After the 1908 Young Turk Revolution that reinstated constitutionalism in the Ottoman Empire, he adopted the pen name Gökalp ("celestial hero"), which he retained for the rest of his life.

As a sociologist, Ziya Gökalp was influential in the negation of Islamism, pan-Islamism, and Ottomanism as ideological, cultural, and sociological identifiers.

[2] Influenced by contemporary European thought, particularly by the sociological view of Émile Durkheim,[3] Gökalp rejected both the Ottomanism and Islamism in favor of Turkish nationalism.

[6] His nationalist ideals espoused a de-identification with Ottoman Turkey's nearby Arab neighbors, instead advocating for a super-national Turkish (or pan-Turkic) identity with "a territorial Northeast-orientation [to] Turkic peoples".

[7] Mehmet Ziya was born in Diyarbakır of the Ottoman Empire on 23 March 1876 to Muhammad Tefvik Bey and Zeliha Hanım.

[8] Diyarbakır was a "cultural frontier", having been ruled by Arabs and Persians until the 16th century, and featuring "conflicting national traditions" among the local populations of Turks, Kurds, and Armenians.

[14] This cultural environment has often been suggested to have informed his sense of national identity; later in his life, when political detractors suggested that he was of Kurdish extraction, Gökalp responded that while he was certain of patrilineal Turkish racial heritage, this was insignificant: "I learned through my sociological studies that nationality is based solely on upbringing.

[16] There, he attended veterinary school and became involved in underground revolutionary nationalist politics[8] for which he served ten months in prison.

[26] He began publishing a small weekly newsletter, Küçük Mecmua, which slowly became influential and led to contributions in the major daily newspapers of Istanbul and Ankara.

[29] Ziya Gökalp was married, and his daughter was named Hürriyet as a reference to the revolution of the Committee of Union and Progress in 1908.

[33] A well-known newspaper columnist and political figure, Gökalp was a primary ideologue of the Committee of Union and Progress.

[35] His 1923 The Principles of Turkism, published just a year prior to his death, outlines the expansive nationalist identity he had long popularized in his teachings and poetry.

While this broad conception of "Turkishness", of pan-Turkism, often embraced what Gökalp perceived to be ethnic commonality, he did not disparage other races, as some of his pan-Turkist successors later did.

[39] For Gökalp the end of the Ottoman Empire marked the end of Pan-Islamism for Turks, who then should concentrate on nationalism but without rejecting their Islamic heritage, which was an integral part of the Turkish identity, nor Western modernity, which he deemed necessary for Turks to compete with other major geopolitical powers, ultimately for Gökalp Turkification, Islamization and Westernization were all legitimate interconnected phenomena as "these three components of the Turkish nation were both complementary and distinct from each other", as Ahmet Seyhun writes before summarizing Gökalp's position: "By Turkifying their culture, the Turks would return to their ancestral ethnic norms.

"[40] Alp Eren Topal, a scholar from Bilkent University, while trying to showcase the originality of Gökalp, and not as someone who only "repeated" European ideas, also talks of the much-neglected influence of Sufism on the thinker: being "a big influence throughout his education and growth", he lauded its "military" lexicon and came to admire the solidarity found in the Sufi orders, "particularly the Naqshbandiyya", which not only had spiritual influence, but also a role in the modernization of the Ottoman Empire, while he also appreciated the metaphysics of medieval Andalusian thinker Ibn 'Arabi, saying that his idealism, as system of thought, was superior to that of George Berkeley or Immanuel Kant – who, he says, recycled ideas already known to Ibn 'Arabi, but without taking them too far –, and, far from being "Gnosticism-mysticism or pantheism", his ideas were pretty contemporary, resonating with those of moderns like Alfred Fouillée, Jean-Marie Guyau, Nietzsche, and William James, concluding that "in all its progression idealist philosophy has not surpassed 'Arabî’s absolute and perfect idealism".

[42] His poetry departs from his more serious sociological works, though it too harnesses nationalist sentiment: "Run, take the standard and let it be planted once again in Plevna / Night and day, let the waters of the Danube run red with blood...."[43] Perhaps his most famous poem was his 1911 Turan, which was first published in Genç Kalemler and served to complement his Turanist intellectual output: "For the Turks, Fatherland means neither Turkey, nor Turkestan; Fatherland is a large and eternal country--Turan!

[46] His thought figured prominently in the political landscape of the Republic of Turkey, which emerged from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire around the time of his death.

[48] Some readings of Gökalp contend, to the contrary, that his Turanism and pan-Turkism were linguistic and cultural models,[48] ideals from which a post-Ottoman identity could be derived, rather than a militant call for the physical expansion of the Republic of Turkey.

[citation needed] Although he often held quite different ideas, Arab nationalist Sati al-Husri was profoundly influenced by Gökalp.