This study investigates the historical foundations of the Turkish-Islamic synthesis, a threefold discourse combining religion, nationalism, and modernization in the form of Westernization, which was systematically indoctrinated by nationalist intellectuals in Turkey during the 1970s. The argument of the study is that Young Ottomans were the first voices of the discursive orientation to unite and synthesize all three elements, as part of the quest to construct a modern Ottoman identity to save the state in the last period of the Ottoman Empire. At the official level, this discourse gradually became institutionalized and officialized during the reign of Sultan Abdul Hamid II with the expansion of modernization policies aimed at transforming society and the state and formed the basis for state policies in many areas. To this end, the writings and statements of Young Ottomans are analyzed in detail, followed by a comprehensive evaluation of the policy implementations in the Ottoman Empire during the reign of Abdül Hamid II and their reflections on education, also including the Sultan's own expressions, in terms of ideological attempts to articulate Islam, Turkishness, and Westernization.

The ideological divergence within the bureaucracy during the modernization process in the last period of the Ottoman Empire is mostly reduced to three different ideological orientations composed of Westernism, Islamism, and Turkism in the relevant literature. However, claiming that this model, which is formulated regarding the classical works of Gökalp and Akçura, could not adequately explain the actual ideological division between the bureaucrats of the period, this study aims to propose a new theoretical framework based upon an alternative tripartite model. For this, Anthony D. Smith’s infamous theoretical explanation about the ideological-strategic differences between the bureaucratic elites of various societies, which rise as a response to the experience of modernization, is re-evaluated and reformulated concerning the intellectual contribution revealed in classical and contemporary studies on the ideological and intellectual orientations within the late Ottoman elites. Accordingly, the first ideological orientation within the elite groups that fundamentally stood against any attempts in the name of modernization and advocated retaining the Islamic tradition could be entitled “traditionalism.” The second one, which could be named “Westernism” (Westernist modernism), asserted that the only way to capture Western civilization was following the same modernization path as the West, contrary to the previous orientation. “Conservatism” (conservative modernism), the third and final ideological orientation, made a distinction between the fields of culture and civilization and idealized to implement a conservative version of modernization by synthesizing Islamic tradition with the technical developments of the contemporary Western world.