What is "turanism"

Turanism, Pan-Turanianism or Pan-Turanism is a pseudoscientific nationalist political and cultural movement which proclaims an ethnic/cultural unity for disparate people who are supposed to have a common ancestral origin in Central Asia, using the Iranian term Turan as the designation for this place.

This political ideology originated in the work of the Finnish nationalist and linguist Matthias Alexander Castrén, who championed the ideology of Pan-Turanism — the belief in the racial unity and future greatness of the Ural-Altaic peoples. He concluded that the Finns originated in Central Asia (in the Altai Mountains), and far from being a small, isolated people, they were part of a larger polity that included such peoples as the Magyars, Turks, Mongols, etc. It implies not merely the unity of all Turkic peoples (as in Pan-Turkism), but also the alliance of a wider Turanid race, also known as the controversial Uralo-Altaic race, believed to include all peoples speaking " Turanian languages". Like the term Aryan, Turanian is used chiefly as a linguistic term, equivalent to Ural-Altaic linguistic group. Although Turanism is a political movement for the union of all Uralo-Altaic peoples, there are different opinions about inclusiveness. In the opinion of the famous Turanist Ziya Gökalp, Turanism is for Turkic peoples only, as the other Turanian peoples (Finns, Hungarians, Japanese) are too different culturally. So he narrowed Turanism into Pan-Turkism. The idea of the necessity of "Turanian brotherhood/collaboration" was borrowed from the "Slavic brotherhood/collaboration" idea of Panslavism.

According to the description given by Lothrop Stoddard at the time of first world war: