The Alevis in Turkey

The Emergence of a Secular Islamic Tradition

David Shankland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN:
  9780700716067
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135789619
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

This is the only volume dedicated to the Alevis available in English and based on sustained fieldwork in Turkey. The Alevis now have an increasingly high profile for those interested in the diverse cultures of contemporary Turkey, and in the role of Islam in the modern world. As a heterodox Islamic group, the Alevis have no established doctrine. This book reveals that as the Alevi move from rural to urban sites, they grow increasingly secular, and their religious life becomes more a guiding moral culture than a religious message to be followed literally. But the study shows that there is nothing inherently secular-proof within Islam, and that belief depends upon a range of contexts.

1
ALEVI AND SUNNI IN THE REPUBLIC OF TURKEY

Turkey tends to be known in the West in rather specific ways: for its being formed out of the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, its secularism, its readiness to become part of the European Union, and for its possessing seemingly intractable political problems such as the Cyprus question or a so-called ‘democratic deficit’. The economic and social developments that have changed the country over the past seventy-five years are rarely integrated with these dominant perceptions. Yet they are nowhere more relevant than when considering the evolving circumstances of the Alevis and their changing relations with the Sunni majority.

At the Republic’s outset, the Alevis were a predominantly rural community, inhabiting mainly, though by no means entirely, an area to the central east, and south-east part of the country. Today, after several decades of rapid migration, they are predominantly urban, occupying usually the outlying areas of large cities, such as Istanbul, Ankara or Izmir. Again, at the outset of the Republic, their communities were little known. The villagers themselves expressed a strong proscription against permitting outsiders to enter their ceremonies, and they actively avoided explaining their doctrines to others.¹ Today in Turkey, Alevi services are frequently held in public arenas and documented on television, their recorded music is sold in outlets almost everywhere, and their lives are described in a booming local publications industry, most (though not all) authored by the Alevis themselves.² While opinion is often diverse, there is a significant voice demanding that the state make explicit recognition of their culture, something that as yet has not formally taken place.³ There has even been a model text book designed to be appropriate for state religious education lessons written from the Alevi point of view, though it has not yet been adopted.⁴

Thus, any work that cares to treat the Alevis has to account for the way that a rural, remote, diverse, private, largely oral Islamic society has become urban, public, active, secular and, to a great extent, begun the express process of codification of its previously diverse largely unrecorded culture within the modern city setting.⁵ In order to begin this task, it is helpful to revisit, extremely briefly, certain relevant aspects of the Republic’s founding.

The population of modern Turkey

The population of the Republic of Turkey took its present form at the end of the Ottoman Empire. As a result of flight, exchange, catastrophe and war, the hitherto religiously mixed population became predominantly Islamic.⁶ In contrast, the ethnic composition of the country grew more varied. Already, in Anatolia the majority Turkish population, itself of diverse background, was offset by Kurds and other groups, such as the Laz of the Black Sea coast or Arabs in the south-east. As the Ottoman Empire contracted, they became leavened with Muslim immigrants from across the Balkans, the Caucasus, Crete and the Fertile Crescent, a policy of welcome that was continued by the Republicans. A huge variety of other groups, albeit in small absolute numbers, such as Gypsies, as well as the remnants of some very ancient groups such as the Yezidis, Nestorians or the Chaldaens, complement this picture.⁷

The new nation was founded upon the presumption that these differences were not important: that a person may be from Anatolia, Russia, the Balkans, the Middle East, or Arab, Caucasian, Turkish, and so on, and it would not make the slightest difference to the fact of their citizenship. However, it was (and is expected still today) that all will identify with the ‘Turkish’ character of the Republic. While persons may speak whatever language they will in private, they are expected to accept being educated in Turkish, and to accept that the foundations of national identity are posited upon its ‘Turkishness’, a pro-gramme that also included a sense of egalitarianism, becoming modern by embracing the West, emphasis on order, hard work, education, sport and culture.

Religion in Turkey

This attempt to create a uniform public national ethnic identity was paralleled in the field of religion. While the Republic became a secular nation–state, the state chose from the outset not to withdraw from the field of religion entirely. Instead, through the Republican People’s Party, who were in power until the elections in 1950, the nation’s leaders attempted to minimise its relevance to the new Republic, emphasising instead the scientific, rational organisation of society. Albeit perhaps reluctantly, faith was catered for through proclaiming a reformed Islam, one that would stress the importance of individual piety rather than atheism or unbelief. This Republican version of the faith stressed the appropriateness of moral behaviour (ahlak) in this world, and while it rejected Seriat, Islamic Law, broadly accepted the legitimacy of the five pillars (acknowledge the one God; pray; perform the pilgrimage; pay alms; and keep the fast). This innovation was, in effect, a puritan secular version of faith, one that stressed the Koran and the need to rid the believer of intermediaries between the self and God. It is used sometimes still today as a justification for the ban on brotherhoods, the tarikats, with their insistence on hierarchy and separation.

This decision both to restrain and to permit religion had certain immediate consequences. In that the state had never declared itself against faith absolutely, it meant that it was able gradually to accommodate successive moves towards re-Islamification after the transition to democracy in 1950. This re-Islamifica-tion has continued until the present, albeit within a Turkey that is growing steadily more diverse as it modernises. Further, because it had also decided right from the outset that the basis of its reformed Islam was to be, broadly speaking, Sunni practice, it was able to take certain formal steps: grant permission to build mosques, print Korans, facilitate the pilgrimage to Mecca, which gradually resulted in, albeit within the secular nation–state, a huge increase in public orthodox activity. This has had the effect of persuading some, and displeasing others, particularly the Alevi community, but it has the advantage that, rather than direct confrontation, in many areas of society expanding religious practice has become based upon a series of negotiations centring upon a recognised and established body of doctrine sanctioned by the state through the aptly named Directorate of Religious Affairs.⁸

All this means that, while the Republic was founded upon the premise that ‘Turkishness’ would be a suitable and sufficient channel through which national identity may be formed, it has gradually permitted Islam to play a greater role in the public life of the country. Today, these sentiments together, and not just ‘Turkishness’ constitute an intertwined but dominant conception of what it means to be a citizen of the Republic. To an outsider, the way that this citizenship is inculcated may appear inflexible, with its fierce patriotism, iconography and regular public rituals, but it has ensured that Turkey has been, albeit with many civil upheavals and sometimes vociferous debate, a viable nation–state generated from a collapsed empire in an otherwise very unstable part of the world.

Identification and group organisation

This, however, leaves us with a question. What is the overlap between the plethora of Turkey’s ethnic and religious groups and subscribing to these dominant twin perceptions of nationhood within the present-day Republic?Such a question is of fundamental importance to the history of the nation, yet extremely difficult to answer, not least because ethnic and cultural identities may evolve and change with such rapidity. Nevertheless, there does appear to exist a pattern, one that is most relevant to our study.

It is clear that the indigenous non-Islamic groups have found it increasingly awkward to combine long-lived membership of the Turkish state and also sustain their communities; that is, the remaining overall number of indigenous Greeks (Rum), Christians, Jews and Armenians has steadily declined, even though there have often been notably successful individuals in business, political or public life who may be drawn from these circles. This implies that the number of non-Muslims of Turkish nationality, already low, is becoming steadily lower. Contrariwise, within the Islamic population, it appears that diverse groups of mixed ethnic backgrounds have easily been remarkably able to identify with the precepts of Turkish nationalism unless their sense of differences has been supported, indeed shaped, by their possessing a traditional social organisation that is founded in opposition to the central state.

For instance, though I am not aware of any scholarly study that specifically examines this question, my own experience suggests that the many and varied Balkan and Caucasian immigrant groups would seem to have become politically and culturally part of the Turkish Republic with very little friction, as is evidenced by a number of accounts produced by their members, tracing their history within the nation.⁹ That is not to say that all their communities have been successful: obviously some have found it easier to establish themselves than others. It is also a fact that, as in the case of the great wave of refugees that came from Bulgaria during the 1980s, sheer numbers have on occasion seemingly made rapid integration problematic. Nevertheless, it appears to have been possible for successive major groups of immigrants throughout the century, even if not obviously Turkish, to become Türk without drastic upheaval: somehow, they fit in.

Another example, even more striking, of the way that ethnic diversity may become successfully integrated is the Black Sea coast. This is an area that is at once both diverse and distinct, in which a proportion of the population is of a non-Turkish minority known as ‘Laz’. As there exists also a Laz language, this population may be expected to sit uneasily with a centralised Turkish Republic. However, in a series of researches that have continued from the 1980s to the 1990s, Ildiko Beller-Hann and Chris Hann have illustrated the astonishingly successful, even enthusiastic way that they have become part of Republican society. Thus, a coast so infested by bandits that the British authorities were reduced during their brief occupation to reporting vainly the appalling state of civil disorder, is now among the safest and the most prosperous parts of the country. Of course, this may change: identities may be renegotiated, and I have no idea what the effect of new electronic media may be in encouraging or facilitating the future sense of ethnic identity. However, at present they appear to possess, or have developed no coherent ethnic ‘Laz’ identity that might force people to choose between being ‘Laz’ and being ‘Turkish’.¹⁰

In contrast, we may take the Kurdish communities of eastern Anatolia. As in other groups, throughout Turkey’s modern history, there have been Kurds who have achieved the most senior positions, but there has equally notoriously been periodic strife, terrorism and rebellion that have resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of people. Unlike the Laz groups, whose ethnicity today appears to be expressed through a fairly mild regional sense of difference – an ethic of hard work, of piety, of being tough on women, of distinctive dances – the Kurdish movement has given rise to a full programme of alternative nationhood expressed politically both nationally and internationally to which some, though certainly not all, subscribe. Yet, unlike the Laz or the Balkan groups, organisationally the Kurds are distinct: they possess a tradition of opposition to central government. This opposition is founded upon a tribal system that enables large groups to come together to form independent resistance to state authority. This, accompanied by a fierce cultural sense of independence and presumption of the legitimacy of armed resistance, appears to have encouraged a volatility that is markedly, even entirely absent on the contemporary Black Sea coast.

The Alevis

The Alevis illustrate this contention afresh, though in a different way, this time through a markedly distinct religious and personal ethic. Should a Kurd wish to become part of the wider nation, there is no reason why their ethnic origin should become clear at all to the outside world, and, but perhaps for the heightened tension during the very peak of the violence in the mid-1990s, it need be no impediment to their advancement. Being an Alevi, however, is another matter. Here, choice becomes markedly less straightforward. Even in times of comparative or sustained peace, the moral, philosophical and existential consequences of being part of the Alevi religious communities are so profound as to influence not just aspects of faith, but also the way one leads one’s secular life as well.

A recent study by Michael Meeker illustrates neatly why this seemingly permanent sense of difference may become so significant. In a detailed historical analysis of Of, a town on the Black Sea coast, he suggests that maintaining a sense of the common everyday symbols, phrases and habits of orthodox religious life enabled an otherwise extremely diverse population both to interact freely among themselves and to create links easily far outside their immediate circle. This implies that a sense of being part of the Islamic community, even within a secular republic, enabled ethnic differences among orthodox believers to be overlooked or forgotten in all but the sharply distinct Kurdish tribal regions in eastern Anatolia, and provides a forceful argument as to how such diverse ethnic, linguistic and national groups could form modern Turkey so smoothly.¹¹

The Alevis, on the other hand, are far less comfortable using active participation within a supra-religious community as a means to establish wider social contact. Instead, they have preferred to stress citizenship within a secular nation. As this conception of national identity is only one strand of the dominant Turkish/Islamic perception of citizenship, it means that they only partially overlap with the majority view. That is, their not giving priority to fasting, to praying in the mosque, or to the everyday sayings and affirmations of belief, has meant that they are not automatically incorporated into one of the most important means by which diverse peoples have been socialised into a Turkish national community.

Just as in the Kurdish case, however, this sense of difference is buttressed by the Alevis possessing a social organisation that is distinct, and in many ways predicated upon not being part of the central system of state control. While there are very great differences between regions, and between groups,...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on the text
• Introduction
• 1 Alevi and sunni in the republic of turkey
• 2 The sub—province
• 3 The sunni villages
• 4 Susesi
• 5 Religion, ritual and social control
• 6 Social change and the alevi communities
• 7 The alevis, evolving identity and the state
• 8 Conclusion
• Appendix 1 Glossary of turkish words
• Appendix 2 Susesi household structure
• Appendix 3 Economy susesi
• Appendix 4 Sub-province voting patterns
• Notes
• Bibliography