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Abdullah Cevdet
Abdullah Cevdet (Ottoman Turkish: ‫ ;ﻋﺒﺪﷲ ﺟﻮﺩﺕ‬Turkish:
Dr.
Abdullah Cevdet Karlıdağ; 9 September 1869 – 29
November 1932) was a Kurdish-Ottoman intellectual and Abdullah Cevdet
physician in the Ottoman Empire.[2][3][4][5][6] He was one
of the founders of the Committee of Union and Progress
(CUP) and wrote articles with pen name of "Bir Kürd" ("A
Kurd")[7][8] for the newspapers such as Kurdistan and Roji
Kurd about Kurdish awakening and nationalism.[9][10][11] In
1908, he joined the Democratic Party which merged with
the Freedom and Accord Party in 1911.[12] He was also a
translator, radical free-thinker, and an ideologist of the CUP
until 1908.[13]

Contents
Biography
Religion and science
Death
Notes Born 9 September 1869
Arapgir, Ottoman
References
Empire
Died 29 November 1932
Biography (aged 63)
Istanbul, Turkey
The son of a physician, and himself a graduate from the Resting Merkezefendi
Military College in Istanbul as an ophthalmologist, Cevdet, place Cemetery, Istanbul
initially a pious Muslim, was influenced by Western
Nationality Kurdish, Turkish
materialistic philosophies and was against institutionalized
religion, but thought that "although the Muslim God was of Citizenship Ottoman Empire, then
no use in the modern era, Islamic society must preserve Turkey
Islamic principles".[14] He published the periodical İçtihat Education Medicine
from 1904–1932, in which articles he used to promote his
modernist thoughts. He was arrested and expelled from his Alma mater Military College in
country several times due to his political activities and lived Constantinople
in Europe, in cities including Vienna, Geneva and Paris.[13] Occupation Physician, writer and
intellectual
His poetry was linked with the Symbolist movement in
France, and he received accolades from leading French Movement CUP (1895-1909),[1]
authors like Gustave Kahn.[15] Committee of Union
and Progress
He thanked and met Theodor Herzl for one of his poem (1889-1908),
published in Neue Freie Presse in 1903. After this Democratic Party
acquaintance, he started to help Theodor Herzl in (1908-1911)

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translating letters of him into Turkish.[16]

The overall goal of early Young Turks such as Cevdet was to bring to end the absolutist regime
of Sultan Abdul Hamid II. Cevdet and four other medical students (including Ibrahim Temo) at
the Military Medical Academy in Istanbul founded the society of Ottoman Progress in 1889,
which would become the "Committee of Union and Progress" (CUP).[17] Initially with no
political agenda, it became politicized by several leaders and factions and mounted the Young
Turk Revolution against Abdul Hamid II in 1908. However, Abdullah Cevdet and Ibrahim Temo
cut their ties with the CUP soon after 1902, as the CUP began to advocate a Turkist nationalist
policy.[18] Instead he promoted his secular ideas in his magazine İçtihat, where he published
articles in support of several policies, which later were part of Atatürk's Reforms like the
shutting down of the madrases or the furthering of women's rights.[19] In 1908 he joined the
Ottoman Democratic Party (Ottoman Turkish: Fırka-i İbad; Turkish: Osmanlı Demokrat
Fırkası) which was founded against the CUP.[12] In 1912 he and Hüseyin Cahit advocated
without success for the Latin script to be introduced in the Ottoman Empire.[20]

Cevdet was tried several times in the Ottoman Empire because some of his writings were
considered as blasphemy against Islam and Muhammad. For this reason, he was labelled as the
"eternal enemy of Islam" (Süssheim, EI) and called "Aduvullah" (the enemy of God).[21] 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
İçtihat on 1 March 1922.[22] For a brief period between 1921 and 1922 he was active for Kurdish
independence.

Religion and science

Cevdat wanted to fuse religion and materialism, that is, under the influence of Victor Hugo and
Jean-Marie Guyau, discard God but keep religion as a social force. In one poem he says:

We are pious infidels; our faith is that

Being a disciple of God is tantamount to love.

What we drink at our drinking party is

The thirst for the infinite.[23]

"Ranging from the New Testament to the Qur’ān, from Plato to Abū al-‘Alā’ al-Ma’arrī, he
created an eclectic philosophy, reconciling science, religion, and philosophy with one
another",[24] and in order to specifically build an "Islamic materialism" (he was a translator of
Ludwig Büchner, one of the main popularizers of scientific materialism at the end of the 19th
century), he would use medieval mystical authors like Al-Maʿarri, Omar Khayyam and Rumi,
and try to find correspondence in their works with modern authors such as Voltaire, Cesare
Lombroso, Vittorio Alfieri and Baron D'Holbach.[25] His "final step was to present modern
scientific theories ranging from Darwinism to genetics as repetitions of Islamic holy texts or
derivations from the writings of Muslim thinkers", trying to fit the Qur'an or ahadith with the
ideas of peoples like Théodule Armand Ribot or Jean-Baptiste Massillon. He found that "the
Qur’ān both alluded to and summarized the theory of evolution."[26]

Disillusioned by the ulema's lukewarm response to his role as "materialist mujtahid" (as he
would term it), he turned to heterodoxy, the Bektashi (he called "Turkish Stoicism") and then

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Baháʼísm. Being unfruitful in that regard as well, he'd spent his last efforts as purely
intellectual.[27]

Death

Left alone in his final years, Abdullah Cevdet died at the age of 63 on 29 November 1932. His
body was brought for religious funeral service to Hagia Sophia, which was still used as a mosque
at that time. However, nobody claimed his coffin, and it was expressed by some religious
conservatives that he "did not deserve" Islamic funeral prayer. Following an appeal of Peyami
Safa, a notable writer, the funeral prayer was performed. His body was then taken by city
servants to the Merkezefendi Cemetery for burial.[28]

Notes
1. A Biographical Dictionary of Albanian History, Robert Elsie, 2012, Page 436
2. Jongerden, J. (2012). Social Relations in Ottoman Diyarbekir, 1870-1915: Volume 51 of The
Ottoman Empire and its Heritage. Brill. ISBN 978-9004225183.
3. The Kurds. Vienna: Austrian Federal Ministry of the Interior. 2015. ISBN 978-3-9503643-6-1.
4. https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/download/article-file/845182
5. https://www.tomlinsons-online.com/p-25084621-competing-ideologies-in-the-late-ottoman-
empire-and-early-turkish-republic.aspx
6. Fevzi Bilgin & Ali Sarihan, Understanding Turkey's Kurdish Question, Lexington Books
(2013), p. 13
7. Klein, Janet (2011). The Margins of Empire: Kurdish Militias in the Ottoman Tribal Zone.
Stanford University Press. p. 275. ISBN 9780804775700.
8. Jongerden (2012), p.169
9. Bajalan, D. (2021). The Cambridge History of the Kurds: The Kurdish Movement and the
End of the Ottoman Empire, 1880–1923. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
p. 104-137. doi:10.1017/9781108623711.005 (https://doi.org/10.1017%2F9781108623711.0
05). S2CID 235541303 (https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:235541303).
10. "Xoybûn'un diplomasisi" (https://www.ozgurpolitika.com/haberi-xoybunun-diplomasisi-2632).
Yeni Ozgur Politika (in Turkish). 22 June 2020. Retrieved 11 August 2021.
11. Ağcakulu, Ali (7 November 2019). "Jön Kürtler" (https://ahvalnews.com/tr/kurtler/jon-kurtler).
Ahval (in Turkish). Retrieved 11 August 2021.
12. "Archived copy" (https://web.archive.org/web/20150213102917/http://www.akarhuseyin.com
/?page_id=514). Archived from the original (http://www.akarhuseyin.com/?page_id%3D514)
on 13 February 2015. Retrieved 2015-04-12.
13. Arslanbenzer, Hakan (7 June 2019). "Abdullah Cevdet: Eccentric, strange and
misunderstood" (https://www.dailysabah.com/portrait/2019/06/07/abdullah-cevdet-eccentric-
strange-and-misunderstood). Daily Sabah. Retrieved 24 April 2020.
14. Şükrü Hanioğlu, "Blueprints for a future society: late Ottoman materialists on science,
religion, and art" in Elisabeth Özdalga, "Late Ottoman Society: The Intellectual Legacy",
Routledge (2005), p. 41
15. Şükrü Hanioğlu, "Blueprints for a future society: late Ottoman materialists on science,
religion, and art" in Elisabeth Özdalga, "Late Ottoman Society: The Intellectual Legacy",
Routledge (2005), p. 46
16. Yaşar Kutluay, "Siyonizm ve Türkiye", Bilge Karınca (2013), p. 291
17. Jongerden (2012), p.69
18. Jongerden, (2012), p.70

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19. Landau, Jacob M. (1984). Atatürk and the Modernization of Turkey. Boulder: Westview
Press. p. 37. ISBN 0865319863.
20. Landau (1984), p. 135
21. Karl Süssheim, “Abd Allah Djewdet’, Encyclopedia of Islam (EI1; Supplement),
Leiden/Leipzig, 1938, 55–60.
22. Hanioğlu, M. Şükrü (1995). The Young Turks in Opposition (https://books.google.com/book
s?id=fU7azFR3AqcC&q=young+turks+in+opposition). p. 202. ISBN 978-0195091151.
23. Şükrü Hanioğlu, "Blueprints for a future society: late Ottoman materialists on science,
religion, and art" in Elisabeth Özdalga, "Late Ottoman Society: The Intellectual Legacy",
Routledge (2005), p. 47
24. Şükrü Hanioğlu, "Blueprints for a future society: late Ottoman materialists on science,
religion, and art" in Elisabeth Özdalga, "Late Ottoman Society: The Intellectual Legacy",
Routledge (2005), p. 49
25. Şükrü Hanioğlu, "Blueprints for a future society: late Ottoman materialists on science,
religion, and art" in Elisabeth Özdalga, "Late Ottoman Society: The Intellectual Legacy",
Routledge (2005), p. 52
26. Şükrü Hanioğlu, "Blueprints for a future society: late Ottoman materialists on science,
religion, and art" in Elisabeth Özdalga, "Late Ottoman Society: The Intellectual Legacy",
Routledge (2005), pp. 55-56
27. Şükrü Hanioğlu, "Blueprints for a future society: late Ottoman materialists on science,
religion, and art" in Elisabeth Özdalga, "Late Ottoman Society: The Intellectual Legacy",
Routledge (2005), pp. 59-60
28. "Abdullah Cevdet" (https://web.archive.org/web/20110918233619/http://yazarmezar.com/me
zar-sayfa-459.html) (in Turkish). Yazar Mezar. Archived from the original (http://yazarmezar.
com/mezar-sayfa-459.html) on 18 September 2011. Retrieved 18 October 2011.

References
▪ Şerif Mardin, Jön Türklerin Siyasi Fikirleri, 1895–1908 (https://web.archive.org/web/2011071
7210331/http://www.iletisim.com.tr/iletisim/book.aspx?bid=267), Istanbul 1964 (1992),
221–50.
▪ idem, Continuity and Change in the Ideas of the Young Turks, expanded text of a lecture
given at the School of Business Administration and Economics Robert College, 1969,
13–27.
▪ Frank W. Creel, The program and ideology of Dr. Abdullah Cevdet: a study of the origins of
Kemalism in Turkey (unpublished PhD thesis), The University of Chicago, 1978.
▪ M. Şükrü Hanioğlu, Bir siyasal düşünür olarak Doktor Abdullah Cevdet ve Dönemi, Istanbul,
1981.
▪ idem, Bir siyasal örgüt olarak Osmanlı Ittihad ve Terakki Cemiyeti ve Jon Türklük, Istanbul,
1986.
▪ idem, The Young Turks in Opposition (https://www.amazon.com/Opposition-Studies-Middle-
Eastern-History/dp/0195091159), Oxford University Press, 1995.
▪ Necati Alkan, "The eternal enemy of Islam: Abdullah Cevdet and the Baha'i Religion" (http://j
ournals.cambridge.org/action/displayIssue?jid=BSO&volumeId=68&issueId=01), Bulletin of
the School of Oriental and African Studies, 68:1, 2005, 1-20.

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