İbrahim Şinasi

İbrahim Şinasi (born in Istanbul on 5 August 1826 – died there on 13 September 1871) was a pioneering Ottoman intellectual — journalist, translator, playwright and newspaper editor — author of The Wedding of a Poet (1859) and founder of the newspapers Tercüman-ı Ahvâl and Tasvîr-i Efkâr. ^{1 2} He used his newspapers to spread Enlightenment ideas during the Tanzimat and made the education of the literate public his personal vocation; he was one of the foremost leaders of the Young Ottomans. ¹

Şinasi was born in Istanbul's Cihangir quarter; the sources split on his birth year (1824, 1826 or 1827 are all given by researchers), his friend Ebüzziya Tevfik stated 1826, and two document-grade sources support 1826, but no document fixes the exact day of 5 August. ^{2 1} His father, an artillery captain, died in one of the Russo-Turkish wars; raised by his mother and relatives, he took a clerkship at the Armory while studying Arabic, Persian and French, and came close to the reformer Mustafa Reşid Pasha, who secured him a government grant to study finance in Paris. ¹ In Paris he studied mathematics, science and history, fell in love with literature, knew Lamartine and Renan, joined the Société Asiatique and translated French works into Ottoman Turkish. ¹

Returning in 1853 he served on the Educational Committee, was dismissed, reinstated and dismissed again in 1863 — probably for journalistic criticism of the government and "European" ideas; the day before his second dismissal he had written for the principle of "no taxation without representation". ¹ In journalism he co-founded Tercüman-ı Ahvâl and then, in 1862, Tasvîr-i Efkâr, the first truly influential Ottoman newspaper, writing in a journalistic Turkish close to the spoken language of average Ottomans. ¹ Joining the secret Young Ottomans in 1865 he went into Paris exile and handed Tasvîr-i Efkâr to Namık Kemal; he returned in 1869, lived as a recluse in financial need, opened a printing house, and died of a brain tumour on 13 September 1871. ¹

His works include Tercüme-i Manzume (1859), verse translations from La Fontaine, Lamartine, Gilbert and Racine; Şair Evlenmesi, The Wedding of a Poet (1859), a one-act comedy satirising arranged marriages arranged through middlemen and the pretensions of self-styled intellectuals, serialised in 1860; Durub-i Emsal-i Osmaniye (1863), the first book of Turkish proverbs; and Müntahabat-ı Eş'ar (1863). ¹ At his death he was working on a large Turkish dictionary and on simplifying the Ottoman script. ¹

This section sets out positions as reported in the sources; it is not a verdict by the museum.

Influenced by the Enlightenment, Şinasi treated freedom of expression as a fundamental right and declared that state actions were not the government's concern alone; his famous line "my nation is humankind, and my motherland is the earth" was inspired by the close of Victor Hugo's Les Burgraves. ¹ The sources credit his literary and political work with laying the groundwork, in the public mind, for the constitutional attempt of 1876 that came after his death. ¹

On his faith: none of the consulted articles gives any religion for him, and Wikidata's only religion value is the generic item Islam — a single structured-data value naming no school. ^{1 2 3} His Société Asiatique membership, Enlightenment advocacy and Young Ottoman politics are intellectual positions, not a school attestation, so under the doubt rule his faith is recorded as unknown. ¹

• The defined source entities cited above, recorded in data/source/.
• Revisions of this article must be dated, and must name the source that changed each fact.