Alevism

The first thing to say about Alevism is that what it is remains genuinely contested, including among Alevis, and that the dispute is not academic: it determines whether Alevi places of worship are recognised in Turkish law.

Three positions are held. That Alevism is a branch of Shia Islam, deriving from Twelver veneration of Ali and the Twelve Imams with Sufi and older Anatolian elements. That it is a distinct heterodox Anatolian Islam, not reducible to either Sunni or Shia. And, argued by a substantial segment of Alevis themselves, that it is a religion in its own right and not Islam at all. Sunni orthodoxy has historically read it as heresy.

What can be described without settling the question is the practice and the theology. Alevism venerates Ali intensely, and the formula of Allah, Muhammad and Ali is understood as a manifestation of light rather than as three persons. Its central theological idea is Insan-i Kamil, the perfect human, and the divine is sought within the person rather than in a law imposed from outside. It does not observe the five daily prayers, does not fast in Ramadan in the Sunni manner, does not require the pilgrimage, and does not worship in mosques. The prohibition on alcohol is not generally observed.

Its emergence is placed in Anatolia among Turkic populations who received Islam from wandering dervishes rather than from urban scholars, consolidating around Haji Bektash Veli and, in Ottoman times, the Bektashi order, which supplied the Janissary corps with its chaplains until that corps was destroyed in 1826.

The cem is the central rite, and almost everything distinctive about Alevism is visible in it.

It is held in a cemevi, an assembly house, not a mosque. Men and women take part together, without segregation, the practice that most sharply marks Alevism off from Sunni orthodoxy and that has attracted the most hostility. It is conducted in Turkish, Zazaki and Kurdish rather than in Arabic. It is built around music: the saz, the long-necked lute, is a sacred instrument, and the sung poems called nefes carry the doctrine, which is transmitted in performance rather than fixed in a canon. It includes the semah, a turning ritual dance performed by men and women together, and it is structured around twelve ritual services distributed among the participants.

Authority is hereditary and initiatory rather than bureaucratic. A dede is a spiritual teacher, traditionally of an ocak lineage claiming descent from Ali and Fatima, who leads the cem, teaches, and arbitrates disputes within the community. The Bektashi structure adds ranks running through dervish and baba to a supreme dedebaba, whose seat is now at the Bektashi centre in Albania. There is no single governing body, and modern Alevi federations and foundations operate alongside the dede system rather than replacing it.

The Turkish state has long refused to recognise cemevis as places of worship on the footing that mosques enjoy, which means no share of the public funding that the state religious directorate distributes, funded in part by Alevi taxes. In 2022 the state recognised Alevism as a cultural group and created a presidency for Alevi and Bektashi culture under the ministry of culture. Alevi organisations largely reject the arrangement, for the obvious reason that culture is precisely not worship.

No reliable figure exists, and the unreliability is itself worth reporting. Estimates for Turkey range from about 4 per cent of the population to about 15, somewhere between three and thirteen million people. Three things drive the spread. The Turkish census does not record sect within Islam. Generations of concealment following massacres suppress self-reporting, and the tradition has its own practice of concealment to draw on. And the boundary question (whether Kurdish and Zaza Alevis, Bektashis, and the Arab Alawites of the south are inside or outside the category), moves the denominator by millions. Any confident single number is an advocacy figure.

The concealment has causes. At Kahramanmaras in December 1978 a mob killed between 105 and 111 people, mostly Alevi women and children; trials ran to 1991, and all the defendants were released by 1992 under an amnesty law. At Sivas on 2 July 1993 a Sunni mob burned the Madimak Hotel during an Alevi cultural festival, killing 37 people. Thirty-three death sentences were passed in 1997 and commuted to life imprisonment in 2002 when capital punishment was abolished; the remaining cases were dismissed on the statute of limitations in March 2012, and further cases were dropped at the thirty-year mark in September 2023. There were killings at Malatya in 1978 and at Corum in 1980.

The impunity, rather than only the killing, is the living grievance. Turkey has also lost repeated cases at the European Court of Human Rights over compulsory religious education and the status of assembly houses.

There is a large Alevi diaspora, principally in Germany, where cemevis operate without the recognition problem.