Ayfer Karakaya-Stump has located, translated, and analyzed previously unpublished source materials from the private archives of Anatolian Alevi families to offer a reconceptualization of the formation of the Ottoman Kizilbash-Alevi milieu in The Kizilbash-Alevis in Ottoman Anatolia: Sufism, Politics and Community. The book, part of the Edinburgh Studies on the Ottoman Empire series, embraces an historical framework to present the “central thesis that the basic doctrinal, devotional and organisational features of Kizilbashism/Alevism must be sought within Sufism broadly defined” (48). While the Safavid order in Iran and the Bektashi order in Ottoman lands are often discussed in relation to Alevi history and praxis, Alevi-held documents themselves reveal ties to Sufi and dervish circles that precede these imperially-affiliated orders. Based on findings from these sources, Karakaya-Stump presents a complex series of historical and political events and intra-Muslim exchanges, within which Kizilbash-Alevi identity solidified in response to confessional and persecutory pressures in the sixteenth century.
Kizilbash-Alevi spiritual lineages (ocaks) emerged as a significant socio-religious network in the Islamic milieu of Ottoman Anatolia. Ocak families regularly sought to obtain verified genealogical documents to certify the seyyid authority of male lineage heads, which linked them to the genealogy of the family of the Prophet Muhammad and his son-in-law Ali. Certain scholarly paradigms and oversights long resulted in suggestions that Alevis lacked such documentary archives, but the Alevi cultural revival of the 1980s and 90s facilitated the publication of Alevi teachings and texts; in some cases, elders from ocak lineages opened the sacred trust of their family archives to research. Karakaya-Stump's remarkable efforts to trace ocak families and locate their documentary holdings have thus resulted in this analysis of 150 private documents preserved by Alevi families, most of which are dated to between the second half of the sixteenth century and the end of the nineteenth. These include Sufi diplomas that reveal the descent of the Alevi ocaks in question from the Wafaʾi order, named for eleventh-century Iraqi sheikh Abu'l-Wafaʾ al-Baghdadi, as well as the aforementioned genealogical scrolls, pilgrimage certificates from journeys to Iraqi Abdal-Bektashi Sufi convents, and papers and religious texts issued in Anatolia by the deputies of the Safavid shah.
Sources held by several research collections, such as the hagiographic vita of Abu'l Wafa, are re-visited. Overlooked or thinly employed by earlier generations of scholars, such documents support perspectives on the formation of the Kizilbash-Alevis emerging from within Alevi archives. As Karakaya-Stump points out in the introduction, the absence of this information long resulted in the identification of “heterodox” Alevi practice with oral transmission, pre-Islamic Turkic shamanism, and a syncretic “Turkish folk Islam” by Ottomanists. Safavid specialists likewise problematically situated the Kizilbash-Alevis amongst extremist Shiʿi ghulāt groups. The bibliography provides a useful overview of the scholarship to which the analysis responds, in historical fields pertaining to Sufism, intra-Ottoman and Ottoman–Safavid relations, and Alevi studies. Karakaya-Stump brings to light a complex social and religious structure with lasting, trans-imperial networks by resisting the dichotomous narratives of distinctly rural/urban, popular/elite, and Ottoman/Safavid Sufisms in the historical context, which becomes important for her astute discussion of “cross-confessional encounters” (71), her well-formulated argument against early twentieth-century Turkish scholar Fuad Köprülü's presentation of Alevism as a rural, lay iteration of centralized Bektashi Sufism, and her layered discussion of the two iterations of the Bektashi order and their respective places in the Kizilbash milieu.
The lengthy treatment of biological and spiritual lineage charts and hagiographies, along with discussions of the intricate web of connections among an ever-expanding array of historical Sufi figures in the first and second chapters form the foundation of Karakaya-Stump's clearly presented arguments for the broader Wafaʾi Sufi presence in medieval Anatolia, Kizilbash-Alevi contact with Abdal-Bektashi convents in Iraq, Safavid mediation of Kizilbash confessionalism, and Ottoman persecution of the Kizilbash presented in the subsequent chapters. A reading of Ottoman Sultan Selim I's ascent presents the significance of his and his successors’ formulation of an imperial, shariʿa-centered Sunnism, and Sufism within it, as a tool to counter Safavid religio-political authority; the Alid-leaning, Safavid-affiliated Ottoman Kizilbash were thus framed as heretics. This discourse contributes to the understanding of the development of Sufism in Anatolia and the evolution of Sufism under Ottoman Sunni rule, and makes fast the historical narrative of the Kizilbash-Alevis as a crucial component of the social, political, and religious developments taking place in the region. As a result, they can no longer be reasonably cast as an anomalous fifth column during the intermittent Safavid wars of the 1500 and 1600s.
Karakaya-Stump also provides data on the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a period during which the Kizilbash virtually disappear from Ottoman state documentation. She addresses the social and economic repercussions of Ottoman persecution of the Kizilbash and their associates during the sixteenth-century Safavid conflicts, which she notes excluded them from social roles and destabilized and potentially eradicated an infrastructure of ocak convents on a Sufi model. She also offers a new interpretation of the role of the compiled Buyruk (lit. Command) texts held by ocak families, positing that they functioned as a means of disseminating Safavid communications to Kizilbash followers in Ottoman Anatolia.
Alevi oral practices are sometimes dismissed as a manifestation of the tribal-folk paradigm. While this book explicitly and unequivocally counters the misconception that the Alevis lack a documentary archive, it is implicitly clear that Karakaya-Stump's deep reading of the formation of Alevi socio-religious structures is at least partially guided by oral sources. She cites “lore,” “local tradition,” “oral tradition,” and “personal conversations” among the clarifying elements in her scholarly understanding of the information in the documents themselves. It would be valuable to have more insight into her assessment, as a historian, of the role of orally transmitted histories, genealogies, and hagiographies, as well as the methodological approaches she utilized to bridge the historic archival documents and the oral traditions of recent Alevi memory.
Karakaya-Stump's linguistic prowess and deliberate work with a series of damaged and poorly copied texts must be considered alongside her tenacious fieldwork, through which she located and, undoubtedly through careful and respectful interactions, secured the research use and publication of the family archives at the center of her analysis. While the contemporary context of Alevis is not the subject of this book, the scholarly paradigms of the past, including assertions of a tribal-cultural rather than a religious identity, have been used to continue the oppression of Alevi people in the post-Ottoman landscape. Countering historical misconceptions with such careful research successfully undermines the weak foundations used to deny Alevis their rights and history. The scholarly and social sensitivity Karakaya-Stump brought to bear during this work makes The Kizilbash-Alevis in Ottoman Anatolia an exemplary study that will inspire future scholarship, but which will not be easily equaled in scope and substance.
