Ziya Gökalp

Mehmet Ziya Gökalp (1876 to 1924) was a Turkish sociologist, writer, poet and politician, considered the father of Turkish nationalism and the chief ideologist of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. After the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 he adopted the pen name Gökalp, meaning celestial hero. As a sociologist he was influential in the negation of Islamism, pan-Islamism and Ottomanism as ideological, cultural and sociological identifiers, and in 1936 the sociologist Niyazi Berkes called him the real founder of Turkish sociology. Influenced by contemporary European thought, particularly the sociology of Emile Durkheim, he rejected Ottomanism and Islamism in favor of Turkish nationalism and promoted the Turkish language and culture. His nationalism has drawn criticism for its rejection of Greeks, Armenians, Assyrians and Jews as foreign to the national state, and it has been described as proto-fascist.