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53 Gökalp was a prolific social thinker and nationalist intellectual. He published many books, novels, and poems. Gökalp’s works reflected his reactions to and views about the turbulent and tragic developments of his lifetime, most specifically during the last three decades of the Ottoman system, and the Islamist, Ottomanist and the pan-Turkist (Turanist) ideas and ideologies of his time. 54 After grappling with all those different strands of thinking, his intense patriotic upbringing and his experiences in Selanik (Thessalonica), with the nonMuslim Balkan nationalisms veered him toward Turkish nationalism and even pan-Turkism.

Ideals are always created in such critical moments. ”56 He often substantiated his arguments with the German situation in the Napoleonic wars, Japanese experiences of threat in the nineteenth century, Jews in Egypt before the arrival of Moses to save them etc. Indeed, it seemed as if the turbulent times of the 1910s and the 1920s were replete with such calamities for the Turkish people, who at a time of disaster were destined to unearth its own nationalism. He thus firmly believed that the time was ripe for the growth of Turkish nationalism into a full-fledged political ideology or even the “Ideal” of the state.

He fled to Paris soon, where he attended college and earned a degree in political science. He eventually found his way to Crimea, where he started to work as a teacher of history and geography. However, his contacts with the Young Turks continued all along. 41 Akçura’s treatise focuses on the three ways of development suggested since the beginning of Westernization in the Ottoman Empire. He enumerates them as follows. The first is to integrate many nations under the Ottoman sovereignty and create a single amalgam of “Ottoman nation” (Ottomanism).