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The Young Turks – Children of the Borderlands?
Erik Jan Zürcher (Universiteit Leiden)
[October 2002]
In...1889, a group of young students in the army medical school founded a secret committee, which would later become known as the Committee of Union and Progress (İttihat ve Terakki Cemiyeti, C.U.P.)...
Between 1889 and 1896 this C.U.P. slowly gained adherents, primarily within the Ottoman bureaucracy.
....from 1905. Newly arrived activists reorganised the émigré movement into a far more effective force, with a cell structure and secure communications, while in 1906 in Salonica, an independent group of conspirators, some of whom had been members of the C.U.P. before 1896, founded a secret committee, which, within two years, managed to gain an important following among the officers of the Ottoman garrisons in the Balkans.
In spite of their enormous importance in the modern history of Turkey, the social, geographical and ethnic background of the Young Turks remains largely unstudied.
After the C.U.P.’s victory in the constitutional revolution, thousand, possibly even tens of thousands joined it, but we have little or no information about this membership. At the same time, however, the leadership of the movement was in the hands of a relatively small group of people, not more than a hundred or so, about whom we can know quite a bit.
Within that leadership we can discern several groups. First of all, the leaders of the opposition movement against the rule of sultan Abdülhamid between 1889 and 1908. This group includes the founders of the movement at the Military Medical School in 1889 and the early members as well as those Young Turks, who kept up the publicity campaign against the sultan’s autocracy from Paris, Geneva or Cairo. Some, but not all, of these re-emerged in the second group, that of the members of the Central Committee of the C.U.P., which was the most powerful political body in the Ottoman Empire from the constitutional revolution of 1908 until the defeat in World War I ten years later. A third group is that of the administrators or party bosses (governors, inspectors, party secretaries (or in the terminology of the C.U.P. “responsible secretaries”), who were entrusted by the leadership with the control over provinces and cities. Finally, we have the activist, politicised army officers, who ultimately gave the C.U.P. its power through their influence in the army and who came to the rescue each time the C.U.P.’s hold on power was threatened. Some of these held formal positions in the Committee and even served on the Central Committee but most did not. As the Turkish independence movement after World War I, led by Mustafa Kemal Pasha (the later Atatürk) was also completely dominated by former C.U.P. members, we could also include the members of the leadership of this movement, the “Representative Committee” and the commissars of the first Great National Assembly in Ankara among the leading C.U.P. cadres whose background we want to investigate, but for the purposes of this article I have left these post-World War I leaders out of consideration.
The “typical” Young Turk
On the basis of the biographies of these leading Young Turks it is possible to discern a number of shared characteristics, which together make up a “typical Young Turk profile”. They were males and they were Muslims (with the exception of one single Sabbataic Jew or dönme)[14] of different ethnic backgrounds: Turk, Arab, Albanian, Kurd or Circassian. Their social background varied (some of them being sons of landowners, others of great dignitaries or generals, yet others sons of small-time civil servants), but it was urban and literate, with most fathers being in the service of the Ottoman state.
Let us first of all look at...the founders and early members in the period between the start of the Young Turk movement in 1889 and its suppression in 1896. This is a group of 20 persons, whose origins were as follows:
İstanbul
2
Balkans
7 (this includes 2 from provinces lost in 1878)
Aegean
3 (Rhodes, Smyrna and Crete)
Arab provinces
2
Kurdistan
2
Caucasus
4 (all from the Russian Empire).
Anatolia
0
Of the seven actual founders themselves, four came from the Russian Caucasus, one from the Albanian area in the Western Balkans and two from Kurdistan. Ethnically, not one was an Ottoman Turk. Surely, it is not an exaggeration to say that this is highly significant. It suggests that the fundamental questions regarding identity and loyalty were being asked earlier among the non-Turkish Muslim communities than among the ethnic Turks (but later than among the Christian communities of the empire).
The second group in our population, that of the members of the Central Committee (Heyeti Merkeziye) between 1908 and 1918 breaks down as follows:
İstanbul
4
Balkans
11
Aegean
4 (Lesbos, Crete, Smyrna, Milas)
Arab provinces
0
Kurdistan
1
Caucasus
1
Anatolia
4 (excluding Aegean coast and Kurdistan)
Unknown
6
The group of most prominent politically active officers, who obviously form a less strictly circumscribed category than the members of the Central Committee, have their birthplaces in the following areas:
İstanbul
8
Balkans
11
Aegean
1 (Smyrna)
Arab provinces
0
Kurdistan
0
Caucasus
0
Anatolia
1
Unknown
5
The predominance of the southern Balkans as origin especially of the post-1908 leaders, civilian and military, is clear. 48 percent of them came from this relatively small part of the empire, with another 26 percent born in the capital. 11 percent came from the islands and coast of the Aegean, while the vast Asiatic possessions of the empire taken together produced only 13 percent of the second-generation leadership. Within the general category of “Balkans” three areas stand out: Salonica, the area from Monastir (Bitola) to Ohrid and the area around Prishtine (modern Kosovo). The number of military officers hailing from the Western Ottoman Balkans is especially remarkable: 11 out of 21, which compares to one from the Aegean and one from Anatolia.
Fathers of Turkish nationalism
A slightly different pattern emerges when we look at one special category among the Young Turks – those who, as writers and teachers, contributed to the emergence of Turkish nationalism. If we look at this group, which comprises Mehmet Ziya Gök Alp (1876-1924), Tekin Alp (real name: Moise Cohen, 1883-1961), Yusuf Akçura (1876-1933), Hüseyinzade Ali Turan (1864-1941), Ahmet Ağaoğlu (1869-1939)and Mehmet Emin Yurdakul (1869-1944), we are struck by one remarkable phenomenon: not one of them hails from an area with a solid Ottoman-Turkish majority. Four of them were born in the Russian Empire (one in Kazan, the others in the Caucasus region), one in a part Turkish, part-Kurdish family in Kurdistan and one in a Jewish family in Macedonia. It would seem that in each case, their awareness of the problems of national identity was sharpened by the fact that they grew up in ethnically mixed areas where Turks were a minority (as in the case of Gök Alp and Tekin Alp) or where Turks lived under Russian domination (in the case of the others). This is perhaps not surprising. As we saw in the case of the founders of the C.U.P, young intellectuals belonging to Muslim communities outside the dominant Ottoman-Turkish one, were sensitised earlier to problems of identity and political loyalty.
when the secret committee that would bring about the constitutional revolution of 1908, was founded in Salonica in 1906, it accepted Ottoman Muslims without question, but non-Muslims only in exceptional cases after screening. The Young Turks developed a fierce Ottoman-Muslim nationalism, which defined the “other” very much in religious terms. In the years that followed, particularly between the outbreak of the Balkan War in 1912 and the end of the Turkish independence struggle in 1922, the Muslim – Non-Muslim divide would completely dominate politics and lead to the tragedies of the expulsion of Muslims from the Balkans and Greek-Orthodox from Anatolia, as well as to the wholesale slaughter of the Ottoman Armenians.
Most of the Young Turk officers also served in the Balkans, with the Third Army in the West or the Second Army more to the East.
Erik Jan Zürcher (Universiteit Leiden)
[October 2002]
In...1889, a group of young students in the army medical school founded a secret committee, which would later become known as the Committee of Union and Progress (İttihat ve Terakki Cemiyeti, C.U.P.)...
Between 1889 and 1896 this C.U.P. slowly gained adherents, primarily within the Ottoman bureaucracy.
....from 1905. Newly arrived activists reorganised the émigré movement into a far more effective force, with a cell structure and secure communications, while in 1906 in Salonica, an independent group of conspirators, some of whom had been members of the C.U.P. before 1896, founded a secret committee, which, within two years, managed to gain an important following among the officers of the Ottoman garrisons in the Balkans.
In spite of their enormous importance in the modern history of Turkey, the social, geographical and ethnic background of the Young Turks remains largely unstudied.
After the C.U.P.’s victory in the constitutional revolution, thousand, possibly even tens of thousands joined it, but we have little or no information about this membership. At the same time, however, the leadership of the movement was in the hands of a relatively small group of people, not more than a hundred or so, about whom we can know quite a bit.
Within that leadership we can discern several groups. First of all, the leaders of the opposition movement against the rule of sultan Abdülhamid between 1889 and 1908. This group includes the founders of the movement at the Military Medical School in 1889 and the early members as well as those Young Turks, who kept up the publicity campaign against the sultan’s autocracy from Paris, Geneva or Cairo. Some, but not all, of these re-emerged in the second group, that of the members of the Central Committee of the C.U.P., which was the most powerful political body in the Ottoman Empire from the constitutional revolution of 1908 until the defeat in World War I ten years later. A third group is that of the administrators or party bosses (governors, inspectors, party secretaries (or in the terminology of the C.U.P. “responsible secretaries”), who were entrusted by the leadership with the control over provinces and cities. Finally, we have the activist, politicised army officers, who ultimately gave the C.U.P. its power through their influence in the army and who came to the rescue each time the C.U.P.’s hold on power was threatened. Some of these held formal positions in the Committee and even served on the Central Committee but most did not. As the Turkish independence movement after World War I, led by Mustafa Kemal Pasha (the later Atatürk) was also completely dominated by former C.U.P. members, we could also include the members of the leadership of this movement, the “Representative Committee” and the commissars of the first Great National Assembly in Ankara among the leading C.U.P. cadres whose background we want to investigate, but for the purposes of this article I have left these post-World War I leaders out of consideration.
The “typical” Young Turk
On the basis of the biographies of these leading Young Turks it is possible to discern a number of shared characteristics, which together make up a “typical Young Turk profile”. They were males and they were Muslims (with the exception of one single Sabbataic Jew or dönme)[14] of different ethnic backgrounds: Turk, Arab, Albanian, Kurd or Circassian. Their social background varied (some of them being sons of landowners, others of great dignitaries or generals, yet others sons of small-time civil servants), but it was urban and literate, with most fathers being in the service of the Ottoman state.
Let us first of all look at...the founders and early members in the period between the start of the Young Turk movement in 1889 and its suppression in 1896. This is a group of 20 persons, whose origins were as follows:
İstanbul
2
Balkans
7 (this includes 2 from provinces lost in 1878)
Aegean
3 (Rhodes, Smyrna and Crete)
Arab provinces
2
Kurdistan
2
Caucasus
4 (all from the Russian Empire).
Anatolia
0
Of the seven actual founders themselves, four came from the Russian Caucasus, one from the Albanian area in the Western Balkans and two from Kurdistan. Ethnically, not one was an Ottoman Turk. Surely, it is not an exaggeration to say that this is highly significant. It suggests that the fundamental questions regarding identity and loyalty were being asked earlier among the non-Turkish Muslim communities than among the ethnic Turks (but later than among the Christian communities of the empire).
The second group in our population, that of the members of the Central Committee (Heyeti Merkeziye) between 1908 and 1918 breaks down as follows:
İstanbul
4
Balkans
11
Aegean
4 (Lesbos, Crete, Smyrna, Milas)
Arab provinces
0
Kurdistan
1
Caucasus
1
Anatolia
4 (excluding Aegean coast and Kurdistan)
Unknown
6
The group of most prominent politically active officers, who obviously form a less strictly circumscribed category than the members of the Central Committee, have their birthplaces in the following areas:
İstanbul
8
Balkans
11
Aegean
1 (Smyrna)
Arab provinces
0
Kurdistan
0
Caucasus
0
Anatolia
1
Unknown
5
The predominance of the southern Balkans as origin especially of the post-1908 leaders, civilian and military, is clear. 48 percent of them came from this relatively small part of the empire, with another 26 percent born in the capital. 11 percent came from the islands and coast of the Aegean, while the vast Asiatic possessions of the empire taken together produced only 13 percent of the second-generation leadership. Within the general category of “Balkans” three areas stand out: Salonica, the area from Monastir (Bitola) to Ohrid and the area around Prishtine (modern Kosovo). The number of military officers hailing from the Western Ottoman Balkans is especially remarkable: 11 out of 21, which compares to one from the Aegean and one from Anatolia.
Fathers of Turkish nationalism
A slightly different pattern emerges when we look at one special category among the Young Turks – those who, as writers and teachers, contributed to the emergence of Turkish nationalism. If we look at this group, which comprises Mehmet Ziya Gök Alp (1876-1924), Tekin Alp (real name: Moise Cohen, 1883-1961), Yusuf Akçura (1876-1933), Hüseyinzade Ali Turan (1864-1941), Ahmet Ağaoğlu (1869-1939)and Mehmet Emin Yurdakul (1869-1944), we are struck by one remarkable phenomenon: not one of them hails from an area with a solid Ottoman-Turkish majority. Four of them were born in the Russian Empire (one in Kazan, the others in the Caucasus region), one in a part Turkish, part-Kurdish family in Kurdistan and one in a Jewish family in Macedonia. It would seem that in each case, their awareness of the problems of national identity was sharpened by the fact that they grew up in ethnically mixed areas where Turks were a minority (as in the case of Gök Alp and Tekin Alp) or where Turks lived under Russian domination (in the case of the others). This is perhaps not surprising. As we saw in the case of the founders of the C.U.P, young intellectuals belonging to Muslim communities outside the dominant Ottoman-Turkish one, were sensitised earlier to problems of identity and political loyalty.
when the secret committee that would bring about the constitutional revolution of 1908, was founded in Salonica in 1906, it accepted Ottoman Muslims without question, but non-Muslims only in exceptional cases after screening. The Young Turks developed a fierce Ottoman-Muslim nationalism, which defined the “other” very much in religious terms. In the years that followed, particularly between the outbreak of the Balkan War in 1912 and the end of the Turkish independence struggle in 1922, the Muslim – Non-Muslim divide would completely dominate politics and lead to the tragedies of the expulsion of Muslims from the Balkans and Greek-Orthodox from Anatolia, as well as to the wholesale slaughter of the Ottoman Armenians.
Most of the Young Turk officers also served in the Balkans, with the Third Army in the West or the Second Army more to the East.
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