Ahmed Riza Bey (Turkish: Ahmet Rıza Bey, 1859–1930) was a prominent Young Turk, an activist, scientist and the minister of Education from the Liberal Union party during the second Constitutional Era in the Ottoman Empire. In 1908, his name was among the possible Grand Viziers. He was the leading negotiator of the failed agreement of coalition between the Ottoman Empire, France and Britain for World War I.
Ahmed Rıza has also been viewed as a polymath by some authors.[1]
He had been concerned with the conditions of the farmers and wanted to implement agricultural methods. He believed in and supported the ideas of the French sociologist, Auguste Comte. He was hostile to colonialism, as were European progressives. He was also opposed to class privilege.
Rıza had graduated from Galatasaray High School in Constantinople. He had also studied agriculture in France. As an idealistic young man ("Young Turk"), he sought to improve the condition of the Ottoman peasantry in the Ottoman Empire.
In 1894 he published a series of publications on unification of Islamic and Ottoman traditions of consultation. In 1895, Meşveret, the journal that he published became a locus of the exile Young Turk. Rıza opposed the radical Prince Sabahettin's calls for revolution and European intervention in the empire at the 1902 Congress of Ottoman Opposition in Paris. At the Second Young Turk Congress in 1907, Rıza at first reluctantly endorsed the use of violence to depose the sultan, but later reversed his position.