Mehmed Ziya Gökalp (23 March 1876 – 25 October 1924) was a Turkish sociologist, writer, poet, and political activist. After the 1908 Young Turk Revolution that reinstated constitutionalism in the Ottoman Empire, he adopted the pen name Gökalp ("sky hero"), which he retained for the rest of his life. As a sociologist, Ziya Gökalp was influential in the negation of Islamism, pan-Islamism, and Ottomanism as ideological, cultural, and sociological identifiers. In a 1936 publication, sociologist Niyazi Berkes described Gökalp as "the real founder of Turkish sociology, since he was not a mere translator or interpreter of foreign sociology." Gökalp's work was particularly influential in shaping the reforms of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk; his influence figured prominently in the development of Kemalism, and its legacy in the modern Republic of Turkey. Influenced by contemporary European thought, particularly by the sociological view of Émile Durkheim, Gökalp rejected Ottomanism and Islamism in favor of Turkish nationalism. He advocated a re-Turkification of the Ottoman Empire, by promoting Turkish language and culture to all Ottoman citizenry. His thought, which popularized Pan-Turkism and Turanism, has been described as a "cult of nationalism and modernization". His nationalist ideals espoused a de-identification with Ottoman Turkey's nearby Arab neighbors, in lieu of a supernational Turkish (or pan-Turkic) identity with "a territorial Northeast-orientation [to] Turkic peoples" Mehmed Ziya was born in Çermik in the Diyarbekir Vilayet of the Ottoman Empire on 23 March 1876. He was of Turkmen Kurdishor Zaza descent. Diyarbakır Province was a "cultural frontier", having been ruled by Arabs and Persians until the 16th century, and featuring "conflicting national traditions" among the local populations of Turks, Kurds, and Armenians. This cultural environment has often been suggested to have informed his sense of national identity; later in his life, when political detractors suggested that he was of Kurdish extraction, Gökalp responded that while he was certain of patrilineal Turkish racial heritage, this was insignificant: "I learned through my sociological studies that nationality is based solely on upbringing." Some historians nonetheless characterize him as being of Kurdish origin. After attending secondary school in Diyarbakır, he settled in Istanbul, in 1896. There, he attended veterinary school and became involved in underground revolutionary politics, for which he served ten months in prison. He developed relationships with many figures of the revolutionary underground in this period, abandoned his veterinary studies, and became a member of the underground revolutionary group, the Society of Union and Progress. The revolutionary currents of Constantinople at the time were extremely varied; the unpopularity of the Abdul Hamid II regime had by this time awakened diverse revolutionary sentiment in Constantinople. Career Mehmed Ziya changed his name, initially as a pen name, to "Gökalp", meaning "Sky warrior" or "Blue warrior" in Old Turkish. Gökalp's work, in the context of the decline of the Ottoman Empire, was instrumental in the development of Turkish national identity, which he himself referred to even then as Turkishness. He believed that a nation must have a "shared consciousness" in order to survive, that "the individual becomes a genuine personality only as he becomes a genuine representative of his culture". He believed that a modern state must become homogeneous in terms of culture, religion, and national identity. This conception of national identity was augmented by his belief in the primacy of Turkishness, as a unifying virtue. In a 1911 article, he suggested that "Turks are the 'supermen' imagined by the German philosopher Nietzsche". His major sociological work was interested in differentiating Avrupalılık ("Europeanism", the mimicking of Western societies) and Modernlik ("Modernity", taking initiative); he was interested in Japan as a model in this, for what he perceived to be its having modernized without abandoning its innate cultural identity. Gökalp suggested that to subordinate "culture" (non-utilitarianism, altruism, public-spiritedness) to "civilization" (utilitarianism, egoism, individualism) was to doom a state to decline: "civilization destroyed societal solidarity and morality". Informed by his reading of Émile Durkheim, Gökalp concluded that Western liberalism, as a social system, was inferior to solidarism, because liberalism encouraged individualism, which in turn diminished the integrity of the state. Durkheim, whose work Gökalp himself translated into Turkish, perceived religion as a means of unifying a population socially, and even "religion as society's worship of itself". Durkheim's assertion that the life of the group was more important than the life of the individual, this was a concept readily adopted by Gökalp.

• published: 23 Nov 2014
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