page_title: Mehmet Fuat Köprülü
section_title: The Making of a Nationalist Intellectual
hierarchical_section_title: Mehmet Fuat Köprülü / Biography / The Making of a Nationalist Intellectual
caption_attribution_description: English: Mehmet Fuat Köprülü, Turkish Minister of Foreign Affairs and Deputy Prime Minister. Photo dates from his early career in the 30s.
context_page_description: Mehmet Fuat Köprülü, also known as Köprülüzade Mehmed Fuad, was a highly influential Turkish sociologist, turkologist, scholar, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Deputy Prime Minister of the Republic of Turkey. A descendant of the illustrious noble Albanian Köprülü family, whose influence in shaping Ottoman history between 1656 and 1711 surpassed even that of the House of Osman, Fuat Köprülü was a key figure in the intersection of scholarship and politics in early 20th century Turkey.
context_section_description: From 1910 to 1913, Fuat Köprülü taught Ottoman language and literature at various high schools in Istanbul, including the prestigious Galatasaray High School. Fuat Köprülü initially opposed the literary movement known as New Language, which sought to simplify the Turkish language, and wrote articles for the Servet-i Funun magazine using a literary style comprehensible only to the most learned of Ottoman intellectuals. Fuat Köprülü changed his writing style and politics during the Balkan Wars. On February 6, 1913, the day after the Bulgarian army attacked the Ottoman lines in the outskirts of Istanbul, Turk Yurdu magazine, a bastion of simplified Turkish prose and Turkish nationalism, published the first of many popular and patriotic essays by the 23-year-old Fuat Köprülü: “Umit ve Azim” (Hope and Determination), “Hicret Matemleri” (Mourning Migration), “Turk’un Duasi” (A Turk's Prayer), and “Turkluk, Islamlik, Osmanlilik” (Turkishness, Islamness, Ottomanness).
  Toward the end of 1913, Fuat Köprülü published his seminal and widely lauded academic article, “Turk Edebiyati Tarihinde Usul” (The Method in Turkish Literary History), in Bilgi Mecmuasi. He argued that historians should not only research kings, viziers, commanders and scholars, but ordinary people as well. Fuat Köprülü believed that in addition to public and official records, historians should also study art, archeology, literature, language, folklore and oral traditions. His plea for historians to study social history was so unique and ahead of its time that the Annales school in France, famous for embracing a similar approach in the journal Annales d’histoire economique et sociale, did not emerge until 1929, a full 16 years after the publication of "Turk Edebiyati Tarihinde Usul". One month after the publication of the article, Fuat Köprülü was appointed Professor of the History of Turkish Literature at Istanbul University. He was only 23 years old.
  Fuat Köprülü continued his scholarly research and academic publications through the years, eventually culminating in his magnum opus, Turk Edebiyatinda Ilk Mutasavviflar (First Mystics in Turkish Literature), in 1918, a book that focused on two Turkish mystics and folk poets, Ahmet Yesevi and Yunus Emre. His Turk Edebiyati Tarihi (History of Turkish Literature), published in 1920, was another seminal book that traced the history of Turkish literature through millennia. In 1923, at the age of 33, Fuat Köprülü was appointed Dean of the Faculty of Literature at Istanbul University. In a short book entitled Turkiye Tarihi (The History of Turkey) published that same year, he reviewed the history of the Turks from ancient Central Asia to the modern Ottoman Empire, continuing the approach he pioneered in his study of Turkish literature.
caption: An image of Mehmet Fuat Köprülü in his early days
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