Little about Haji Bektash Veli's life is settled among historians, and the order that bears his name has always been comfortable with that uncertainty in a way few others are. Tradition holds that he was born in Khorasan, in the eastern Islamic world, and travelled west into Anatolia in a period of upheaval following the Mongol conquests, settling eventually near the town later renamed Hacibektas in his memory.
There he gathered followers among a population still only recently and unevenly Islamized, in a countryside where older Anatolian folk custom and residual Christian practice remained close beneath the surface of everyday religious life, and his teaching is remembered as unusually tolerant of that mixture rather than opposed to it.
Sources disagree sharply on when he lived and died, with proposed dates for his death ranging across more than half a century, and the order itself did not take organized shape during his own lifetime. It was assembled afterward by followers who built a devotional structure around his tomb and his memory, incorporating reverence for Ali ibn Abi Talib and the Twelve Imams recognized in Twelver Shia Islam alongside distinctly Anatolian devotional forms, a combination that has led scholars to describe Bektashism as one of the most syncretic bodies within the wider Sufi tradition, neither straightforwardly Sunni nor straightforwardly Shia in its practice.