Turkist scholars redefined Turkish history as national and ethnic rather than dynastic and religious

Evidence

The studies and articles published in this journal and elsewhere by Ziya Go¨kalp, Ko¨pru¨lu¨, and their collaborators present a new conception of the scope of Turkish history. For them it is primarily the history of the Turks and of Turkey—that is, of a people and a country, rather than of a dynasty or a religion, though these are still accorded some respect. Their field of study included not only pre-Ottoman Turkish Anatolia, but also the history of Turkish states and peoples far from Turkey, in Central Asia and India. In another respect, too, the scholars of that generation broadened the scope of Turkish historical studies. Ziya Go¨ kalp was a disciple of the French sociologist Emile Durkheim, and he and Ko¨pru¨lu¨ were primarily responsible for the introduction of the sociological method to Turkish history. Their articles and books deal with institutions, law, folklore and culture as well as with political history. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 2021

Categorization

• XREF: The shift from dynastic/religious Ottoman history to an ethnic-national Turkic history reaching into Central Asia parallels later debates about whether modern Turkish national identity is a Western-imposed construct or an indigenous rediscovery — relevant to the reader’s Said-adjacent cluster on how the region became legible to itself and to the West.
• QUESTION: The spread of Durkheimian sociological method into Ottoman/Turkish historiography — via Gökalp specifically — is a transmission channel worth tracing: French positivist sociology arriving as a tool for national self-definition.