Early life

Mehmed Ziya was born in ermik in the Diyarbekir Vilayet of the Ottoman Empire on 23 March
1876. He was of Turkmen Kurdish
[7][8]
or Zaza
[9][10]
descent. Diyarbakr Province was a "cultural
frontier", having been ruled by Arabs and Persians until the 16th century, and featuring
"conflicting national traditions" among the local populations of Turks, Kurds, and Armenians.
[11]

This cultural environment has often been suggested to have informed his sense of national
identity; later in his life, when political detractors suggested that he was of Kurdish extraction,
Gkalp responded that while he was certain of patrilineal Turkish racial heritage, this was
insignificant: "I learned through my sociological studies that nationality is based solely on
upbringing."
[11]
Some historians nonetheless characterize him as being of Kurdish origin.
[12]

After attending secondary school in Diyarbakr, he settled in Istanbul, in 1896. There, he
attended veterinary school and became involved in underground revolutionary politics, for which
he served ten months in prison.
[13]
He developed relationships with many figures of the
revolutionary underground in this period, abandoned his veterinary studies, and became a
member of the underground revolutionary group, the Society of Union and Progress.
[13]
The
revolutionary currents of Constantinople at the time were extremely varied; the unpopularity of
the Abdul Hamid II regime had by this time awakened diverse revolutionary sentiment in
Constantinople.
Career
Mehmed Ziya changed his name, initially as a pen name, to "Gkalp", meaning "Sky warrior" or
"Blue warrior" in Old Turkish.
Gkalp's work, in the context of the decline of the Ottoman Empire, was instrumental in the
development of Turkish national identity, which he himself referred to even then as Turkishness.
He believed that a nation must have a "shared consciousness" in order to survive, that "the
individual becomes a genuine personality only as he becomes a genuine representative of his
culture".
[4]
He believed that a modern state must become homogeneous in terms of culture,
religion, and national identity.
[14]
This conception of national identity was augmented by his
belief in the primacy of Turkishness, as a unifying virtue. In a 1911 article, he suggested that
"Turks are the 'supermen' imagined by the German philosopher Nietzsche".
[14]

His major sociological work was interested in differentiating Avrupallk ("Europeanism", the
mimicking of Western societies) and Modernlik ("Modernity", taking initiative); he was
interested in Japan as a model in this, for what he perceived to be its having modernized without
abandoning its innate cultural identity. Gkalp suggested that to subordinate "culture" (non-
utilitarianism, altruism, public-spiritedness) to "civilization" (utilitarianism, egoism,
individualism) was to doom a state to decline: "civilization destroyed societal solidarity and
morality".
[15]

Informed by his reading of mile Durkheim, Gkalp concluded that Western liberalism, as a
social system, was inferior to solidarism, because liberalism encouraged individualism, which in
turn diminished the integrity of the state.
[15]
Durkheim, whose work Gkalp himself translated
into Turkish, perceived religion as a means of unifying a population socially, and even "religion
as society's worship of itself".
[16]
Durkheim's assertion that the life of the group was more
important than the life of the individual, this was a concept readily adopted by Gkalp.
[16]