Abdullah Cevdet

Intellectual and doctor

Abdullah Cevdet Bey was a Kurdish-Turk intellectual, activist, poet, essayist, and physician. A Young Turk, he was one of the founders of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) and wrote articles with pen name of "Bir Kürd" for the publications such as Meşveret, Kurdistan and Roji Kurd about the East–West dichotomy and Kurdish awakening and nationalism.

In his personal publication İctihad he pushed for the westernization of society, feminism, workers rights, liberty, science, secularism, and social liberalism.

He was an ideologue of the CUP until 1902, when he became an opponent of the organization he founded as it embraced Turkish nationalism.

In 1908, he established the Democratic Party, which merged with the Freedom and Accord Party in 1911. He was briefly active in support of Kurdish independence in the early 1920s before supporting Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's Turkish National Movement.