Kemal's father, Haci Ahmet Rıza Effendi, was a Turk from the village of Kalfat in Çankırı who ran a candle making enterprise.

This visit to Europe likely gave Kemal his liberal convictions which the autocratic government of Abdul Hamid II could not tolerate.

Because of his opposition to the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), the group which had carried out the revolution, he spent most of the following decade opposed to the government.

Upon his return, he appeared before the sultan and accepted Abdul Hamid's compliments and royal moneys; This was criticized by the Unionist press.

[9] Kemal, now editor-in-chief of the liberal İkdam newspaper while also teaching political history at the Faculty of Literature at the Darülfünun, began to write editorials heavily criticizing the CUP.

In The Times dated 9 March 1909, on speculating that he would contest the seat of the late Minister of Justice Refik Bey, Kemal was described as amongst the "leading men of letters in Turkey, an excellent speaker, and personally very popular".

[13] After a speech he gave to a crowd at the Darülfünun on 7 April 1909, the day after the murder of Hasan Fehmi, students and faculty marched to the Sublime Porte to demand the arrest of the murderers; These events began the 31 March Incident, a political crisis that served to almost dismantle the Ottoman constitutional order and restore it as an autocracy under Abdul Hamid II.

Ali Kemal had to flee to Paris again as Unionist forces dispatched from Salonica were about to enter Istanbul to restore order.

They already had a son Lancelot Beodar who died in Switzerland aged 18 months after contracting whooping cough, and a daughter named Celma.

Kemal stayed with his mother-in-law Margaret Brun (née Johnson) and with his children, first in Christchurch, near Bournemouth, and then in Wimbledon, London, until 1912, when he returned to the Ottoman Empire after that year's anti-Unionist coup d'état.

With the Unionists ascendant after the Raid of the Sublime Porte, Kemal was briefly arrested and again sent into exile, this time to Vienna, though he returned to the Empire three months later.

This, combined with his past opposition to the Unionists, made him anathema to the nationalist movement gathering strength in Ankara and fighting the Turkish War of Independence against the attempts between Greece and the Entente to partition Anatolia.

However, after the Great Offensive and the Liberation of İzmir, he wrote an article titled "Our Goals Were and Are One" (Turkish: Gayelerimiz Bir İdi ve Birdir) on 10 September 1922, and said that he was wrong for opposing the Nationalists.

Kemal condemned the events of the Armenian genocide and inveighed against the Unionist chieftains as the authors of that crime, relentlessly demanding their prosecution and punishment.

In an 18 July 1919 issue of the Alemdar, Ali Kemal Bey wrote: "... our Minister of Justice has opened the doors of prisons.

"[20] Due to his opposition to the Turkish National Movement, Ali Kemal was among the four Darülfünun faculty members compelled to resign by students in March 1922 for being insufficiently patriotic.

[21] On 4 November 1922, Kemal was kidnapped from a barber shop at Tokatlıyan Hotel in Istanbul, and was carried to the Anatolian side of the city by a motorboat en route to Ankara for a trial on charges of treason.

As described by Nureddin personally to Rıza Nur, who with İsmet Pasha (İnönü) was on his way to Lausanne to negotiate peace with the Allies, his corpse was hanged with an epitaph across his chest which read, "Artin [an Armenian name] Kemal, traitor to religion and homeland".

For a long time, It was unknown where he was buried due to the lack of a tombstone or any sign on his grave, but the burial location was determined in 1950.

He returned to Turkey after the death of Atatürk and was admitted—with the personal approval of President İsmet İnönü—into the Turkish Diplomatic Service, serving twice as its Permanent Under-secretary in the 1960s and as ambassador to London from 1964 to 1966 and again from 1966 to 1972.

His wife and her brother were killed when an unidentified ASALA militant opened fire on his car while he was serving as ambassador in Madrid in 1978.