Download PDF | ( Edinburgh Studies On The Ottoman Empire) Ayfer Karakaya Stump The Kizilbash Alevis In Ottoman Anatolia Sufism, Politics And Community Edinburgh University Press (2020)
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Acknowledgements
This project has lasted much longer than I ever imagined it would. It was a fixture of my life for nearly two decades, from its initial research phase through its first rendition as a dissertation in 2008 and its final expansion and transformation into this book. It was made possible by contributions from a multitude of people, all of whom, I am afraid, I am unable to mention here by name. A very special thanks goes to my former supervisor, Cemal Kafadar, who has profoundly shaped my thinking about history with his well-rounded erudition, nuanced understanding of the Ottoman world in its wider context, and sense of historical empathy.
I owe him several debts of gratitude for his inspiring guidance, trust in my work and ever-appreciated friendship. I am equally indebted to Carter Findley, my first mentor in the field, who will always serve as a model of assiduous and meticulous scholarship. A heartfelt thanks also goes to the late Sinasi Tekin. The individualised Ottoman language classes that I took with him during the early stages of my research proved to be a lifesaver as I was entering the polyglot territory of Alevi documents and manuscripts. In addition, I am grateful to Ahmet Karamustafa for generously sharing with me his vast expertise in Sufism and his precious insights into AleviBektashi history over the years.
Much of the research for this book would not have been possible were it not for the many Alevi dedes and ocakzades who opened their private archives and imparted information and traditions to me concerning their family histories. I am eternally grateful to them and to all other members of the Alevi community who hosted and guided my husband and me during my field trips, helped me acquire copies of documents and manuscripts, and generously shared their knowledge regarding various aspects of Alevi ocaks.
Among them I should particularly note the late Hasan Cevik Dede, Bektas Keskin Dede, Mehmet Ekber Cevik, Htiseyin Keskin and Hiiseyin Cahit Karginer, all from Antep; Hiiseyin Dogan Dede, Hayri Dogan Dede, Abuzer Giizel Dede, Mustafa Alkan (Asik Ozeni) and Kazim Acar from Adiyaman; the late (Kiiciik) Tacim Bakir Dede, the late Mehmet Yiiksel Dede, Abuzer Erdogan Dede, Veyis Erdogan Dede, Asaf Kogdag and Mehmet Ocak from Maras; the late Ali Riza Kargin Dede and Esref Dogan from Malatya; Ahmet Mutluay Dede and Hayrettin Kaya from Elazig; Hamza Ozyildirim Dede and Ali Ozg6z Dede from Erzincan; Halil Oztiirk, Demir Durgun, Mustafa lyidoSan and Kelime Ata from Sivas; Mustafa Aygiin Dede, Celebi Eken Dede, Haydar Altun Dede, Mustafa Oksel and Hiiseyin Karsu from Amasya; the late Muharrem Yanar and Abdiilkadir Sel Dede from Tokat; Galip Dedekargino$lu, Izzettin Doan, Nurcemal Mola, [brahim SinemillioSlu, Muharrem Ercan Dede and Kamil Oksel, who currently reside in Istanbul, and the late Muharrem Naci Orhan, also from Istanbul; Htiseyin Dedekarginoglu Dede, Hamdi and Hayriye Karginer, who currently reside in Ankara; Ismail and Aysel Dogan, who currently reside in Izmir; and many others whom I cannot acknowledge due to economy of space.
A special thanks also goes to my friend and colleague Ali Yaman and to the late Mehmet Yaman Dede; early on in my research process they both generously shared with me documents and manuscripts from their own libraries, which they had collected from their family members and members of other Alevi ocaks.
Numerous other colleagues and friends contributed to this work with their time and labour. Among them I should gratefully acknowledge Himmet Taskémiir and Abdullatif al-Khaiat, who many times over the years provided assistance to me in deciphering documents in Ottoman Turkish and Arabic. I also received help from Nima Shafaieh and Shantia Yarahmadian with some Persian documents and passages. Aimee Dobbs and Shahin Mustafayev helped me acquire a copy of a book from the library of the Academy of Sciences in Baku, and Richard McGregor was kind enough to share with me his copy of the manuscript containing Murtada al-Zabidi’s Raf* niqgab. Afet Dadashova transcribed some pages for me from Cyrillic into the Latin alphabet. Derrick Wright went over the entire manuscript, editing its language.
I would like to extend my heartfelt gratitude to all of them. I am also indebted to the following teachers, colleagues and friends who in different ways and to varying extents helped me along the way: Andras Riedlmayer, Wolfhart Heinrichs, Bedriye Poyraz, Mark Soileau, Helga Anetshofer, Hakan Karateke, Ozer Ergenc, Zeynep Ertug, [han Basg6z, Edouard Méténier, Irene Markoff, Hiilya Tas, Rtiya Kilig, Hiilya Canbakal, Amelia Gallagher, Ali Akin, Abdullah Bilgili, Can Delice, Erdem Cipa, Ethel Sara Wolper, Abir Yousef, Hiiseyin Abiba, Ayhan Aydin, Nabil al-Tikriti and Levent Mete. I apologise to anyone whom I may have inadvertently omitted.
At different stages of this project, I received financial assistance from a number of institutions and foundations, including the American Research Institute in Turkey, the Kirkland Fellowship and the Whiting Dissertation Fellowship from Harvard University, the National Endowment for Humanities and Koc University’s Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations. I would also like to acknowledge the financial support of my department and the School of Arts & Sciences of the College of William & Mary in Virginia. Staff of the Vakiflar Genel Miidiirltigiti Arsivi in Ankara (The Archive of the General Directorate of Foundations), among them especially Burhan Toy, and of the Basbakanlik Osmanl: Arsivleri (The Ottoman Archives of the Prime Minister’s Office) in Istanbul greatly facilitated my research in those archives. I also made extensive use of the collections and interlibrary loan services of Widener Library at Harvard University, ISAM (Center for Islamic Studies) and Boazici University libraries in Istanbul, and the library of the College of William & Mary. I thank all these institutions and their staff for their support, as well as the fellows at William & Mary Center for Geospatial Analysis who prepared the maps. Finally, I would like to thank the series editor Kent Schull and the editorial staff at Edinburgh University Press, including Nicola Ramsey and Eddie Clark, for their expertise, professionalism and cooperation.
No words of appreciation would suffice to express my gratitude to my family. My parents, Melek (Dolar) Karakaya and Delil Karakaya, have always been the greatest source of emotional support and motivation for me in my educational pursuits. They were the ones who inadvertently sparked the initial fire for this project and supplied me with first-hand information on several issues. Their presence and prayers made the writing of this book so much more meaningful than it would have been otherwise. Thanks also to my brothers Abbas Karakaya and Mehmet Ali Karakaya, to my late sister Aysel Karakaya and to my sister-in-law Sibel Tatar for their constant encouragement whenever I needed reassurance and for their help in practical matters. My daughters, Ezgi and Bahar, literally grew up with this book as if it were a third sibling in need of constant undue attention. With their cheerful presence, they made this painful and seemingly unending process of reading, writing and editing much more bearable, and infused my life with a sense of balance. This book, for whatever it is worth, owes the most to my husband Laine Stump, who unswervingly stood by me during this very long journey. I have relied on him in more ways than I can even count.
Introduction
I am aware that there is an inherent tension in suggesting that we should
acknowledge our position while taking distance from it, but I find that tension
both healthy and pleasant. I guess that, after all, I am perhaps claiming that legacy of intimacy and estrangement.
— Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past:
Power and the Production of History
On 5 October 2002, a grand performance called Binyilin Tiirkiisii — The Saga of the Millennium as its organisers translated it — took place in one of the largest indoor stadiums in Istanbul. It was organised by the European Federation of Alevi Associations, bringing together 1,500 baglama players ranging in age from seven to seventy, several hundred semah performers and dozens of soloists, most from different parts of Turkey and Europe, but also several from Australia and North America. Every effort was made to publicise the event, parts of which were also broadcast live on a few national television channels in Turkey.
The performance was set up as a stylised Alevi religious ceremony known as a ‘cem’, in which the ritual dance of semah is performed by groups of men and women, and mystical poems (deyis or nefes) are recited, accompanied by the music of the baglama, the sacred lute.! However, the performance’s sheer size and splendour, its cosmopolitan venue and its inclusion of diverse traditions of music and dance from around the world, as well as its organisers’ concerted effort to reach as wide an audience as possible, set The Saga of the Millennium in stark contrast to traditional Alevi cems, which took place in a village setting with close-knit congregations that were strictly closed to the non-initiated. Alevis would hold their cems at night in utmost secrecy to avoid the state authorities and their Sunni Muslim neighbours who viewed them with suspicion because of their non-conformity to shari‘a-centred normative Islam. While most Alevis live in urban centres and lead secular lives today, with their Alevi heritage more a cultural than a religious affiliation, their community identity is still deeply rooted in a shared sense of being a group persecuted for its beliefs. These collective memories of oppression and resistance were enacted throughout The Saga of the Millennium, turning the performance into a celebration of the Alevis’ cultural resilience.”
The forefathers of the modern-day Alevis were the Kizilbash (T. Kizilbas), whose story is at the centre of this book.* To the extent that the Kizilbash are familiar to historians outside the field of Turkish-Ottoman studies, they are known as the devoted Anatolian followers of Shah Isma‘il (1487-1524) — the hereditary shaykh of the Safavi Sufi order and the founder of the Safavid dynasty — who played a key role in the establishment of the Safavid state in 1501 but whose non-normative teachings and rituals would be quickly abandoned in favour of legalist Imami Shi‘ism, which the new state adopted as its official creed.*
The Kizilbash uprisings against the Ottoman state in the sixteenth century and the many waves of Kizilbash persecution,° are also more or less common knowledge for those acquainted with the basics of the Sunni Ottoman and Shi‘i Safavid rivalry that defined the early modern Middle East.° What is less recognised is that while Kizilbashism in Safavid Persia assimilated into mainstream Imami Shi‘ism over the course of a few generations, it survived in Ottoman Anatolia as a distinct identity and confession despite a hostile political and religious environment.’ The Kizilbash, today commonly known as Alevis, constitute the second largest faith community in modern Turkey, making up about 15 per cent of the country’s population, with smaller pockets or related groups in neighbouring countries, especially in the Balkans.*
Existing scholarship in the main views Kizilbashism through two distinct but overlapping frameworks. The first of these, more prevalent within the field of Turkish-Ottoman studies, treats Kizilbashism as an undifferentiated strain within the hazy category of Turkish folk Islam. It points to Turkmen tribal groups, with their largely oral practices and strong Central Asian heritage in the form of shamanism, to account for nonmainstream Kizilbash practices and beliefs.’ In the fields of Islamic and Iranian studies, on the other hand, the tendency is to bracket Kizilbashism with other popular religio-political movements that proliferated in the late medieval Irano-Turkic world.
These movements are perceived as reincarnations of the so-called extreme Shi‘i groups (Ghulat) associated with the initial party of ‘Ali who purportedly divinised him.'° Despite some differences, there is much that is common in the two approaches. Most importantly, both of them relegate Kizilbashism to the world of a timeless syncretism that blended Islam with various foreign elements rooted in some obscure, distant past. As such, neither of them pays sufficient attention to the immediate historical context that spawned the Kizilbash milieu, nor do they have much to say about the period after the early sixteenth century, when the Kizilbash transformed from a proselytising, revolutionary movement into a quietist religious order of closed communities.!! The present work, in addition to offering an alternative framework for the study of Kizilbash origins, also charts this process of transformation, drawing on a recently surfaced corpus of documents and manuscripts generated within the Kizilbash/Alevi milieu.
Combining these internal sources with their conventional literary and archival counterparts, this book recounts how during this period Kizilbash communities developed an elaborate socio-religious organisation centred on a number of charismatic family lineages known as ocaks (lit. hearths). Through the case study of the Alevi ocak network in eastern Anatolia, the following chapters trace the historical roots of the ocak-centred socio-religious organisation of the Kizilbash/Alevi communities to the cosmopolitan Sufi milieu of late medieval Anatolia and neighbouring regions, and account for its evolution roughly up to the nineteenth century when the ocaks were increasingly incorporated into the institutional framework of the kindred Bektashi order.
Just a few decades earlier, neither a public performance such as The Saga of the Millennium nor a book attempting to explore Alevi history from an internal perspective based on sources from the private archives of ocak families would have been conceivable. What made both possible was the Alevi cultural revival of the late 1980s and the early 1990s, which brought an unprecedented visibility to the once isolated and guarded Alevis. Having come into being under the long-term pressures of rural-urban migration during the 1950s and 1960s that progressively shifted the centre of gravity of Alevi culture away from the village,!? the Alevi cultural revival commenced with a flurry of popular publications on Alevism mostly by first-generation urbanite Alevis.!
These not only generated an easily accessible pool of valuable information concerning the religious and social aspects of Alevism, but also helped normalise the ‘Alevi issue’ as a topic of debate and scholarly research. With the relative normalisation of public discourse on the hitherto taboo subject of Alevism, a process facilitated and carried further by the concomitant proliferation of Alevi cultural associations in Turkey’s cities and among the Alevi diaspora in Europe, a growing number of Alevis have come to assert their difference openly, something they were previously reluctant to do for fear of stigmatisation and retaliation. The same impetus for greater visibility also facilitated the willingness of members of ocak lineages — the dedes or pirs (lit. elders) — to make available for research purposes their family archives upon which this book primarily relies.
Although generally subsumed under Shi‘i Islam based on the criterion of the veneration of ‘Ali, the first Shi‘i imam, and his eleven successors, Alevi beliefs and ritual practices defy Shi*i normativity. Alevis typically do not perform formal Islamic obligations such as daily prayers and fasting during the month of Ramadan." Full integration of women into Alevi ritual life, which takes place in separate sacred spaces rather than a mosque, and the permitted use of alcohol are likewise ritual and social practices that contravene Islamic ‘orthopraxy’.'° Clearly formulated dogmas are in general less essential for the constitution of Alevism than ritual practices and socio-ethical norms. Despite this theological fuzziness, Alevi mystical poetry and the rich stock of Alevi religious maxims contain many clues that help to gain an understanding of basic Alevi teachings.
At the most fundamental level, these reveal a conception of the Divine that is immanent and all-encompassing, permeating all creation. This monistic ontology complements and informs other more specific Alevi beliefs, such as the idea of the Perfect Man (insan-1 kamil) and °Ali in particular as the locus of Divinity (Hakk ademdedir), the immortality of souls (6len tendir, canlar 6lmez) and the possibility of their transmigration from one body to another (don degistirmek), and the kindred notion of cyclical existence (devir),'° all of which run contrary to Islam’s normative precepts. Similarly, the Alevi understanding of hell and heaven as metaphors for the relative spiritual condition of the soul renders all but extraneous such core Islamic theological notions as the day of resurrection and the afterlife.'’
Despite such characteristic Alevi beliefs and practices that are hard to reconcile with canonical Islam, traditional Alevi discourse is clearly located within Islamic systems of reference and betrays an intimate connection to Sufism, a key consideration of this book. To begin with, their very term of self-designation, ‘Alevi’, is derived from its Arabic cognate “Alawt, which in its base meaning refers to the descendants and followers of Imam ‘Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad.'® Alevi tradition, however, in a manner reminiscent of the Sufi notion of nir Muhammadi (the Muhammadan light), unites ‘Ali and Muhammad into one, as two inseparable halves of a cosmic entity emanating from the primordial divine light. It is this idea, it would seem, that underscores the famous Alevi triad of ‘Allah (or Hakk), Muhammad, Ali’.!? Likewise, Alevi communal ceremonies, cems, are performed as re-enactments of the prototypical gathering of forty saints (Kirklar Meclisi) that Alevis believe took place during the Prophet Muhammad’s nocturnal ascent into heaven (T. Mirac; Ar. Mi‘raj) (Figure I.1).?°
The central point of the ritual space (meydan) where the cem ceremony takes place is, moreover, named after the famous tenth-century Sufi martyr, Husayn b. Mansur al-Hallaj (858-922), whom Alevis hold in particularly high-esteem. Known as dar-i Mansur (lit. the gallows of Mansur), a disciple stands on this spot during initiation, facing the dede officiating the ritual, with one or both hands crossed on the chest, right toe placed on the left toe and head bowed down, a position that simultaneously alludes to Mansur’s execution and signifies the disciple’s willingness to make sacrifices on the path to God/the Truth (Hakk yolu) (Figures I.2a and I.2b ).?! These and many other features of the Alevi tradition are paralleled in one form or another in Islamic mysticism, even though the particular permutations, ways of articulation and ritualistic enactments of these beliefs amount to a distinctive Alevi religious system.
Alevis, separated in this manner from both Shi‘i and Sunni Muslims, provide an important example of groups in the Islamic world whom, for lack of a better term, I call “dissentient religious communities’. These are, broadly speaking, united in their rejection of the legalistic orientation and textual literalism of normative Islam in favour of an esoteric and ethical understanding of religion. Other such groups that apparently arose in an Islamic context but have since become more or less autonomous religious bodies with an ambiguous or completely breached relationship to the rest of the Muslim community include, for instance, the Ahl-i Haqq in Iran, the Nusayri Alawites in Syria, the Yazidis in Iraq and Turkey and the Druze in Lebanon and Israel. Lack of sources, save those by hostile or superficially informed outsiders, has made the groups in question obscure targets of historical scholarship. There is typically an inadequate understanding of their belief systems and internal structures, and little more than poorly substantiated speculations concerning their origins. Historians often approach these non-conformist religious groups, relegated to the realm of ‘heresy’ by proponents of normative Islam, as marginal to the larger Islamic history, correlating their emergence to the ‘survival’ or ‘infiltration’ of extra-Islamic beliefs and practices. Their treatment as parochial phenomena on the basis of tenuous survival theories not only shrouds the broader Islamic context that generated these communities but also denies them a historical dimension.”
The present work moves away from such externalistic and decontextualised approaches as it explores Kizilbash/Alevi history against the backdrop of social and religious developments in Anatolia and the neighbouring regions during the late medieval and early modern era. The Kizilbash as a socio-religious collectivity emerged within the Safavidled Kizilbash movement” over the course of the late fifteenth century and early sixteenth. In that sense, the genesis of a distinct Kizilbash/ Alevi identity is the story of how an epithet that had been the name of a radical religio-political movement became the name of an inward-looking religious community with relatively well-defined boundaries.
But as a system of religious ideas and liturgical practices, with particular organisational underpinnings, the Kizilbash milieu was far from being an entirely Safavid creation but had an autonomous and prior existence grounded in a cluster of separate but interconnected Sufi and dervish groups and sayyid families. These seem to have shared in common a mode of piety marked by a pronounced esoteric and °Alid orientation, and a claim to spiritual authority based on personal and/or genealogical charisma that tacitly rejected the strictly textual authority of legalist Islam. From a longue durée perspective, then, the formation of a distinct Kizilbash/Alevi identity is the story of multifaceted encounters and cross-fertilisations among different Sufi and dervish traditions with certain common religious references and overlapping spheres of influence, and the union of related charismatic family lines and their disciple communities under the spiritual leadership of the Safavi family, or ocak (P. diidman).
Kizilbash Origins, Syncretism and the Kopriilii Paradigm
There has been limited scholarly effort to study the history of Kizilbash/ Alevi communities in an integrated fashion and with an attitude that takes seriously its socio-religious aspects. If one reason for this failure is the deficiencies of available sources, which at best present a caricature of Kizilbash/Alevi religious ideas and internal structures, a second, related reason is scholars’ tendency to treat Kizilbashism/Alevism as a nebulous manifestation of syncretistic folk Islam, a tendency that allows for little of the generalisation necessary for a positive line of historical enquiry. The renowned early twentieth-century Turkish historian Fuad K6priilii set the framework for this approach in his seminal works on the development of Islam in Anatolia, which still form a point of departure for most pertinent scholarly and popular debates.**
A brief overview of K6priilii’s major assumptions and arguments, as well as recent challenges to them, is therefore necessary, both to place the present work within the larger historiography and to set the stage for a discussion of new information and perspectives emerging from recently surfaced Alevi written sources. Fundamental to Kopriilii’s construct of Turkish religious and cultural history was a dichotomous framework based on a rigid and hierarchical separation between high Islam and folk Islam. High Islam, represented by established Sunni dogma, was defined by its book-based nature while folk Islam was defined by its orality.7> The contrast between high and folk Islam was further sharpened in K6priilii’s narrative by such overlapping and mutually reinforcing binaries as settled versus nomad, cosmopolitan versus local, pure versus syncretic and, finally, orthodox versus heterodox. The Alevis were integrated into this dualist framework as lay followers of the Bektashi Sufi order, with the two groups together conceived of as the primary locus of “Turkish folk Islam’.
In K6priilii’s thinking, Turkish folk Islam was an organic and direct extension of a pre-Islamic Turkish cultural heritage that had been preserved under the cloak of the Yeseviyye, a Sufi order founded by the twelfth-century Turkish mystic Ahmed Yesevi (d. 11667?), and that was transmitted as such from Central Asia to Anatolia more or less intact. The foremost carriers of this supposedly authentic Turkish culture were the illiterate nomadic Turkmen tribes who persisted in their attachment to ancient shamanic beliefs and practices even as they nominally converted to Islam. K6priilti argued that their nomadic lifestyles and orally passed on culture rendered these tribes oblivious to the textual normativity of high Islam and its cosmopolitan culture, thus leaving them open to influences from ‘deviant’ popular Shi‘i and esoteric (batini) currents, designated as “extreme Shi‘ism’, or ghuliiw, in Islamic heresiographies and modern scholarship alike.”®
Notwithstanding the obvious significance with which K6priilii imbued them, the role played by the Turkmen tribes in this scenario was in fact a passive one. The real agents in the making of Turkish folk Islam were the Turkmen religious leaders, called babas or dedes, who, according to KO6priilti, combined in themselves both tribal and religious leadership, and were successors to the pre-Islamic shaman-bards (T. kam-ozan), but now in a Sufi garment.”’ The thirteenth-century mystic Haci Bektas, eponym of the Bektashi order, was one such religious figure and one to whom KOpriilti attributed a key role in the transfer of the Yesevi tradition from its Central Asian homeland to Anatolia. In the thirteenth century, a group of these Turkmen babas, most affiliates of the Yesevi order like Haci Bektas, instigated the massive Baba*i revolt of 1239-1241 against the Seljuks of Anatolia. For Kopriilti, the Baba°’i revolt was the seminal event in the development of Anatolian heterodoxies where all the social and religious elements of the heterodox Turkmen milieu came together to sow the seeds of successive heretical movements in the region. Thus, the spiritual legacy of the Baba’is would later be taken over by the itinerant dervish group known as the Abdals of Rum (Ot. Abdalan-1 Rtim), to be passed on eventually to the Bektashis. It was this syncretistic Turkish folk Islam with its timeless shamanic core, K6priilii seems to suggest, that would acquire a sectarian dimension under the influence of the Safavids from the second half of the fifteen century onwards when perennial tensions between the nomadic Turkmens and the centralising Ottoman state became particularly acute.”
This brief summary, admittedly, cannot do justice to Kopriilti’s wider scholarship that had a profound impact in launching the study of Turkish and Islamic history in the Anatolian context on its modern path. However, the two-tiered model of religion and the survival theories that formed the analytical backbone of his approach, while standard items in the conceptual toolkit of religious historians of his time, have come under considerable critical scrutiny since then. Parallel critical reassessments of KOpriilti’s conceptual framework have been put forward by some leading scholars of Sufism and popular piety in the Anatolian and Central Asian contexts. Most notable among them are Ahmet Karamustafa and Devin DeWeese who, approaching the subject from different geographical directions, have both cast doubt on K6priilii’s dualistic model, challenging the idea of a simple dichotomy and an impermeable boundary between ‘high’ and ‘popular’ Sufism and calling into question the aggregation of distinct religious movements under the ill-defined and all-inclusive heading of “folk religion’. The two scholars also have exposed the tenuous nature of approaches that are based on the notion of pre-Islamic survivals, which tend to abstract religious ideas and practices from their historical contexts and impose an undue continuity on them.”? Cemal Kafadar, similarly, has problematised the categories of ‘heterodoxy’ and ‘orthodoxy’, disputing specifically their utility as analytical concepts within the context of late medieval Anatolia. In doing so, he drew attention to the confessional ambiguity that prevailed in the Baba’i milieu in particular and the broader Sufi environment in contemporary Anatolia in general.*°
Another aspect of K6priilii’s scholarship that has attracted critical attention is its politics, which, at least as much as its conceptual framework, was a product of its times. Making this point, Markus Dressler recently emphasised and scrutinised how the formative concerns of Turkish nationalism shaped and limited K6priilii’s thinking.*! A most conspicuous manifestation of K6priilti’s investment in the nascent Turkish nationalist project is his blatantly Turco-centric vision of popular Islam in Anatolia. His depiction of the Alevi-Bektashi communities as embodiments of an unadulterated pure Turkish culture, one that had disappeared almost entirely among the cosmopolitan Ottoman elite, correlates to his representation of Alevism-Bektashism as an exclusively Turkmen phenomenon (by entirely glossing over Kurdish and Zazaki speaking Alevis, for example). This key premise of the K6priilti paradigm, in part a response to American Protestant missionaries’ earlier attribution of non-Turkish and Christian origins to the related communities,** was crucial in establishing the continuity and permanence of an essential core in Turkish culture even as the latter’s geographical locus shifted from Central Asia to Anatolia.
The same concern underpins KO6priilti’s emphasis on a formative Central Asian connection in the genealogy of Alevism-Bektashism despite his inability to adduce sufficient evidence of a widespread Yesevi presence in medieval Anatolia, as Karamustafa observed earlier.*?
Notwithstanding its seeming efficacy for the nationalist agenda, KOpriilii’s narrative also contains a major thread of ideological tension. This is a tension that pulls between his affirmative depiction of the Turkmen tribes as unintentional and passive carriers of a national heritage and his negative portrayal of the same groups, specifically within the context of the Baba’i and the Kizilbash uprisings. Exponents of these uprisings, K6priilti wrote, were ill-intentioned protagonists of ‘esoteric currents’ that deliberately aimed at ‘subverting the fundamentals of Islam and establishing their own domination’, an idea clearly echoing the Islamic heresiographical discourse concerning the so-called Ghulat sects.** K6priilii often fell back on such essentialist notions as the nomadic Turkmens’ innate propensity for heterodoxy and militancy as if to alleviate this tension, but the discord resulting from an uneasy combination in his approach of nationalist priorities and normative religious assumptions (good Turks but problematic Muslims) seems to have remained unresolved.**
Despite the difficulties generated by some of its empirical and conceptual assumptions, and certain blind spots arising from its political embeddedness, the K6priilii paradigm continues to be influential in shaping both scholarly and popular perceptions of Alevi-Bektashi communities. Leading contemporary students of Kizilbash/Alevi history Iréne Mélikoff*° and Ahmet Yasar Ocak?’ have been particularly important in perpetuating and spreading KOpriilti’s views on the subject. These two well-known scholars have followed in Kopriilii’s footsteps in treating Kizilbashism-Alevism together with Bektashism as the principal manifestation of Turkish folk Islam. Most of their works on the subject from the second half of the twentieth century are devoted to further expounding KOpriilii’s basic ‘pre-Islamic survivals’ thesis by identifying additional traces in Alevi-Bektashi hagiographic literature and lore in the shape of nature cults and miracle motifs presumably associated with shamans in pre-Islamic times. Mélikoff and Ocak, however, differ from K6priilti in so far as both downplay the Shi‘i elements in the makeup of popular Islam in medieval Anatolia, attributing the later palpable Shi‘i manifestation to Safavid influence. Ocak, in addition, sees Anatolian folk Islam as also incorporating elements from sources other than shamanism, in particular the various Iranian and Indian religious traditions, although the latter, at least until recently (see below), have clearly occupied a secondary place in his analysis.
Over the past thirty years, the K6priilti paradigm through the works of Mélikoff and Ocak also attained wide public circulation among Alevis themselves.*® As a result, the idea of Alevi-Bektashi culture as an outgrowth of the Central Asian Yesevi tradition and a storehouse of pre-Islamic Turkish culture was embraced and internalised as common knowledge by a significant segment of the Alevi community. Since then, a flood of publications by researchers of Alevi background have detected shamanic imprints in their religious and cultural traditions, thereby confirming Alevis’ and Alevism’s authentic Turkish origins. These researchers have upheld the notion of ‘syncretism’ as a defining feature of their ancestral belief system, conceiving it as a positive synthesis of national culture and religion that is deemed to be inherently more tolerant and amicable to modern secularism.*? The popularisation and normalisation of K6priilii’s ideas concerning the Central Asian/Turkish origins of Alevism did not, however, go uncontested. Some members of the Alevi community rejected the Central Asia thesis as a fictitious official narrative and a product of the so-called Turk-Islam synthesis cultural policy that was put in place following the 1980 military coup. In an effort to disprove it, and offset its pervasive influence, exponents of this Opposing position came to construct their own counter-narratives stressing the non-Turkish — specifically Kurdish and in some cases Zaza — and/or non-Islamic essence of their tradition. This collision resulted in sustained and heated debates, turning Kizilbash/Alevi history into an embattled terrain between groups with contrasting visions of Kizilbashism/Alevism and with divergent political interests and sympathies.”
The place and significance of ongoing polemics concerning Kizilbash origins in contemporary Alevi identity politics and their intersectionality with secularising Kurdish and Islamist movements are beyond the scope of this work. What is relevant for the purposes of the present discussion is how these polemics have highlighted some of the gaps in KOpriilti’s pertinent works, the most glaring of which is the aforementioned disregard for the sizeable Kurdish- and Zazaki-speaking Alevi communities who are typically, but unconvincingly, explained as ‘assimilated Turks’ by those advocating the Central Asia thesis. Despite their destabilising effect on K6priilii’s nationalist metanarrative, however, the many accounts of Kizilbash/Alevi history put forward in recent years as an alternative to that of K6priilti’s tend to lack a strong empirical grounding. Neither do any of them truly succeed in providing a substantive and systematic critique of KOpriilii’s basic conceptual framework based on a flawed notion of syncretism. *! For instance, those who foreground Kurdish- and Zazaki-speaking Alevis in their works simply invert K6priilii’s Central Asia thesis as they seek the roots of Alevi beliefs and ritual practices in ancient Mesopotamian and Kurdish religions. Others, eager to maintain a distance from both types of nationalist narratives, connect Alevism to the various repressed religious traditions of Anatolia or to a set of humanist and socialist values with no religious dimension of any kind.*? No matter how radical a departure they claim to represent from K6priilii’s views, however, all of these critical voices still subscribe to the same imprecise and malleable notion of syncretism, drawing on the same pool of alleged pre-Islamic residues in Alevi beliefs and ritual practices to support their conflicting conclusions. As such, they not only reinforce politically and intellectually suspect preoccupations with primordial essences that characterised Kopriilti’s thinking but also often commit the methodological fallacy of treating similarities and parallels as evidence of direct transmission and continuity.
These ongoing polemical debates around the question of Kizilbash/ Alevi origins and identity are instructive in that they exhibit the pitfalls of ahistorical applications of the concept of religious syncretism. The presence of syncretic processes — that is the fusion of beliefs and ritual practices from various distinct sources — in the making of Kizilbashism/Alevism (as in other religious traditions) is not what is disputed here. Indeed, given the social-temporal space within which it originated and was sustained, it would be surprising if some of the elements of Kizilbash/Alevi tradition were not extensions of pre-Islamic forms of worship and beliefs that prevailed among Turkmen, Kurdish and Zaza communities, or adapted, knowingly or unknowingly, from other religious groups that inhabited the same region. After all, this is the way religious and cultural traditions historically operate. Neither is it my intention to make a case for a complete abandonment of the concept of syncretism in studies of cultural transplantations and cross-fertilisation, and for scrutinising the perceptions and politics surrounding such processes, whether in Alevi studies or elsewhere.** Rather, my goal here is to question the utility of syncretism as an explanatory model and, more specifically, its treatment as the defining characteristic of Kizilbashism-Alevism. Methodologically, as put by Eric Maroney, ‘calling a religion “syncretistic” is often a way of saying that it is the sum of its parts or of beginning to reduce or dissect it’.“4 The drawbacks of taking apart practices and identities only to trace back their individual constituent components to some imagined pure ethnic and religious generative source are forcefully in evidence in the multitude of publications on Alevism that fail to yield a clear picture of how the greater whole is constituted and has maintained its resilience over the centuries. More than mere analytical concerns are at stake here. There are issues of power involved in singling out certain religious traditions as ‘syncretistic’ when in reality all religions have composite historical origins. When used as a taxonomic tool to differentiate allegedly ‘pure’ traditions from their ‘decadent’ counterparts, the concept of syncretism thus not only loses much of its analytical power; it also turns into an othering term that serves to validate the hegemony of the self-acclaimed custodians of normativity, a tendency that is unfortunately still all too common in Islamic historiography.
Topical Focus and Approach
This work, above all, is an attempt to rescue Kizilbashism/Alevism from the murkiness of a timeless folk Islam and to return it to the status of a historical object in context, not as an anomaly or a historical accident but as a particular manifestation of various religious and social trends in the late medieval and early modern Islamic(ate) world. The framework of analysis that it adopts is one of socioreligious organisation. Its initial point of departure is a pool of information concerning the inner workings of traditional Alevism that has accumulated since the Alevi cultural revival. This new information has dispelled the myth of the Kizilbash/ Alevi communities as being a nebulous collection of tribes devoid of any identifiable religious structures. Indeed, one can no longer doubt in the light of the emerging data that the traditional community organisation of the Kizilbash/Alevis developed reasonably clear contours. This was a genealogically based socio-religious organisation centred on a collection of charismatic family lines, the so-known ocaks, and sustained through semi-formal and informal social networks and a set of morally sanctioned and quasi-hierarchically structured relationships.*°
The basic parameters of the ocak system reaching to modern times can be summed up as follows. Each Alevi community, whether defined on the basis of a village or a tribe, or as a subsection of either, is attached to a particular ocak, or saintly lineage group. Members of these ocaks, the ocakzades, owe their elevated spiritual status to their real or imagined sayyid (T. seyit) ancestry, that is their prophetic descent through the progeny of “Ali and the Prophet’s daughter, Fatima. Individual ocaks are generally concentrated in particular regions and preside over one or a few central villages that may contain a pilgrimage site, or ziyaret, associated with that ocak. Religious leaders, called dedes (or pirs), are chosen from among the ocakzades, and fulfil liturgical, judicial and educational functions (Figure [.3). Historically, dede families have tended to move from one village to another, often following their migrating disciples (talibs, lit. seekers). Such mobility partially explains the historical proliferation of Alevi ocaks because a dede family moving to a new place may emerge as an independent ocak under a new name.*’ In addition to the basic ocakzade-talib division that underlies Alevi communal structures, there are also regional hierarchies among the ocaks themselves, with certain ones recognised as miirsid (lit. the one who guides) lines to whom other dede families pledge allegiance, although such categorical designations are not always uncontested.
Individual ocak communities are conceived in terms of a family model. Intermarriage between members of dede families and members of their talib communities is therefore traditionally not permitted because their relationship is likened to one between parents and their children. One’s ocak affiliation is inherited from one’s father and forefathers and cannot be shifted from one dede lineage to another except under unusual circumstances. Dedes are responsible for officiating talib initiation ceremonies (T. ikrar cemi), as well as at annual gérgii cemi (lit. ritual of good manners), where any conflicts between community members are resolved and any wrongdoings compensated for or punished. In order to be eligible for initiation, a talib, who must ideally be married, is required to pick from among his peers another married man with whom he will form a bond of musahiblik (companionship), thereby establishing a fictive kinship between the two married couples who make a lifelong commitment for mutual emotional and physical support. He also has to have a rehber (guide), someone knowledgeable about Alevi ritual practices recruited from among the qualified talibs, who will symbolically deliver him and his musahib to the dede. The same set of relationships is replicated at the level of dede. Just like a lay follower, a dede, too, has to have a musahib and a rehber, pledge allegiance to a fellow ocakzade and pass through gdrgii once a year.** The dede officiating at an ocakzade’s rites of ikrar and gorgii is in turn regarded as the miirsid. In matters superseding the authority of the dede, a talib may have recourse to the mediation of his miirsid.
Each ocak community, with its local hierarchies, tends to function independently, but in principle all ocaks are connected to a convent that serves as their supreme spiritual centre. This function was historically fulfilled by the Safavi convent in Ardabil, albeit evidently with an Abdalturned-Bektashi convent located in the Iraqi town of Karbala, known as the Karbala convent (Kerbela Dergahi) among the Alevis, acting as the intermediary. However, from the early nineteenth century onward, when relations with the Karbala convent started to break down due mostly to external factors, the Haci Bektas convent in Kirsehir gradually emerged as the new institutional focal point for the Alevi communities in Anatolia, and it was to it that the Alevi dedes began to appeal for accreditation.
By all appearances, the crystallisation of the ocak system was a key aspect of the consolidation of a distinct, overarching Kizilbash/Alevi identity. This decentralised and flexible configuration of authority, binding together saintly families and convents in a loose hierarchy, seems to have generated and successfully sustained a distinct Kizilbash/Alevi collectivity over the centuries. Alevis often depict the resulting matrix of relations in the maxim ‘hand to hand, hand to God/Truth’ (el ele, el Hakk’a), revealing their awareness of a broader Kizilbash/Alevi network beyond the boundaries of their local ocak community. It is true that traditional Alevi communal structures have been eroded significantly since the middle of the twentieth century when large-scale migrations into urban centres began; only a limited number of ocaks are currently functional in their traditional formats. Yet, the internal definition of the community’s external boundaries still rests on the memory of this network of Alevi ocaks and their affiliates whose descendants qualify as members of the in-group simply by virtue of being born into an Alevi family irrespective of whether, or to what degree, they embrace and practice the Alevi faith.
The ocaks, with their constitutive centrality to Alevi socio-religious organisation and identity, thus provide us with a much more tangible entry point into Kizilbash history than the relatively elusive and historically hard-to-document religious ideas and ritual practices. They not only offer a safer base for the analysis of the generative foundations of Kizilbashism but also of its shifting social boundaries and content over time. Following this line of thinking, the present work uses a group of ocak lineages in eastern Anatolia, the region with the highest Kizilbash concentration until recent times, as illustrative case studies to investigate the emergence and development of Kizilbash identity and tradition primarily through the lens of communal structures.
Alevi Sources>®
Paucity of sources is a perennial problem for historians interested in the study of dissentient minority religious communities who by definition did not have equal access to the means of production of historical narratives as their hegemonic counterparts. Such groups have tended to leave behind few paper trails, and accounts of them by outsiders abound with major gaps, prejudices and misconceptions that place serious limitations on their use. Looked at from this perspective, it is hardly possible to exaggerate the importance of Alevi documents and manuscripts in private hands that have stayed out of the reach of researchers until relatively recently. The tantalising evidence emerging from this new body of written material, which I shorthand as “Alevi sources’, offers at least partial answers to many basic questions about Kizilbash/Alevi history that are still outstanding. It also undermines, refines and enriches our assumptions concerning the wider socio-religious history of Anatolia during the four centuries between the initial arrival of the Seljuk Turks in the late eleventh century and the entrenchment of Pax Ottomanica circa 1500.
Alevi sources consist of documents and manuscripts that have been handed down from generation to generation within Alevi dede families as a type of sacred trust and as testimony to the families’ ocakzade status and sayyid descent (Figures I.4a, 4b, I.4c). In the past, dedes carefully guarded their family documents from the gaze of outsiders, including that of lay followers, and some continue to do so. It was only in the wake of the Alevi cultural revival in the early 1990s that individual dede families began making their documents available for research purposes. Overall, we still do not have a clear idea as to the full extent of these documents as new ones continue to come forth. While individual examples of Alevi documents have appeared in print, the bulk of them are still unpublished, and they have not so far been systematically examined in their entirety with attention to historical context, mechanisms of production and renewal, audience, as well as content.°!
A similar situation holds true for the more widely known Buyruk manuscripts that have become the subject of several articles of varying scope and quality since the beginning of the revival.° Nor have Alevi sources been utilised to rethink the broader contours of Kizilbash/Alevi history. The present work sets out to do just that, using the family documents of a select group of Alevi ocaks in eastern Anatolia that are unified in their historical affinity to the Wafa’iyya — an Iraqi-born Sufi tradition and descent group traced to the eleventh-century mystic Abu’1-Wafa® al-Baghdadi. Given their novelty and some of their unusual characteristics, it would be in order to offer a general overview of the Alevi sources utilised in this work and to describe the nature of evidence they contain.
The greater part of the documents explored here come from families affiliated with the ocaks of Dede Kargin, ASuicen and Imam Zeynel Abidin (the last also known as the dedes of Mineyik), whose private archives were the most comprehensive of all those available in terms of both the number of documents and the length of the time period they spanned. These three ocaks are among the most prominent in eastern Anatolia, with the last two also having a claim to miirsid-hood. The remaining Alevi sources used in this work are documents that belong to the ocaks of Sinemilli, Seyh Siileyman, Seyh Ahmed Dede, Seyh Delil Berhican, Seyh Coban, Celal Abbas (aka Sah Ali Abbas), Kara Pir Bad, Kureysan, Kizil Deli and Sah Ibrahim Veli.
The first six of these ocaks intersect with the previously mentioned three on the grounds of their historical linkage to the Wafa’iyya; disciples of the ocaks of Sinemilli and Kureysan, in addition, recognise the Aguicens as their miirsid. The Kizil Deli ocak is associated with the well-known Bektashi saint Seyyid °Ali Sultan even though its Malatya branch, which is considered here, historically recognises the dedes of Mineyik as the miirsid line. The ocak of Sah Ibrahim Veli, on the other hand, is another very prominent ocak with a claim to miirsidhood similar to the ASuicens and the ocak of Imam Zeynel Abidin; it is, however, unique (with the possible exception of the ocak of Celal Abbas) in having a pedigree tracing back to the house of the Safavids.
Compared to their archival counterparts, Alevi documents pose an array of additional challenges to the researcher. First, Alevi documents as a whole are dispersed among dozens, or possibly even hundreds, of dedes and their families in different corners of Anatolia and the Balkans. Even in the case of a single ocak, they are often scattered unevenly among several dede families inhabiting different localities. In general, one or two families possess all or the majority of documents related to their ocak, with the rest of the affiliated families holding just a single specimen or none at all.
Identifying the locations of the different branches and offshoots of an ocak, seeking out those individuals and families who are in possession of one or more of the documents relating to that ocak, and acquiring their consent for studying these documents are tasks that can be difficult and time-consuming, and virtually impossible to accomplish with perfection given the element of chance. Second, with regard to older Alevi documents, only a few are still in their original state. The rest are copies made at later dates, evidently to ensure the preservation of the physically deteriorated originals or to produce additional copies for the individual archives of affiliated dede families. During the copying process, multiple documents were occasionally integrated into a single scroll, most likely because it was physically easier to keep a single long sheet than multiple short ones. Dedes also had their documents periodically copied as part of a procedure for renewing their legitimacy as ocakzades and for updating their family tree with the inclusion of subsequent generations.
This practice of recurrent copying and recopying, undertaken at times by individuals with limited competence, explains the degenerated state of some of the documents, more so of those originally composed in Arabic. Many of these display copying errors, misspellings and lapses in the flow of the text. In addition to such unintended mistakes, these later copies also frequently include what appear to be intended omissions and revisions that reflect changing religious sensibilities and needs, as well as altered significance and usage of the documents in question. It is thus an extremely tedious job to sort out the initial configurations of documents from their later copies, especially in cases when the extant copies don’t always supply original composition dates, instead providing only copying or renewal dates or no dates at all.
Further adding to the challenge are: the polyglot character of the documents, which variously use Turkish (at times non-standard or archaic forms), Arabic and Persian, sometimes within the same document; the scattered nature of their chronology, with dates ranging from the late fourteenth to the mid-twentieth century; and their various and at times eclectic genres that have been little studied. All these challenges are aggravated in cases of long scrolls that are compilations of multiple documents, where disentangling the textual layers is particularly onerous because the different parts are not always clearly separated from one another and have uneven styles.
Notwithstanding all these problems and ambiguities, a number of models relatively consistent in form and content can be discerned in the set of documents examined for this research. Excluding some two dozen fragments and entirely illegible documents, I have analysed approximately 150 Alevi documents (several of which were rough replicas of one another) written on separate sheets or scrolls of paper. Of these, about forty concerned commercial transactions, criminal court cases and other such mundane issues, or were from the twentieth century, including a few personal letters. The rest of the dated documents, which are particularly important for the purposes of the present work, have dates between the second half of the sixteenth century and the end of the nineteenth, with five exceptions that bear earlier dates.
These largely consist of: (1) Sufi diplomas (Ar. ijazas; Ot. icdzetndmes) of the Wafa’i order; (2) documents issued or renewed at the Karbala convent in Iraq or by Karbala’s naktbii’l-esraf (Ar. naqtb al-ashraf ), the local chief of the descendants of the Prophet; (3) Bektashi diplomas conferred by the Celebis at the Haci Bektas convent in Kirsehir; and (4) various documents issued by Ottoman authorities and the kadi courts confirming the holders’ status as sayyids and dervishes.
Putting aside what appears to be a sixteenth-century copy of an Ahi (Ot. Ali; Ar. Akhi) ijaza dated 14 Sa*ban 775/1374, the oldest layer of Alevi documents consists of ijazas of the Wafa’i order, all in Arabic. These were the most disappointing in terms of the quality of the extant copies. Of the fifteen dated copies of Wafa*i ijazas, the oldest four are from the fifteenth century, while another nine date to the sixteenth century and the remining two to the first half of the seventeenth century. A final one, reframed as a sayyid genealogy (Ar. shajara, Ot. secere) when it was copied in 1265/1848, must have been originally drawn up sometime in the sixteenth century or earlier. An additional group of documents revealing a Wafa°i affinity includes sayyid genealogies reaching back to Abu’l-Wafa’, which were issued or renewed by the naktbii’l-esraf in Karbala during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In many cases, these shajaras in Arabic were bestowed by the nakibii’l-esraf on the authority of older documents, some of which may also have been composed initially as ijazas, although such a transition in genre is rarely discernible; one such exception is the aforementioned document dated 1265/1848.
More than three dozen documents originating in Iraq are the second oldest documents. As a whole, they reveal that dedes periodically travelled to this region from at least the mid-sixteenth century on. Oral testimonies also confirm that journeys to obtain updated genealogies were made until the middle of the twentieth century. During these travels, it turns out, dedes visited various Shi‘i-Alevi pilgrimage sites and a number of Sufi convents that over time, if not originally, came to be associated with the Bektashi order. Of these convents, the one at Karbala appears to be the place where many Alevi documents originated. Notwithstanding the fact that distinctions between different genres seem to be blurred in many cases, Alevi documents from Iraq are basically of three types: abovementioned shajaras in Arabic, ziyGretnames in Turkish (some in narrative format, others containing, or consisting entirely, of pictorial illustrations) and hilafetnames in Turkish, respectively confirming the dedes’ sayyid descent, their visits to the Shi°i-Alevi sacred sites in Iraq and their paying homage to the convent in Karbala.
Of the remaining documents, twenty-seven were issued by Ottoman authorities or the kadi courts, verifying their holders’ status as dervishes and sayyids. All of these are dated from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, with the exception of a copy of an imperial edict (Ot. ferman) dated 930/1524 and ten icazetnames granted by the Celebi Bektashis in Kirsehir during the nineteenth century and early twentieth. I have come across surprisingly few Alevi documents, only two in fact, that are directly traceable to the Safavids. The first, the original of which is extant, is dated 1089/1678. The second, although copied in 1242/1826, must have been initially composed sometime in the early sixteenth century. The explanation of why significantly fewer Safavid-related documents than one would expect have been preserved must lie either in the risk involved in holding on to them or in their growing irrelevance after the Safavids’ demise in the early eighteenth century, or more likely both.~*
In addition to such individual documents, Alevi sources also include manuscripts of literary religious works. A significant portion of these works, emanating from Bektashi, Hurufi and Shi‘i milieus, are not uniquely Kizilbash/Alevi, although they are important for undoing the common notion of Kizilbash/Alevi communities as being isolated islands with an exclusively orally transmitted tradition and for showing their interconnections with broader Sufi and Shi‘i literary traditions and networks. In addition to these, there are among Alevi sources a set of more distinctively Kizilbash/Alevi manuscripts known as Buyruk (lit. Command) that are held in especially high esteem and that, therefore, deserve special attention. According to tradition, Buyruk contains an authoritative account of basic Kizilbash/Alevi beliefs and rituals, and only dede families would own a copy of it.
The earliest written reference to Buyruk is found in a missionary report from 1857,™4 and a Buyruk text was published for the first time in Turkey in 1958.°> Since then, multiple other Buyruk manuscripts in private collections and in libraries have become known, with the oldest dating to the early seventeenth century, and a few of these have fully or partially appeared in print.°°
A close examination of these different manuscripts reveal great variations among them, suggesting that ‘Buyruk’ , rather than being the title of one single work, was the name given to collections of religious treatises originating with the Safavids. Buyruk manuscripts are thus particularly significant for revealing previously littleunderstood aspects of relations between the Safavids and their followers in Anatolia, including first and foremost their continuing contacts well into the late seventeenth century, as well as for offering an emic picture of the spiritual nature of these relations. Also found in the private archives of dede families are a special set of rectangular-shaped manuscripts, known as conk, that include collections of Kizilbash/Alevi mystical poetry; while these are of utmost importance for exploring Kizilbash/Alevi teachings and religious ideas, they largely lie outside of the bounds of the present book, which focuses on socio-religious history rather than theology.*”
Major Findings
One of the most interesting surprises that came from delving into Alevi documents was the discovery of the historical affinity of a sizeable network of Alevi saintly lineages with the Wafa*i Sufi tradition. Originating in eleventh-century Iraq, the Wafa’iyya was apparently an important component of the late-medieval Anatolian socio-religious landscape, although historians operating with K6priilii’s central postulate of Central Asian roots of popular Islam in Anatolia have until recently failed to grant it adequate attention. As early as 1936, Abdiilbak? Gélpinarli suspected the Wafa’*i affiliation of a group of important religious and literary figures associated with the Abdals of Rum, a dervish group that existed in Anatolia since at least the fourteenth century. Yet neither he nor any others further pursued this idea, perhaps because it was not in accord with received scholarly notions.°*
The long-standing neglect of historians of a possible Wafa’i connection in the origins of Anatolian Sufism was first noted in earnest in a brief but seminal article by Ahmet T. Karamustafa, in which the author urged scholars to pursue this line of enquiry.*? Of late, Ahmet Yasar Ocak, too, revised his long-standing emphasis on the Central Asia/ Yesevi connection by allowing a much greater space for the Wafa’iyya as a constitutive component of ‘popular mysticism’ in Anatolia and of the Alevi-Bektashi tradition in particular.’ A systematic investigation of the Alevi documents, which this works sets out to do, further expands and nuances our understanding of the role of Wafa*i-affiliated Sufi communities and descent groups in the making of the Kizilbash/Alevi milieu. It also offers us the basic parameters of a new narrative of Kizilbash/ Alevi history from its early beginnings up to its consolidation, a narrative that calls for a readjustment in focus from pre-Islamic Central Asia to the cosmopolitan Sufi milieu of late medieval Anatolia and the neighbouring regions.
Icazetnaémes granted by the Celebi Bektashis from the nineteenth century and early twentieth aside, the Alevi documents reveal no evidence of a Yesevi connection. Nor do they validate K6priilti’s reductionist view of the Alevis as lay followers of the Bektashi order. While they do confirm the closely intertwined trajectories of the two affiliations, they draw a much more complicated picture of their relationship than is commonly assumed. Among other things, the Alevi documents indicate that Kizilbash—Bektashi relations were primarily forged not in the central Bektashi convent in Kirsehir but across a previously unknown network of convents in the various cities of Iraq that housed the shrines of the Shi°i Imams and their kinsfolk.
The hub of this network was a convent in Karbala that initially belonged to the Abdals of Rum but was eventually incorporated into the Bektashi order. The Karbala convent appears to have maintained a relatively institutionalised relationship with the Alevi ocaks, and those of Wafa*i origin in particular, with its members, it would seem, serving as liaisons between the Safavids and their Kizilbash followers in Anatolia. Many Alevi documents granted to the members of Alevi saintly lineages were issued or renewed there, as mentioned earlier.
A broader conclusion that can be drawn from these two important findings — namely the historical Wafa’i affinity of a sizeable cluster of Kizilbash/Alevi ocaks and their ties to a network of Sufi convents in Iraq — concerns the question of the underlying dynamics and nature of the Kizilbash movement. The conventional view represents the Kizilbash milieu as a collection of different Turkmen tribes who were directly linked to the Safavids.*!
The Alevi sources significantly modify this common conjecture, for they indicate that in the microcosm of the Anatolian Kizilbash milieu were not individual tribes as such, whether Turkmen or otherwise, but rather various Sufi and dervish circles, and sayyid families, each with its own sphere of influence, all of which coalesced under the leadership of the Safavi family, or, using the Alevi terminology, the ocak of Ardabil (Erdebil ocagi). To the extent that tribal identities and kinship relations were relevant in the configuration of Kizilbash communities, they interfaced with a phenomenon known as ‘communal Sufi affiliation’.
This phenomenon, which occupies an important but insufficiently examined place in the history of Sufism, developed in tandem with Sufism’s diffusion beyond its original urban base into rural and tribal settings from the eleventh century onward, and with the concurrent spread of the genealogical discourse in Islamdom.® Current scholarship has typically viewed the popularisation of Sufism as a decline and degeneration of its classical ideals and has, therefore, paid little attention to the long-term social and religious implications of this process. This might explain the common failure to recognise how the dissemination of certain Sufi ideas and institutions paved the way for the formation of alternative religious systems and communities in the Islamic world. The Alevi sources are illuminating in this regard as they allow us to trace the evolution of hereditary Sufi lines into independent ocaks within the framework of the Kizilbash movement. Many ideals of Sufism were accordingly translated from the individual to the communal level and put to use as the basis for a new social and moral order.
The Sufi connection in the making of Kizilbash communities should come as no surprise to scholars in the field. Even putting aside the Sufi origins of the Safavids themselves, this connection is in evidence in the distinctively Sufi character of the Alevis’ conceptual, ritual and organisational vocabulary, as well as in some of the key tenets of the Alevi belief system that were briefly summarised above. K6priilii, too, was cognisant of such a connection. Yet for K6priilti and most others, Sufism was no more than a thin veneer barely hiding the timeless pre-Islamic (in the case of K6priilti, shamanic) core of Kizilbashism. Disputing this supposition, the present work argues that Sufism was not an added veneer but the very context within which Kizilbash communities formed and developed.
The recovery of the previously undervalued and understudied Sufi context of the Kizilbash movement also sheds a new light on the Ottoman-Safavid conflict and the process of Sunni confessionalisation that it heralded in the Ottoman empire. Recent studies of Sunni confessionalisation in the Ottoman Empire have highlighted Sufism as a key site of contestation in this process.“ This new insight is particularly valuable in gaining a better understanding of the causes, experience and longterm consequences of the Kizilbash persecutions in the Ottoman Empire that, among other things, targeted the Sufi infrastructure of the Kizilbash milieu, and in turn catalysed a parallel process of Kizilbash confessionalisation.
Additionally, and more specifically, it helps to make better sense of the variegated trajectory of the Wafa’i tradition in late medieval Anatolia, cutting across social, ethnic and even sectarian divisions. Wafa°i offshoots that thrived in the region since pre-Ottoman times enjoyed a historical affinity not only with many Alevi ocaks but also with a number of prominent Sufi shaykhs and sayyid families of Sunni denomination, who were patronised by various dynasties, including the Seljuks and the Ottomans. The Wafa’i legacy, characterised as it was by a “‘metadoxic’ outlook, to use Cemal Kafadar’s terminology, would, however, not survive the pressures of confessionalisation unleashed by the Ottoman-—Safavid conflict, losing its independent identity and assimilating largely into the Kizilbash milieu and/or the Bektashi tradition over the course of the sixteenth century.
Organisation of Chapters
This book is in large measure organised around four major themes that are brought to the forefront by the Alevi documents, presented as much as possible in the order of their chronological relevance. Chapters 1 and 2 address the implications of the historical affinity of some of the most prominent Alevi saintly lineages with the Iraqi-born Wafa’i Sufi tradition. Chapter 1 presents a selective overview of the life and spiritual legacy of Abu’l-Wafa’, based on the hagiography of the saint and other near-contemporary Sufi narratives. This chapter makes the point that the metadoxic outlook of the Baba’i milieu in medieval Anatolia, as well as many components of Kizilbashism-Alevism, explained on the basis of pre-Islamic survivals in the conventional literature, in fact had their parallels and antecedents in the early Wafa°i milieu.
Chapter 2 proceeds by tracking the various Sufi figures and sayyid families who are purported to be spiritual and/or biological descendants of Abu’1-Wafa’ and who thrived in Anatolia from the late twelfth century or early thirteenth until the mid-sixteenth century. It shows how, from the second half of the fifteenth century onward, most Wafa°i offshoots in eastern Anatolia came to be assimilated under the common flag of Kizilbashism, gradually losing their group identities and order structures as they evolved into components of the Kizilbash/Alevi ocak system. This chapter also argues that the erosion of the Wafa°i memory, to some extent a natural corollary of the incorporation of the Wafa’i affiliates into the Safavid-led Kizilbash movement, also involved the conflation and blending of the Wafa°i legacy with that of the Bektashi tradition as it was configured in the Bektashi hagiographic and oral tradition compiled at about the turn of the sixteenth century.
The second major theme that emerges from the Alevi sources concerns relations between the Kizilbash/Alevi communities and the Bektashi order, an issue that occupied historians for some time. Chapters 3 and 4 take up this multifaceted issue and modify some of the related assumptions of the KOpriilti paradigm. Chapter 3 traces the roots of the complex relations between the two affiliations to their common association with the cult of Haci Bektas and their shared links to the Abdals of Rum, whose legacy would in large part be absorbed by the Bektashi order. Chapter 4 focuses on the Abdal-Bektashi convent in Karbala, which seems to have served as a link between the Safavids and their Kizilbash followers in Anatolia. The informal networks that developed around this convent throw further light on the entwined histories of the Kizilbash/Alevi communities and the Bektashi order and on the workings of the Alevi ocak system.
Teasing out the wider implications of the findings presented in previous chapters, Chapter 5 formulates an alternative account of the Kizilbash movement as a nexus of various mystical circles, dervish groups and sayyid families who came together around Safavid spiritual leadership over the course of the late fifteenth century and early sixteenth.
This chapter also shows how the Kizilbash communities in Anatolia persisted through the Caldiran defeat in their attachment to their distant spiritual masters, the Safavid shahs, who in turn appear to have never entirely abandoned their spiritual claims over these communities. Contacts between the Safavids and the Kizilbash communities in Anatolia were maintained not only indirectly through the mediation of the Karbala convent in Iraq but also through other mechanisms. Of the latter, I identify three: the dispatching of religious treatises, the granting of the position of halife (P. khalifa) to selected Alevi ocaks and the mediation of a branch of the Safavid family in southeastern Anatolia that evolved into the Alevi ocak of Sah Ibrahim Veli.
Another theme brought to the fore by the Alevi documents is relations between the Ottoman state and the Kizilbash communities, which is taken up in Chapter 6. Alevi documents that were issued by Ottoman authorities or the kadi courts recognising related families as Sufi dervishes and/or sayyids form a point of departure of the analysis in this chapter. While such documents might at first sight be interpreted simply as manifestations of Ottoman religious tolerance and administrative pragmatism, this chapter approaches them in the light of the key argument of this book that emphasises the Sufi genealogies of Kizilbash/Alevi saintly lineages. In assessing relations between the Ottoman state and the Kizilbash communities, a special emphasis is placed on the sixteenth-century Kizilbash persecutions and their ruinous impact on the Sufi infrastructure of the Kizilbash milieu.
I contend that the persecutory measures employed against the Kizilbash, rather than being viewed within such binaries as tolerance versus intolerance and politics versus religion, ought to be understood in connection to a range of other developments in Ottoman history, including most importantly the process of Sunni confessionalisation that entailed the demarcation of boundaries of acceptable Sufism. Pressures for confessionalisation would also pave the way for Kizilbashism to evolve from a social movement comprising a diverse range of groups and actors into a relatively coherent and self-conscious socio-religious collectivity.
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