Abdullah Cevdet
Abdullah Cevdet 'Bey' was a Kurdish-Turk intellectual, activist, poet, essayist, and physician. A Young Turk, he was one of the founders of the Committee of Union and Progress and wrote articles with pen name of "Bir Kürd" for the publications such as Meşveret, Kurdistan and Roji Kurd about the East–West dichotomy and Kurdish awakening and nationalism. In his personal publication İctihad he pushed for the westernization of society, feminism, workers rights, liberty, science, secularism, and social liberalism. He was an ideologue of the CUP until 1902, when he became an opponent of the organization he founded as it embraced Turkish nationalism. In 1908, he established the Democratic Party, which merged with the Freedom and Accord Party in 1911. He was briefly active in support of Kurdish independence in the early 1920s before supporting Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's Turkish National Movement.
Cevdet's literary career was defined by his antagonistic relationship with religious conservatives and constant press censorship. Due to his critical historical essays on Islam and Muhammad, he was taken to court several times over charges of blasphemy. He introduced to the Ottoman public Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and the Bahá'í Faith. Several of Cevdet's ideas, by Atatürk's own admission, came to fruition as part of his reforms such as secularism, the shuttering of madrases, and the furthering of women's rights.
Biography
Early life
Abdullah Cevdet was born on 9 September 1869 in Arapgir, Malatya. He was born to a family of Kurdish origin. He would always describe himself as a Turk of Kurdish origin. His father was Hacı Ömer Vasfi Efendi, a clerk of the first battalion in Diyarbakır. After completing his primary education in Hozat and Arapgir, he went to Harput with his family. He graduated from Ma‘mûretülazîz Military Junior High School in 1885. At the age of fifteen, he went to Istanbul to attend the Kuleli Military Medical Preparatory School. He graduated three years later and continued his education in the Imperial School of Medicine.Cevdet was initially a pious Muslim and received a religious education, but was influenced by Western materialistic philosophies which turned him against institutionalized religion. He thought that "although the Muslim God was of no use in the modern era, Islamic society must preserve Islamic principles".
Years in Medical School
During his student years in the Imperial School of Medicine, he was influenced by biological materialism, the ideology which dominated the school. He translated a section of Ludwig Büchner’s work Kraft und Stoff, which greatly influenced him, under the title Fizyolociya-i Tefekkür "Physiology of Contemplation". In the same year, he published Dimâğ on brain functions. In 1890 he prepared the first draft of his work Fünûn ve Felsefe, which attempted to reconcile the ideas of Islamic scholars and biological materialist philosophers. Cevdet published two more books on biological materialism and brain functions, Fizyolociya ve Hıfz-ı Sıhhat-i Dimâğ and Melekât-ı Akliyye in his last year at school, and wrote articles on the same subjects in the magazines Maârif, Musavver Cihan and Resimli Kitab.As Cevdet developed his political beliefs, he identified with the Young Ottomans before him, especially Ali Suavi. On 3 June 1889, he and three of his friends: İbrahim Timo, İshak Sükûti, Mehmed Reşid, founded the Ottoman Union Committee. This society later became the Committee of Union and Progress. The overall goal of Young Turks such as Cevdet was to bring to end the absolutist regime of Sultan Abdul Hamid II. He was arrested several times during his education due to his political activities and was expelled from school for a while. While in medical school he joined the literature scene, and upon the request of Abdülhak Hâmid, he compiled his poems into a book. In these early works published under the name of Ömer Cevdet, the influences of Namık Kemal, Recaizade Mahmud Ekrem, Hâmid and Halid Ziya can be felt. After his first poetry book Hiç, published in 1890, he also published the poetry books Tuluat and Masumiyet.
He eventually completed his medical education in July 1894 and became an ophthalmologist. After finishing school, he practiced in Haydarpaşa Numune Hospital in Istanbul. He was sent to Diyarbakır on a temporary duty in November of the same year due to a cholera epidemic, on the side organizing among those in the city to establish a CUP branch there. He saved Ziya Gökalp from his suicide attempt and initiated him into the CUP. He also took the opportunity to translate Büchner’s Natur und Geist under the pen name Goril.
As an activist
When he returned to Istanbul in 1895, he was arrested on charges of subversion and he was assigned to the ophthalmology department of the Tripoli Central Hospital, which was essentially an exile. However, he continued his work on behalf of the CUP there. After serving one and a half years, he was again imprisoned. When he was released four months later, he learned that he was to be deported to Fezzan, so he fled to France via Tunisia 1897. He was sentenced to life imprisonment in absentia for this.He arrived in Paris in the aftermath of the Mizancı Murad affair, when Murat Bey overthrew Ahmed Rıza as CUP leader, but subsequently returned to the Ottoman Empire after striking a deal with Sultan Abdul Hamid's top intelligence officer Ahmed Celâleddin Pasha. Cevdet went to Geneva and met with Young Turks such as Tunalı Hilmi and Dr. Mehmed Reşit and became close with Ahmed Rıza. Cevdet and Ibrahim Temo would soon cut their ties with the CUP after 1902, as the organization began to advocate a Turkist nationalist policy. For now though, together with İshak Sükûti in Geneva, he published the Osmanlı newspaper, a new CUP organ, in Turkish and French, and wrote articles denouncing autocracy. Plekhanov, Axelrod, and Lenin were also in Geneva at the same time and were busy publishing Iskra. He translated Western works; among the works he translated was Friedrich Schiller's drama William Tell. He later published the preface he wrote for the work as a book titled İki Emel. He also translated Vittorio Alfieri's essay Della Tirannide under the title İstibdâd. In one of the poetry books he published in Geneva, Kahriyât, he included poems written with political aspirations rather than artistic concerns, themed on freedom and patriotism, almost all of which were directed against Abdul Hamid II, accusing him of hostility towards liberty.
Eventually, Abdul Hamid took notice of the dangerous literature Cevdet was publishing. In 1899 Cevdet softened his publications so 72 of his friends imprisoned in Fezzan and Tripoli could be released. The Sultan then offered to buy him out by employing him as chief physician of the Vienna embassy on the condition that he would give up writing political articles and stay away from Istanbul, an offer which he accepted, to much consternation from his Young Turk friends. During this time, although he continued to identify with the sultan's opposition to some extent, he occupied himself more with poetry and publishing books that received interest from Symbolist circles. His poetry was linked with the movement, and he received accolades from leading French authors like Gustave Kahn.
His position was suspended in 1903 after an incident where he slapped the ambassador who informed the palace that he was secretly continuing his political activities. He returned to Geneva and founded the Ottoman Union and Revolution Committee and published the Osmanlı again as the organization's organ. The government organized a false flag operation to extradite him from Switzerland, by claiming his authorship of a pornographic booklet that targeted the sultan, though it was actually published by a government agent. Cevdet was deported from Switzerland, but he was able to move to Egypt.
Egyptian years
From 1904 to the end of his life in 1932, Cevdet published the periodical İctihad and stayed out of politics, writing articles to promote Westernization and secularism. It came under several aliases as the magazine would be interrupted by shuttering: Cehd, İşhâd, İştihâd, Âlem, Eski İçtihad.He moved to Cairo and joined Prince Sabahaddin's Private Enterprise and Decentralization League. He wrote articles in support of the 1906 Erzurum Uprising and called for constitutional monarchy along with the abolition of certain taxes. After the Young Turk Revolution and the return of constitutional monarchy he did not return home immediately, but stayed in Egypt for a while longer until 1910.
In Cairo he sought to reconcile the Eastern and the Western literary traditions. Within the framework of this goal, he translated Shakespeare, Schiller, Hugo, and Byron, as well as Saadi, Rumi, and Khayyam. He believed the Ottoman Empire was backwards and not competitive because of the role of religion in society. In 1908, he translated and published Reinhart Dozy’s two-volume work Essai sur l’Histoire de l’Islamisme under the title Tarih-i İslâmiye. The book, which was critical of Islam and of Muhammed, caused immense controversy upon its release; it was banned and confiscated by the censors in February 1910 and existing copies were thrown from the Galata Bridge after catching the attention of the Sheikh-ul-Islam. Cevdet claimed that he translated the work to allow Muslim historians to correct Dozy's mistakes.
He thanked and met Theodor Herzl for publishing one of his poems in Neue Freie Presse in 1903. After this acquaintance, he started to help Herzl by translating his letters into Turkish.
After 1910
In 1908, he joined the Ottoman Democratic Party which was founded against the CUP.He returned to Istanbul in 1910. He established his own printing house, İctihad Evi, or the Idjtihad House, where he published the Kütüphane-i Ictihad series. His house in Cağaloğlu became something of a salon for intellectuals in the capital. Among those Abdullah Cevdet hosted included Yusuf Akçura, Hasan Âli Yücel, Nazım Hikmet, Mehmet Emin Resulzade, Prof. Karl Süssheim, and Madam Corrine. In 1912, he and Hüseyin Cahit advocated without success for the Latin script be used to write Turkish, which would eventually happen in 1928. He was an advocate for the teaching of biological materialism in schools and for opening schools in the countryside to educate peasants, which would eventually happen in 1940. He emphasized the concepts of citizenship and general will expressed by Rousseau in The Social Contract. Cevdet was subject to political pressure due to his critical stance against the CUP which at this point established a dictatorship, and Turkey's participation in World War I, and was forced to stop writing in 1914. He wrote anonymous editorials in the İkdam for a while.
During the occupation era he was appointed to the General Directorate of Health by the Grand Vizier Damat Ferid Pasha. He was likely the first to advocate for the regulation of sex workers in Turkey, though the discovery of him issuing brothel certificates for prostitutes resulted in his dismissal from his job due to public outrage. He was initially in favor of Turkey becoming a mandate. During the Turkish War of Independence he played a role in the establishment of the Friends of England Association and briefly was active in the Society for the Rise of Kurdistan from 1921 to 1922. He immediately took Ankara's side upon the opening the Grand National Assembly, and worked to provide health services in the provisional government. Due to his pro-British stance during the occupation years and his involvement in Kurdish nationalist organizations, he was banned from state service for life during the Republican period. He spent the rest of his life writing poetry, translating, and publishing İctihad.
Cevdet was put on trial several times because some of his writings were considered blasphemous against Islam and Muhammad. For this reason, he was labelled as the "eternal enemy of Islam" and called "Aduvullah". His most famous court case was due to his defense of the Baháʼí Faith, which he considered an intermediary step between Islam and the final abandonment of religious belief, in his article in İctihad on 1 March 1922.