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Young Turks

Not to be confused with Young Ottomans.
This article is about the reform movement within the Ottoman Empire. For other uses, see Young Turks (disambiguation).
Flag of the Young Turk Revolution
A lithograph celebrating the Young Turk Revolution featuring the sources of inspiration of the movement, Midhat Pasha, Prince Sabahaddin, Fuad Pasha and Namık Kemal, military leaders Niyazi Bey and Enver Pasha, and the slogan "Liberty, equality, fraternity" (hürriyet, müsavat, uhuvvet in Turkish, ελευθερία, ισότης, αδελφότης in Greek)

The Young Turks (Ottoman Turkish: ژون تركلر, romanized: Jön Türkler, also كنج تركلر Genç Türkler) formed as a constitutionalist broad opposition-movement in the late Ottoman Empire against the absolutist régime of Sultan Abdul Hamid II (r. 1876–1909). The most powerful organization of the movement, and the most conflated, was the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP, founded in 1889), though its goals, strategies, and membership continuously morphed throughout Abdul Hamid's reign. By the 1890s, the Young Turks were mainly a loose and contentious network of exiled intelligentsia who made a living by selling their newspapers to secret subscribers.

Included in the opposition movement was a mosaic of ideologies, represented by democrats, liberals, decentralists, secularists, social Darwinists, technocrats, constitutional monarchists, and nationalists, to name a few. Despite being called "the Young Turks", the group was of an ethnically diverse background; in addition to Turks, Albanian, Aromenian, Arab, Armenian, Azeri, Circassian, Greek, Kurdish, and Jewish members were plentiful.[a][1][2][3][4] Besides membership in outlawed political committees, other avenues of opposition existed in the ulama, Sufi lodges, and masonic lodges. By and large, Young Turks favored taking power away from Yıldız Palace in favour of constitutional governance. Many coup d'état attempts associated with Young Turk networks occurred during the Hamidian era, repeatedly ending in failure.

In 1906, the Paris-based CUP fused with the Macedonia-based Ottoman Freedom Society under its own banner. The Macedonian Unionists prevailed against Sultan Abdul Hamid II in the 1908 Young Turk Revolution.[5] With this revolution, the Young Turks helped to establish the Second Constitutional Era in the same year, ushering in an era of multi-party democracy for the first time in the country's history.[6] However, in the wake of events which proved disastrous for the Ottoman Empire as a body-politic (such as the 31 March Incident of April 1909, the 1912 coup, and the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913) the country fell under the domination of a radicalized CUP following the 1913 Raid on the Sublime Porte. With the strength of the constitution and of parliament broken, the CUP ruled the Empire in a dictatorship, which brought the Empire into World War I in October 1914. The genocides of 1915 to 1917 against Ottoman Christians were masterminded within the CUP, principally by Enver Pasha, Talat Pasha, Bahaeddin Şakir, and others.

The term Young Turk is now used to characterize an insurgent trying to take control of a situation or of an organization by force or political maneuver,[7] and various groups in different countries have been designated "Young Turks" because of their rebellious or revolutionary nature.


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  5. ^ Hanioğlu 1995, p. 12.
  6. ^ Akçam 2006, p. 48.
  7. ^ "young turk". Dictionary.com (10th ed.). HarperCollins Publishers. Retrieved 27 January 2017. [...] an insurgent in a political party, especially one belonging to a group or faction that supports liberal or progressive policies [...] any person aggressively or impatiently advocating reform within an organization.

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