Mysticism and Imperial Politics: The Safavids and the Making of the Kizilbash Milieu

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 sayyidfamilies 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 Çaldıran 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 ḫalīfe(P. khalīfa) to selected Alevi ocaks and the mediation of a branch of the Safavid family in southeastern Anatolia that evolved into the Alevi ocakof Şah İbrahim Veli.

The Iraq Connection: Abu’l-Wafaʾ Taj al-ʿArifin and the Wafaʾi Tradition

In the oldest cluster of the recently surfaced Kizilbash/Alevi documents(mainly Sufi diplomas (ijāzas) and genealogies (shajaras), or fragments thereof(Abu’l-Wafaʾ Taj al-ʿArifin, the eponym of the Wafaʾi order, is frequently named as a familial and/or spiritual progenitor. The story of the Wafaʾiyya, which one rarely encounters in histories of Islamic mysticism, began in eleventh-century Iraq, but its Iraqi branch seems to have faded away over a few generations, leaving behind no permanent imprints. Chapters 1 and 2 address the implications of the historical affinity of some of the most prominent Alevi saintly lineages with the Wafaʾi Sufi tradition. Chapter 1 presents a selective overview of the life and spiritual legacy of Abu’l-Wafaʾ, based on the hagiography of the saint and other near-contemporary Sufi narratives. It underlines the difficulty of categorizing the saint and his spiritual legacy along the lines of conventional binaries of Sunni versus Shiʿi and “heterodox” versus “orthodox.” This chapter makes the point that the metadoxic outlook of the Babaʾi 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 Wafaʾi milieu.

Introduction

The introduction places the book in the context of the larger literature on Islam in Anatolia. It explains how this book is part of a recent wave of studies that take a critical, revisionist approach to the deeply entrenchedparadigmdeveloped by the early-twentieth century Turkish historian Fuad Köprülü, highlighting in particular the perils of a binary vision of religion based on high Islam and folk Islam, and the ahistorical application of the notion of syncretism in Alevi-Bektashi studies. The introduction also offers an outline of Alevi beliefs, rituals, and socio-religious organization, discusses the recently surfaced Kizilbash/Alevi manuscripts and documents that form the book’s primary source base, summarized the major themes and argumentsthat emerge from them, and explains the organization of the chapters around these themes.

Hacı Bektaş and his Contested Legacy: The Abdals of Rum, the Bektashi Order and the (Proto-) Kizilbash Communities

Chapter 3 takes up the issue of the relationship between the Kizilbash/Alevi communities and the Bektashi order, tracing its roots to their common association with the cult of Hacı Bektaş and their shared links to the Abdals of Rum. This chapter challenges Köprülü’s conjecture of an insular Turkish folk Islam transferred under the cover of the Yesevi Sufi order from Central Asia to Anatolia, and inherited in its new home by successive heterodox circles within a linear evolutionary scheme; it was purported to have passed from the Yeseviyye to the Abdals of Rum, an itinerant dervish group active in late medieval Anatolia, and from them onto the better institutionalized Bektashi order. Within this framework, Köprülü treated the Kizilbash/Alevis as lay followers of the Bektashi order. Evidence emerging from Alevi sources complicates this picture. They disclose no evidence of a Yesevi connection. Nor do they validate Köprülü’s view of the Alevis as lay followers of the Bektashi order. While they do confirm the closely intertwined trajectories of the two affiliations, their interactions and eventual partial fusion appear to have involved a much more contested process than presumed by Köprülü, tensions crystallizing especially around the spiritual legacy of Hacı Bektaş.

From Persecution to Confessionalisation: Consolidation of the Kizilbash/Alevi Identity in Ottoman Anatolia

Alevi documents that were issued by Ottoman authorities recognising related families as Sufi dervishes and/or sayyids form a point of departure of the analysis in this chapter that focuses on relations between the Ottoman state and the Kizilbash communities. While such documents might 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.

The Forgotten Forefathers: Wafaʾi Dervishes in Medieval Anatolia

Using Alevi documents and Seljuk and Ottoman-era archival sources, chapter 2 tracks the various Sufi figures and sayyidfamilies who are purported to be spiritual and/or biological descendants of Abu’l-Wafaʾ 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 Wafaʾi 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 ocaksystem. This chapter also argues that the erosion of the Wafaʾi memory, to some extent a natural corollary of the incorporation of the Wafaʾi affiliates into the Safavid-led Kizilbash movement, also involved the conflation and blending of the Wafaʾi 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.

A Transregional Kizilbash Network: The Iraqi Shrine Cities and their Kizilbash Visitors

A notable revelation of the Alevi sources regarding the relationship between the Kizilbash/Alevi communities and the Bektashi order is the relatively institutionalized relations between the Kizilbash/Alevi saintly lineages and a group of (would be-) Bektashi convents in Iraq that acted as liaisons between the Safavids and their Kizilbash followers in Anatolia. The hub of this network was a convent in Karbala that originally belonged to the Abdals of Rum, but that was eventually appropriated by the Bektashi order. Many Alevi documents were issued or renewed there. Focusing on this convent and relations that developed around it, this chapter attempts to shed further light on Alevi-Bektashi symbiosis, and the evolution of the Alevi ocak system on the basis of a set of informal networks connecting the Safavids, the Bektashis and the Kizilbash/Alevi communities. It was only through the course of the nineteenth century, when the policies of the Ottoman state undermined the powerbase of the local sayyid families and abrogated the institutional identity of the convents that this long-standing network began to lose its vibrancy and eventually collapsed. This, in turn, heralded a process whereby the Alevi-Bektashi milieu gradually lost its transregional character and came to be confined largely to Anatolia.

Conclusion

Summary of main arguments