Ottoman History Podcast - Dervish Piety and Alevism in Late Medieval Anatolia

Episode Date: April 20, 2018

Episode 359 with Zeynep Oktay Uslu hosted by Matthew Ghazarian and Işın Taylan Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud In this episode, we explore the evolution of Abdal and Bektashi doctrine from the 14th to 17th centuries. The Abdals of Rum and the Bektashis were two dervish groups in Anatolia who by the 16th century would merge to become the Bektashi Sufi order. Many Bektashi beliefs and practices are also inter-connected with those of Alevi communities. By taking a closer look at Abdal and Bektashi poetry, we examine how poetry, fiction, and other aspects of dervish piety evolved into the core beliefs of contemporary Alevism in Turkey. « Click for More »

Welcome to another episode of Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Matt Gazarian. And I'm Hüsn Taylan. And we are here today with Zeynep Oktay-Uslu, who teaches in the Department of Turkish Language and Literature and has taught in the Department of History at Bosphorus University in Istanbul. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you very much for having me. It's a pleasure. So Zeynep finished her PhD in Islamic Civilization last year at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, part of the Sorbonne in Paris, where she wrote a dissertation called The Perfect Man in Bektashism and Alevism.

Today we'll draw on her expertise to discuss the evolution of Abdal and Bektashi doctrine from around the 14th to the 17th centuries. The Abdals of Rûm and the Bektashis were two dervish groups who would by the 16th century merge to become the Bektashi Sufi Order, which many of our listeners will know for their important roles in spiritual as well as political and military affairs in the Ottoman Empire. Many Bektashi beliefs and practices were also interconnected with those of Turkey's Alevi communities, and we'll be looking to Zeynep to help us sort through the connections among all of these overlapping groups. In the first half of the podcast, we'll be looking to Zeynep to help us sort through the connections among all of these overlapping groups.

In the first half of the podcast, we'll try to introduce these various groups and historical trends in Anatolia between the 1200s and 1600s, more or less. And then in the second half, we'll turn to the topic of Alevi Bektashi literature as historical and literary sources for studying these trends. Let's start with some basics about Alevis. Who are they and what is Alevism? So when we ask the question, what is Alevism? Of course, are we asking the question historically

or are we asking the question about modern Alevism? One of the biggest difficulties in present-day academic study and popular literature is the conflation of the historical Alevism with the modern concept of Alevism. The modern concept is defined by some scholars as a religious denomination and a social identity, which I think is a great definition, bringing two aspects together that overlap, but at the same time do not have to exist together. So you can be an Alevi as a social identity without necessarily being religious.

Historically, though, these two things, the idea of Alevism being a religious denomination and a social identity, were not necessarily two different concepts. So we have to also remember that. And could you tell us about the prevalent narrative or narratives of Islamization of Anatolia and regarding the Islamization of Alevi's is still the Koperlu paradigm, Mehmet Fuat Koperlu's paradigm, despite recent critiques in the international arena. In Turkey, it's completely accepted to our day. And in the international arena, there's still some acceptance. So Mehmet Fuat Koprulu, he's active as a sort of father of early Turkish Republican social science.

This is the guy you're talking about. Yes. And so his projects, I mean, his large projects was part of nation building. So we have to contextualize him. And that has been done, of course, by some recent work, which has shown his academic bias and how it relates to nation building in Turkey and also Western academia at the time. His perspective is that the Alevis were Islamized by Dervish groups who were not fully Islamized themselves because of their lack of Arabic and Persian and their distance from urban centers. between shaman beliefs and shaman practices and Islamic beliefs, which is considered under the category of syncretism, which has been radically problematized lately. So the Koprulu paradigm has been dominant in scholarship,

even as it is critiqued recently. So where does your work come in then well the i guess the fortunate and unfortunate thing about working on alevism is whatever you write is in some sense a response to koeppler um one thing that i accept about his the one thing that i accept about his paradigm and that other people accept about his paradigm is the importance of dervish piety in the formation of alevi belief and practice. By the way, we use the word Alevi, but of course, historically, that is a modern use. I also want to say that. So historically, these Alevi groups were called Qazilbash and Alevi is an umbrella category that encompasses

many different groups. Right. So you mentioned a few groups that are crucial to the formation of modern Alevism and its doctrines. Among these are the Abdals of Rum and the Bektashis, who are both wandering dervishes. But you also mentioned this institutionalization of Sufi orders that is going on in different parts of the Islamic lands between around the 1200s to 1500s and how that institutionalization was affecting the Bektashis and the Abdals of Rum. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about these historical trends and how this sort of institutionalization of Sufi orders came about and how it affects these Abdals and Bektashis. In his God's Unruly Friends, Karam Mustafa talks about this new form of renunciation,

which emerges in the Islamic lands between 1200 and 1500. And he reads this new form of renunciation as a reaction to the institutionalization of Sufism. You can see this institutionalization in Sufism's web of relations with the political and cultural elite. And what this new form of piety embraces, first of all, is absolute poverty. absolute poverty. So there's this idea that doctrinally they embrace absolute poverty and the Bektashis and the Abdals of Rum are very much part of this trend that is a much larger trend that occurs not just in Anatolia and the Balkans where they're mostly active, but also in several other places in the Islamic lands. So when you say this renunciation kind of rises as a result of this institutionalization, I want to make sure I got it straight. There's a sort of heavy

organization going on within different Sufi orders. And then these Abdals and Bektashis sort of reject this and, you know, take something like a vow of poverty and, you know, kind of double down on their wandering dervish ways. Is that correct? Yes. First of all, they don't accept, they're not part of orders. They see the idea of orders as something that is political and that's something that is this worldly. That's why they have affiliations, but their affiliations are loose affiliations that can change and they have multiple affiliations. And this is actually very important for understanding Bektashis and Abdals of Rum because most of the authors that I've worked on were both Bektashis and Abdals of Rum and maybe put focus on one of those things

depending on context. Got it. And so you also mentioned the importance of their antinomian or socially subversive practices. Is this coming out of this sort of renunciation of the formation of orders as we know them? So I think that there's a really interesting balance here because these people were socially subversive and were quote unquote against society but they had followers and they wanted followers so our question my one of my biggest questions in my research has been how did the how does the socially subversive tendency coexist with the need to be accepted as a saint. And this actually, you know, Kaygu Suzaabdal, whom I think will come to, one of the main authors that I work on, he shifts his language depending on who he's talking to. And he focuses on this idea that depending on who is looking at him, he can be either an infidel

or a saint. And I actually want to read my translation of two different passages from his work that shows us this shift of perspectives, this multiplicity of perspectives regarding who he is and multiplicity of social identities that are always at work. So the first one is how he's viewed by Islamic authorities. They say, He knows neither the Sunnah nor the Fard. He has absolutely no knowledge of any proof or verse.

They say, So this is the first one. And then the second one is what Qayqas says is the way he's viewed by honest people and friends of god whoever sees qaikus abdul says this is a lover of muhammad and ali he has come to earth to avow what he had denied yet they have mistaken his avowal for denial so the reading that you just did of qaikus abdul it talks about how he's being pilloried by Islamic authorities or Sunni authorities, mainly for what they see as his willy-nilly beliefs and practices. Can you tell us a little bit more about his beliefs and practices? What were his doctrine and beliefs? and beliefs. So one of the main things that characterize him, by the way, he wrote more than 10 works, some of which is badly transliterated, and most of which is in manuscript

form. And if you read one of his works, you would think that he's a typical didactic Sunni. And you read another one of his works, you would see him as an extremist Shiite. And that was something that was difficult for me to wrap my head around at first. But the first thing that gave me a clue was the fact that he shifted his doctrine according to his audience. But then I thought, okay, what does this tell us about the period? And of course, this took me to Jamal Kafadar's now famous concept of metodoxy as characterizing this period. Qaigusuz Abdal lived in the late 14th and early 15th century.

And this was a period where there were, as Jamal Kafadar puts it, there were no established doxies. So I think that's part of what's going on here. But I also found out, and this was actually a very important finding of my research, that, for instance, I found some of this out from the manuscripts that had not been located before. You have 12 or Shiite poetry by him. So this is the first instance of 12 or Shiism, other than Nesimi's poetry, who, you know, has a whole different trajectory, although he's been appropriated by Alevism now.

So this, first of all, tells us that in the 14th century, I mean, when you look at his work, part of his work, especially his poetry collection, which he has over 530 poems in his poetry collection. And look at his poetry collection, you look at his Kitab al-Maghlata, the book of Pradl, and you see that in the late 14th century, Shiite beliefs were established in these circles. And this, of course, changes our narrative of the circles, meaning like literary circles like these kind of people like kaygus abdal who are preaching but also composing writing and kind of disseminating their belief yes i mean i meant a specific circle so we can trace kaygus abdal's relation to haji bektash through first of all haji bektktaş's spiritual daughter, Kadıncık Ana or Hatın Ana.

Haji Bektaş being the founder of the Bektaşi Order. Yes, and then from Kadıncık Ana's disciple is Abdal Musa, who is Kaygısuz Abdal's mürşid, spiritual director. So we only have actually two other people between Haji Bektaş and Kaygısız Abdal. actually two other people between Bajib Bektash and Kaygusuz Abdal. So this is actually also, when I say these circles, I mean not Dervish circles in larger sense, but I also mean Bektashi and Abdal circles. Right. So what bearing does this have on the Islamization of Anatolia? So the Islamization of Anatolia was a gradual process, which took place between roughly 1100 and 1400 via the settlement of Turkish migrants and also the conversion of local Christians. What happens when we say that in the 14th century Shiite doctrines were established in Anatolia is that we've changed our timeline regarding Shiite doctrines and put that timeline in the same timeline of the Islamization of Anatolia. So the Islamization of Anatolia and the entry of Shiite

doctrines into Anatolia were simultaneous and most likely linked processes. My first hypothesis regarding this is the role of Persian as the lingua franca of this period. When we look at the works of authors of this period, first of all, we know that many of them speak Persian. We've been talking about Qayyik Usuz Abdel, he spoke Persian, he had passages in his works in Persian, and he also had individual poems in Persian. And he refers to Attar, Saadi, other Persian authors frequently, and he makes no reference to Arab authors. And you can see the similar trend in other Abdal and Bektashi authors as well. What this makes me think about is that Persian was in one sense a vehicle maybe for this transfer of religious doctrine.

religious doctrine and if we think of this through a perspective of vernacularization there was in one sense a double vernacularization of islam taking place whereas from arabic to persian and then persian to turkish through dervish piety so if i understood you correctly it's that dervishes like kagus Abdaal and others who are spreading their doctrine in Anatolia, they're doing this through the Persian language more so than through Arabic. And so when you say double vernacularization, you mean that this Arabic isn't just being translated into Turkish, but it had been translated into Persian. And then these Anatolian Sufis or dervishes or whoever are then taking it from Persian and spreading the doctrine through Turkish. So there's a double vernacularization into Persian, then into Turkish. Yes, linguistically, but also culturally,

so traditionally. And I think that is one of our biggest difficulties in conceptualizing the idea of vernacularization. How does vernacularization happen? Something becomes globalized and then it becomes localized. And I think that this whole idea is that in this context, the Persian tradition is what becomes localized in Anatolia within these circles. You also talk about how from the 1500s onward, there is another wave of institutionalization that goes along with the formations of Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires. So during the 1500s, dervishes face pressure to join existing Sufi orders, or they create their own orders.

What exactly goes on during this period that encourages these changes? The establishment of regional empires puts extra pressure on these groups to be socially accepted, because these regional empires also become the representatives of their own orthodoxies. So what happens is, as these regional empires also become the representatives of their own orthodoxies. So what happens is as these regional empires become, especially in the Ottoman context, as the Ottoman Empire becomes the enforcer of a Sunni orthodoxy, lines are drawn.

And heterodoxy, the concept, our anachronic concept in this sense, makes sense in the regard that doxies are being formed in interaction, not in a center-periphery way, but in their interaction with one another. And that's why I find it so important to think about Ottoman Sunnitization together with the emergence of Alevism. And so what these groups do is, of course, is to find some umbrella order in which they can find a way not to be persecuted. In the Ottoman context, this becomes the Bektashi order, which is related, I think, is most likely related to the Bektashi relationship to the Janissaries.

Got it. to the Bektashi relationship to the Janissaries. Got it. So the increasing sunnatization of the Ottoman Empire is interacting with the spreading of Shia doctrine in Anatolia. And you're arguing that these things are kind of co-constitutive of each other, that they're reacting to each other, they're happening at the same time. And one reaction to this sunnatization is that these dervishes, like the Abdals and the Bektashis,

become more organized as a way to avoid persecution. That's exactly it. Got it. We'll continue the conversation in just a moment after a short musical break. Welcome back to Ottoman History Podcast. We're here with Zeynep Oktay-Uslu discussing Abdal, Bektashi, and Alevi texts from early modern Anatolia. I wanted to shift our conversation a bit to the corpus of Alavi Bektashi literature, which form an important source base for your work, Zeynep. What exactly is this Alavi Bektashi corpus made of?

Is it fiction? Are they historical chronicles? Are they written? Are they oral? What is it? This is kind of the million dollar question in one sense, and then so easy to answer in another sense. I just want to start with saying that actually I edited a dossier on the Alibi Bektashi corpus, Alibi Bektashi literature in the current volume of Shah Dargih, and in the intro, I actually tried to answer the question, why don't we know,

how do we come to define this, and why don't we try to define this corpus? So, to start with, this is a vast corpus, a vast corpus, most of which is completely unstudied, completely unedited, and in manuscript form. There are all these works by individual authors that have never been looked at, that people don't have access to. And then there are all these poetry collections, which is actually a really important topic that I haven't had the chance to work on, but it's one of my future plans.

The idea, the corpus of medjmoa or junk, in which you can, in one manuscript of, let's say, 500 folios, you find, you know, a few hundred poets who've poems who only maybe have one, two, three poems that have survived. And so I want to start with why have we neglected this corpus? There are so many reasons. I want to start with why historians neglected this corpus. First of all, it requires a really deep polygraphical knowledge that is not readily available to everyone. Secondly, it requires a very deep literary knowledge that literature people haven't yet produced that the historians can rely on. Why don't people in literature?

Well, I don't even see these literature. I mean, I believe that literature and history should not be as divided as they are. And this is one area where you see that importance of that divide being lost one day. You know, in literature, in Turkey especially, this is the area which is like halk-e debiat, folk literature.

The moment you say something is folk literature in the Turkish context, it becomes sort of the least valuable part of Turkish literature, despite the fact that historically it was so important in the nation building. So this halk edebiyat, or at least this label of halk edebiyat,

is what's put on this corpus because it's poetry, maybe folktale-ish. So they are sort of fictional and they're orally recounted? I would say poetry is central. It's mostly poetry. And this is another question

that I've been thinking about lately that nobody has really tried to answer. I mean, there are so few people who are working on alivism in the first place. But the question is of how was it possible for such a deeply complex and unified system of religious thought, how was it for such a system to be codified in poetry and not religious treatises not complex works of philosophy and this is not a book of law this is poetry exactly and poetry becomes the codifier of social and religious, personal and social life. And this is a really important concept that I'm really thinking about lately.

Regarding orality and literacy, another area where we know so little, the whole problem of orality is a huge problem. How do you talk about something which you do not have access to historically? So there is some research about, anthropological research about how, you know, this poetry is orally consumed and produced. But historically, it's very hard for us to think about this. One of my findings that I talk about in my critical edition of one of Kaygu Sabdal's works is that from the meter, from the aruz, the formal meter, you can actually figure out that the work was either intended for oral performance, so to be heard, or dictated. Again, heard. So this actually shows us something

that is in line with some other research in this field. A lot of this literature, even when it was written down, it had some oral aspect to it, and it was, in a lot of different contexts consumed orally. One thing I'm curious about is the manuscript of the work of Kaygu Saptal you discovered in the National Library in Ankara. Could you tell us more about the manuscript and its author? And how are they important for the understanding of the development of Alevism and Bektashism in Anatolia?

Thank you for that question. So, I mean, the whole idea of discover means, you know, something that nobody knew was there. I guess they didn't know, but it was there. It was that people didn't pay attention to it, you know? So it ties in with this whole idea of this whole area of literature not being considered important. with this whole idea of this whole area of literature not being considered important.

The manuscript is dated 920, so 1514, which makes it the second oldest manuscript, older only by a little more than 10 years from the earliest manuscript. But before, we thought that he had written around 130 individual poems. Now, that number has increased to 530. You basically discovered a manuscript with about 400 poems that, as far as we know, weren't really known about at all. Yes. And among those poems were the poems about the 12 imams, the Ahl al-Bayt, Tabarra. So, three crucial aspects of Alawi religious doctrine. Yes.

Although they weren't central, which is something that I also have theories about that I will never be able to prove because of their oral nature. Right, right. So in this poetry, and you have translated a great deal of it, one of the lines that you read earlier, I found really entertaining. There's some classic insults there, like he cuts off his beard, he eats hemp, he is a regular at the tavern, but not a regular at the jami. These sort of insults are being thrown at Kaigusu's abdal. But my question for you is, we have Kaigusu's abdal talking about these insults.

Do we have other sources that are actually writing these sorts of things about him? I'm curious just because I'm wondering to what extent these insults helped him cultivate his own poetic voice. That, you know, they say I'm so bad, and let me tell you why I'm not. It sounds almost like a contemporary musical artist saying the same thing. You know, it's like, they say I'm a bad Muslim, but let me tell you why I'm not. And then he goes into his poetry. So I'm just curious, do we have other sources?

And to what extent do you think that was part of his poetic voice? Well, we don't have other sources from his period. We have later other sources, the sources that Kara Mustafa worked on. Generally, outsider accounts, heresiographies, Western travelers reports, Ottoman documents. So a lot of those things, but they were later. So in this period, we don't have that. But interestingly, for instance, when you look at Kargustapta's precursor, Yunus Emre, you actually see a similar trend, although a similar idea of Melamet.

Melamet being like this, although they insult me line. Yes, blame. The idea that being blamed is, first of all, it developed as the idea of being blamed not being so bad. And then it became, you know, being blamed being a great thing, historically. And so the path of blame, I guess, is a path that both Yunus and his follower, Qayy Gusuz Abdal, very much adhere to. And I just want to make a side point saying,

you know, there's this line that made me laugh when I saw it in again the the newly discovered corpus where you know samara says i should where kai goes up does says i should just find my own voice and stop imitating yunus which i loved he he managed to do it down he managed to do it wow so he writes this down in his he says you know i'm just imitating yunus m right i need to move past it and he does it yes wow and he does it by actually doing what you said by actually increasing that tone of malama just enough so that it will be he will be completely kai gusus which means fearless right okay and this is where he gets his epithet yes he's given his epithet by his master, Abd al-Musa, when he becomes Qaigusuz.

This device of melamet, blame, in the literature, is this only Qaigusuz Abd al and Yunus Emre, or is this something that's widespread across the corpus? Because you work on a lot of these different authors. I'm just curious, do you see it elsewhere yes um so for my dissertation i also worked on the works of sadiq abdal shamsi yamini and virani other than yamini all the three other ones were both abdals and bektashis yamini was not a bektashi and we see this path in all of them. And we see it to our day as a major aspect of Alevi thought, I think.

Now that I've mentioned these other authors, I also want to say, when we look at these authors, the reason I chose these authors was that it gave me a chronological look from the 14th to the 17th century. And I was actually able to see from Kaigusu's to Virani, despite variations between authors, depending on their different social contexts and audiences, I could see the consolidation of Alevi thought in these five authors.

So we don't actually need a very big corpus to even be able to trace the evolution of Alevi piety, which we've never done before. And some of my findings actually shows us, for instance, when some major aspects of Alevi thought or bektashi thought were first developed just from five just from five authors you can actually make major uh discoveries in that sense that's why literature is so important that we should never forget to rely on literature as a historical source right so you mentioned some of these important foundational elements of Alevi and Bektashi piety coming up in this corpus that you talk about.

I was wondering if you could just give us some examples of what these elements are exactly. The reverence of Ali is one of them. What else is there? This is a good question. Of course, the list is long. And I will just start with, at the end of my dissertation, I have these two tables where I actually make lists and then I show whether or not one doctrine is found in this author or that author.

We can start with aspects that are aspects of Bektashi, Abdal, and Alevi doctrine. For instance, the doctrine of Muhammad Ali as a specific doctrine that is different from the Shiite doctrine of Muhammad Ali. Meaning what exactly? The doctrine of Muhammad Ali? It posits the essential unity of Muhammad and Ali

as a single entity. And it was actually developed into the trilogy of Allah, Muhammad, Ali. But that is actually a very late development. And then the veneration of the 12 Imams, the veneration of the Ahl al-Bayt, which is the Prophet's family. Antinomianism is an important doctrine that exists in

Bektashi, Abdal, and Alevi thought, as we've just said. Malamat is in that context. The doctrine of the four Gates is an important doctrine. Four practices, Bektashi and Abdal practices that are also Alevi practices. The first thing that we think of is the Aina Jem ceremony that we find in, for instance, actually is quite late.

Among the authors that I worked on, we find it only in Firani in the 17th century. But we also find pilgrimage to holy Shiite sites, for instance, that is common. There is references to companionship, Musahiplik in Yemeni. And there is the Tajaman Gulbang, which is Alibi Bektashi prayer,

that is also found quite late in Firani. So all of these you're finding in the different authors that you look at in the Alavi Bektashi corpus, kind of popping up from different authors at slightly different times, depending. But a few of them that you mentioned before, the reverence of the family of the prophet, the reverence of Ali, the Muhammad Ali idea that they form an essential unity. These ones you see sort of across the field. And so these you see sort of solidifying into the sort of foundations of alavi piety that we have even up to the present.

Exactly. And each author has a different audience. For instance, Shamsi is writing, this is very interesting, by the way, Shamsi's Dehmur, Ten Birds, was written in honor of and presented to Selim, the Abu Sultan Selim, who, you know, he was an aptal. How do we come, you know, that's a whole different thing to wrap one's head around. So we can think that, okay, he must shaped his writing in in a way that would make it acceptable to Selim. Saduq Abtal had a different audience. Yamini had a different audience. He all had a both Sunni and Shiite audience which you can see in his work and so despite the fact that

these authors were writing in for different audiences in different context had different characters and temperaments, and in some sense, different social circles, at least because of their times, they all had the four basic doctrines, I guess the four basic doctrines of Muhammad Ali, 12 Imams, Ahl al-Bayt, and Malamat. Got it.

So in a way, this literary corpus is an asset for people who are trying to look into the solidification of these what we now find to be foundational beliefs for anybody who considers themselves spiritually an alevi exactly and for instance we see that the doctrine of muhammad ali the veneration of the 12 imams and the ahl al-Bayt, as I just said, were already established in these circles in the 14th century. We started out with this in our talk today. the oneness of being, wahdat al-wujud, which is considered to be the major aspect of Bektashi thought

because of its prevalence in the nafs, is actually absent from most of these authors except for Khayeguzuz Abdaal. For our listeners, this is a deep question, but what is the oneness of being? According to who? I mean, this wasn't,

you know, the oneness of being as a term was not used by Ibn Arabi. So, but let me say for the Bektashis, what was it? It was the idea that God manifested himself in the universe, and that manifestation was not something other than God. Okay, so it's a theological distinction we could say it's something about god and his being which is the subject of centuries if not millennia of theological debate but for the

bektashis this is important that it was one essential being that manifested itself it wasn't some human or it wasn't some something else It was God and God alone. Yes, that definition, that's the largest definition. So you can actually apply it to Ibn Arabi himself. But the Bektashi, the thing we find, for instance, in Qaygusus Abdal is extremely interesting. According to Ibn Arabi, you do not have access to God's essence. You have got access to God's attributes,

which are manifested in the universe, but the essence itself remains inaccessible. Whereas in Qaigus' Abdal, the zat, the essence, is accessible. And in one of his works, two of his works, openly identified with Ali.

And the creation, the manifestation, is openly identified with muhammad so there is only one being the esoteric aspect of that one being is ali and the exoteric aspect which is the universe of that being is muhammad so we won't go into any more detail here just being as this is uh it's a it's a profound subject in the same way that, for example, the Trinity continues to be the source of serious debate and division among the world's Christians. Just for example, that for the Bektashis and for Kagisu's Aptal, this oneness of being was important.

And Kagisu's Aptal, if I'm getting you correctly, had a particular way of reading that oneness of being was important and kagesu's aptal if i'm getting you correctly had a particular way of reading that oneness of being and you can see that in his in his work yes and i think that was foundational for the veneration of ali it would lay the theoretical groundwork for the veneration of ali and it was done by poetry and a work of fiction. Right. So not legalistic works, not a book of laws, nothing like this. This is poetry. And why?

Why is it poetry? Because if I take it from the definition of the oneness of being, because according to Kaigu Susan, according to many of these other authors, poetry is where you can unify the visible with the invisible. You can use the visible to refer to the invisible because things in poetry can have multiple hidden meanings. of this really deep thought, as opposed to this now, you know, modern idea of poetry or fiction as something that is not the truth. Right, something confined to a different realm that is not history, that is not actionable.

It's just stories. Halka debiata. Exactly. Got it. So having looked at this huge corpus and at a relatively early period, what does this tell us about today? What are the modern implications on Alevism and the Alevi literature today? I actually find quite a bit of an analogy between the later period that I work on, you know, the consolidation of Alevi doctrine and the Bektashi order, and what's

happening today. You know, we talked about how Ottoman Sunnatization has to be read together with the formation of Alevism. My main question in that regard is, how does an alternative religious discourse shape itself in the presence of a dominant Islamic discourse? And how much is it shaped by this dominant discourse? And the same question, the exact same question holds today, in which we have this Islamist discourse and politics, and which denies Alevites their basic rights. And at the same time, we have the standardization of a very heterogeneous community due to urbanization, but also politics within the Alevis themselves.

One of the things that my research shows that maybe I haven't been able to point to very much today is the heterogeneity of doctrines and thoughts and individual temperaments of these authors. These are individuals. And we, especially in history, as historians, we forget, we focus so much on the community. For the Alevis, we focus so much on communities. And I totally care about the the community but the community and the individual exist together and that perspective is what makes me think about the heterogeneity of the historical Alevi corpus. That there's this inner religious diversity within Alevis and so at the

same time there's external pressure from a sort of Islamist political current going on there's also an impetus to standardize with trends like urbanization within the al-awiyah communities is that what you're saying there's sort of two forces going on here yes and i'm saying that the heterogeneity of the historical al-awiyahs holds for the modern al-awiyahs which is being lost as we speak. That these varied practices, beliefs, coming from all different corners of Turkey and wherever else, are subject to a sort of standardization from these two forces.

Exactly. Or three forces. So politics of certain groups, urbanization, and the government, or whatever we call the holders of power. Well, all right. I think that we probably have a lot more to discuss here that we could keep going on with, but that's all the time we have for today.

Zeynep, I want to thank you very much for joining us on the podcast today. Thank you very much. It's been a great pleasure for me. And for those of you who want to find out more, we will post a bibliography with relevant works and other sources that you can look at to read more about Bektashism, Ottavism, history, literature, and everything else. You can access that at our website ottomanhistorypodcast.com.

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