Süleyman Nazif

Süleyman Nazif (;‎ 29 January 1870 – 4 January 1927) was a Turkish poet and a prominent member of the CUP. He mastered Arabic, Persian, and French languages and worked as a civil servant during the reign of Sultan Abdul Hamid II. He contributed to the literary magazine Servet-i Fünun ("Wealth of Knowledge") until it was censored by the Ottoman government in 1901.

Biography Süleyman Nazif was born in 1870 in Diyarbakır to a Kurdish family, his father was Said Pasha, a poet and historian. He was the brother of renowned Turkish poet and politician Faik Ali Ozansoy. He started his education in his very early years in Maraş. Later, he was schooled in Diyarbakır. In 1879, he joined his father again in Maraş, took private lessons from his father and in French language from an Armenian priest.

Following the death of his father in 1892, Süleyman Nazif worked at several posts in the Governorate of Diyarbakır. In 1896, he was promoted and worked for a while in Mosul. After moving to Constantinople, he started to write articles against Sultan Abdul Hamid II, sympathizing with the ideas and aims of the Young Ottomans. He left Istanbul and settled in Paris in 1897. There he contributed to Meşveret which had been started by Ahmet Rıza and joined the Committee of Union and Progress. However, since he was not very successful in administrative posts, he decided in 1915 to leave public service and return to his initial profession as a writer. Nazif demanded that the convoy be transferred to a safer zone in Mosul but his proposal was ultimately refused. The convoy was eventually massacred. Nazif was critical of Dr. Mehmed Reshid, the governor of Diyarbakir, who was known as the "Butcher of Diyarbakir". Nazif, who stated that Reshid "destroyed through massacre thousands of humans" also wrote about a committee established by Reshid with the objective of providing a 'solution of the Armenian question'. The committee had its own military unit and was called the 'Committee of Inquiry'.

On November 23, 1918, Nazif's article titled Kara Bir Gün (literally: A Black Day) was published in the newspaper Hadisat to condemn the French occupying forces in Istanbul. The article led to the commander of the French forces sentencing Nazif to execution by firing squad. The order was rescinded, however. As a result of a speech he gave on January 23, 1920, at a meeting to commemorate the French writer Pierre Loti, who had lived a while in Constantinople, Süleyman Nazif was forced into exile on Malta by the occupying British military. During his stay of around twenty months in Malta, he wrote the novel Çal Çoban Çal. After the Turkish War of Independence, he returned to Constantinople and continued to write. )

He died of pneumonia on January 4, 1927, and was interred at the Edirnekapı Martyr's Cemetery.