Buyruk means command or decree, and the books that carry the name present themselves as the commands of the tradition's authorities: most versions speak in the frame of Imam Jafar al-Sadiq, the sixth Imam, whom Alevis honour as the fountain of their doctrine, while a second family of manuscripts descends from the circle of Sheikh Safi al-Din of Ardabil, the Sufi ancestor of the Safavid house whose movement shaped the Kizilbash communities of Anatolia.
The contents mix genres deliberately. Doctrinal sections expound the four gates of the path, shariat, tarikat, marifat and hakikat, law, path, knowledge and truth, with the forty stations that lead through them; the seeker's progress is mapped as an interior journey in which love of God, love of the Prophet's house and the guidance of a master are indispensable. Ritual sections regulate the cem, the communal ceremony of prayer, music and the ritual dance called semah, prescribing the twelve services performed within it; they set out musahiplik, the covenant by which two married couples bind themselves as companions of the hereafter, answerable for each other's conduct, and the procedures of communal accountability by which disputes are aired and reconciled before worship may proceed. Narrative sections carry the sacred history, from the primordial assembly of the Forty to the sufferings of the Imams, Kerbela above all, binding doctrine to memory.