A comparative analysis of the concepts of Turkism, Islamism, Westernism in Ziya Gökalp and Ahmet Ağaoğlu's nationalism understanding

Many thinkers and many different approaches have played a role in the formation of Turkish nationalism. Especially during the transition to the nation-state structure in the foundation years of the Republic of Turkey, the influence and contention of these different approaches can be seen. The conflict was mainly about whether to adopt Western civilization as a whole or the parts needed from the West. Examining the different perspectives of Ziya Gökalp and Ahmet Ağaoğlu as representatives of different approaches in this period will also give an idea about their understanding of nationalism in modern Turkey. The aim of this study is to shed light on the understanding of nationalism of the period by revealing the ideas, similarities and differences between Gökalp and Ağaoğlu on Turkism, Islamism and Westernism. In order to reach the aforementioned findings, first of all, the studies in the literature on Gökalp and Ağaoğlu's conceptions of nationalism were reviewed in detail and the ideas in the two thinkers' own works were compared and analyzed. The results revealed that both thinkers saw modernization as inevitable, that they had close ideas on Turkism, but that they differed on Islamism, and that the main divergence emerged on Westernism; the reason for this was that while the element of culture was at the center of Gökalp's understanding of nationalism, the Westernism was at the center of Ağaoğlu's approach.