Abstract
This chapter is dedicated to the formation of Fuad Köprülü as a late Ottoman and early republican intellectual. Köprülü’s early historical work on the literary traditions of the Turks following their Islamization shows how his evolution as a scholar concurred with his turn toward Turkish nationalism in the Young Turk period. In this phase of his career he was strongly influenced by French sociology and philosophy, as well as, in more immediate ways, by his early mentor Ziya Gökalp, a leading intellectual-activist of the nationalist movement. Attention is also given to Köprülü’s ambivalent relationship to the Turkish History Thesis, which was formulated in the early 1930s and marked the Kemalist regime’s attempt to increase its control over the contested question of Turkish history and identity. The chapter shows how Köprülü’s historiography and his nationalist and secularist politics remained closely connected.