Pan-Turkism

European works such as Joseph de Guignes's Histoire générale des Huns, des Turcs, des Mogols, et des autres Tartares occidentaux, &c. avant et depuis Jésus-Christ jusqu'à present (Paris, 1756–1758) and Arthur Lumley David's A Grammar of the Turkish Language with a Preliminary Discourse on the Language and Literature of the Turkish Nations (London, 1832) paved the way for a debate on Turkish peoples living under different administrations and their common ethnic bonds. David rejected the lumping together of all Turkic tribes under the rubric of Tatars, and proposed the generic name Turk for all these peoples; this made many intellectuals in the Ottoman Empire and other Turkic states reevaluate their approach to their peoples' ethnic origins. A French translation of the work was submitted to the Ottoman Sultan Mahmud II in 1833, and was widely read by Ottoman intellectuals and linguists. A Polish convert, Mustafa Celâleddin Pasha (Constantine Borzecki), who had fled to the Ottoman Empire after the unsuccessful 1848 revolution, liberally used de Guignes's work in preparing his own study, Les turcs anciens et modernes (Constantinople, 1869). Mustafa Celâleddin Pasha maintained that Turks and Europeans were from the same "Touro-Aryan" race. Works of Arminus Vámbéry, who traveled widely in Central Asia and underscored the common racial "Turanian" characteristics of the Turkic peoples, and Léon Cahun's Introduction á l'histoire de l'Asie (Paris, 1896) presented the "Turanian" race as one that brought civilization to Europe; this strongly influenced many Turkish intellectuals. Vámbéry should be credited as the first non-Turkish savant who, in 1865, entertained the idea of a Turkic "empire extending from the shore of the Adriatic far into China." Many Ottoman intellectuals paid close attention to these new ideas. It is interesting to note that in the prefatory article of the Young Ottoman journal Hürriyet (established 1868), the Turks were portrayed as "a nation in whose medreses Farabis, Ibn Sinas, Ghazzalis, Zamakhsharis propagated knowledge." Another leading Young Ottoman, Ali Suavi, underscored the common ethnic origins of the Turkic groups in his journal Mukhbir (1878). In an essay on Khiva he criticized the Ottoman policy toward this Central Asian khanate and described its people as "Muslim Turks who belong to our religion, nation, and ethnic family." In 1876 Süleyman Pasha prepared the first volume of his "World History" to be used as a textbook at the Royal Military Academy; in it he underscored the common bond uniting the Turkic peoples by drawing heavily on de Guignes's work. Beginning in 1877 history textbooks referred to the Turkish ancestry of the Ottomans, and the Ottoman press developed a keen interest in Turks living in Central Asia and the Caucasus, publishing many articles on them.