"The world is my true ration Its people are my nation."

Humanism is an abiding tradition in Turkish culture. Before adopting Islam and settling in Anatolia, the Turks had already acquired anthropocentric attitudes as a result of the vicissitudes they experienced in long periods of exodus and during relatively brief sojourns in Asia. Changes of locale, shifting cultural orientation, new religious allegiances, wars with many nations and communities, struggle for survival in the face of natural disasters helped to create among the Turks a sense of life´s impermanence as well as faith in human endurance against the ravages of a hostile world. Contact with diverse peoples diminished their ethnocentricity and gave them a faculty for latitudinarian relations. Cataclysmic social and cultural changes instilled in them a sense of reliance on man rather than institutions.

The seeds of humanism which the Turks brought with them found fertile ground in Anatolia, where Sufism (Islamic mysticism) had firmly established itself. During their conversion to Islam and assimilation of its cultural concomitants, many Turks embraced the Sufi doctrine as well as its humanist concepts which were congenial to their pre-Islamic humanistic tradition.

http://www.turkishculture.org/print.php?ID=270