10 Facts About Young Turks

Young Turks was a political reform movement in the early 20th century that favored the replacement of the Ottoman Empire's absolute monarchy with a constitutional government.

Young Turks were a heterodox group of secular liberal intellectuals and revolutionaries, united by their opposition to the absolutist regime of Abdulhamid and desire to reinstate the constitution.

The Young Turks favored a reinstatement of the Ottoman Parliament and the 1876 constitution, written by the reformist Midhat Pasha.

Young Turks became a truly organized movement with the Committee of Union and Progress as an organizational umbrella.

The unity among the Young Turks that originated from the Young Turk Revolution began to splinter in face of the realities of the ongoing dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, especially with the onset of the Balkan Wars in 1912.

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The Young Turks needed to modernize the Empire's communications and transportation networks without putting themselves in the hands of European bankers.

However, the Young Turks soon recognized the difficulty of spreading this idea among the deeply religious Ottoman peasantry and even much of the elite.

The Young Turks thus began suggesting that Islam itself was materialistic.

Positivism, with its claim of being a religion of science, deeply impressed the Young Turks, who believed it could be more easily reconciled with Islam than could popular materialistic theories.

Many of the original Young Turks rejected this idea, especially those that had formed the Freedom and Accord Party against the CUP.