Organizational Transformation of the CUP, 1889-1902

Abstract

Abstract The weft of the fabric of the Young Turk movement was its distinct ideology. During the CUP’s formative phase, this positivist, social Darwinist, and biological materialist dogma was conspicuous. Later, as various groups gathered beneath the CUP banner, the motivating ideology had to be submerged, and evidence for it was barely visible, as if veiled by a mist. Today only a careful reader able to ferret meaning from between the lines will discern that this philosophy continued to lead during the later phase of the CUP. Intellectual members came to the CUP already knowledgeable about its ideological basis. An entire generation having become imbued with western ideas while attending college in the Ottoman Empire had embraced this philosophy, so fundamental to the original Young Turks. It is misleading, therefore, to study the “lists of detrimental individuals” prepared by Ottoman ambassadors. Because evidence of support for the Young Turks cannot be found in the highly censored Ottoman press, one might easily conclude that every intellectual was an admirer of the sultan there are so many praises of the sovereign. For instance, a person who praised the sultan lavishly in a domestic journal expressed his enmity only after he fled to Egypt and became a participant in the Young Turk movement.