Abdullah Cevdet

Abdullah Cevdet Bey (‎9 September 1869 – 29 November 1932) was a Young Turk intellectual and physician of Kurdish origin. He was one of the founders of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) and wrote articles with pen name of "Bir Kürd" ("A Kurd") for the publications such as '' Meşveret'', ''Kurdistan'' and '' Roji Kurd'' about the East–West dichotomy and Kurdish awakening and nationalism. In his personal publication '' İctihad'' he pushed for the westernization of society, feminism, workers rights, liberty, science, secularism, and social liberalism. He was an ideologue of the CUP until 1902, when he became an opponent of the organization he founded as it embraced Turkish nationalism. In 1908, he established the Democratic Party, which merged with the Freedom and Accord Party in 1911. He was briefly active in support of Kurdish independence in the early 1920s.

Cevdet's literary career was defined by his antagonistic relationship with religious conservatives and constant press censorship. Due to his critical historical essays on Islam and Muhammad, he was taken to court several times over charges of blasphemy. He introduced to the Ottoman public Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and the Bahá'í Faith. Several of Cevdet's ideas, by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's own admission, came to fruition as part of his reforms such as secularism, the shuttering of madrases, and the furthering of women's rights.

Biography

Early life

Abdullah Cevdet was born on September 9, 1869 (or 1867) in Arapgir, Malatya. He was born to a family of Kurdish origin. He would always describe himself as a Turk of Kurdish origin. His father was Hacı Ömer Vasfi Efendi, a clerk of the first battalion in Diyarbakır. After completing his primary education in Hozat and Arapgir, he went to Harput with his family. He graduated from Ma‘mûretülazîz ( Elâzığ) Military Junior High School in 1885. At the age of fifteen, he went to Istanbul to attend the Kuleli Military Medical Preparatory School. He graduated three years later and continued his education in the Imperial School of Medicine.

Cevdet was initially a pious Muslim and received a religious education, but was influenced by Western materialistic philosophies which turned him against institutionalized religion. He thought that "although the Muslim God was of no use in the modern era, Islamic society must preserve Islamic principles".

Years in Medical School

During his student years in the Imperial School of Medicine, he was influenced by biological materialism, the ideology which dominated the school. He translated a section of Ludwig Büchner’s work ''Kraft und Stoff'', which greatly influenced him, under the title ''Fizyolociya-i Tefekkür'' (1890) "''Physiology of Contemplation''". In the same year, he published ''Dimâğ'' ("''The Brain''") on brain functions. In 1890 he prepared the first draft of his work ''Fünûn ve Felsefe'' ("''Science and Philosophy''"), which attempted to reconcile the ideas of Islamic scholars and biological materialist philosophers. Cevdet published two more books on biological materialism and brain functions, ''Fizyolociya ve Hıfz-ı Sıhhat-i Dimâğ'' ("''Physiology and the Preservation of Mental Health''") and ''Melekât-ı Akliyye'' ("''The Angels of Reason''") in his last year at school, and wrote articles on the same subjects in the magazines ''Maârif'', ''Musavver Cihan'' and ''Resimli Kitab''.

As Cevdet developed his political beliefs, he identified with Young Ottomans before him, especially Ali Suavi. On 3 June 1889, he and three of his friends: İbrahim Timo, İshak Sükûti, Mehmed Reşid, founded the Ottoman Union Committee. This society later became the Committee of Union and Progress. The overall goal of Young Turks such as Cevdet was to bring to end the absolutist regime of Sultan Abdul Hamid II. He was arrested several times during his education due to his political activities and was expelled from school for a while. While in medical school he joined the literature scene, and upon the request of Abdülhak Hâmid, he compiled his poems into a book. In these early works published under the name of Ömer Cevdet, the influences of Namık Kemal, Recaizade Mahmud Ekrem, Hâmid and Halid Ziya can be felt.Abdullah Cevdet (Karlıdağ), ''Kenthaber.com Arapgir-Malatya İz bırakanlar Sayfası, Erişim tarihi: 20.07.2011''
/ref> After his first poetry book ''Hiç'', published in 1890, he also published the poetry books ''Tuluat'' (1891) and ''Masumiyet'' (1893).

He eventually completed his medical education in July 1894 and became an ophthalmologist. After finishing school, he practiced in Haydarpaşa Numune Hospital in Istanbul. He was sent to Diyarbakır on a temporary duty in November of the same year due to a cholera epidemic, on the side organizing among those in the city to establish a CUP branch there.Zeynep Çamsoy, Milli Mücadele Döneminde Kürdistan Teali Cemiyeti, ''Ankara Üniversitesi Türk İnkılap Tarihi Enstitüsü Yüksek Lisans Tezi, Ankara 2007'' He saved Ziya Gökalp from his suicide attempt and initiated him into the CUP. He also took the opportunity to translate Büchner’s ''Natur und Geist'' under the pen name Goril.

As an activist

When he returned to Istanbul in 1895, he was arrested on charges of subversion and he was assigned to the ophthalmology department of the Tripoli (of Libya) Central Hospital, which was essentially an exile.Abdullah Cevdet (Karlıdağ), ''Kenthaber.com Arapgir-Malatya İz bırakanlar Sayfası, Erişim tarihi: 20.07.2011''
/ref> However, he continued his work on behalf of the CUP there. After serving one and a half years, he was again imprisoned. When he was released four months later, he learned that he was to be deported to Fezzan, so he fled to France via Tunisia 1897. He was sentenced to life imprisonment in absentia for this.

He arrived in Paris in the aftermath of the Mizancı Murad affair, when Murat Bey overthrew Ahmed Rıza as CUP leader, but subsequently returned to the Ottoman Empire after striking a deal with Sultan Abdul Hamid's top intelligence officer Ahmed Celâleddin Pasha. Cevdet went to Geneva and met with Young Turks such as Tunalı Hilmi and Dr. Mehmed Reşit and became close with Ahmed Rıza. Cevdet and Ibrahim Temo would soon cut their ties with the CUP after 1902, as the organization began to advocate a Turkist nationalist policy. For now though, together with İshak Sükûti in Geneva, he published the ''Osmanlı'' newspaper, a new CUP organ, in Turkish and French, and wrote articles denouncing autocracy. Plekhanov, Alexrod, and Lenin were also in Geneva at the same time and were busy publishing ''Iskra''. He translated Western works; among the works he translated was Friedrich Schiller's drama ''William Tell''. He later published the preface he wrote for the work as a book titled ''İki Emel''. He also translated Vittorio Alfieri's essay ''Della Tirannide'' (1789) under the title ''İstibdâd'' (''Despotism''). In one of the poetry books he published in Geneva, ''Kahriyât'', he included poems written with political aspirations rather than artistic concerns, themed on freedom and patriotism, almost all of which were directed against Abdul Hamid II, accusing him of hostility towards liberty.

Eventually, Abdul Hamid took notice of the dangerous literature Cevdet was publishing. In 1899 Cevdet softened his publications so 72 of his friends imprisoned in Fezzan and Tripoli could be released. The Sultan then offered to buy him out by employing him as chief physician of the Vienna embassy on the condition that he would give up writing political articles and stay away from Istanbul, an offer which he accepted, to much consternation from his Young Turk friends. During this time, although he continued to identify with the sultan's opposition to some extent, he occupied himself more with poetry and publishing books that received interest from Symbolist circles. His poetry was linked with the movement, and he received accolades from leading French authors like Gustave Kahn.

His position was suspended in 1903 after an incident where he slapped the ambassador who informed the palace that he was secretly continuing his political activities. He returned to Geneva and founded the Ottoman Union and Revolution Committee 'Osmanlı İttihat ve İnkılap Cemiyeti''and published the ''Osmanlı'' again as the organization's organ. The government organized a false flag operation to extradite him from Switzerland, by claiming his authorship of a pronographic booklet that targetted the sultan, though it was actually published by a government agent. Cevdet was deported from Switzerland, but he was able to move to Egypt.

Egyptian years

From 1904 to the end of his life in 1932, Cevdet published the periodical '' İctihad'' and stayed out of politics, writing articles to promote Westernization and secularism. It came under several aliases as the magazine would be interrupted by shuttering: ''Cehd'', ''İşhâd'', ''İştihâd'', ''Âlem'', ''Eski İçtihad''.Oğuzhan Saygılı, Abdullah Cevdet’in Doğru Anlaşılabilmesine Doğru
/ref>

He moved to Cairo and joined Prince Sabahaddin's Private Enterprise and Decentralization League. He wrote articles in support of the 1906 Erzurum Uprising and called for constitutional monarchy along with the abolition of certain taxes. After the Young Turk Revolution and the return of constitutional monarchy he did not return home immediately, but stayed in Egypt for a while longer until 1910.

In Cairo he sought to reconcile the Eastern and the Western literary traditions. Within the framework of this goal, he translated Shakespeare, Schiller, Hugo, and Byron, as well as Saadi, Rumi, and Khayyam. He believed the Ottoman Empire was backwards and not competitive because of the role of religion in society. In 1908, he translated and published Reinhart Dozy’s two-volume work ''Essai sur l’Histoire de l’Islamisme'' ("''Essay on the History of Islamism''") under the title ''Tarih-i İslâmiye'' ("''Islamic History''"). The book, which was critical of Islam and of Muhammed, caused immense controversy upon its release; it was banned and confiscated by the censors in February 1910Hilmi Yavuz, Dozy, İslam Tarihi ve Abdullah Cevdet(1), ''Zaman gazetesi, 01 Kasım 2006''
/ref> and existing copies were thrown from the Galata Bridge after catching the attention of the Sheikh-ul-Islam. Cevdet claimed that he translated the work to allow Muslim historians to correct Dozy's mistakes.

He thanked and met Theodor Herzl for publishing one of his poems in ''Neue Freie Presse'' in 1903. After this acquaintance, he started to help Herzl by translating his letters into Turkish.

After 1910

In 1908, he joined the Ottoman Democratic Party () which was founded against the CUP.

He returned to Istanbul in 1910. He established his own printing house, İctihad Evi, or the Idjtihad House, where he published the ''Kütüphane-i Ictihad'' series. His house in Cağaloğlu became something of a salon for intellectuals in the capital. Among those Abdullah Cevdet hosted included Yusuf Akçura, Hasan Âli Yücel, Nazım Hikmet, Mehmet Emin Resulzade, Prof. Karl Süssheim, and Madam Corrine. In 1912, he and Hüseyin Cahit advocated without success for the Latin script be used to write Turkish, which would eventually happen in 1928. He was an advocate for the teaching of biological materialism in schools and for opening schools in the countryside to educate peasants, which would eventually happen in 1940. He emphasized the concepts of citizenship and general will expressed by Rousseau in ''The Social Contract''. Cevdet was subject to political pressure due to his critical stance against the CUP which at this point established a dictatorship, and Turkey's participation in World War I, and was forced to stop writing in 1914. He wrote anonymous editorials in the '' İkdam'' for a while.

During the occupation era (1918–1923) he was appointed to the General Directorate of Health 'Sıhhiye Genel Müdürlüğü''by the Grand Vizier Damat Ferid Pasha. He was likely the first to advocate for the regulation of sex workers in Turkey, though the discovery of him issuing brothel certificates for prostitutes resulted in his dismissal from his job due to public outrage. He was initially in favor of Turkey becoming a mandate. During the Turkish War of Independence he played a role in the establishment of the Friends of England Association and briefly was active in the Society for the Rise of Kurdistan from 1921–1922. He immediately took Ankara's side upon the opening the Grand National Assembly, and worked to provide health services in the provisional government. Due to his pro-British stance during the occupation years and his involvement in Kurdish nationalist organizations, he was banned from state service for life during the Republican period. He spent the rest of his life writing poetry, translating, and publishing ''İctihad''.

Cevdet was put on trial several times because some of his writings were considered blasphemous against Islam and Muhammad. For this reason, he was labelled as the "eternal enemy of Islam" and called "Aduvullah" (the enemy of God). Karl Süssheim, “Abd Allah Djewdet’, ''Encyclopedia of Islam'' (EI1; Supplement), Leiden/Leipzig, 1938, 55–60. His most famous court case was due to his defense of the Baháʼí Faith, which he considered an intermediary step between Islam and the final abandonment of religious belief, in his article in ''İctihad'' on 1 March 1922.

One-party era

Abdullah Cevdet's translations, compilations, articles, books, and projects on educational reform were said to be the secret program of Atatürk's reforms. He published the program of the utopian plan in a work called '' Uyanık Bir Uyku'', which was developed with Kılıçzade Hakkı in İctihad.
In 1925, President Mustafa Kemal Atatürk hosted Abdullah Cevdet in Çankaya Mansion. Cevdet was impressed by Atatürk's library and the two held mutual admiration. According to him, “Gazi Pasha tatürkhad fulfilled the goals that intellectuals had nurtured with fire and faith for many years.” Their meeting was scheduled for one hour, but their meeting ended up lasting four hours. As he was leaving, Mustafa Kemal told his guest, “I did everything you wrote and said.” After Cevat Pasha resigned his parliamentary seat from Elâzığ, there were talks to have Cevdet take his seat in a by-election. These plans were quashed by a smear campaign started by the conservative newspaper ''Tevhid-i Efkâr'', who's writers accused Cevdet of "wanting to bring breeding males from Europe.” This was a distortion of a proposal of Cevdet's to invite farmers with experience in animal husbandry from the Balkans, Italy, and Germany to settle uncultivated land in Anatolia and teach the peasants.

In 1928, upon Atatürk’s request, he translated ''Le Bon Sens'', a book of religious criticism and a sort of atheist manifesto written by French philosopher Baron d'Holbach under the pseudonym of Jean Meslier; the work was published under the title ''Akl-ı Selim'' ("''Common Sense''") in the State Printing House among the Publications of the Ministry of National Education. He dedicated its first copy Atatürk, who ordered the book be printed in the new Latin derived alphabet in 1929. In 1931, he published his poems in a book called ''Karlıdağ’dan Ses''.Oğuzhan Saygılı, Abdullah Cevdet’in Doğru Anlaşılabilmesine Doğru
/ref>

Left alone in his final years, Abdullah Cevdet died of a heart attack in Istanbul at the age of 63 on 29 November 1932. His body was brought for religious funeral service to Hagia Sophia, which was still used as a mosque at that time. However, nobody claimed his coffin due to his alleged atheism, and it was expressed by some religious conservatives that he "did not deserve" Islamic funeral prayer. Following an appeal from Peyami Safa, a notable writer, the funeral prayer was performed. His body was then taken by municipal workers to the Merkezefendi Cemetery for burial. After his death, his personal library and archive were preserved by his daughter Gül Karlıdağ. The rare works are kept together with the furniture and other items he used on the top floor of the İctihad House in Cağaloğlu, which still stands today.

Views

Religion and science

Cevdet wanted to fuse religion and materialism, that is, under the influence of Victor Hugo and Jean-Marie Guyau, 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.

Şükrü Hanioğlu describes Cevdet's influences and goals as the following: "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, one of the main popularizers of scientific materialism at the end of the 19th century), he would use medieval mystical authors like Al-Maʿarri, Omar Khayyam and Rumi, and try to find correspondence in their works with modern authors such as Voltaire, Cesare Lombroso, Vittorio Alfieri and Baron D'Holbach. His "final step was to present modern scientific theories ranging from Darwinism to genetics as repetitions of Islamic holy texts or derivations from the writings of Muslim thinkers", trying to fit the Qur'an or ahadith with the ideas of peoples like Théodule Armand Ribot or Jean-Baptiste Massillon. He found that "the Qur’ān both alluded to and summarized the theory of evolution."

He expressed his belief in science as, “In short, in places where science and technology plant their flags, deserts turn into wheat fields, marshes into flowery gardens. Captivity and poverty disappear, and happiness, honor and truth begin to live.”

Disillusioned by the ulema's lukewarm response to his role as "materialist mujtahid" (as he would term it), he turned to heterodoxy, the Bektashi (he called "Turkish Stoicism") and then Baháʼísm. Being unfruitful in that regard as well, he'd spent his last efforts as purely intellectual.

Family

His wife was Fatma Hanım, daughter of Ahmet Hamdi Bey, the Istanbul Police Chief and Mayor of Beyoğlu during the reign of Abdul Hamid II. His family adopted the surname Karlıdağ. He had two children: a son Mehmed Cevdet Karlıdağ and a daughter Gül Karlıdağ, who was active in the Workers' Party of Turkey.

Legacy

In 2005 there was an attempt to rename a street in Ankara after Abdullah Cevdet which received intense reaction from Islamist newspapers. '' Akit'' correspondent Hasan Karakaya dug up the "breeding males from Europe" canard in his recrimination of the initiative.

Bibliography

Poetry

* ''Hiç'' (1890)
* ''Türbe-i Masumiyet'' (1890)
* ''Tulûat'' (1891)
* ''Masumiyet'' (1894)
* ''Kahriyât'' (1906)
* ''Karlı Dağdan Ses'' (1931)
* ''Düşünen Musiki'' (1932)
* ''Rafale de Parfums : Sonnets'' (1904)

Prose

* ''Ramazan Bahçeleri'' (1891)

Philosophy

* ''Dimâğ'' (1890)
* ''Fizyolacya-i Tefekkür'' (1892)
* ''Fünûn ve Felsefe'' (1897)

Translations

* Max Weber's 'Asırların Panoraması'
* Gustave Le Bon’s 'Asrımızın Hususu Felsefiyesi''* Omar Khayyam's ''Rubaiyat''
* Mevlânâ's ''Selected Divans''
* Gustave Le Bon's 'Dün ve Yarın''(1921)
* Gustave Le Bon's 'İlm-i Ruh-i İçtimai''(1924)
* Gustave Le Bon's 'Ameli Ruhiyat''(1931)
* Baron d'Holbach's ''Le Bon Sens'' 'Akl-ı Selim: Sağduyu Tanrısızlığın İlmihali''(1928)

Notes

References

* Şerif Mardin
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'', 68:1, 2005, 1-20.

External links

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{{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 from the Ottoman Empire
Turkish atheists
Turkish magazine founders
Turkish revolutionaries