottoman Empire. In this sense, it is possible to consider
Fezleke as one of the attempts of a modernist state to create loyal citizens by
establishing a nation based on common values. As I will try to show below, this
“nation” was not Turkish but Ottoman in character in Fezleke.
However, rather than Ottomanism as an ideology of creating equality between non-
Muslims and Muslims, Fezleke embodies a state-centered Ottomanism by praising
the power, justice and benevolence of the Ottoman dynasty towards its subjects
throughout the text. Despite coinciding with the Nationality Law of 1869, it does
not necessarily require equality based on citizenship but attempts to promote loyalty
to the dynasty irrespective of religion and ethnicity. Although Ahmed Vefik’s
use of harsh words for those who infringed upon the rights of non-Muslims can
be attributed to his emphasis on the equality of non-Muslims,41 they should be
considered as normative judgments that Ahmed Vefik uses, even describing the
Sultans, throughout the text. For example, in explaining the deterioration of Ottoman
governance in the late 17th century, he writes that those who were greedy
(aç gözlü) and dishonorable (erâzil-i nas) came to power.42 Similarly, he describes
36Somel, The Modernization of the Public Education in the Ottoman Empire, 86.
37Ibid., 84.
38Ibid., 88.
39Ibid., 88.
40Ibid., 88.
41For example, Ahmed Vefik calls those who attacked all of the Christian population of İzmir with rage
after Russia defeated the Ottomans in the Battle of Chesme “miserable” (esâfil-i nâs). Ahmet Vefik Paşa,
Fezleke-i Tarih-i Osmanî, 252.
42Ahmet Vefik Paşa, Fezleke-i Tarih-i Osmanî, 207-208.
75
the Teke Turkmens who rejected paying their taxes as “disobedient” (serkeş). In
other words, rather than carrying the connotations of equality between Muslims and
non-Muslims, these negative words used for those attacking non-Muslims reflect the
author’s subjective stance he takes in his narrative.
More importantly, Ahmed Vefik emphasizes the omnipotent state in maintaining
authority, rather than solely the security of the non-Muslims provided by the Ottoman
government by the punishment for those who attacked the non-Muslims.
For example, when some “impudent” (edebsiz) people burned down the churches in
Bursa during the reign of Sultan İbrahim, they were immediately punished, just as
those Arab rebels, by the Grand Vizier.43 In other words, the punishment is not
peculiar to those who attacked non-Muslims, but to those who act against the state
authority. Indeed, beginning with the reign of Osman Ghazi who established the
first court (mahkeme-i adalet tesis eyledi),44 the theme that the Ottomans always
had a just rule over its subjects is implied by repeating the words, such as qanun and
nizam, along with the theme of the Ottomans’ emphasis on education, throughout
the book. Moreover, if Vefik Pasha aimed to promote Ottomanism with emphasis
on non-Muslims, it would have been better not to mention the killings of civilian
Christians by the Muslim community at all.
Ahmed Vefik’s mentioning of the public works done in the newly conquered regions
can also be read as a form of state-centered Ottomanism. For example, at the end
of the first chapter, in Tetimme section: The lands of Bursa, Kocaeli (İzmit) and
Biga which had been in wrack and ruin before the Ottomans were reconstructed
(âbâd etti) after their conquest and the non-Muslim population of the Byzantine
Empire moved to these cities.45 However, again, the improvement of the living
conditions is not peculiar to the non-Muslim subjects of the empire. In a similar
vein, when an earthquake hit the Hijaz region, the state immediately sent officers
and started the reconstruction of the buildings there.46 These examples demonstrate
the benevolence of the Ottoman state towards its subjects in general.
Moreover, Ahmed Vefik’s missing of the opportunity to emphasize the good treatment
of non-Muslims by the state can be given as his lack of intention towards
non-Muslims. For example, while the good relations that Osman Ghazi established
with the Byzantines were generally touched upon in the 15th and 16th-century Ottoman
histories by telling how the Ottomans left their belongings before going to
43Ahmet Vefik Paşa, Fezleke-i Tarih-i Osmanî, 184
44Ibid., 77.
45Ibid., 78.
46Ibid., 248.
76
summer pasture and coming back with various presents for the tekfur, there is no
mention of friendly relations between the Ottomans and the Byzantines in Fezleke.
More importantly, in contrast to the contemporary histories in which “the equality
of Muslims and non-Muslims before the law as the main achievement of the Rescript”
47 is stated, there is no emphasis on the Gülhane Rescript in Fezleke. The
Pasha only emphasizes the equality that the Rescript brought, but he does so by
giving reference to Shari’a: “While the equality between a vizier and a shepherd
has been forgotten in the eyes of Shari’a, this has been announced again.”48 In this
sense, he underlines the equality among Muslims, rather than the one between non-
Muslims and Muslims. Yet, on the other hand, the lack of emphasis on the rescript
can be argued that this is might be something expected because the equality between
Muslims and non-Muslims had achieved to a great extent with the Reform
Edict of 18563. However, there is no mention of the Edict either, despite the fact
that it was put in force in 1856 and the book was written in 1863 and published in
1869.
In fact, rather than a national or nationalist history,49 Fezleke is, as Akşin Somel
puts it, dynasty-oriented history in the sense that it was the history of the Ottoman
dynasty rather than the history of a particular nation. Thus, I call it state-oriented
history where the Ottoman state is praised. In this respect, rather than a form of
Ottomanism that espouses equality between Muslims and non-Muslims, it is possible
to find what Hobsbawm called “state-based patriotism”50 in Fezleke. The people
in state-patriotism are defined irrespective of their ethnicity. Since state-based patriotism
aims to produce loyalty among the subjects to the state, Ahmed Vefik’s aim
in Fezleke can be interpreted as creating an identification among the people with
the state. However, while doing so, Ahmed Vefik does not emphasize the equality
of the Muslim and non-Muslim Ottomans at all.
This state-centered patriotism can also be observed in the lack of emphasis on the
ethnic origins of the Ottoman dynasty. Apart from the sentence stating that the
ancestors of the Ottoman dynasty were “Turkish tribes escaping from Mongols”,51
it is not possible to find any reference to the Turkishness neither of the Ottoman
dynasty nor of the Ottoman Empire in Fezleke. Indeed, Ahmed Vefik does not call
the members of the Ottoman dynasty “Turk” but “Ottoman”. This is also valid
47Somel, The Modernization of the Public Education in the Ottoman Empire, 198.
48Ahmet Vefik Paşa, Fezleke-i Tarih-i Osmanî, 272.
49Gülten Madendağ, “Ahmed Vefik Paşa ve Türkçülük” (MA diss., Mustafa Kemal University, 2009), 59.
50Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780, 86.
51Ahmet Vefik Paşa, Fezleke-i Tarih-i Osmanî, 56.
77
for the Anatolian beyliks: other than one sentence referring to the leaders of the
beyliks as “Turkish beys” (Anadolu’da kalan Türk beyleri), Ahmed Vefik calls them
“Turkoman” beyliks. Similarly, he uses the word “Ottoman” whenever he refers
to the lands (Memalik-i Âli Osman)52 and soldiers (Asâkir-i Osmâniye)53 of the
empire. Ahmed Vefik also does not call the Ottoman subjects (re’âyâ) Turks, but
writes that the subjects of Osman began to be called “Ottomans” in 1300/1301.54
The lack of the designation of the Ottoman dynasty as Turk stands in stark contrast
to both the pre-19th century Ottoman and contemporary histories in which both
the members of the Ottoman dynasty and the Ottoman soldiers were called “Turk”.
For example, Ahmedî, in his Dâstân, uses the word “Turk” for defining the soldiers
of Murad I when he depicts the war between the Ottomans and the Karamanids:
“Both Tatars and Turks perished.”55 Neşrî writes that Murad I gives the Serbian
king the following reply before the Battle of Kosovo: “God willing, I will show him
Turkish courage (İnşallah ana Türk erliğin gösterem).”56 In addition to calling the
language they speak “Turkish” (Türkî ), the early Ottomans referred to themselves
as “Turk” even more than “Ottoman” and they even traced their origins back to
Central Asia, most notably the Oghuz Turks. Moreover, this usage of “Turk” was
not only limited to the members of the Ottoman dynasty but it was also used in
referring to the Ottoman soldiers and the subjects of the Ottoman rulers.
Fezleke also lacks the Turkish myths of origins in the form of the genealogy of the
Ottoman dynasty which can be found in both pre-19th and contemporary histories.
For example, in the first pages of his Dâstân, Ahmedî traces the genealogy
of Ertugrul Ghazi, the father of Osman Ghazi, back to Gök Alp.57 Similarly, both
Âşıkpaşazâde and Neşrî trace the Ottoman origins back to the Oghuz tribes in Central
Asia.58 Neşrî starts his history by writing “there are many different groups of
Turks (Etrak ki vardır, esnaf-ı kesiredir)” and gives not only a history of the Oghuz
52Ahmed Vefik Paşa, Fezleke-i Tarih-i Osmani, 101.
53Ibid., 132.
54Ibid., 59.
55Ahmedî Dâstân ve Tevârîh-i Mülûk-i Âl-i Osman, trans. by Çiftçioğlu Nihal Atsız (İstanbul: Türkiye
Yayınevi, 1949), 15.
56Mehmed Neşri, Kitâb-ı Cihan-nümâ, trans. by Faik Raşit Unat (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi,
1949), 269.
57Ahmedî, Dâstân ve Tevârîh-i Mülûk-i Âl-i Osman, 8. According to the Turkish oral epic, Gök Alp was
one of the sons of the legendary Oghuz Khan who sent his three children to the West (Gök, Dağ, Deniz)
and other three (Gün, Ay, Yıldız) to the East. It is important to note that, contrary to the 19th century
Ottoman histories, the early Ottoman chroniclers and historians put the name of Gök Han/Alp on the
genealogy of Osman Ghazi, rather than Gün Han/Alp from whom the Kayı tribe comes. This can be
considered as another evidence of the invention of a certain Kayı tribe in the 19th century.
58Aşıkpaşazade, Aşıkpaşaoğlu Tarihi, trans. Hüseyin Nihâl Atsız (İstanbul: Ötüken Neşriyat, 2011), 14-15.
78
Turks but also a detailed description of the tribal origins of the Ottomans. This was
a common theme in the textbooks of the Hamidian regime, as well: they point to
the Turkish or Turkmen origins of the Ottoman dynasty from Central Asia through
the Kayı tribe.59 However, Fezleke does not include such genealogy. In contrast to
Akün’s claim that Fezleke attaches the Ottomans to Turkishness,60 Ahmed Vefik
barely mentions the names of Süleyman Shah and Ertugrul and does not state that
the Ottomans originated from the Oghuz Turks or the Kayı tribe. In short, Ahmed
Vefik’s Fezleke diverges from the common practice in Ottoman historiography linking
the Ottoman Empire with the history of Turks in Central Asia by associating
the Ottoman genealogy with the Oghuz tribes.
In this sense, the part allocated in Fezleke’s for the pre-Ottoman history is also quite
short in terms of length, compared to 19th-century histories which give considerable
space to the history of the pre-Ottoman polity, such as Hammer’s Geschichte des
osmanischen Reiches (History of the Ottoman Empire), Süleyman Hüsnü Pasha’s
Târîh-i Âlem (World History) and Nâmık Kemal’s ‘Osmânlı Târîhi (Ottoman History).
For example, Hammer’s Geschichte des osmanischen Reiches, Fezleke’s predecessor,
published between 1827 and 1835 in 10 volumes, allocates a whole chapter
on the origins of Turks.61 Similarly, Süleyman Pasha in his Târîh-i Âlem, though
not an Ottoman history, published in 1876 and studied in military schools allocates
a separate chapter called Tavâîf-i Türk (the Tribes of the Turks) on the history of
Turkic peoples, based on De Guignes’ Histoire generale des Huns, des Mongoles,
des Turcs et des autres Tartares occidentaux,62 in which he claimed that the Oghuz
Khan is the greatest ancestor both the Ottomans and Seljukids.63 Nâmık Kemâl in
his ‘Osmânlı Târîhi (Ottoman History) -which began to be written in 1884 but was
never completed64- dwells upon the arrival of the Kayı tribe in Anatolia in detail
and writes that the Kayı, to which the Ottomans belong, is “the noblest among the
Oguz Turkmen tribes.”65 In a similar vein, Ahmed Cevdet Pasha writing in 1854 in
Târîh-i Cevdet talks about the Seljukids as the predecessor of the Ottomans and
he associates the Ottomans’ creation of an Islamic unity with the Turkishness of
59Somel, Modernization of the Public Education in the Ottoman Empire, 197.
60Ömer Faruk Akün, “Ahmed Vefik Paşa,” 152.
61Baron Joseph Von Hammer Purgstall, Büyük Osmanlı Tarihi (İstanbul, Üçdal Neşriyat, 1993), 33.
62Yinanç, “Tanzimat’tan Meşrutiyet’e Kadar Bizde Tarihçilik,” 579.
63Hüseyin Zorlu, “Süleyman Hüsnü Paşa Tarihçiliği ve Tavaîf-i Türk,” (MA diss., İnönü Üniversitesi, 2018),
32.
64Ömer Faruk Akün, “Nâmık Kemal” in Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslam Ansiklopedisi 32nd vol. (İstanbul:
TDV İslam Araştırmaları Merkezi, 2006), 371.
65Namık Kemal, Osmanlı Târihi I (İstanbul: Bilge Kültür Sanat, 2012), 87.
79
the Ottoman dynasty.66 The pride felt with the Turkish origins of the Ottomans is
much stronger at the turn of the century with Selanikli Tevfik’s Muhtasar Târîh-i
’Osmânî published in 1905.67
In contrast to these histories, Fezleke does not include a myth of origins tracing the
genealogy of the Ottomans to Oghuz Khan. It starts with the reign of Osman Ghazi,
rather than the origins of the Ottoman dynasty, and the period before Osman Ghazi
is briefly touched upon in the introduction (mukaddime) of the book. Although the
reign of each Sultan was told in separate sections, no section was given neither for
Süleyman Shah nor for Ertugrul Ghazi. These two figures were barely mentioned
in the introduction. In other words, Ahmed Vefik starts his history with the reign
of Osman Ghazi by giving almost no space to the pre-Ottoman period: Other than
the short passage on where the Osman Beğ came from, there is almost no mention
of Turkish history in Central Asia.
In this sense, Fezleke is not different from the Ottoman history produced by Târîh-i
Osmânî Encümenî which Akçura harshly criticizes for not allocating any space for
pre-Ottoman Turkish history.68 However, although the length allocated for the period
before Osman Ghazi can be interpreted as Ahmed Vefik’s lack of interest in
pre-Ottoman history, the fact that Fezleke is a book on Ottoman history, as its
title suggests, rather than on Turkish history, should be also considered. Moreover,
Ahmed Vefik certainly knew about the history of Turkic peoples, hence the origins
of the Ottomans, as can be seen both in Hikmet-i Târîh69 published six years
before Fezleke and -as I show below- in Lehce-i ‘Osmânî. In other words, Ahmed
Vefik deliberately does not include both the origins of the Ottoman dynasty and
the pre-Ottoman history. In short, leaving aside finding the signs of cultural Turkism,
Fezleke shows even less emphasis on the Turkishness of the Ottoman Empire,
compared not only to its contemporaries but even to the pre-19th century Ottoman
histories. The major reason for this lack of elements of Turkishness in the book is
probably related to the fact that it was written for rüşdiyye schools in which non-
Muslim pupils also studied. Hence, rather than a national history, it is possible to
find a state- and dynasty-oriented history in Fezleke, thereby promoting loyalty to
the dynasty irrespective of religion or ethnicity.
Fezleke bears a similarity with the pre-19th century Ottoman histories by refer-
66Ahmed Cevdet Paşa, Tarih-i Cevdet, trans. by Mehmet İpşirli (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 2018), 34.
67Arzu M. Nurdoğan, “II. Abdülhamid Döneminde İlköğretim Okullarındaki Ders Kitapları ve Tarih Öğretimi,”
Türk Tarih Eğitimi Dergisi 3 no. 2 (2014): 99.
68François Georgeon, Türk Milliyetçiliğinin Doğuşu, 193.
69Ahmed Vefik Paşa, Hikmet-i Târih (Konya: Çizgi Kitabevi, 2013), 73.
80
ring to Mongols as “Tatars”.70 Although the word Tatar is used as a political and
geographical, rather than an ethnic, designation, Ahmed Vefik obviously does not
consider them as “fellow Turks” as Akçura and Gökalp do.71 When the Tatars break
their political pact with the Ottoman Sultans, they are simply regarded as one of
those enemies of the Ottomans.72 In other words, Fezleke shares the same narrative
with its predecessors in which both Genghis Khan and Timur are depicted as the
enemies of the Ottomans: Genghis Khan’s invasion of Central Asia forced the Kayı
tribe to migrate to Khorasan and Timur committed massacres against the civil population
both before and after he defeated Sultan Bayezid I.73 Although Ahmed Vefik
does not call Timur himself Tatar but his soldiers, Timur is always depicted with his
cruelty74 This is in stark contrast to Gökalp’s and Akçura’s perception of Genghis
Khan and Timur not only as Turk but also as the greatest heroes of Turkish history.
Moreover, Namık Kemâl in his ‘Osmanlı Târîhi also praises Timur and describes
“world conquerer” (cihângir).75 However, as I show below, Ahmed Vefik describes
Tatars as Turkified Muslim Mongols in his Lehce-i ‘Osmânî.
Ahmed Vefik considers not only Tatars (Mongols) but also Turkmens as the enemies
of the Ottoman state because they establish alliances with Anatolian begliks, such
as the Eretnids and the Karamanids. More importantly, however, he differentiates
the Turkmens from the Tatars: he interestingly uses the word Etrâk (Turks) to
refer to Turkmens tribes. For example, he calls Turkmen tribes who fought on
the side of the Karamanlı state against the Ottomans in 1386, such as Turgutlu and
Varsak “Etrâk” (Turks).76 Similarly, when he talks about the relocation of Ottoman
subjects who escaped the Turkmens in Anatolia, he calls the atrocities committed
by Turkmens “Etrâk zulmü (the oppression committed by the Turks)”.77 Moreover,
in contrast to his general usage of “Turkmen” instead of “Turkish” for Anatolian
70Ahmet Vefik Paşa, Fezleke-i Tarih-i Osmanî, 75-6.
71“Türkler dediğimiz zaman, etnografya, filolocya ve tarih müntesiplerinin bazan ‘Türk-Tatar’, bazan ‘Türk-
Tatar-Moğol’ diye yâd ettikleri bir ırktan gelme, âdetleri, dilleri birbirine pek yakın, târihî hayatları birbirine
karışmış olan kavim ve kabîlelerin mecmû’unu murâd ediyoruz.” Akçura, Türkçülüğün Tarihi, 15.
“The only scientifically established fact is that various Turkish speaking peoples such as Yakuts, Kirghizes,
Uzbeks, Kipchaks, Tatars and Oghuz have a linguistic and, traditionally, an ethnic unity.” Gökalp, The
Principles of Turkism, 19.
72Ahmet Vefik Paşa, Fezleke-i Tarih-i Osmanî, 139.
73Somel, The Modernization of Education in Empire, 197.
74“Tatarların Sivas’ı urup kana boğarak Şehzade Ertuğrul Beği şehid eyledikleri. . . ” Ahmet Vefik Paşa,
Fezleke-i Tarih-i Osmanî, 75.
75Namık Kemal, Osmanlı Târihi I, 318.
76Ahmet Vefik, Fezleke-i Tarih-i Osmanî, 70.
77“Etrâk zulmünden kaçan raiyet bu ülkelere. . . ” Ibid., 78.
81
begliks,78 Yet, Ahmed Vefik also sometimes calls these Turkmen begliks “Etrâk”:
“the people of Turkish and Byzantine states flooded into the Ottoman lands to
take refuge in the shadow of justice.”79 This differentiation of the Turkmen from
the Tatar by calling them Turks is another common practice of the Ottoman court
histories that continued in Fezleke. For example, Neşrî in his Kitâb-ı Cihannümâ
calls Turgutlu and Bayburtlu Turkmens “Turk”, thereby separating from Tatars in
a similar vein.80
However, Ahmed Vefik’s use of Turk in referring to Turkmen tribes is at odds with
contemporary accounts. A contemporary of Ahmed Vefik, for example, Scottish
archeologist William Mitchell Ramsay writing in 1897 explains the difference between
Turk and Turkmen in the following words:
“The Turkmens are all nomadic, while the Turks lead a settled life. Yet
it is certain that Turkmen villages occasionally put off the nomadic habit
and adopt a settled life; but in that case, they tend to forget the name
Turkmen, and to rank themselves as Turk and Osmanlı.”81
In other words, since those Turkmen tribes giving up their nomadic lifestyles are
called Turk, what distinguishes them is whether they have a nomadic or sedentary
life. More importantly, Ramsay uses the words Turk and Ottoman interchangeably.
However, Ahmed Vefik uses these words just in the opposite meaning: While the
Pasha avoids using the word Turk for the Ottoman dynasty, he refers to Turkmen
tribes as Turks. In this sense, Ahmed Vefik does not associate the word Turk with
the contemporary nomads of Anatolia.
78For example, Ahmed Vefik calls Teke tribes “Turkmen” when they were showing resistance to the taxman.
Ahmet Vefik Paşa, Fezleke-i Tarih-i Osmanî, 251.
79Ibid., 32.
80Faruk Sümer, “Turgutlular,” in Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslam Ansiklopedisi 41st vol. (İstanbul: TDV İslam
Araştırmaları Merkezi, 2012), 420.
81W.M. Ramsay, Impressions of Turkey: During Twelve Years’Wanderings (London: Hodder and Stoughton,
1897), 100.
82
4.2 Lehce-i ‘Osmânî
Ahmed Vefik Pasha published Lehce-i ‘Osmâni (literally means “the Ottoman dialect”)
in 1876 in Istanbul. It has been considered as the first dictionary of Anatolian
Turkish82 in the sense that it was the first dictionary from Turkish to Turkish. In
other words, compared to Esad Efendi’s Lehcetü’l Lügât prepared between 1725
and 1732 in which the meaning of Turkish words is given in Arabic and Persian,83
Lehce-i ‘Osmânî (hereafter Lehce) gives the meaning of Arabic and Persian words
in Turkish.84 The dictionary consists of two parts: cüz’-i evvel and cüz’-i sânî. The
title of the first part is Aslı Arabî ve Fârisî olmayan kelimâtı ve müvelledâtı hâvî
(“Includes the words and derivatives whose origin is not Arabic or Persian”) and
the title of the second part is Aslı Arabî ve Fârisî olan elfâz-ı ‘Osmâniyyeyi hâvî
(“Includes the words of Arabic and Persian origin in the Ottoman wording”). In
other words, non-Arabic and non-Persian words in the first part, and the Arabic and
Persian words used in Ottoman Turkish were given in the second part. Similar to
Fezleke, Vefik Pasha does not share the sources he used neither in the preface nor at
the end of his dictionary. Although Ahmed Vefik does not give any information on
how many years it took to prepare such a voluminous dictionary, the three-year gap
between his dismissal from the membership of Şûrâ-yı Devlet on 15 August 1873 and
the publication of the dictionary suggests that he spent this period for preparing his
dictionary.
There is a table of symbols (rumûzât) following the preface in which Ahmed Vefik
explains the abbreviations used throughout the dictionary. This table is significant in
terms of showing Ahmed Vefik’s suggestions for a new spelling in Ottoman Turkish.
He puts certain signs (or symbols) on the letters which are used in Turkish but not
signified in the Arabic script to differentiate them from each other. For example, for
the letter waw, he locates a dot on the letter to show four different vowels in Turkish:
a dot above waw signals “o”, a dot below waw sounds “u”, a dot on waw sounds
“o”, a short line below waw sounds “ü” and single waw sounds “ö”. In this sense,
Ahmed Vefik comes up with his suggestion for reforming the Ottoman script in the
period of simplification of the Ottoman language, which first started by Şinâsi in
both prose and verse and later intensified with Nâmık Kemâl’s writings.85 In other
82Tansel, “Ahmed Vefik Paşa’nın Şahsiyeti’nin Teşekkülü, Husûsî Hayâtı ve Muhtelif Karakterleri,” 141.
83Şehülislam Mehmed Esad Efendi, Lehcetü’l-Lügat, trans. H. Ahmet Kırkkılıç (Ankara, Türk Dil Kurumu
Yayınları, 1999), vii.
84Ahmet Vefik Paşa, Lehce-i Osmânî, trans. Recep Toparlı (Ankara: Türk Dil Kurumu Yayınları, 2000),
xvii.
85Şerif Mardin, The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought, 263.
83
words, just as the Young Ottomans, Ahmed Vefik aimed to make the language more
comprehensible by the people.
Although Tansel claims that Lehce’s first edition published in 1876 by Cemiyet’iyyeti
İlmiyiyye-i Osmâniye (The Ottoman Science Community) in Tab’hâne-i Âmire
consists of 1455 pages,86 Toparlı in his introduction to the transliteration of the
dictionary asserts that the first edition contained 1297 pages, whereas the second
edition contains 1455 pages because the second part of the book including Arabic
and Persian words was added in the edition published in 1890.87 However, Toparlı’s
claim cannot be held because the edition published in 1888 that can be found in
the library of Toronto University consists of 1455 pages. Interestingly, Ahmed Vefik
was not among the members of Cemiyet’iyyet-i İlmiyiyye-i Osmâniye that published
Lehce-i Osmânî.88 Cemiyet’iyyet-i İlmiyiyye-i Osmâniye founded in May 1861 defines
its objective as the publication of scientific works in its program.89 In contrast
to the institutions with similar motives founded directly by the state initiative,
Cemiyet’iyyet-i İlmiyiyye-i Osmâniye was “a private community”.90 Although this
community dissolved in 1867, the publication of Lehce shows that its printing house
founded in March 1864 to publish its major organ Mecmu’a-i Fünûn was still intact.
91
Lehce both indicates the origins and forms of the words through the phrases, such
as “in French (Fransızca)” or “from Italian (İtalyancadan)” and the abbreviations,
such as “İs.” (noun) or “S.” (adjective). Owing to Ahmed Vefik Pasha’s interest
and knowledge in folklore, besides the words that are not part of formal Ottoman
Turkish but used by the people, such as çimrenmek, ıklamak-fıklamak, kocunmak,
pat-patadak and yanaz, the dictionary also includes various proverbs and idioms in
explaining the meanings of entries.92 There are even slang words, such as kırıtmak
and tırıl in the dictionary. This shows Ahmed Vefik’s value given to the words
circulating among common people. Some of the entries, such as “balık”, “Türk”
and “Yeniçeri” are considerably longer than others, rendering the work seems like
an encyclopedia rather than a dictionary. The dictionary is considerably rich in
86Tansel, “Ahmed Vefik Paşa’nın Eserleri,” 253.
87Ahmet Vefik Paşa, Lehce-i Osmânî, xvii.
88İhsanoğlu, Cem’iyyet-i İlmiyye-i Osmâniyye, 2172.
89Ibid., 2180.
90Ibid., 2174.
91Ibid., 2184-86.
92For example, in the entry Baş Ahmed Vefik shares various idioms that include the word “baş”, such as
“baş kaldırmak”, “başa çıkmak” and “baş vermek”.
84
terms of content, including dish names. Indeed, Lehce even contains geographical
names ranging from districts (vilâyet, kazâ’ and nâhîye) and cities to continents by
allocating space for the words, such as Adana and Afrika. The work also possesses
anthropologic value since it accommodates the information regarding the Turkmen
and Kurdish tribes in Anatolia, along with the Oghuz tribes. Yet, on the other hand,
it demonstrates Ahmed Vefik’s lack of knowledge of the religion of Turkic people,
Tengrism. For example, he gives the following explanation for the word arpag: “it
is a spell read by pagans for the sick in ancient Turkistan.”93 Thus, he believes that
Tengrism is a form of paganism.
Şemseddin Sâmi, who himself later wrote one of the major dictionaries of the Turkish
language, Kâmus-i Türkî (the Dictionary of the Turkish Language) published in
1900, describes Lehce as “the greatest and the most beneficial work” of Ahmed
Vefik Pasha.94 It is quite possible that Şemseddin Sâmi benefited from Lehce in
writing his Kâmus-i Türkî, in which he regards Lehce as a significant work for
Turkish words.95 In this respect, Akçura regards Kâmus-i Türkî as the improved
version of Lehce.96 Moreover, Sâmi’s division of the Turkish language into two
branches, Western (Garb Türkçesi, namely Ottoman Turkish) and Eastern (Şark
Türkçesi, namely Chagatai) is completely in line, as I show below, with that of
Ahmed Vefik.97 Similarly, James William Redhouse, along with whom Ahmed Vefik
worked in the Translation Bureau,98 in the preface of his significant A Turkish
and English Lexicon: Shewing in English, the Significations of the Turkish Terms
published in 1890 mentions Ahmed Vefik among those from whom he received help
during the writing process.99 In addition to affecting dictionary writing in Turkey,
it was also argued that Lehce affected the modernization of the Tatar language.
Strauss claims that Gabdulkayyum Nasyri in his Lahca-e Tatari published in Kazan
in 1892 imitated Ahmed Vefik’s dictionary.100
Veled Çelebi İzbudak, a lexicographer and the author of Türk Dili (The Turkish
93Ahmet Vefik Paşa, Lehce-i Osmânî, 22.
94Şemseddin Sami, Kamus-ül Alâm (Ankara: Kaşgar Neşriyat, 1996).
95Abdullah Uçman, “Şemseddin Sami,” in Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslam Ansiklopedisi 38th vol. (İstanbul:
TDV İslam Araştırmaları Merkezi, 2010), 522.
96Akçura, Türkçülüğün Tarihi, 115.
97Şemseddin Sami, Kâmus-i Türkî, trans. Paşa Yavuzarslan (Ankara: Türk Dil Kurumu, 2019), 10.
98Carter V. Findley, “Sir James W. Redhouse (1811-1892): The Making of a Perfect Orientalist?,” Journal
of American Oriental Society 99, no. 4 (Oct.-Dec. 1979): 580.
99Sir James W. Redhouse, A Turkish and English Lexicon: Shewing in English, the Significations of the
Turkish Terms (Beirut: Libraire du Liban, 1987), xi-xii
100Johann Straus, “Language Modernization – The Case of Tatar and modern Turkish,” Central Asian Survey
12, no. 4 (September 2007): 567.
85
Language), in his preface to Kunos’ Türk Halk Edebiyatı puts forward two claims:
first, he asserts that Ahmed Vefik published Redhouse’s dictionary that was given to
Âlî Pasha by changing its name to Lehce-i Osmânî. Secondly, Çelebi maintains that
Kamus-i Türkî was a version of Lehce with minor changes. However, both Tansel and
Levend reject these claims respectively. Since Redhouse’s aforementioned dictionary
was published 17 years before Lehce and it was from Turkish to English and English
to Turkish, Tansel finds the first claim improbable. In a similar vein, Agah Sırrı
Levend views Çelebi’s claims as baseless and shows the fact that Redhouse shares
Ahmed Vefik’s name among those who consulted.101 Lastly, Akün points out that
Redhouse’s dictionary cannot be compared with the scope of the Turkish words
included in Lehce.102
Although it was prepared as an Ottoman dictionary, as its name “the Ottoman
Dialect” suggests, Lehce has been considered as a Turkish dictionary, not only by
the Turkist intellectuals but also by scholars. For example, Toparlı who transcribed
the work into the Latin alphabet not only argues that Lehce paved the way for the
later Turkish dictionaries, such as Şemseddin Sami’s Kâmus-ı Türkî appearing in
1901, but also considers it as the first national dictionary of Turkish (Türkçenin ilk
millî sözlüğü).103 Tansel argues that since the dictionaries before Lehce included
(only?) words from Arabic and Persian, the existence of a separate part for Turkish
words in Lehce was something unprecedented at that time.104 Similarly, Kushner
cites Ahmed Vefik’s dictionary as one of the first works distinguishing Turkish words
from those of Arabic and Persian in the Ottoman language.105 In fact, this argument
was first put forward by Akçura who claimed in Türkçülüğün Tarihi that Ahmed
Vefik differentiated the Turkish words from those with Arabic and Persian origins
for the first time by showing them in a separate part in his Lehce.106
However, although Ahmed Vefik perceives Ottoman language as a part of the Turkish
language, as I show below, there is no part solely reserved for Turkish words in Lehce.
In fact, as Ahmed Vefik himself states in the preface, the dictionary dictionary
is divided into two parts as Arabic and Persian words and those are not. The
first part -considered as a separate part including Turkish words by both Akçura
101Agâh Sırrı Levend, Şemsettin Sami (Ankara: Ankara Üniversitesi Basımevi, 1969), 90-91.
102Ömer Faruk Akün, “Lehce-i Osmânî” in Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslam Ansiklopedisi 27 vol. (İstanbul: TDV
İslam Araştırmaları Merkezi, 2003), 128.
103Ahmet Vefik Paşa, Lehce-i Osmânî, xvii.
104Tansel, “Ahmed Vefik Paşa’nın Eserleri,” 253.
105Kushner, The Rise of Turkish Nationalism, 60.
106Akçura, Türkçülüğün Tarihi, 35.
86
and historians- bears the title “Includes the words and derivatives whose origin is
not Arabic or Persian”. In other words, although the majority of the words in
the first chapter is of Turkish origin, it also includes words from Western (ecnebî )
languages, such as French, Italian, Latin and Greek. Secondly, even if there was
such a part as claimed by Tansel and Kushner, it is not clear what is the importance
of separating Turkish words from those of Arabic and Persian with regard to the
importance given by Ahmed Vefik to the Turkish language. In the preface to his
dictionary, Ahmed Vefik clearly writes that his aim is to show the origins of the words
in the Ottoman language. For example, the origins of the words from European
languages were indicated with the phrases, such as “Greek in origin (aslı Yunânî )”
or “Italian in origin (aslı İtalyanca)” in the first cüz. In this respect, there is no
special attention given to the Turkish words. In this sense, Ahmed Vefik’s aim was
a scientific endeavor to show the true origins of words, rather than prioritizing the
Turkish words over others.
However, Ahmed Vefik’s categorization of words in terms of their origins is not
accurate. For example, in the first part in which he supposedly gives non-Arabic
and non-Persian words, he lists Arabic and Persian origins, such as baklâ, abdest
and zarûret along with the Turkish and foreign words from European languages.
It is unlikely that Ahmed Vefik did not know that these words are Arabic and
Persian because he also gives these words in the second part of the dictionary. He
was probably not only aware of the fact that these words were Arabic or Persian
in origin but also knew that these words have different meanings in the Turkish
language (Türkî ). For example, for the word bağan, he writes that it is bagâne
in Persian (Fârisî ) and it means the loss of an unborn child, abortion, in Türkî.107
Similarly, for the word bakkâl, he writes that it means “Türkîde yağ ve pirinç, mutfak
havayici satan, sebzeden başka levazımı ve kuru bukûlü satan esnaf.”108
What is significant here is that while Ahmed Vefik shares the origins of words from
French, Italian and Greek (Rum) throughout the first part of the dictionary, he does
not indicate the origins of the Arabic and Persian words, just as he does not do for
the Turkish ones. Indeed, he does not use the phrase “Türkî” (Turkish) for most of
the Turkish words in the first part of the book. He only uses the phrase Türkî when
probably the meaning of the word is either different from the way it is used in Arabic
and Persian or not obvious to the Ottoman reader because it is from Chatagai, as in
the case of böke.109 In this sense, Ahmed Vefik might have considered these Arabic
107Ahmet Vefik Paşa, Lehce-i Osmânî, 34.
108Ibid., 36.
109Ibid., 65.
87
and Persian words as Turkish, thereby requiring no indication as such. Therefore, it
can be argued that Ahmed Vefik shares the idea that the words with foreign origins
used by the people should be deemed Turkish with Gökalp and Akçura. This can
be supported in his explanation in the entry “bezirgan”: Vefik Pasha writes that
it is “originally a Persian word that has become a Turkish one (Türkî olmuş aslı
Fârisî kelime)”110 In other words, Ahmed Vefik implies that a foreign word can be
Turkified in time. This supports Akün’s claim that Ahmed Vefik accepts the words
with Arabic, Persian and Western origin which are used in the spoken language as
Turkish and shares in the first part of Lehce, while allocating the second part for
the Arabic and Persian words that are only used in the written language.111 In this
sense, Ahmed Vefik’s approach shares a strong agreement with the Turkist principle
that considers foreign words as Turkish if they are part of the nation’s lexicon.
Although he states the opposite in the preface, Ahmed Vefik also allocates considerable
space for the archaic -in the sense that they were not in use by the people-
Turkish words probably from Chagatai, such as berk,112 çaşıt,113 esrimek,114 dilmaç,
115 dirmek,116 kargış117 onat,118 öründelemek,119 sançmak120 and tamu121. Interestingly,
he does use the phrase “Türkî” (Turkish) for these words, except for a
few: for example, for the word kıtık, Ahmed Vefik writes that “it means kırkmak in
Türkî.”122 It might suggest that he assumes that they are Turkish words. Moreover,
the fact that Ahmed Vefik also used these words in his adaptations of French theatre
plays123 can be interpreted that he has an aim to revive these words. In other
words, in contrast to the Turkist understanding of language that all the words used
by the people are Turkish, Ahmed Vefik wanted to put these words in use again.
110Ahmed Vefik Paşa, Lehce-i Osmânî, 52.
111Ömer Faruk Akün, “Lehce-i Osmânî,” 127.
112Ahmet Vefik Paşa, Lehce-i Osmânî, 50.
113Ibid., 89.
114Ibid., 139.
115Ibid., 117.
116Ibid., 117.
117Ibid., 215.
118Ibid., 292.
119Ibid., 303.
120Ibid., 331.
121Ibid., 367.
122Ibid., 235.
123Tansel, “Ahmed Vefik Paşa’nın Eserleri,” 265-71.
88
Moreover, probably owing to his competency in the Turkic languages, he also allocates
considerable space for Turkic words as well, such as basrık, böke, kıtık, kökün
and kişir which can be found in the first dictionary of Turkic languages, Divân-i
Lügati’t Türk compiled between 1072 and 1074.124 However, Ahmed Vefik does not
indicate which Turkic branch of language these words belong to. For example, for
the word dil, he writes that it is also called til in Türkî without specifying what
that Turkic language is.125 Although it seems that he means Chagatai by Türki, he
refers to both Chagatai and Ottoman Turkish when he uses the word Türkî. For
example, for the word bölücü, after giving its equivalents in Arabic, such as kassam,
he also gives its synonyms in both Chagatai and Ottoman Turkish: Türkîde yargıcı,
hâkim.126 What is important here is that Ahmed Vefik obviously considers all of
them Turkish and believes that it suffices to indicate their origins as “Türkî”.
Although Akçura believes that Ahmed Vefik saved the Turkish words from extinction,
127 Ahmed Vefik’s use of archaic Turkish and Turkic words draws criticism from
his contemporaries. Nâmık Kemâl treats Lehce with ridicule. In his letter of 1887 to
Menemenlizade Rifat Bey, Kemâl writes that “Lehce-i Osmânî was written for the
people of Bukhara”.128 In another letter, Nâmık Kemâl warns Abdülhâk Hâmîd not
to imitate Ahmed Vefik’s language.129 Tanpınar argues that Kemâl was against the
superfluous changes that Ahmed Vefik wanted to make in the language. Perhaps
in agreement with Kemâl, despite praising the Pasha’s language in his first three
adaptations, Tanpınar finds Ahmed Vefik’s language arbitrary and poor.130 Although
Ahmed Midhat praises Lehce, he also writes he had to defend Vefik Pasha’s
dictionary against those making fun of it: “I have heard criticism from people who
asked me ‘can there be a dictionary like this? Who does not know the meaning of
the words içmek or süpürmek?’”131
Before going into details about how Ahmed Vefik perceived Turkishness -the Turkish
language and Turkish or Turkic people- in his dictionary, it is important to clarify the
124I used Türk Dil Kurumu’s (Turkish Language Association) online database
(https://www.tdk.gov.tr/divanu-lugatit-turk-veri-tabani/) that enables users to search the words in
Divan-i Lügati’t Türk. Since Divan-i Lügati’t Türk was found during the Second Constitutional Period
and published in 1914 for the first time, it is not possible that Ahmed Vefik was able to use this source.
125Ahmet Vefik Paşa, Lehce-i Osmânî, 117.
126Ibid., 65.
127Akçura, Türkçülüğün Tarihi, 35.
128Namık Kemal, Namık Kemal’in Husûsî Mektupları III, 27.
129Namık Kemal, Namık Kemal’in Husûsî Mektupları I, 434.
130Ahmed Hamdi Tanpınar, 19uncu Asır Türk Edebiyatı Tarihi, 287.
131Quoted in Tansel, “Ahmed Vefik Paşa’nın Eserleri,” 255.
89
meanings of the words ulus, millet, kavim and ümmet. Similar to his contemporaries,
such as Nâmık Kemâl and Ali Suâvi, Vefik Pasha uses these words, including ümmet,
interchangeably to refer to the nation. He defines ulus as “greater than a tribe
(aşiret), halk, millet, kavim, ümmet”132 It is perhaps because Ahmed Vefik gives
these words as synonyms, he does not allocate separate entries for the words millet,
kavim and ümmet.
While Ahmed Vefik calls the Turkmen tribes in Anatolia as “Turkmen”, he writes
that the Pechenegs are an ancient Turkish tribe (kadim Türk aşireti) in the entry
“Bacanak”.133 This clearly shows that the Pasha considers one of the Oghuz tribes
as Turkish without making any differentiation between Turks and Turkic people.
More importantly, for the entry Barlas, the Pasha writes that it is both a Turkish
tribe (Türk aşireti) and a Timurid nation (Timurlenk kavmi).134 This consideration
of the Timurid people as Turks stands in contrast to his depiction of the Timurids
as Tatars in Fezleke. This might suggest a change in Ahmed Vefik’s perception of
Timur and Timurids, from Tatars (Mongols) to Turks. Indeed, as we can see from
the preface, Ahmed Vefik differentiates the pre-1300 period from the post-1300 one
by implying that Mongols were both Muslimized and Turkified.
In his short preface to Lehce, it is possible to find Ahmed Vefik’s perception of the
Turkish language and its dialects. Ahmed Vefik writes that “the Oghuz branch
(Oğuz şubesi), the oldest and the most common among the Turkish languages, once
covered from East China Sea (Bahr-i Şarkî ) to Hungary (Macaristan), including
Tatarstan and Turkestan, and still called the Guz language (lisânı).” He states that
the Turkmen language, which is the continuation (anın yenisi) of the Guz language,
gradually diffused to Anatolia after covering Iran and Syria and gave birth to the
Ottoman dialect (Lehce-i Osmânî ). Guz lisânı later expanded to India via Fergana
and infused into the Hallacı (Khalaj) language of Afghanistan.135 Regarding the
Kipchak language, Ahmed Vefik considers it as another old branch of the Turkish
language, similar to the Kyrgyz, Cuman and Bulgar, that occupied the region from
Khiva to Siberia and Kazan. As we can see from his entry on Bulgar, the Pasha
considers the Bulgarians once-Turkish people that mixed with Slavs.136 In the pref-
132Ahmed Vefik, Lehce-i Osmânî, 395.
133Ahmet Vefik Paşa, Lehce-i Osmânî, 33.
134Ibid., 41.
135Today the Khalaj language, just as the Oghuz group of languages, is considered “an independent branch
of the Turkish family of languages” and Khalaj people, “ostensibly of Turkish origin”, lived in western
Turkistan and then in Eastern Afghanistan during the pre-Mongolic period.(Bosworth, C.E. and Doerfer,
G., "Khaladji," in: Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition, Edited by: P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C.E.
Bosworth, E. van Donzel, W.P. Heinrichs.
136“Tavâif-i etrâktan Sakalibeye karışmış bir kadim taife.” Ahmet Vefik Paşa, Lehce-i Osmânî, 68.
90
ace, Ahmed Vefik also states that the Chagatai language is born from the Uyghur
language -that spread to Kashgar- in 800s (1400s) after the Chinggisid nations (Çingizyan
akvâmı) penetrated into the lands of Turks and Islam in 700s (1300s.). Considering
his differentiation between the pre-1300 and the post-1300 Mongolic eras, it
can be said that Ahmed Vefik believed that the Mongols not only convert to Islam
but also Turkified after 1300. He concludes that the books in Uyghur, Kipchak and
Chagatai, such as Ali Şîr Nevâî’s Mahbûbü’l-Kulûb, and more specifically the books
of the Seljukids, Turkmen and Ottomans should be examined in detail to see the
differences between the branches of “our language”.137
Two important points can be inferred from the preface regarding Ahmed Vefik’s perception
of the Ottoman Turkish. First, despite calling Ottoman Turkish “’Osmânî”
and his work “the Ottoman dialect”, Ahmed Vefik clearly considers the Ottoman
language as Turkish. Despite including words from Arabic, Persian, Greek, Armenian,
French and Italian, Ahmed Vefik claims that ‘Osmânî (the Ottoman language)
is part of the (grand) Turkish language, more specifically that of the Turkoman language
which evolved from the Oghuz language branch.138 In this sense, 25 years
before Şemseddin Sâmi’s famous phrase that “Lisânımız lisân-ı Türkî’dir (Our language
is Turkish)”139 used in his preface to his Kâmûs-i Türkî, Ahmed Vefik had
stated the same idea differently. However, Ahmed Vefik cannot be considered as the
first Ottoman scholar who consider the Ottoman language as Turkish one because
the Ottoman language was already called Turkish by the Young Ottomans, such as
Nâmık Kemâl in his article of 1866140 and Ziya Pasha in 1868.141
Secondly, and more importantly in terms of showing Vefik Pasha’s cultural Turkism,
according to Ahmed Vefik, the Ottoman language is not only Turkish but also part
of a grand Turkish language. Vefik Pasha calls the Ottoman language “Western
Turkish (Lisân-ı Türkî’nin Garbîsine denir)”, namely the Turkish language which
is spoken in the West.142 In other words, as his use of the term “elsine-i Türkî ” (the
Turkish languages) suggests, Ahmed Vefik believed that Ottoman Turkish was not
the only Turkish language. In the preface, Ahmed Vefik sees three major branches
137Ahmet Vefik Paşa, Lehce-i Osmânî, 2.
138“. . .Türkmân lisânı, İran ve Suriye’yi kaplayıp Anadolu’ya inmiş, mürûr-i zamanla Lehce-i Osmânî’yi tedil
etmiştir.” Ibid., 2.
139Şemseddin Sami, Kâmus-i Türkî, 13.
140Nâmık Kemâl, “Lisan-ı Osmanî’nin Edebiyatı Hakkında Bazı Mülâhazâtı Şâmildir,” in Yeni Türk Edebiyatı
Antolojisi II (1865-1876), ed. Mehmet Kaplan, İnci Engünün and Birol Emil (İstanbul: Marmara
Üniversitesi Yayınları, 1993), 186.
141Ziyâ Paşa, “Şiir ve İnşa,” in ibid., 48.
142Ahmet Vefik Paşa, Lehce-i Osmânî, 391.
91
of the Turkish language -Oghuz, Kipchak and Chagatai which evolved from Uyghurand
indicates that the Ottoman language belongs to the Oghuz branch. In the entry
Çağatay, Ahmed Vefik defines Chagatai in the following words: “it is the language
spoken and written in Turkistan, Khorasan and Khwarazm, the lands of Chagatai
Khan given to him by his father, Genghis Khan, which emerged as a separate branch
from the ancient Uygur language, namely Eastern Turkish (Türkî-i Şarkî ), written in
Persian spelling.143 Ahmed Vefik also adds that Chagatai flourished with the works
of the Timurids, such as Lütfî, Hüseyin Baykara, Haydar Mirza, Nevaî, and the
Mughals, such as Babur Shah. It is important to note that Ahmed Vefik’s perception
of the Turkish language bears considerable similarities with the classification of
Turkic languages today.144
However, although Vefik Pasha mentions the three branches of the Turkish language
in the preface, he claims that there are two Turkish languages: the one spoken in
the East (Çağatay) and the other spoken in the West (‘Osmânî ) in his entry on
“Türkçe” (Turkish).145 Yet, whether there are two or three branches, it is clear
that Ahmed Vefik believes that there is a grand or a general Turkish language out
of which two branches emerged. In this sense, Ahmed Vefik shares Gökalp’s and
Akçura’s understanding of the Turkish language in which there is one grand Turkish
language from which other Turkish languages emerged.
Moreover, just as Gökalp and Akçura, Vefik Pasha calls Chagatai Eastern Turkish.
However, although Ahmed Vefik was certainly among the first Ottoman scholars
who accepted Chagatai as part of the Turkish language, it is not possible to argue
that this idea was put forward in Lehce for the first time. The relationship between
Chagatai and Ottoman Turkish was already known by the Ottoman intellectuals in
the 1870s. For example, though he does not use the word Chagatai, Ali Suâvi in
Lisân ve Hatt-ı Türkî published in 1869 writes that Ottoman Turkish dates back to
Uyghur.146 In contrast to Tansel’s claim that Ziya Pasha considers Chagatai as a
separate language,147 Ziya Pasha not only points out the relationship between Ottoman
and Chagatai literature148 but also considers Chagatai as part of the Turkish
143Ahmet Vefik Paşa, Lehce-i Osmânî, 83.
144Johson divides the Turkic languages into two branches: Oghur (Bulghar) in the West and Common Turkic
in the East. Accordingly, Common Turkic later created “the three primary branches”: Oghuz, Kipchack
and Uyghur. (Lars Johanson, “The History of Turkic,” in The Turkic Languages, ed. Lars Johanson and
Eva A. Csato (London: Routledge, 1998), 81-82.
145Ahmet Vefik Paşa, Lehce-i Osmânî, 391.
146Mesut Şen, “Tanzimat Aydınlarının ‘Çağatay Türkçesi’ne Bakışı ve Şemseddîn Sâmî’nin Tesiri,” Turkish
Studies 9, no. 9 (2014): 84.
147Tansel, “Ahmed Vefik Paşa’nın Eserleri,” 252.
148Mustafa Çağlar, “Ziya Paşa’nın Harâbât’ı (2. Cilt, İnceleme-Metin-Dizin)” MA diss., Manisa Celal Bayar
92
language in his Harâbât published in 1874.149 Similarly, Ahmed Mithat in 1872
writes that “Turkish spoken in Turkistan was our language six or seven hundred
years ago.”150 In other words, Ahmed Vefik’s contemporaries were also informed of
the works of the orientalists on Turkic languages, such as E. Marc Quatremere’s
Chrestomathie en turc-oriental published in 1841, Vambery’s Çagataische Sprach-
Studien published in 1867 and Pavet de Courteille’s Dictionnaire turk-oriental published
in 1870.151
Moreover, Ahmed Vefik Pasha believes that the difference between the Eastern and
Western Turkish languages results from the influence of Arabic and Persian. He
argues that while Western Turkish imitated Arabic spelling, Eastern Turkish imitated
the Persian spelling regarding the difference between the two. In this sense,
the Pasha implies that while they are the same language, they come under the influence
of Arabic and Persian, which led to differences between the two. The Pasha
gives the word “tarmak” as an example: it is written with “teh” in Eastern Turkish,
whereas it is written with “tah” in Western Turkish.
Furthermore, in line with his division of the Turkish language into two main
branches, Ahmed Vefik divides the Turks into the West and East in his quite long
entry on “Türk”: “The five nations (ulustan yani milletten), such as Uyghur, Halıç
and Karlık are from the Eastern Turks (Şark Türkleri) and the ten nations, such as
Oghuz, Kipchaks, Pechenegs, Kyrgyzs, Cumans (Koman), Kazakhs (Kaysak) and
Kangly (Kanglı) are from the Western Turks.152 In this sense, similar to Gökalp
and Akçura’s perception of one grand Turkish nation, or Bütün Türklük in Akçura’s
words, Ahmed Vefik considers all Turkic peoples as part of the same nation that he
calls Turk.
Lastly, I will dwell upon the issue of how Ahmed Vefik differentiates Türk from
Türkmen. In contrast to Fezleke in which the Pasha avoids using the word Turk,
Vefik Pasha clearly calls the Ottoman dynasty Turk in Lehce in his entry Türk. More
importantly, in contrast to the lack of ethnic myths of origins in Fezleke, in his entry
on “’Osmanlı”, he claims that the origin of the Ottoman dynasty is Osman, the son
of Ertugrul, who belongs to the Kayı tribe in the Oghuz nation (ulus).153 In the
Üniversitesi, 2018), 11.
149Nâzım Hikmet Polat, “Türk Dünyasının Entegrasyonunda Lise Edebiyat Tarihi Kitaplarının Yeri,” Bilig
Türk Dünyası Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi 91 (2019): 258.
150Mesut Şen, “Tanzimat Aydınlarının ‘Çağatay Türkçesi’ne Bakışı ve Şemseddîn Sâmî’nin Tesiri,” 85.
151Zühal Ölmez, “Çağatay Edebiyatı ve Çağatay Edebiyatı Üzerine Araştırmalar,” Türkiye Araştırmaları
Literatür Dergisi 5, no. 9 (2007): 177.
152Ahmet Vefik Paşa, Lehce-i Osmânî, 390.
153Ibid., 294.
93
entry Alp, he gives Kaya Alp, who was considered as the father of Suleyman Shah in
the Ottoman chronicles,154 as the ancestor of the Ottomans (cedd-i ‘Osmâniyan)155
Since Ahmed Vefik defines Oghuz as the oldest genealogy of Turks and writes that
the history of Turks starts with the legends of Oghuz Khan,156 it can clearly be seen
that he considers the members of the Ottoman dynasty as Turks. However, on the
other hand, in his entry on “Kayı”, the Pasha claims that the Ottomans descended
from a Turkmen tribe. Although there was no mention of the name Kayı in his
history of the Ottoman Empire, Ahmed Vefik allocates space for the entry Kayı in
which he writes that it is an exalted Turkmen tribe descending from Oghuz Khan
and Kayı Khan was the great ancestor of the Ottomans.157 In other words, just
as he associates “the Oghuz Turkish” with “the Turkoman dialect”, he considers
the Turkmens as Turks: he defines “Türkmen” as those parts of Oghuz tribes who
became Muslim after coming from Turkestan to the lands of Islam.158 Thus, the
words Turkmen and the Oghuz Turks are associated and used interchangeably by
Ahmed Vefik.159
On the other hand, however, Ahmed Vefik Pasha still draws a line between the
members of the Ottoman dynasty coming from a Turkmen -the Kayı- tribe and the
contemporary nomadic Turkmen tribes in Anatolia in his entry on “Türk”.160 First,
he asserts that while those Oghuz Turks (Guz), including the Seljukids, who converted
to Islam are called Türkmen, those Oghuz who did not settle are called Türk
which later to be meant rude (kaba) and peasant (rûstâ’î ). In other words, just as
he did in Fezleke, Ahmed Vefik asserts that Turks, rather than Turkmens, are associated
with nomadism. Secondly, Ahmed Vefik tries to differentiate the Ottomans
from the Turkmen tribes in terms of language. He claims that “the Ottoman language
(‘Osmânî ) in time separated itself from the Oghuz Turkish (Oğuz Türkîsi),
namely from its Turkoman dialect (Türkmen lehçesi).”161 In other words, although
at first glance it seems that Ahmed Vefik that the Ottoman Turkish is a dialect of
Turkoman language, the Pasha also believes the Ottoman Turkish as independent
154Halil İnalcık, “Osmanlı Beyliği’nin Kurucusu Osman Beğ,” Belleten 71, no. 261 (August 2017): 487.
155Ahmet Vefik Paşa, Lehce-i Osmânî, 16.
156Ahmet Vefik Paşa, Lehce-i Osmânî, 290.
157Ibid., 222.
158Ibid., 391.
159This interchangeable use of the words Oghuz and Turkmen can also be seen in the entries on each Turkmen
tribe. For example, in the entry Teke, Vefik writes that “it is an ancient Oghuz, namely Turkmen, country.”
Ibid., 374.
160Ibid., 391.
161Ibid., 391.
94
and different from the Turkoman language. This argument disassociating the Ottoman
language from the Turkoman (or Oghuz) Turkish might also be interpreted
as an attempt for separating the Ottoman elites -despite coming from a Turkmen
tribe, Kayı- from the contemporary nomadic Turkoman tribes.
Lastly, I will focus on the meanings of the words Tatar and Mongol and their relation
to Turks in the eyes of Ahmed Vefik. In the respective entry, Ahmed Vefik defines
Tatars as a small tribe of Mongol people (tavâyif ) that mixed with the Turks and
took the name Tatar.162 More importantly, he claims that those Turks living in
Siberia, Dasht-i Qipchak, Kazan and Crimea, and their language, are called Tatar,
Uzbek and Nogais.” In this sense, the phrase “today, there is no Tatar tribe anymore”
might imply that these people are Turkified (and Muslimized). In this respect, in
contrast to his attitude in Fezleke, Ahmed Vefik differentiates Tatars from Mongols
in the sense that the former is Turkish-speaking people. However, interestingly, he
also includes Uzbeks and Nogais in his definition of Tatars. Just as Tatars, Ahmed
Vefik considers Uzbeks and Nogais as Turkified Mongol tribes: in the entry Moğol,
the Pasha writes that Mongols are an ancient nation (ulus) living in Tatarstan
and the rest of it is still Turkmen-speaking (Türkmen-zebân) known as Uzbek or
Nogai.163 Instead of the word “Turkmen-speaking”, Ahmed Vefik uses Turkishspeaking
in his entry Özbek by writing that while it was a Muslim Mongolic tribe,
it became a Turkish-speaking now (müslim Moğol aşayiri iken hâlen Türkî-zebân
olmuştur).164 Thus, Uzbeks are former Mongol tribes who converted to Islam and
became Turkish-speaking people. In short, Ahmed Vefik incorporates these Turkic
peoples, Tatars, Uzbeks and Nogais, in Gökalp and Akçura’s scope of Turkishness
by claiming that they are Turkish-speaking Muslims. More importantly, in contrast
to his depiction of Tatars as Mongols in Fezleke, Ahmed Vefik approaches Akçura’s
views that Mongols were Turkified and Tatars are the same as Turks ("Türk Tatar
birdir").165
162“Ellerinde bulunan tavayif-i etrâke karışıp cümlesine sonra heyet-i tatar denmiştir ve hâlen Tatar aşireti
kalmamıştır.” Ahmet Vefik Paşa, Lehce-i Osmânî, 371.
163“Bakisi hâlen Türkmen-zebân olup Asya Garbında Özbek, Nogay gibi maruftur.” Ibid., 281.
164Ibid., 304.
165Akçura, Müverrih Léon Cahun ve Muallim Berthold’a Göre Cengiz Han, 21-22.
95
5. CONCLUSION
In contrast to the literature on Turkish nationalism that locates the emergence of
Turkish nationalism in the Young Turk Period, if not later, the scholarship on Ahmed
Vefik Pasha has considered him a Turkist. This gap, or contradiction, results from
the lack of differentiation between cultural and political Turkism in both pieces of
literature. The scholars writing on Ahmed Vefik fail to notice Gökalp and Akçura’s
consideration of Ahmed Vefik as a cultural Turkist while repeating the Turkist image
created by these Turkist intellectuals. Similarly, the literature on Turkish nationalism
disregards the period in which Turkish nationalism flourished on the cultural
level. In this sense, this thesis attempted to bridge this gap by differentiating cultural
Turkism from political Turkism. It juxtaposed Ahmed Vefik’s perception of
Turkish history and language with those of Gökalp and Akçura by focusing on his
two works, Fezleke-i Târîh-i ‘Osmânî and Lehce-i ‘Osmânî. Thus, it showed that
although Fezleke-i Târîh-i ‘Osmânî embodies a state-centered Ottomanism, instead
of any signs of Turkism, Ahmed Vefik’s thoughts on both the Turkish language and
history almost completely fit with those of Gökalp and Akçura in Lehce-i ‘Osmânî.
The formation of the Turkish nation-state requires the existence of Turkish nationalism
before 1923. The literature on Turkish nationalism has mostly located the
emergence of Turkish nationalism in the Second Constitutional Period. However,
just as the nation-state, nationalism requires a precedent, as well. In other words,
there must have been a ground upon which Turkish nationalism was built. The
period in which Ahmed Vefik should be considered in this respect: The second half
of the 19th century was a transition period for the emergence of Turkish nationalism
in the sense that a distinct Turkish identity through an emphasis on Turkish culture
in the form of language and history was created. This thesis attempted to show that
Ahmed Vefik played an important role with his Lehce-i ‘Osmânî by providing a vocabulary
consisting of Turkish ethnic myths of origins and common descent between
Turks and Turkic people for the first political Turkists of the early 20th century.
However, the existence of such vocabulary does not necessarily indicate the emer-
96
gence of political Turkism. In contrast, the cultural Turkism of the late 19th century
can be differentiated from the political Turkism of the CUP and later Republican
regimes through the changing meaning of the words used by Ahmed Vefik and his
contemporaries, which reflects the blurred and fluid boundaries between Ottomanism,
Islamism and Turkism. The vocabulary they created was mostly taken up later
by Turkists, such as Gökalp and Akçura, but the meaning of the words also changed
in the early 20th century. For example, while Nâmık Kemâl and Ali Suâvi used the
words "Turk", "Ottoman" and "Muslim" interchangeably, Gökalp and Akçura clearly
differentiated these three from each other. Although Ahmed Vefik, compared to
Kemâl and Ali Suâvi, shows more consistency in this respect, he also uses the words
Turk and Turkmen in the opposite meaning used by the abovementioned Turkists
both in Lehce-i ‘Osmânî and Fezleke-i Târîh-i ‘Osmânî : according to Ahmed Vefik,
the nomadic tribes of Anatolia are called Turks, whereas those who adopted a
sedentary lifestyle are referred as Turkmen.
In this sense, I have avoided arguing that a modern form of Turkish nationalism,
covertly or overtly, existed in Ahmed Vefik throughout this thesis. Ahmed Vefik’s
perception of Turks and Turkic people as part of the same nation based on language
does not make him a Turkist, like Gökalp and Akçura, who espouses the unification
of all Turks. In other words, Turkism was not a politicized thought in Ahmed
Vefik. However, on the other hand, Ahmed Vefik laid the ground for the emergence
of Turkism by showing the linguistic similarity between the Turks of the Ottoman
Empire and those Turkic peoples living in different parts of the world. Indeed,
as Gökalp himself writes, Ahmed Vefik with his Lehce was one of the first people
who aroused the feelings of Turkism in Gökalp. Hence, although cultural Turkism
does not bear any political connotation within itself, it puts the seeds that would
acquire a political character later. Ahmed Vefik with his works on Turkish culture
played a role in creating Turkish ethnic myths of origins and common descent, as
Anthony Smith puts it, which were later politicized.1 Thus, the ground for Gökalp
and Akçura’s political Turkism that consider the Turkic peoples as part of the same
Turkish nation had been prepared in the second half of the 19th century through
publications on Turkish history and language. For example, four years later Ahmed
Vefik’s translation of Şecere-i Türkî, Ali Suavi, in his famous article Türk published
in 1868 in Mukhbir, not only writes that “Turk, Turkmen, Mogol, Tatar, Ozbek and
Yakut come from the same family” but even considers Huns as Turks.2 Without
such interest and information developed by the intellectuals of the second half of the
1Anthony D. Smith, “Ethnic Myths and Ethnic Rivals,” European Journal of Sociology 25, no. 2 (1984):
301.
2Hüseyin Çelik, Ali Suavi Ve Dönemi, 438.
97
19th century, the Turkist of the 20th century could not build their political theories
on the unification of all Turks.
In a similar vein, Gökalp and Akçura’s ideas on the Turkish language were influenced
-if not inspired- by Ahmed Vefik. Before these two Turkists, Ahmed Vefik
envisions one single and grand Turkish language with two main branches in Lehcei
Osmânî : Western Turkish (Oghuz) and Eastern Turkish (Chagatai). Thus, he
creates a link between the Ottoman Turks and the Turkic peoples of Central Asia.
Moreover, Ahmed Vefik’s inclusion of the words with Arabic, Persian, Italian and
French origins, along with Turkish words in the first part suggests that he considered
these words as Turkish. Although Ahmed Vefik’s allocation of considerable
space for Turkic and archaic Turkish words in his dictionary might conflict with the
Turkists’ understanding of the simplification of Ottoman language, his use of the
words, idioms and proverbs in colloquial Turkish in his adaptations and translations
of plays can be also seen in line with Turkism in language.
However, in contrast to Lehce-i ‘Osmânî, this thesis also demonstrates that Ahmed
Vefik’s Fezleke-i Târîh-i ‘Osmânî does not accord with Turkism in historiography as
defined by Gökalp and Akçura. Compared to both its contemporary and pre-19th
century counterparts, Fezleke-i Târîh-i ‘Osmânî lacks both the genealogy of the
Ottomans in the form of the myths that traces the origin of Osman Beg to Oghuz
Khan and the history of the Ottomans before they arrived in Anatolia. In this sense,
rather than an Ottoman history in which the Ottomans are told as part of the grand
Turkish history, Fezleke-i Târîh-i ‘Osmânî embodies a dynasty-centered history that
directly starts and ends with the reign of Ottoman sultans. Thus, instead of the
signs of cultural Turkism, it represents a form of state-centered Ottomanism. I
demonstrate rüşdiyye schools which were designed as promoting loyalty among the
Ottoman subjects. However, I have also tried to differentiate the Ottomanism found
in Fezleke-i Târîh-i ‘Osmânî from the one indicated in the Ottoman Citizenship Law
of 1869: rather than a form of Ottomanism that espouse equality between Muslims
and non-Muslims, I have claimed that there exists a “state-based patriotism” which
does not require such equality in Fezleke-i Târîh-i ‘Osmânî. In other words, although
state-based patriotism, just as Ottomanism based on citizenship, aims to harness
loyalty among the subjects in the form of an identification with the state, it is not
possible to find an emphasis on the equality between the Muslim and non-Muslim
Ottomans in Ahmed Vefik’s state-patriotism.
98
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