ZIYA GOKALP—THE FORERUNNER OF MUSTAFA KEMAL ATATURK

FORTY YEARS after his death, Ziya Gokalp remains the most influential thinker Turkey has produced in recent times. Born in 1876 and educated at Istanbul, he eventually became professor of Sociology at the University, composing most of his essays between 1911 until his death in 1924. Intellectually Ziya Gokalp was the founder of modern Turkey. Were it not for him, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s drastic “reforms” might never have been implemented.

In the words of Halide Edib Hanem:

Ziya Gokalp wanted to build a new Turkey which would remove the gulf between the Osmanli Turks and their pagan Turanian ancestors. He believed that the Islam established by the Arabs would never suit our purpose. With the ethnic material he had carefully collected about the cultural and political institutions of the pre-Islamic period of Turkish history, he wanted to initiate a religious reform compatible to our national temperament.

Ziya Gokalp can claim the distinction as the first articulate crusader in the Muslim world for the Western concept of nationalism.

Now the mission of the Turks is nothing but to uncover the pre-Islamic Turkish past which has remained with the people and to graft Western civilization in its entirety on to it. In order to equal the European powers militarily and in the sciences and industry, our only road to salvation is to adopt Western civilization completely!¹ (Nationalism and Western Civilization, Ziya Gokalp, New York, 1959, p. 276.) Ziya Gokalp rejects the supremacy of the Ummat or universal brotherhood of Islam because it conflicts with the Western concept of nationality.

Among the pre-Islamic Turks, patriotism reached its highest levels. In the future as in the past, patriotism should be the most important area of morality for the Turks because the nation and its soul is ultimately the only self-existing unit.

Loyalty to the nation must take precedence over loyalty to family or religion. Turkism must give highest priority to Nation and Fatherland. We shall create a genuine civilization—a Turkish civilization which will follow the growth of a New Life. To classify the Turks who are fairer and more handsome than the Aryans with the Mongolian race has no scientific foundation. The Turkish race has not degenerated like other races by alcohol and debauchery. Turkish blood has remained rejuvenated and hardened like steel with the glories of the battlefield. Turkish intelligence is not worn out; its sentiments are not weakened. The conquest of the future is promised to Turkish resolution.

(Ibid., pp. 302, 271, & 60.) In his attempts to make the adoption of modern Western civilization appealing to the popular mind, Ziya Gokalp advanced the following arguments.

Western civilization is a continuation of ancient Mediterranean civilization. The founders of the Mediterranean civilization were Turkish peoples such as the Sumerians, Scythians, the Phoenicians and the Hyksos.

There was a Turanian Age in history before the ancient ages for the earliest inhabitants of Western Asia were our forefathers. Thus we are part of Western civilization and have an integral share in it.

(Ibid., pp. 266-7).

This remarkable distortion of history supports the wild claims advanced by nationalist historians during 57 the regime of Ataturk that the great peoples of antiquity were either Turks themselves or civilized by the Turks. The Phoenicians and the Hyksos were both Semetic peoples; the Scythians were akin to the Persians while the Sumerians defy ethnic classification. Ziya Gokalp forgot even to mention the Egyptians. Would he consider them Turks too?

Ziya Gokalp claims that the Turks revolutionized the history of Europe by destroying the Roman Empire. Like all the radical Turkish nationalists of his day, he identified the modern Turks with the Huns and as a result, many Turkish parents actually named their children “Atilla.” The role played by the Huns in the downfall of Rome, despite their destructiveness, was not significant. The kinship between the Huns and the people of modern Turkey is dubious, to say the least, and were I a Turk, I should scarcely take pride in claiming to be among their descendants!

Ziya Gokalp denied Islam the dignity of deserving the rank of an independent civilization of its own.

When a nation advances to higher stages of its evolution, it finds it necessary to change its civilization too. When the Turks were nomadic tribesmen in Central Asia, they belonged to the civilization of the Far East.

When they passed to the stage of the Sultanistic state, they entered into the area of Byzantine civilization. And today in their transition to a secular nation-state, they are determined to accept Western civilization. (Ibid., pp. 270-1).

In the adoption of Western civilization, Ziya Gokalp, in contrast to his contemporaries, does not distinguish between the good and the bad, but insists upon thorough-going imitation in all its aspects.

58 The great mistake of the leaders of the Tanzimat were their attempt to create a mental amalgam made up of a mixture of East and West. They failed to see that the two, with their diametrically opposed principles, could not be reconciled. The dichotomy in our political structure, the dual court system, the two types of schools, the two systems of taxation, two budgets, the two sets of laws, are all products of this mistake. Any attempt to reconcile East and West means to keep carrying medieval conditions to the modern age and trying to keep them alive. Just as it was impossible to reconcile Janissary methods with a modern military system, just as it was futile to synchronize old-fashioned medicine with modern medicine, so it is hopeless to carry the old and new conceptions of law, the modern and the traditional standards of ethics side by side. Each civilization has its own logic, its own aesthetic standards, its own world-outlook. For this reason, different civilizations cannot mix freely with each other. Again, for the same reason, when a society does not take a certain civilization in its entirety as a system, it fails to take its parts too. Even if it takes some parts, it fails to digest and assimilate them. Our Tanzimat reformers, who failed to understand this point, were always taking half measures in whatever they attempted to do. Before they took measures to modernize national production, they wanted to change the habits of consuming, clothing, eating, building and furniture. On the other hand, not even a nucleus of industry by European standards was built because the policy makers of the Tanzimat attempted their reforms without studying conditions and without putting forth definite aims and plans. (Ibid., pp. 270-7).

Ziya Gokalp was among the earliest in Turkey to champion a purely secular state later implemented² 59 by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

The aim of Turkism in law is to establish modern law in Turkey. The most fundamental condition for our success in joining the ranks of the modern nations is the complete cleansing of all branches of our legal structure of all traces of theocracy and clericalism. The state that is free of these two characteristics of the medieval state is called the modern state. In the first place, in a modern state, the right to legislate and to administer directly belongs to the people. No office, no tradition and no other right can restrict and limit this right. In the second place, all members of the modern nation, regardless of their religious affiliation, are regarded as equal to each other in every respect. In short, all provisions existing in our laws that are contrary to liberty, equality and justice and all traces of theocracy and clericalism should be completely eliminated. TURKISM IS A SECULAR MOVEMENT AND CAN RECONCILE ITSELF ONLY WITH MOVEMENTS OF A SECULAR NATURE. (Ibid., pp. 304-5).

In his attempts to “prove” that there is no incompatibility between Islam and Western civilization, he argues:

It is only by means of its civilization that Europe has been able to defeat the Muslim nations and become the Master of the world. Why then, should we hesitate in taking over this same civilization which has proved so successful? Does not our Muslim faith make it a duty for us to take over all kinds of science and learning as our Holy Prophet himself said, “Seek knowledge even if it be in China,” and “Learning is the lost property of the believer; he should take it wherever he finds it?”³ Japan is accepted 60 as a European power but we are still regarded as an Asiatic nation because of our non-acceptance of European civilization in a true sense. The Japanese have been able to adopt Western civilization without losing their religion and national entity.

Why then, should we still hesitate? Can’t we accept Western civilization and still be Turks and Muslims?

(Ibid., pp. 266-7 & 277).

Not content to propagate nationalism, Ziya Gokalp wanted to change Islam itself. No nationalist was more zealous in his insistence upon the “purification” of the Turkish language of all words of Arabic and Persian derivation and the official translation of the Quran into Turkish, thus smashing the Ummat and transforming the universal brotherhood of Islam into a Turkish sect.

The land where the call to prayer resounds in Turkish; where those who pray understand the meaning of their religion; the land where the Quran is learnt in Turkish; where every man, big or small, knows full well the command of God: Oh Son of Turkey! that land is thy fatherland! - The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, Muhammad Iqbal, Shaikh Muhammad Ashraf, Lahore, 1962, p. 160.

Ziya Gokalp fancied himself a great poet. Here is a portion of his poem called “Religion and Science,” in which he presents his concept of ideal womanhood.

There is the woman,-my mother, my sister or my daughter. It is she who calls up the most sacred emotions from the depths of my life.

There is my Beloved - my sun, my moon and my star. It is she who makes me understand the poetry of life! How could the Holy Law of God regard these beautiful creatures as despicable?

Surely there is an error in the interpretation of Quran 73 by the learned.

The foundation of the nation and the state is the family. As long as the full worth of the woman is not realized, national life remains incomplete;

The upbringing of the family must correspond with justice;

Therefore equality is necessary in three things—in divorce, in separation and in inheritance.

As long as the woman is counted half the man as regards inheritance and in matrimony, neither the family nor the country will be elevated.

For other rights we have opened national courts of justice.

The family, however, we have left in the hands of the jurists and theologians.

I do not know why we have left the woman in the lurch. Does she not work for the nation?

Or will she turn her needle into a sharp bayonet to tear off her rights from our hands through a revolution? (Ibid., p. 161).

Dr. Muhammad Iqbal in his RECONSTRUCTION OF RELIGIOUS THOUGHT IN ISLAM says: … “(Ziya Gokalp’s) Ijtihad is open to grave objections (pp. 160-1). With regard to the Turkish poet’s demand, I am afraid he does not seem to know much about the family law of Islam … “ (p. 169).

Ziya Gokalp’s pet project was the reformation of Islam into a modernized and scientific religion. By a “modernized” and “scientific” religion he meant making the mosque as much as possible resemble a Christian church. Four years after his death, his dreams became reality when the new “Faculty of Divinity” at the University of Istanbul appointed a committee to make recommendations through the 74 University to the Ministry of Education. Its report, published in June 1928, recommended among other things, the introduction into the mosque of pews and cloakrooms, that worshippers pray with their shoes on, Turkish as the language of worship and the abolition of Arabic; the elimination of the prostrations in prayer, and in order to make worship in the mosque “beautiful”, “inspiring”, and “spiritual”, “the mosque needs trained musicians and musical instruments. The need is urgent for modern, Western sacred instrumental music in the mosque.”⁴

(Emergence of Modern Turkey, Bernard Lewis, Oxford, London, 1961, p. 408).

However, because the Turkish people are as staunchly devoted Muslims as their brethren elsewhere, they refused to swallow this mutilation of their faith at the hands of Ziya Gokalp and thus the whole project was soon abandoned as a miserable failure.