“Unity in Language, Thoughts, Deeds”: The Ideas of Ismail Gasprinskii and Conceptualization of Turkic Nationalism in Turkey

Abstract

At the last decades of the long 19th century, a prominent Russian Muslim journalist and educator, Ismail Gasprinskii (1851–1914), promoted a cultural-political project for Russian Muslims, which after the Revolution of 1905 gradually shifted to the idea of national-cultural autonomy within Russian empire, long after some of Gasprinskii’s ideas were reinterpreted and he personally became known as a pan-Turkist, especially in the USSR and in Turkey. This case study aims at examining how the image of Ismail Gasprinskii was embedded into pan-Turkic discourse in Turkey. Hence, we focus on key authors, including founders of pan-Turkism Yusuf Akçura and Ziya Gökalp, who initiated the process of portraying Gasprinskii as one of the “ideologists of pan-Turkism”. Following the main aim of the study, we also briefly analyze Gasprinskii’s cultural-political project for Russian Muslims, along with the ideas of pan-Turkism per se. We argue that there are two central narratives, which solidified the imagination of Gasprinskii as a “pan-Turkist”. First, the myth of his studying in Moscow military gymnasium amidst the “militant pan-Slavism”, and second, the pan-Turkic reinterpretation of the slogan “Unity in language, thoughts, deeds”, which appeared on the heading of Gasprinskii’s newspaper Perevodchik-Terjiman in October of 1912, two years before his death.