Born in Medgidia to an ethnic Tatar Muslim family, Gemil completed primary and secondary studies in his native town, and graduated from the Faculty of History and Philosophy at the University of Iași (1965), where he later received a PhD.
[1][2] A native speaker of Crimean Tatar and Romanian, Gemil has studied Ottoman and Modern Turkish, Turkmen, and Azerbaijani, as well as having a grasp of English, French, Uzbek, Kazakh and Kyrgyz.
[1] In the months following the 1989 Revolution, Gemil joined the new provisional governing authority, CPUN, created around the National Salvation Front.
[2] After the 1990 legislative election, he represented Constanța County in the Chamber, sitting with the Turkish Democratic Union (UDTR) group, serving on the Committee for Education, Science, Youth and Sport, as well as on the Committee on Human Rights, Religious Affairs and National Minority Issues.
[2] He was among the founding members of the Democratic Union of Turco-Islamic Tatars of Romania (UDTTR), and its first president, being reelected for the same constituency in the 1992 suffrage (after which Gemil was Secretary of the Education Committee).