Şinasi used his newspapers, Tercüman-ı Ahvâl and Tasvîr-i Efkâr, to promote the proliferation of European Enlightenment ideals during the Tanzimat period, and he made the education of the literate Ottoman public his personal vocation.

Through his work as a political activist and one of the foremost literary figures of his time, Şinasi laid the groundwork in the minds of the public for contemporary and later reforms in the Ottoman Empire and, later, the modern Republic of Turkey.

[8] At a young age, he established a close relationship with the famed reformer Mustafa Reşid Pasha, who helped him earn a government grant to study finance in Paris.

He advocated strongly for an increasing Westernization of the Ottoman Empire and also for "encyclopedism"; he believed that the public should be educated in a wide variety of subject areas, so his pieces frequently included references to figures, such as Plato or Newton, and elevated concepts such as natural law.

[10] After joining the reformist secret society Young Ottomans in 1865 and going into exile in Paris, Şinasi transferred the management of the Tasvir-i Efkâr to his employee and colleague Namık Kemal.

[14] In the first issue of his first newspaper, Şinasi wrote, "Since people who live in a society have a duty of loyalty to various official obligations, it necessarily follows that a part of their rights consists of the dissemination of verbal and written ideas to promote the interests of the motherland.

He declared, in his writing, that "my nation is humankind, and my motherland is the earth" (Ottoman Turkish: ملتم نوع بشر در وطنم روی زمین, romanized: Milletim nevʿ-i beşerdir, vaṭanım rûy-i zemîn).

Both elite and folk literature incorporated elements of the Islamic tradition, but popular writing drew heavily on the Central Asian roots of the Ottomans.

[19] Şinasi altered the paradigm of writing within the Ottoman Empire by simplifying the language, intentionally engaging directly with an increasingly literate public, and introducing new, more European, genres to the masses.

[3] He attempted to forge a pure Turkish (öz Türkçe), through the elimination of words borrowed from other languages in order to make the content and style of his work more appealing and easier to comprehend.

[20] He also simplified the Arabic-based Ottoman Turkish script, combining the nashk and kufi calligraphy, but he "only succeeded in reducing the more than five hundred signs used since Muteferrika first cut his type to 112.".

It was printed as a serial, in parts called Tefriqa in his newspaper Tercüman-ı Ahvâl in response to the growing popularity of theater in the Ottoman Empire.

European acting troupes from London, Paris, St. Petersburg, and other major cities increased the demand for plays amongst the people of the Middle East, particularly in urban centers like Tbilisi, Istanbul, and Cairo.

In writing this play, as was typical of his artistic style, Şinasi employed a Turkish language that was closer to the vernacular, rather than the vocabulary and structures previously used by the cultural elite.

[23] In the play, a poor young man became infatuated with a beautiful woman, but according to Muslim tradition, grooms were unable to see the faces of their brides until after the marriage contract was finalized.