Between Empire and Nation-State
but Islamic. They saw themselves as a Muslim elite bringing scientific en-
lightenment to the masses in the guise of a liberal and progressive Islam,
which had analogies to positivism: unlike the Dönme, the Young Turks
“did not attempt to reconcile Islam with modern sciences and ideas, and
they developed a positivist-materialist ideology by deliberately misinter-
preting Islamic sources.”^41 Indeed, “for the Young Turks religion was to be
the stimulant and not the opiate of the masses.”^42
Along with diverging in regard to morals, ethics, and religiosity, another
difference between most Dönme and CUP ideology was that the latter
was elitist and racist. It promoted phrenology in the service of proving
theories about the hierarchies of races.^43 As adherents of biological ma-
terialism, the Young Turks absorbed western European ideas about race,
particularly the Frenchman Gustave Le Bon’s obsession with protecting
the superior race (in his case, white European) and Edmond Demolins’s
inquiry into the alleged superiority of the Anglo-Saxons.^44 After Japan’s
victory over Russia in 1904 , leading thinkers such as Yusuf Akçura pro-
moted Turkish nationalism based on race. In an influential piece entitled
“U ̈ç Tarz-ı Siyaset,” (Three Political Systems), submitted to the extreme
nationalist Young Turk journal Türk, based in Cairo, Akçura argued that
the best choice among Ottomanism, Islamism, and Turkism, was the lat-
ter; it was best to “pursue a Turkish nationalism based on race [ırk].”^45
The term “Turk” replaced “Ottoman,” and skepticism about the loyalty
of “parasitical” Christians and non-Turkish Muslims was expressed in the
main Young Turk publications. Young Turks wholeheartedly embraced
theories of race, although they rearranged the hierarchies to place Turks
on top.^46 By 1906 , Turkish nationalism based on the pseudoscientific race
theories of Europe had become the guiding ideology of the CUP.^47 These
would be the traits of the official ideology of the early Turkish Republic,
and carrying “Jewish” rather than “Turkish blood” would ultimately be
used against the Dönme.
While the ideology and leading activists in the CUP are well identi-
fied, less known is the role that Sufi brotherhoods and Freemasons also
played in oppositional politics in that era aiding the CUP and favoring
the overthrow of Abdülhamid II. Chief among the radical Sufi brother-
hoods are the Bektaşi and Mevlevi orders, to which Karakaş and Kapancı
Dönme, respectively, adhered. As Haniogˇlu notes, “some Sufi orders who
were discriminated against by the sultan and his confidants in favor of
other rival orders became ardent supporters of the Young Turks.”^48 He