A Turkist Scholar: Bursal？ Mehmet Tahir Efendi

There are religion, language and culture throughtout history. But the concept of nationalism emerged after the French Revolution and this is a new concept for human history. In the nineteenth century, the Ottoman State was not a society containing people of different languages and religions.Rapid land losses and minority rebellions have also affected Turks within the Ottoman State. Bursal？ Mehmet Tahir, borned at the end of the 19th century when the world has been reshaped, is a scholar who makes very valuable work about Turkish history by starting from the question that; “Who is a Turk?”. Bursal？ Mehmet Tahir undertook the work to reveal Turks' contributions in science and arts in the past. While Turkish nationalism became identical with Ziya G？kalp and Yusuf Ak？ura; Bursal？ Mehmet Tahir did not take enough attention that he deserve even though he had suggested similar ideas long before and despite of their importance in Turkish cultural life they are almost forgotten. Through our present work we intend to find out these intellectual place among other thinkers in respect to Turkish nationalistic ideology and reveal hidden aspects of their life and works