Conceptualizing Nation: Perspectives of Mehmet Akif Ersoy and Ziya Gökalp

This work analyzes the Islamist and Turkist conceptualization of nation during the Second Constitutional Era through the written works of Mehmet Akif Ersoy and Ziya Gökalp. In this sense, the articles, poems, letters, and books written by these two late Ottoman intellectuals as well as their recorded speeches reviewed chronologically in order to analyze the changes of their conceptualizations of nation. The understandings of nation of the selected intellectuals were compared through three constitutive elements gathered from various definitions of nation as the political community, the sovereignty, and the common values. The main argument of this work is both Akif’s and Gökalp’s understandings of nation had seen some substantial changes in time in parallel to the existing sociopolitical conditions of Turkey. This being the case, it can be said that both Akif and Gökalp had conceptualized nation through a sovereign entity based on certain common values.