He was arrested and expelled from his country several times due to his political activities and lived in Europe, in cities including Vienna, Geneva and Paris.

[14] The overall goal of early Young Turks such as Cevdet was to bring to end the absolutist regime of Sultan Abdul Hamid II.

[16] Instead he promoted his secular ideas in his magazine İctihat, where he published articles in support of several policies, which later were part of Atatürk's Reforms like the shutting down of the madrases or the furthering of women's rights.

[19] His most famous court case was due to his defense of the Baháʼí Faith, which he considered an intermediary step between Islam and the final abandonment of religious belief, in his article in İctihat on 1 March 1922.

[21]"Ranging from the New Testament to the Qur’ān, from Plato to Abū al-‘Alā’ al-Ma’arrī, he created an eclectic philosophy, reconciling science, religion, and philosophy with one another",[22] and in order to specifically build an "Islamic materialism" (he was a translator of Ludwig Büchner, one of the main popularizers of scientific materialism at the end of the 19th century), he would use medieval mystical authors like Al-Maʿarri, Omar Khayyam and Rumi, and try to find correspondence in their works with modern authors such as Voltaire, Cesare Lombroso, Vittorio Alfieri and Baron D'Holbach.

[23] His "final step was to present modern scientific theories ranging from Darwinism to genetics as repetitions of Islamic holy texts or derivations from the writings of Muslim thinkers", trying to fit the Qur'an or ahadith with the ideas of peoples like Théodule Armand Ribot or Jean-Baptiste Massillon.

"[24] Disillusioned by the ulema's lukewarm response to his role as "materialist mujtahid" (as he would term it), he turned to heterodoxy, the Bektashi (he called "Turkish Stoicism") and then Baháʼísm.