The Formation of Turkish Republicanism by Turnao & #287;lu Banu;

Author:Turnao & #287;lu, Banu; [Turnao & #287;lu, Banu;]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780691172743
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2017-01-15T07:00:00+00:00

GÖKALP AND HIS ÜÇ CEREYAN (THREE CURRENTS OF THOUGHT)

The founding document of the new idealist program was drafted by Gökalp, the official chief ideologue of the Young Turks. His Üç Cereyan (Three Currents of Thought), serialized in Türk Yurdu as of 20 March 1913 before the loss of Edirne, expressed a new social and national idealist program, later reprinted as a book, Türkleşmek, İslamlaşmak, Muasırlaşmak (Turkism, Islamism, Modernism) in 1918, and republished in 1923 as Türkçülüğün Esasları (The Principles of Turkism). It was adopted by the CUP and applied later in practice throughout World War I.

What Gökalp did was to synthesize Turkism, Islamism, and modernization (or Westernization) harmoniously, despite the apparent contradictions between them: “We are of the Turkish nation (millet), of Islamic religious community (ümmet), of Western civilization (medeniyet).”66 Nationally, Turks belong to a Turkish culture, while internationally they belonged to the Islamic ümmet and Western civilization. “Turkism means furthering the ascendancy of the Turkish nation”67 by extolling indigenous Turkic customs, habits, and virtues. Like his contemporary Turkists, Gökalp believed that the Turkish nation was a bearer of shared values and traditions, which would bind its members together and define the culture, but he did not attempt “to reinstitute the ancient Turkish civilization”68 by reviving fossilized ancient Turkish words or dialects as Çağatay, Kazak, or Tatar had done. Rather, he aimed “to discover national ideas peculiar only to the Turkish people”69 by eliminating artificial values taken from other civilizations while concurrently discovering institutional similarities between different nations.70 This inquiry must be the goal of the New Life, which would be “realized only with the awakening of the national Culture.”71

In defining “culture” (hars), Gökalp distinguished this term from civilization (medeniyet). In his interpretation of Gökalp’s social and political thought, Niyazi Berkes treated culture and civilization as a binary opposition and regarded the question of how to modernize and Westernize the Turkish nation while combining it with Islam as Gökalp’s main concern.72 Writing the modernization history of Turkey with a certain political taste, he believed that Gökalp’s main sociological interest lay in differentiating these two concepts. Gökalp himself did not define these concepts as mutually exclusive, but as complementary to one another. In his “Hars ve Medeniyet” (Culture and Civilization), he wrote that both concepts overlap on religious, moral, legal, intellectual, aesthetic, economic, linguistic, and technological spheres of social life. The major difference between culture and civilization was that “culture is national; civilization is international.”73 Whereas culture refers to the composition of those aspects of social life of an individual nation, civilization “consists of the sum total of the common features of several national Cultures.”74 For instance, Western civilization consisted of European and American nations. Within this civilization, there were different and independent cultures like English, German, and French.75

The analytical distinction between culture and civilization was important for Gökalp because when conflated, it would lead to the isolation of true Turkish culture and discarding national history and tradition.76 He saw around him social decay and disintegration, the obliteration of tradition and the alienation of the elite from the common people (halk).

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.