Abdullah Cevdet

Who was Abdullah Cevdet?

Abdullah Cevdet, Ottoman Turkish: عبدالله جودت was an Ottoman intellectual and a medical doctor by profession of Kurdish descent. He was also a poet, translator, radical free-thinker and an ideologist of the Young Turks who led the Westernization movement in the Ottoman Empire from 1908 until 1918.

Cevdet was influenced by materialistic philosophies of the West and antagonistic towards institutionalized religion. He published articles on socio-religious, political, economic and literary issues in the periodical İctihad, which he founded in 1904 in Geneva and used to promote his modernist thoughts. He was arrested and expelled from his country several times due to his political activities and lived in Europe.

The overall goal of Young Turks such as Cevdet was to bring to end the regime of Sultan Abdülhamid II. For this purpose Cevdet and four other medical students at the Military Medical Academy in Istanbul founded the secret "Committee of Union and Progress" in 1889. Initially with no political agenda, it became politicized by several leaders and factions and mounted a revolution against Abdülhamid II in 1908. However, Abdullah Cevdet was not politically involved in the CUP but promoted his secular ideas until his death.