Contestualizzare il Turchismo. Una rilettura del pensiero di Yusuf Akçura e Ziya Gökalp

The genesis of Turkish nationalism is one of the most debated topics in the field of Ottoman cultural and intellectual history despite scholarship’s strong tendency to analyse it through essentialist approaches. This essay is aimed in investigating the genesis of Turkism through a reassessment of the political ideas of two prominent political thinkers: Yusuf Akçura (1876-1935) and Ziya Gökalp (1876-1924). The inquiry begins with an overview of Ottomanism, Panislamism and Turkism, considered the main political and cultural trends in the intellectual life of the last decades of the Ottoman Empire. It then shows how Turkism originated both from endogenous and exogenous sources, such as European Turkologists and Turkish intellectuals from the Ottoman Empire and Russia. Through the direct analysis of some of the political writings by Akçura and Gökalp, the essay illustrates how Ottomanism, Pan-islamism and Turkism entertained a dialectical relationship which shaped the two thinkers’ peculiar attitudes towards issues as ethnicity, religion, citizenship, and the building of a collective identity for Turkic peoples both inside and outside the Ottoman Empire. The paper ends with a reflection on the fortune of Turkism in the framework of the Republic of Türkiye founded by the military and civilian bureaucratic cadres under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, discussing the legacy of these two intellectuals often praised as the “intellectual fathers” of Turkish nationalism.