Ibrahim Sinasi

İbrahim Şinasi was a pioneering Ottoman intellectual, author, journalist, translator, playwright, and newspaper editor. He was the innovator of several fields: he wrote one of the earliest examples of an Ottoman play, he encouraged the trend of translating poetry from French into Turkish, he simplified the script used for writing the Ottoman Turkish language, and he was one of the first of the Ottoman writers to write specifically for the broader public. Şinasi used his newspapers, Tercüman-ı Ahvâl and Tasvir-i Efkâr, to promote the proliferation of European Enlightenment ideals during the Tanzimat period, and he made the education of the literate Ottoman public his personal vocation. Though many of Şinasi’s projects were incomplete at the time of his death, “he was at the forefront of a number of fields and put his stamp on the development of each field so long as it contained unsolved problems.” Şinasi was an early proponent of a constitution for the Empire. Along with his colleague and friend Namık Kemal, Şinasi was one of the foremost leaders of the Young Ottomans, a secret society of Ottoman Turkish intellectuals pushing for further reform in the Ottoman Empire after Tanzimat in order to modernize and revitalize it by bringing it into line with the rest of Europe. Although Şinasi died before their goals for reform came to fruition, the Young Ottomans' efforts directly led to the first attempt at constitutional monarchy in the Empire in 1876, when the short-lived First Constitutional Era ushered in the writing of an Ottoman constitution and the creation of a bicameral parliament. Through his work as a political activist and one of the foremost literary figures of his time, Şinasi laid the groundwork in the minds of the public for contemporary and later reforms in the Ottoman Empire and, later, the modern Republic of Turkey.