Young Turks

2 Pages 398 Words

People are almost never happy with what they have. They are always wanting something different, and when they get what they think they want, they change their minds and want something else. This is an ongoing cycle in many cultures. The Middle Eastern society is no exception. Countless reform movements and revolutions mark the history of this region.
In the early twentieth century, one of these reform movements arose. This group of revolutionaries were coined the “Young Turks”. However similar, this group differed in many ways from earlier movements. The Young Turks were generally well educated, they came from jobs as civil servants, and also a great number were students from the University in Istanbul. The earlier groups such as the Young Ottomans, and the Tanzimat, were from upper class families in the aristocracy, this is definitely not true of the Young Turks.
The Young Turks also wanted a return of the Constitution and Parliament. This is also true of the Young Ottomans, but not of the Tanzimat. A major difference between these three movements is their emphasis on Islam. The Young Turks had by far the least emphasis on Islam. They were more focused on a Turkish nation which was muslim, than being muslim first and Turkish second. The Young Turks also envisioned an empire of only Turkish speaking muslims, and not of an empire encompassing all the Ottoman lands and other races and ethnic groups which were encompassed therein.
Even though it wasn’t their original concern, the movement of the Young Turks is the first real step toward creating a unified muslim nation. In my opinion, they realized they weren’t able to control all the different lands which had been conquered by the Ottoman Empire, and they didn’t want to. They wanted to create a Turkish nation which only included Turkish speakers. They did not intend this to be a geographic boundary of the nation. The Young Turks planned on the nation...