(1876-1924)
Ziya Gokalp was an ethnic Kurdish intellectual born in Diyarbakir. He considered himself a Turk and ironically became one of the founders of modern Turkish nationalism. His seminal study The Principles of Turkism (1920) defined a nation as being based on upbringing, not ethnicity. According to Gokalp, a nation was not a racial, ethnic, geographical, political, or voluntary group but a group of people who had gone through the same education and received the same acquisitions in language, religion, morality, and aesthetics. His work probably helped influence Mustafa Kemal Ataturk to try to assimilate the Kurds into what was then the still aborning Turkish nation.
Historical Dictionary of the Kurds. Michael M. Gunter.