The concept of Turkish identity in Şehbenderzade Filibeli Ahmed Hilmi

This study is a discussion of the life and thoughts of Şehbenderzade Filibeli Ahmed Hilmi, who was a writer and thinker of the time of the Second Constitutional era, on Turkish identity. Some of his works have been published in Latin alphabet and several masters and Ph.D. thesis have already been done. However there have not been any studies which were comprised of his national thoughts. While surveying his works, we noticed that he places a special emphasis on the notion of Turkish identity. This became an important factor in choosing the direction of our studies. Furthermore we thought, on the basis of the articles by Ahmed Hilmi, that we would better understand the social and philosophical framework of the Second Constitutional era which constitutes an important period in our political and philosophical history. We also felt that there had been a necessity to comment on a lot of information regarding Ahmed Hilmi?s life both in the translations of his works and in the researches conducted about him, and, under the light of the documents that we uncovered the first time, we unraveled many benighted parts of his life.The first section of our study is devoted to Şehbenderzade Filibeli Ahmed Hilmi?s life, his works, his school of thought, and the philosophical structure of his time. The second section deals with Ahmed Hilmi?s works in which he discusses his thoughts on Turkish identity. In the third section, taking into consideration the conditions of his time, the main principles of the thoughts on Turkish identity which we attemp to frame using his words are discussed, and his view of the state of the modern Turkish identity, the causes of its decline, and his suggestions to reverse the situation are presented.In our researches, we used Ahmed Hilmi?s works and his articles in the newspapers and magazines which he published. We also used other resources, whose references are given, and made a comparison between our findings regarding the historical course of the thoughts on Turkish identity. To obtain infirmation on the life of our thinker, we mainly referred to the Otttoman archives.Although the reference to our work dates back to a century ago, it still has current traits in terms of its problems and findings.