Alevis form a distinct religious community within Turkey and its diaspora, holding beliefs and practices that diverge sharply from Sunni Islam, including the absence of the five daily prayers and the mosque in favour of the cemevi and the cem, and that history has made the ceremony as much a marker of communal identity as an act of worship.
Alevis faced serious persecution across Ottoman and later Turkish Republican history, including massacres associated with accusations of heresy and, more recently, violent attacks such as the 1993 Sivas incident in which a mob set fire to a hotel hosting an Alevi cultural festival, killing thirty-seven people, an event still commemorated within the community as a defining trauma. Partly because of that history, the cem was traditionally held privately and its details kept from outsiders, and cemevis lack the legal recognition given to mosques in Turkey, a status Alevi organisations have long campaigned to change. The dede who leads the ceremony inherits the office through descent from families claiming lineage to the Twelve Imams or to associated saintly figures, and dede lineages historically also served as arbiters of communal dispute outside the ceremony itself, so the reconciliation that must occur before the cem can proceed was historically backed by a dede's standing authority in the community's ordinary affairs, not only a ritual formality performed on the night. Migration to Germany and other European countries has produced cemevis and Alevi federations operating openly outside Turkey, where the community's legal recognition is often more secure than at home.