ABSTRACT
According to Bernard Lewis, ‘the national revival of the Turks in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has long been recognised as one of the most significant developments in the modern history of Islam’.1 While few would dispute the central argument, namely that the emergence of ‘national’ identity among the Turks (of Turkey) represented a profound transformation, Lewis’s preferred terminology might be misleading. Indeed, how can one speak of the national revival of the Turks when the vast majority had never before exhibited a significant awareness of, or an affinity to, their nationality?2 Turkish national identity had not been lost at some point in the past, only to be revived during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; it had, quite simply, never existed, at least not for the majority of the population.
