Pan-Turanism

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PAN-TURANISM

Pan-Turanism is an ideology that originated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and propagated a strong cultural attachment among all Turkic peoples. Although pan-Turanism is correlated to pan-Turkism, its adherents differ. While historically pan-Turkism was chiefly confined to the Turks living in the Ottoman Empire and its borderlands, pan-Turanism had broader pretensions. Pan-Turanism aimed at joining all Turkic peoples that claimed descent from Turan, including the Mongols. The name Turan is connected to a mythological plateau in Central Asia. In Avesta the people called Tura were represented as the enemies of the true religion, namely the people who did not accept Zoroastrianism. However, later the term Turan commonly referred to the land north of the Amu Darya River (the Oxus River of antiquity), where the non-Iranians of Central Asia and chiefly the nomadic Turkic peoples lived.

In the late nineteenth century the tsarist empire, by invading the Caucasus and Central Asia, incorporated a vast number of Turkic peoples into its realm. The Russification policy adopted by tsarist Russia in this region caused a number of local elites to promote an alternative to Russian pan-Slavism. However, their activities prior to the First World War were mainly confined to organizing all of Russia's Muslim congresses and the publication of certain periodicals such as Yeni Fuyuzat (New abundance) and Shelale (Cascade) in Baku or Turan in Tashkent.

The growing solidarity among Russia's Turkic peoples was welcomed in the Ottoman Empire, which was suffering from a long-lasting and humiliating decline. Among the leaders of the ruling Committee of Union and Progress in the Ottoman Empire were personalities such as Enver Pasha, who aspired to forge a Turanian empire that would bring Turkic peoples together and result in gains in the Caucasus and Central Asia. The entry of the Ottoman Empire into the First World War was partly motivated by such a desire. The Ottoman propaganda campaign in the First World War was dominated by two distinctive trends of pan-Islamism and pan-Turanism. While pan-Turanism aimed at the Turkic peoples of the Balkan peninsula, the Caucasus, northern Iran, and Central Asia, the pan-Islamist propaganda was still largely directed at the peoples of the Near and Middle East, and even as far as the Indian subcontinent. In Iran and Central Asia, with their diverse ethnic composition, the Ottomans employed a combination of pan-Turanism and pan-Islamism resulted.

With the end of the First World War and the fall of the Ottoman Empire, there were only a handful of political adventurers that still pursued pan-Turanism, among them Enver Pasha, who was killed in 1922 while fighting the Bolsheviks in Central Asia.

In the Republic of Turkey, while local nationalism with pan-Turkish allusions was tolerated and even encouraged, pan-Turanism never became a significant political trend. It was only with the disintegration of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s that the call for unity among the Turkic peoples was once more heard. Although this call was promoted by the cooperation pacts realized among the new independent Turkic republics of the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Turkey, the profound rivalries both on the regional as well as the international level nevertheless hampered any noteworthy achievements.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Atabaki, T. "Recasting Oneself, Rejecting the Others: Pan-Turkism and Iranian Nationalism." In Identity Politics in Central Asia and the Muslim World. Edited by E. J. Zurcher, and W. van Schendel. London: I. B. Tauris, 2001.

Landau, J. M. Pan-Turkism: From Irredentism to Cooperation. London: Hurst, 1995.

Touraj Atabaki

Encyclopedia of Islam and the Muslim World