Nâmık Kemâl

Namık Kemal (born in Tekirdağ in 1840, died on the island of Chios in 1888) was a Turkish writer, journalist and political activist of the Ottoman Empire, who wrote in Ottoman Turkish during the late Tanzimat period. He is considered a central figure of the Young Ottomans, the group that pushed for a constitutional system in place of the sultan's absolute rule. His lasting importance lies in giving shape to the idea of loyalty to the nation, rather than to the sultan alone, an idea that had barely existed in the empire before him.

The son of an astrologer working at the sultan's palace, he worked in the government's Translation Office at a young age and later wrote for newspapers. His essays on political and social reform cost him his post, and in 1867 he went into exile in Paris. There, and later back in Constantinople, he ran publications that criticised autocracy and called for a parliament. His play Vatan yahut Silistre, in which an Ottoman soldier defends a Bulgarian town against the Russians out of love for his homeland rather than religious or dynastic loyalty, had such an impact that he was banished a second time, to Cyprus, where he spent three years.

The first Ottoman Parliament was set up in 1876, but Sultan Abdul Hamid II soon suspended it. Kemal opposed this move and was sent away from the capital for a third time, to the island of Chios, where he died in 1888.

His thinking combined admiration for British and French parliamentary institutions with criticism of a Westernisation he regarded as superficial. He is credited, though the claim should be treated with caution, with being the first to use the phrase 'unity of the Muslims' in 1872, a core idea of pan-Islamism. He also wrote about the inferior position of women in Ottoman society. His legacy is considerable: his concept of the fatherland helped shape Turkish national identity, and according to tradition Mustafa Kemal Atatürk said that he had been inspired by Kemal's writings as a young man.