Abdullah Cevdet ( ota, عبدالله جودت; tr, Abdullah Cevdet Karlıdağ; 9 September 1869 – 29 November 1932) was a
Kurdish
Kurdish may refer to:
*Kurds or Kurdish people
*Kurdish languages
*Kurdish alphabets
*Kurdistan, the land of the Kurdish people which includes:
**Southern Kurdistan
**Eastern Kurdistan
**Northern Kurdistan
**Western Kurdistan
See also
* Kurd (dis ...
intellectual and physician in the
Ottoman Empire
The Ottoman Empire, * ; is an archaic version. The definite article forms and were synonymous * and el, Оθωμανική Αυτοκρατορία, Othōmanikē Avtokratoria, label=none * info page on book at Martin Luther University) ...
. He was one of the founders of the
Committee of Union and Progress
The Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) ( ota, اتحاد و ترقى جمعيتی, translit=İttihad ve Terakki Cemiyeti, script=Arab), later the Union and Progress Party ( ota, اتحاد و ترقى فرقهسی, translit=İttihad ve Tera ...
(CUP) and wrote articles with pen name of "Bir Kürd" ("A Kurd") for the publications such as ''
Meşveret
''Meşveret'' ( Ottoman Turkish: ''Consultation'') was a bimonthly magazine which existed between 1895 and 1898. Published in Paris the magazine was the first official organ of the Committee of Union and Progress and was subtitled as “the media ...
'', ''
Kurdistan
Kurdistan ( ku, کوردستان ,Kurdistan ; lit. "land of the Kurds") or Greater Kurdistan is a roughly defined geo-cultural territory in Western Asia wherein the Kurds form a prominent majority population and the Kurdish culture, languages ...
'' and ''
Roji Kurd'' about
Kurdish
Kurdish may refer to:
*Kurds or Kurdish people
*Kurdish languages
*Kurdish alphabets
*Kurdistan, the land of the Kurdish people which includes:
**Southern Kurdistan
**Eastern Kurdistan
**Northern Kurdistan
**Western Kurdistan
See also
* Kurd (dis ...
awakening and nationalism. In 1908, he joined the Democratic Party which merged with the
Freedom and Accord Party in 1911.
He was also a translator, radical free-thinker, and an ideologist of the CUP until 1908.
Biography
The son of a physician, and himself a graduate from the
Military College
A military academy or service academy is an educational institution which prepares candidates for service in the officer corps. It normally provides education in a military environment, the exact definition depending on the country concerned. ...
in Istanbul as an
ophthalmologist, Cevdet, initially a pious Muslim, was influenced by Western
materialistic philosophies and was against institutionalized religion, but thought that "although the Muslim God was of no use in the modern era, Islamic society must preserve Islamic principles". He published the periodical ''İçtihat'' from 1904–1932, in which articles he used to promote his
modernist
Modernism is both a philosophy, philosophical and arts movement that arose from broad transformations in Western world, Western society during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The movement reflected a desire for the creation of new fo ...
thoughts. He was arrested and expelled from his country several times due to his political activities and lived in Europe, in cities including Vienna, Geneva and Paris.
His poetry was linked with the
Symbolist movement in France, and he received accolades from leading French authors like
Gustave Kahn
Gustave Kahn (21 December 1859, in Metz – 5 September 1936, in Paris) was a French Symbolist poet and art critic. He was also active, via publishing and essay-writing, in defining Symbolism and distinguishing it from the Decadent Movement.
P ...
.
He thanked and met
Theodor Herzl
Theodor Herzl; hu, Herzl Tivadar; Hebrew name given at his brit milah: Binyamin Ze'ev (2 May 1860 – 3 July 1904) was an Austro-Hungarian Jewish lawyer, journalist, playwright, political activist, and writer who was the father of modern po ...
for one of his poem published in
Neue Freie Presse
''Neue Freie Presse'' ("New Free Press") was a Viennese newspaper founded by Adolf Werthner together with the journalists Max Friedländer and Michael Etienne on 1 September 1864 after the staff had split from the newspaper ''Die Presse''. It ...
in 1903. After this acquaintance, he started to help
Theodor Herzl
Theodor Herzl; hu, Herzl Tivadar; Hebrew name given at his brit milah: Binyamin Ze'ev (2 May 1860 – 3 July 1904) was an Austro-Hungarian Jewish lawyer, journalist, playwright, political activist, and writer who was the father of modern po ...
in translating letters of him into Turkish.
The overall goal of early
Young Turks such as Cevdet was to bring to end the absolutist regime of Sultan
Abdul Hamid II. Cevdet and four other medical students (including
Ibrahim Temo
Ibrahim Starova, also Ibrahim Bërzeshta (born ''Ibrahim Ethem Sojliu''; 22 March 1865 – 5 August 1945), better known as Ibrahim Temo, was an Ottoman- Albanian politician, revolutionary, intellectual, and a medical doctor by profession. Temo was ...
) at the Military Medical Academy in Istanbul founded the society of Ottoman Progress in 1889, which would become the "Committee of Union and Progress" (CUP). Initially with no political agenda, it became politicized by several leaders and factions and mounted the
Young Turk Revolution
The Young Turk Revolution (July 1908) was a constitutionalist revolution in the Ottoman Empire. The Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), an organization of the Young Turks movement, forced Sultan Abdul Hamid II to restore the Ottoman Consti ...
against Abdul Hamid II in 1908. However, Abdullah Cevdet and Ibrahim Temo cut their ties with the CUP soon after 1902, as the CUP began to advocate a Turkist nationalist policy. Instead he promoted his
secular
Secularity, also the secular or secularness (from Latin ''saeculum'', "worldly" or "of a generation"), is the state of being unrelated or neutral in regards to religion. Anything that does not have an explicit reference to religion, either negativ ...
ideas in his magazine ''İçtihat,'' where he published articles in support of several policies, which later were part of
Atatürk's Reforms like the shutting down of the madrases or the furthering of women's rights. In 1908 he joined the Ottoman Democratic Party ( ota, italic=yes, Fırka-i İbad; tr, Osmanlı Demokrat Fırkası) which was founded against the CUP.
In 1912 he and
Hüseyin Cahit advocated without success for the Latin script to be introduced in the Ottoman Empire.
Cevdet was tried several times in the Ottoman Empire because some of his writings were considered as
blasphemy against
Islam and
Muhammad
Muhammad ( ar, مُحَمَّد; 570 – 8 June 632 CE) was an Arab religious, social, and political leader and the founder of Islam. According to Islamic doctrine, he was a prophet divinely inspired to preach and confirm the mo ...
. For this reason, he was labelled as the "eternal enemy of Islam" (Süssheim, EI) and called "Aduvullah" (the enemy of God).
Karl Süssheim
Karl Süssheim (21 January 1878, Nuremberg – 13 January 1947, Istanbul, Turkey), was a German historian and Orientalist of Jewish descent. He was a professor of Islamic history and was fluent in Arabic, Persian and Ottoman Turkish.
Life
He ...
, “Abd Allah Djewdet’, ''Encyclopedia of Islam
The ''Encyclopaedia of Islam'' (''EI'') is an encyclopaedia of the academic discipline of Islamic studies published by Brill. It is considered to be the standard reference work in the field of Islamic studies. The first edition was published i ...
'' (EI1; Supplement), Leiden/Leipzig, 1938, 55–60. His most famous court case was due to his defense of the
Baháʼí Faith
The Baháʼí Faith is a religion founded in the 19th century that teaches the essential worth of all religions and the unity of all people. Established by Baháʼu'lláh in the 19th century, it initially developed in Iran and parts of the ...
, which he considered an intermediary step between Islam and the final abandonment of religious belief, in his article in ''İçtihat'' on 1 March 1922. For a brief period between 1921 and 1922 he was active for
Kurdish independence
Kurdish nationalism (, ) is a nationalist political movement which asserts that Kurds are a nation and espouses the creation of an independent Kurdistan from Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey.
Early Kurdish nationalism had its roots in the Ottom ...
.
Religion and science
Cevdat wanted to fuse religion and materialism, that is, under the influence of
Victor Hugo
Victor-Marie Hugo (; 26 February 1802 – 22 May 1885) was a French Romantic writer and politician. During a literary career that spanned more than sixty years, he wrote in a variety of genres and forms. He is considered to be one of the great ...
and
Jean-Marie Guyau
Jean-Marie Guyau (28 October 1854 – 31 March 1888) was a French philosopher and poet.
Guyau was inspired by the philosophies of Epicurus, Epictetus, Plato, Immanuel Kant, Herbert Spencer, and Alfred Fouillée, and the poetry and literature of ...
, discard God but keep religion as a social force. In one poem he says:
We are pious infidels; our faith is that
Being a disciple of God is tantamount to love.
What we drink at our drinking party is
The thirst for the infinite.
"Ranging from the New Testament to the Qur’ān, from Plato to Abū al-‘Alā’ al-Ma’arrī, he created an eclectic philosophy, reconciling science, religion, and philosophy with one another", and in order to specifically build an "Islamic materialism" (he was a translator of
Ludwig Büchner
Friedrich Karl Christian Ludwig Büchner (29 March 1824 – 30 April 1899) was a German philosopher, physiologist and physician who became one of the exponents of 19th-century scientific materialism.
Biography
Büchner was born at Darmstadt on ...
, one of the main popularizers of
scientific materialism
Metaphysical naturalism (also called ontological naturalism, philosophical naturalism and antisupernaturalism) is a philosophical worldview which holds that there is nothing but natural elements, principles, and relations of the kind studied by ...
at the end of the 19th century), he would use medieval mystical authors like
Al-Maʿarri
Abū al-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī ( ar, أبو العلاء المعري, full name , also known under his Latin name Abulola Moarrensis; December 973 – May 1057) was an Arab philosopher, poet, and writer. Despite holding a controversially irreli ...
,
Omar Khayyam
Ghiyāth al-Dīn Abū al-Fatḥ ʿUmar ibn Ibrāhīm Nīsābūrī (18 May 1048 – 4 December 1131), commonly known as Omar Khayyam ( fa, عمر خیّام), was a polymath, known for his contributions to mathematics, astronomy, philosophy, an ...
and
Rumi, and try to find correspondence in their works with modern authors such as
Voltaire
François-Marie Arouet (; 21 November 169430 May 1778) was a French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher. Known by his ''nom de plume'' M. de Voltaire (; also ; ), he was famous for his wit, and his criticism of Christianity—es ...
,
Cesare Lombroso,
Vittorio Alfieri
Count Vittorio Alfieri (, also , ; 16 January 17498 October 1803) was an Italian dramatist and poet, considered the "founder of Italian tragedy." He wrote nineteen tragedies, sonnets, satires, and a notable autobiography.
Early life
Alfieri was ...
and
Baron D'Holbach. His "final step was to present modern scientific theories ranging from
Darwinism to
genetics
Genetics is the study of genes, genetic variation, and heredity in organisms.Hartl D, Jones E (2005) It is an important branch in biology because heredity is vital to organisms' evolution. Gregor Mendel, a Moravian Augustinian friar wor ...
as repetitions of Islamic holy texts or derivations from the writings of Muslim thinkers", trying to fit the
Qur'an
The Quran (, ; Standard Arabic: , Quranic Arabic: , , 'the recitation'), also romanized Qur'an or Koran, is the central religious text of Islam, believed by Muslims to be a revelation from God. It is organized in 114 chapters (pl.: , s ...
or
ahadith
Ḥadīth ( or ; ar, حديث, , , , , , , literally "talk" or "discourse") or Athar ( ar, أثر, , literally "remnant"/"effect") refers to what the majority of Muslims believe to be a record of the words, actions, and the silent approval ...
with the ideas of peoples like
Théodule Armand Ribot or
Jean-Baptiste Massillon
Jean-Baptiste Massillon, CO (24 June 1663, Hyères – 28 September 1742, Beauregard-l'Évêque), was a French Catholic prelate and famous preacher who served as Bishop of Clermont from 1717 until his death.
Biography
Early years
Massillon wa ...
. He found that "the Qur’ān both alluded to and summarized the
theory of evolution
Evolution is change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. These characteristics are the expressions of genes, which are passed on from parent to offspring during reproduction. Variatio ...
."
Disillusioned by the ulema's lukewarm response to his role as "materialist
mujtahid" (as he would term it), he turned to heterodoxy, the
Bektashi
The Bektashi Order; sq, Tarikati Bektashi; tr, Bektaşi or Bektashism is an Islamic Sufi mystic movement originating in the 13th-century. It is named after the Anatolian saint Haji Bektash Wali (d. 1271). The community is currently led by ...
(he called "Turkish
Stoicism") and then
Baháʼísm. Being unfruitful in that regard as well, he'd spent his last efforts as purely intellectual.
Death
Left alone in his final years, Abdullah Cevdet died at the age of 63 on 29 November 1932. His body was brought for religious funeral service to
Hagia Sophia
Hagia Sophia ( 'Holy Wisdom'; ; ; ), officially the Hagia Sophia Grand Mosque ( tr, Ayasofya-i Kebir Cami-i Şerifi), is a mosque and major cultural and historical site in Istanbul, Turkey. The cathedral was originally built as a Greek Ortho ...
, which was still used as a
mosque
A mosque (; from ar, مَسْجِد, masjid, ; literally "place of ritual prostration"), also called masjid, is a place of prayer for Muslims. Mosques are usually covered buildings, but can be any place where prayers ( sujud) are performed, ...
at that time. However, nobody claimed his coffin, and it was expressed by some religious conservatives that he "did not deserve"
Islamic funeral prayer. Following an appeal of
Peyami Safa
Peyami Safa (April 2, 1899 – June 15, 1961) was a Index of Turkey biography-related articles, Turkish journalist, columnist and novelist. He came to the fore in the Turkish literature of the Turkey, Republican era with his psychological works ...
, a notable writer, the funeral prayer was performed. His body was then taken by city servants to the
Merkezefendi Cemetery
The Merkezefendi Cemetery ( tr, Merkezefendi Mezarlığı) is a burial ground situated in Merkezefendi neighborhood of Zeytinburnu district on the European part of Istanbul, Turkey. The neighborhood and the cemetery are named after Merkez Efendi, ...
for burial.
Notes
References
*
Şerif Mardin
Şerif Mardin (1927 – 6 September 2017) was a prominent Turkish sociologist, political scientist, academic and thinker. In a 2008 publication, he was referred to as the "doyen of Turkish sociology."
Early life and education
He was born in Ista ...
Jön Türklerin Siyasi Fikirleri, 1895–1908 Istanbul 1964 (1992), 221–50.
* idem, Continuity and Change in the Ideas of the Young Turks, expanded text of a lecture given at the School of Business Administration and Economics Robert College, 1969, 13–27.
* Frank W. Creel, The program and ideology of Dr. Abdullah Cevdet: a study of the origins of Kemalism in Turkey (unpublished PhD thesis), The University of Chicago, 1978.
*
M. Şükrü Hanioğlu, Bir siyasal düşünür olarak Doktor Abdullah Cevdet ve Dönemi, Istanbul, 1981.
* idem, Bir siyasal örgüt olarak Osmanlı Ittihad ve Terakki Cemiyeti ve Jon Türklük, Istanbul, 1986.
* idem,
The Young Turks in Opposition', Oxford University Press, 1995.
* Necati Alkan
"The eternal enemy of Islam: Abdullah Cevdet and the Baha'i Religion" ''Bulletin of the
School of Oriental and African Studies
SOAS University of London (; the School of Oriental and African Studies) is a public research university in London, England, and a member institution of the federal University of London. Founded in 1916, SOAS is located in the Bloomsbury a ...
'', 68:1, 2005, 1-20.
External links
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Cevdet, Abdullah
1869 births
1932 deaths
People from Arapgir
Kurdish people from the Ottoman Empire
19th-century people from the Ottoman Empire
Kurdish academics
Kurdish physicians
Burials at Merkezefendi Cemetery
Kurdish writers
Young Turks
Kurdish atheists
Kurdish politicians
Turkish atheists