Citation:
Thesis Type:
PhD dissertationAbstract:
This dissertation deals with the history of the Alevi communities historically known as the Kizilbash in Ottoman Anatolia. Scholars have typically treated Alevism as an undifferentiated strain within the hazy category of "heterodox folk Islam" and mostly in terms of the role these communities played in the sixteenth-century Ottoman-Safavid conflict. There has thus been little effort to explore Alevi history in its own right. This dissertation proposes to fill this gap by examining the development of the Alevis' socio-religious organization, which is centered around a number of charismatic family lines called ocaks. Drawing upon a group of newly available documents and manuscripts emanating from within the Alevi milieu itself, this dissertation traces the origins of the ocak system to the cosmopolitan Sufi milieu of late medieval Anatolia and accounts for the system's evolution up to the nineteenth century.
Chapter one reveals the historical affinity of a number of prominent Alevi ocaks in eastern Anatolia with the Waf'i order and shows how from the second half of the fifteenth century onwards the various branches of the Wafa'iyya came to merge with the Safavid-led Kizilbash movement, gradually evolving into distinct components of the Alevi ocak system. Chapters two and three deal with the trajectory of the Alevi-Bektashi symbiosis. Highlighting Alevis' historical ties to the Abdal/Bektashi convent in Karbala, these chapters propose looking beyond the central Bektashi convent in Kirşehir for a fuller grasp of the issue. Chapter four, devoted to Alevi-Safavid relations, argues that the Alevis conceived of their bond with the Safavids primarily in Sufi terms and that they continued in their spiritual attachment to the shahs even after the revolutionary phase of the Kizilbash movement. Relations between the shahs and their Anatolian followers were maintained through the mediation of the Abdal/Bektashi convent in Karbala. Until the late seventeenth century, the Safavids also continued to bestow hilafetnames on members of Alevi ocaks and to dispatch religious treatises to Anatolia. The Safavid memory among the Alevis began to fade away following the demise of the dynasty around the mid-eighteenth century and the subsequent increase in influence of the Çelebi Bektashis among them.