The city of Turkestan (Photo: iStock)
Dávid Somfai Kara
27/03/2024 10:52
There are 150 million Turkic-speaking peoples in the world, united not only by language but also by the Pan-Turkic idea. This idea, which originated in the 19th century, sought to unite all the Turkic-speaking peoples of the world, both culturally and politically. However, Turkic-speaking peoples did not generally call themselves Turkic, because ethnic identity was almost unknown among them, and tribal and political identity was considered more important. It may sound strange, but the idea of Turkic unity originated in Hungary. Many people considered the Hungarians to be a Turkic people, and the Hungarian linguist Ármin Vámbéry was the first to start to deal with the various Turkic-speaking peoples in a unified way, and he had a great influence on the Turkish intellectuals.
At that time, the Turkic peoples lived in the Ottoman and Russian Empires. The Ottomans considered themselves of Turkmen origin, but the multi-ethnic and mixed-religious state of their empire (Turkish, Arab, Kurdish, Greek, Armenian, Georgian, Albanian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Bosnian, Circassian, Jewish) was held together by the ideal of Sunni Islam, not nationalism. On the other hand, in the Russian Empire, many Turkic-speaking peoples (Tatars of Kazan and Crimea, Nogays, Bashkirs, Caucasian and Azeri Turks) suffered from the religious and cultural oppression of the Orthodox Russian nation. The latter saw in the Pan-Turkic idea, in the unity of the Turkic peoples, the possibility of liberation from Russian oppression. Their leader, the Crimean Tatar Ismail Gaspirali (1851-1914), studied in Paris in the 1870s, where he was introduced to nationalism and the Enlightenment. On his return to Crimea, he proclaimed Jadidism (Arabic for 'new'), through which he sought to transform Muslim education on the European model. Its followers swore to nationalism rather than religious identity and emphasized ethnic identity. They conceived of a unified Turkic nation, in which the different peoples were united by the idea of a common Turkic language, although no real Turkic linguistic unity existed at that time.
A reformist movement similar to Jadidism spread throughout the Ottoman Empire, such as the Young Turk movement, which also aimed at nationalism and modern education in Turkish. After the Young Turk revolution of 1908, the Jadidist Pan-Turkic idea also gained ground in the Ottoman Empire. The sociologist Mehmet Ziya Gökalp (1876-1924) was already an outspoken advocate of the unity of the Turkic peoples. His writings were influential, and one of his most enthusiastic readers was Mustafa Kemal (1881-1938), later Atatürk.
In the Soviet Union, the independence aspirations of the Turkic peoples failed; although they proclaimed their independent states in succession - Turkistan (Uzbek, Kyrgyz, Karakalpak), Azerbaijan, Bashkortostan, the Kazakh Tatar Edil-Urals and the Kazakh Alas - Stalin persecuted and executed intellectuals who supported Turkic autonomy or Pan-Turkic ideas from the 1930s onwards. Atatürk created the modern Turkish nation-state in 1923 based on the idea of Turkish nationalism, with a common language and culture. The Turkic-speaking states recognised that in the globalised 21st century, Turkish unity was the only way to give their interests a strong voice in a region surrounded by the European Union, Russia, Iran and China. Türkiye is now the flagship of the idea of Turkish unity.
The author is a Turkologist and Mongolist