Making a Revolution, 1908 of the Third Army (such as Enver Pasha), made up the bulk of the revolu-
tionaries. The heart of the revolution of 1908 was Macedonia.
The revolution was spearheaded by the CUP, first organized in 1889
by students at the Royal Medical Academy in Istanbul, who were heav-
ily influenced by biological materialist ideology, and later spread to Paris
and Cairo, and then to cities throughout the Ottoman Empire, including
Salonika. Until 1902 , the CUP was an umbrella organization for most
groups aiming to assassinate Sultan Abdülhamid II or dethrone him in a
coup d’état.^37 One of the first to join was Dr. Nâzım, the director of the
municipal hospital in Salonika (a building designed by Hamdi Bey’s mu-
nicipal architect Poselli) and scion of a leading Kapancı Dönme tobacco
merchant family.^38 Dr. Nâzım was one of the few to continue in the CUP
from its founding to the revolution of 1908 , at which time he had become
one of the organization’s two main ideologues.
Although Dönme such as Dr. Nâzım would play a leading ideological
role in the CUP, and there are echoes in Young Turk writings of the em-
phasis on progress and science and their harmony with Islam in Dönme
school curriculums and journals, it is important to stress the differences
between the original Young Turk ideology and the opinions expressed by
most Dönme. Dr. Nâzım was about as representative of the Dönme as
Leon Trotsky was of Russian Jews. Young Turk ideology was far more ex-
treme, and the two diverged. Moreover, the ideology of the CUP leaders
and its members, Dönme and others, were not necessarily the same. Dif-
ferent groups supported the overthrow of the sultan for diverse reasons.
Yet this major difference is often overlooked, leading to gross mischarac-
terization of the Dönme and confusing them with Jews.
Unlike most Dönme, the Young Turks before 1908 were marked by a
materialist, positivist (replacing religion with science), social Darwinist
(survival of the fittest), and anti-religious political theory, which opened
Young Turks to accusations of atheism. Reflecting positivist leanings, the
CUP’s Paris-based official publication, Meşveret (Consultation), was dated
according to the positivist French revolutionary calendar, which began on
January 1 , 1789 , and not according to the Muslim calendar.^39 At the same
time, the CUP used Islamic rhetoric and references in their writing, call-
ing Abdülhamid II an atheist.^40 Although they seemed to promote Islam
in public, in private they disparaged it, and they hoped it would eventu-
ally play no public role. Şükrü Haniogˇlu argues that they used Islam in
order to persuade the public to follow their program, which was anything