Yusuf Akçura
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Yusuf Akçura (Tatar: Yosıf Aqçura; 1876-1935) was a prominent Ottoman activist of the pan-Turkist or Turanism camp.
He was born in Simbirsk (now Ulyanovsk) in Russia and lived there until he and his mother emigrated to Turkey when he was seven. He was educated in İstanbul and entered the Harbiye Mektebi (War College) in 1895, before taking up a post in the Erkan-i Harbiye (General Staff Course), a prestigious training programme for the Ottoman military. He failed to complete this course as he was accused of belonging to a seditious movement and was exiled to Fezzan.
He escaped exile in 1899 and made his way to Paris where he began to emerge as a staunch advocate of Turkish nationalism. He returned to Russia in 1903 and began to write extensively on the topic. He garnered most attention for his 1904 work Uc Tarz-i Siyaset (Three Policies), which was originally printed in the Cairo-based magazine Turk. The work called on Turks to abandon the multi-ethnic Ottoman Empire and instead to turn wholly to their Turkish identity. Initially dismissed as an extremist, his ideas began to find more favour after the Young Turk Revolution and founding of the Second Mesrutiyet (limited form of democracy).
With a growing feeling of nationalism in the country, he returned and founded the journal Turk Yurdu, which sought to become the intellectual force behind the growth of nationalism. Differing from the regime somewhat, he defined the Turkish in purely ethnic terms and came to look outside the borders of the country for a kinship with other Turkic peoples. he also called for creation of a national economy and a move away from Islamic values (an area in which he clashed with Ziya Gökalp, as Akçura wanted a secular Turkey, fearing that Pan-Islamism would retard nationalist development), meaning that he was largely sympathetic to Kemal Atatürk. As a result he developed into a figurehead during the early republican period, whose writings became widely read and who became one of the leading university professors in Istanbul. He died in the city in 1935.
