Ottomanism, Pan-Islamism, Pan-Turkism and Pan-Turanism
Early Ottoman intellectuals, such as Akchura, Tekinalp, Gokalp, and Namik Kemal inspired by the decadence of the Empire and the need to reform, elaborated on several ideologies that paved the way for Kemal’s reforms.
Since the Tanzimat (1839) there appeared the ideologies of Ottomanism, Pan-Islamism, Pan-Turkism and Pan-Turanism.
Despite some references to the Turkish people as a distinctive nation5, until early 20th century the term ‘Turk’ could mean anyone belonging to the Muslim millet (Karpat 1982: 165) and was often used negatively, even by elite Ottomans, to describe crude Anatolian villagers (Poulton 1999: 81,89; Smith 1999: 143)6. A more ethnocentric Turkish consciousness evolved when the Balkan states championed the freedom of their unredeemed kin living under Ottoman rule (Ahmad 1969: 154); a process culminated with the Greek-Turkish war 1919-1923. Hence, although Turkey’s nation-building trail seems to share similar foundations with the Greek paradigm, a clear differentiation is that its appearance and evolution followed with substantial delay.
From: Continuity and change in the minority policies of Greece and Turkey by Georgios Niarchos,Ph.D. candidate at the European Institute, LSE
http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/hellenicObservatory/pdf/symposiumPapersonline/Niarchos.pdf
Ottomanism, adopting West-European ideas, advocated a policy of equal rights to all religious communities and ethnic groups in order to integrate them within the Imperial regime. Pan-Turkists rejected it because such provisions to ethnicities would curtail the rights of the Turkish population. Pan-Islamism acquired a religious anti-imperialist character as a reaction to the presence of the Great Powers over the Muslim world and focused on the common faith in order to unite the empire’s subjects, though a large part of them were Christians. It was initiated by Abdulhamit II aiming to prevent the secession of the Arab provinces and control the spread of colonialism, Christianization and Pan-Slavism. His deposition in 1909 and the subsequent Arabic uprisings sealed the movement’s fate. Pan-Turkism was embraced by the Young Turks, when their Ottomanism did not seem to appeal to non-Muslims. It contained extreme and racist principles and its focus included all Turkish and Turkish-speaking diasporas in the Balkans, Central Asia and the Russian Empire. It still survives in the ideology of extreme right-wing political parties like Turkes’s Nationalist Action Party. Pan-Turanism (in close relation with Turanism) was used by Akchura in order to express ‘Turan’, as the common cradle of all Ural-Altaic and Finno-Hungarian people, envisaging their union, while Tekinalp included only Turkish people. Gokalp-probably the most influential Pan-Turkist and later Turkish nationalist-distinguished Pan-Turanism from realistic politics, due to its utopic character. For these movements see, Hostler 1957, Landau 1985, Pesmazoglou 1993: 240-262, Poulton 1999: 72-116, Zarevad 1991.
