The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought

Young Turks

The phrase “young Turks” was first used by Charles MacFarlane in 1828 to refer to the generation of young Ottomans being brought up under a Western educational system at the time. Over the ensuing 80 years, “young Turks” took on various meanings and was applied to quite diverse groups of people. In 1855, Abdolinimo Ubicini coined the phrases “jeune Turquie de Mahmoud” (young Turks of Mahmoud) and “jeune Turquie d’Abdul Medjid” (young Turks of Abdülmecid) in an attempt to describe the reforming Ottoman statesmen under Sultans Mahmud II (d. 1839) and Abdülmecid (d. 1861). Hippolyte Castile made the first use of the capitalized expression “Young Turks” in 1857, a concept that refers to a group of 19th-century Ottoman intellectuals and statesmen akin to the Giovani Italia of Mazzini. Various Ottoman sources register that several reform-minded young bureaucrats were called “jeunes” in 1861. When, in 1867, a number of leading Ottoman intellectuals fled the Ottoman capital to organize an opposition movement in Paris, the European press labeled them Young Turks.

The exiles themselves adopted this title as the name of their movement. The Egyptian prince Mustafa Fazıl, who financed the movement, used the phrase grand parti de la Jeune Turquie in his letter to the sultan inviting him to carry out extensive reforms. In their official program, these dissidents called themselves Jeune Turquie, as contrasted with the Vieux Turcs, a term they applied to the conservative statesmen of the time. In Turkish historiography, this first Ottoman opposition movement abroad is referred to as the “Young Ottoman movement.”

In the 1870s, the terms “Young Turk” and “Young Turkey Party” were employed once again, especially in British and French diplomatic correspondence. This time, they referred to those statesmen and bureaucrats who promoted the constitutional regime. Following the end of the short-lived constitutional regime in 1878, the opponents of Sultan Abdülhamid II’s regime came to be called Young Turks (Jön Türk in Turkish). The Ottoman Freemasons named their political branch “Committee of Young Turkey at Constantinople” in 1893. By 1895, the French publication of the main opposition organization, the Ottoman Committee of Union and Progress, was published as organe de la Jeune Turquie. From this point on, the phrase “Young Turk” was used to denote Ottoman opposition organizations dominated by Muslim dissidents. Despite some confusion in the European press at the time, the term did not encompass the opposition groups formed by Armenians, Macedonians, and other non-Muslim minorities. The sultan issued an imperial decree in July 1901 banning use of the phrase “Young Turks” in official correspondence and in the press, on the grounds that it aggrandized individual opponents by according them the status of a social group. Henceforth, officials and journalists adopted the term “agitator” in place of Young Turk.

After 1908, the term fell out of use within the empire, with the exception of the names of several newspapers. However, European and American journalists and scholars continued to use the phrase to refer to the governments formed following the revolution of 1908, which reinstated the constitutional regime; this has created some confusion, since both adherents and opponents of the ruling Committee of Union and Progress had belonged to the Young Turk movement that came to an end in 1908.

The Young Turk Movement and Its Major Political Ideas

Although opposition to Abdülhamid II’s (r. 1876–1909) regime started on the morrow of the dismissal of the Ottoman parliament in February 1878, for more than a decade the Young Turk movement did not go further than the publication of a few journals in Europe. In 1889, the main Young Turk organization, originally named the Ottoman Union Committee, was established in the Royal Medical Academy. The name was changed to the Ottoman Committee of Union and Progress in 1895 after protracted negotiations between the original founders and Ahmed Rıza (1858–1930), a staunch positivist who proposed Auguste Comte’s (1798–1857) famous dictum “Order and Progress.”

Until 1902, the Ottoman Committee of Union and Progress operated as an umbrella organization with various “activist” branches promoting revolutionary tactics and a branch in Cairo initially dominated by the ‘ulama’. At the Congress of Ottoman Liberals, held in February 1902 in Paris, a major schism developed between the member organizations over the question of foreign intervention in the service of revolutionary change in the empire. The argument resulted in the dissolution of the Committee of Union and Progress as an alliance. The majority faction, led by the sultan’s brother-in-law Mahmud Celaleddin Pasha (1843–1903), and his two sons, Sabahaddin (1879–1948) and Lutfullah Beys (1880–1973), allied itself with the Armenian and Albanian committees, and promoted the idea of a coup d’état to be carried out with British assistance. The minority splinter group, composed of the “activists” led by Ahmed Rıza, adopted a Turkist policy. They allocated a central role to ethnic Turks, as the dominant ethnic group, in the future of the empire, and categorically opposed any foreign intervention in Ottoman politics. The majority faction underwent reorganization in 1905 under the leadership of Sabahaddin Bey, who, influenced by the Science sociale movement and especially renowned French pedagogue and founder of L’École des Roches Edmond Demolins (1852–1907), advocated decentralization and private initiative. He founded the League of Private Initiative and Decentralization in that year and worked toward creating a mutual understanding with the non-Muslim organizations, especially the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (the Dashnaktsutiun).

The Turkist faction also underwent reorganization in 1905 under the leadership of Bahaeddin Şakir (1874–1922), who gave it the new name Ottoman Committee of Progress and Union (CPU). The CPU now adopted an even stronger activist agenda. In 1907, it merged with the Ottoman Freedom Society, established by army officers and bureaucrats in Salonica in 1906. This merger proved crucial for the effort to expand the influence of the movement within the Ottoman armies of European Turkey. In 1908, with the help of these armies, the Ottoman CPU carried out the constitutional revolution, which marked both the end of Abdülhamid II’s regime and the terminus of the Young Turk movement.

Since members and sympathizers of organizations dominated by Muslim opponents of the sultan were all called Young Turks, the designation should not necessarily be taken to imply a shared pool of ideas. For instance, both Muslim clerics and ardent positivists worked side by side in various “Young Turk” organizations. However, many Young Turks, including the original founders of the Ottoman Committee of Union and Progress, were adherents of mid-19th-century German materialism who admired the famous German popular materialist Ludwig Büchner (1824–1899). Darwinism and social Darwinism also deeply influenced many Young Turks. Several Young Turk leaders promoted positivism. Almost all members of the movement were influenced by French popular sociologist Gustave Le Bon (1841–1931) and his theories about the phenomenon of the crowd, which shaped the elitist outlook of the Young Turks.

Following the reorientation of the Ottoman Committee of Union and Progress toward political activism in 1905, many of these ideas were shelved. Instead, the leaders of the movement promoted more popular ideas, such as a variant of the ideology of Ottomanism, which allocated a dominant role to the Turks in Ottoman politics and opposed European economic penetration and political intervention.

The Young Turk movement is mistakenly equated with the activities of the Committee of Union and Progress that carried out the Young Turk Revolution of 1908. European and American scholarship goes further, referring to the Ottoman Second Constitutional Period (1908–18) as the “Young Turk” era. According to the accepted view in Turkish scholarship, however, the Young Turk movement came to an end with the revolution of 1908.