Legend & origins
Forty souls in one room
Alevi legend tells of the Meeting of the Forty. Muhammad, returning from his night journey, was let into a gathering of forty souls only once he came in as one of them rather than as the Prophet. A single grape was pressed, all forty drank from it, and all of them rose and began to turn. The point of the story is equality: nobody entered that room by rank.
Every Alevi worship gathering re-enacts that room. The gathering is called a cem, and it looks nothing like a mosque service. There is no hierarchy at the door. Men and women take part together, which by itself sets Alevism apart from most worship in the region. Music does the work that scripture does elsewhere. At the centre of it is the semah, a turning dance performed by women and men side by side.
The tradition took its present shape in medieval Anatolia, around a saint called Haci Bektash Veli. His lodge drew on Sufi mysticism, on the reverence for Ali and the Twelve Imams that Shia Muslims share, and on older Anatolian and Central Asian belief. Alevis themselves disagree about whether Alevism is a branch of Islam, a separate religion or a philosophy, and that argument is live and sometimes bitter.
The movement that shaped Alevism was the Qizilbash. The word means redheads, after the crimson caps worn by the Turkoman followers of Shah Ismail, who carried the Safavid revolution in Persia in 1501. When the wars between the Ottomans and the Safavids closed the border, the Qizilbash of Anatolia were left on the wrong side of it.
Ottoman authorities treated them as a Persian fifth column. Massacre and forced conversion pushed Alevism up into the mountains and into secrecy. Villages there did without mosques and met in a cem house instead. They did without clergy too, relying on guide families whose position passed from father to son. Four centuries of hiding turned discretion into an institution of its own.
What sets them apart
Worship without a mosque
Alevism keeps the outward forms of Islam at arm's length. Alevis do not attend mosque, do not fast during Ramadan and do not make the pilgrimage to Mecca. Everything goes into their own gathering instead.
The gathering and its guide
Worship happens in a seated circle, led by a dede. A dede is a spiritual guide whose role is inherited rather than appointment. Before the prayers can begin, any quarrels in the community have to be raised and settled. There is a small court of conscience built into the service itself.
The saz as scripture
The bağlama, also called the saz, is a long-necked lute. It carries the deyiş, which are the sung poems of Pir Sultan Abdal, Şah Hatayi and the other great Alevi bards. Alevis call the instrument the stringed Qur'an, and they mean it fairly literally.
Semah, the turning dance
The semah is danced at the heart of the cem, by women and men together. It was banned for a long time and mocked for longer. It is now the most recognisable public symbol the community has.
Muharrem and Hızır
Alevis keep twelve days of mourning and fasting for the Imams and for Kerbela, the battle where the Prophet's grandson was killed. In midwinter they mark the days of Hızır, a deathless helper who is said to appear in times of trouble.
1937 — today
Dersim, Sivas, and the unfinished file
The republic promised secular equality and delivered new wounds instead. The Dersim operations of 1937 and 1938 killed more than ten thousand Alevi Kurds and Zazas and scattered the survivors across the country. The name Dersim was struck off the map and replaced with Tunceli. Later there were pogroms against Alevi neighbourhoods, at Maraş in 1978 and at Çorum in 1980.
Then came Sivas. In July 1993 a crowd surrounded the Madımak hotel, where writers and musicians had gathered for an Alevi cultural festival, and set it on fire. Thirty-five people died. The siege lasted about eight hours, it was filmed, and the security forces did not intervene. Every Alevi demand made since refers to this footage.
The demands are modest enough to be awkward for the government. Alevis want the cemevi, recognised as a house of worship in law. They want an end to the compulsory religion classes in schools, which teach the Sunni tradition. And they want some official honesty about Dersim and Sivas. Governments have opened museums, but the legal status has not moved.
The population has moved instead. Migration has made Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir the real centres of Alevi life, along with Berlin and Cologne. In those cities the associations, the festivals and the satellite channels do the work the state will not.
Whatever you seek, seek it in yourself — not in Jerusalem, not in Mecca.Haci Bektash Veli, 13th century
Geography
Where they live
Based on work by Dr. M. Izady, Atlas of the Islamic World and Vicinity (New York: Columbia Univ, 2006–present) @ gulf2000.columbia.edu/maps.shtml
Through time
Timeline
- 13th centuryHaci Bektash Veli. The saint's lodge at Sulucakarahöyük becomes the tradition's anchor; Anatolian Islam takes its heterodox turn.
- 16th centuryThe Kızılbaş persecutions. Ottoman–Safavid war makes Anatolia's Alevis suspects; massacres drive the faith underground.
- 1826The Bektashi ban. The order tied to the destroyed Janissaries is outlawed; lodges close or go quiet.
- 1937–38Dersim. Aerial bombing and deportation kill 10,000+ in the Alevi Kurdish mountains, renamed Tunceli by a 1935 law.
- 1978–80Maraş and Çorum. Nationalist pogroms kill more than a hundred at Maraş, dozens at Çorum; Alevi counts run higher.
- 1993The Sivas massacre. 35 die in the Madımak hotel fire; the trial's amnesties become a second wound.
- TodayRecognition pending. Cemevis serve millions without legal status; the European diaspora funds and broadcasts the revival.
Anatolia's second confession
Estimated population
No Turkish census asks; estimates span 10–20 million (10–25% of the population), spanning Turkish, Zaza and Kurmanji speakers. Germany hosts the largest diaspora, with Alevism officially recognised in several federal states.
What they gave the region
Turkey's conscience and its soundtrack
Take the Alevi contribution out of Turkish culture and a good half of the songbook goes quiet. The aşık tradition is theirs, meaning the wandering poet-singers, with Pir Sultan Abdal and Şah Hatayi among the most famous. The same goes for the bağlama itself, as well as modern voices from Âşık Veysel through to the protest singers of the 1970s. Not to forget the semah, which shaped Turkish stage dance.
Then there is Bektashi humour, the wry joke that punctures authority, which counts as a national genre in its own right. And a line of Hacı Bektaş about seeking whatever you seek inside yourself is the one piece of mysticism most Turkish schoolchildren can quote.
Politically, Alevis have been the most reliable constituency republican Turkey has for secularism: they have the most to lose if it goes.
Looking forward
The cemevi question
Everything here runs through one word, which is recognition: legal status for the cemevi, an end to compulsory religion classes, and honesty about Dersim and Sivas. Each election cycle brings an opening of some kind, and each one stalls. The community has not waited. Urban cemevis are now run rather like congregations, training to become a dede is turning into formal education instead of family inheritance, and in Germany — where Alevism is recognised and taught in state schools — standards have developed that are now being exported back to Turkey.
Assimilation is the quieter risk. Marriage outside the community, and a general drift towards secularism, are thinning the knowledge the villages used to hold. But a tradition that survived four centuries underground knows how to wait, while the saz keeps recruiting.
The emblem
The twelve-rayed star
Twelve for the Twelve Imams. The teslim taşı is a stone medallion with twelve grooves cut into it, worn by initiates of the Bektashi order, and it is the oldest badge Alevism has. The circle at its centre stands for the cem, the community sitting and facing inward.
Sources10
- Minority Rights Group, Alevis in Türkiye – community profile. minorityrights.org
- Irene Markoff, Music, saints and ritual: sema and the Alevis of Turkey (Isis Press), 1993.
- Markus Dressler, Writing religion: the making of Turkish Alevi Islam (Oxford University Press), 2013.
- Ayfer Karakaya-Stump, The Kizilbash-Alevis in Ottoman Anatolia: Sufism, politics and community (Edinburgh University Press), 2020.
- Colin Imber, The persecution of the Ottoman Shiites according to the muhimme defterleri, 1565 to 1585 (Der Islam), 1979.
- Martin van Bruinessen, “Genocide in Kurdistan?” The Suppression of the Dersim Rebellion in Turkey, in G. Andreopoulos (ed.), Genocide: Conceptual and Historical Dimensions, 1994.
- Human Rights Watch, World Report 1994, Turkey chapter, 1994.
- European Court of Human Rights, İzzettin Doğan and Others v. Turkey, Grand Chamber judgment, 2016.
- Elise Massicard, The Alevis in Turkey and Europe: identity and managing territorial diversity (Routledge), 2013.
- European Court of Human Rights, Hasan and Eylem Zengin v. Turkey, judgment on compulsory religious instruction, 2007.