Sufi sm and ‘Popular’ Islam 147has in fact as its explicit aim the restoration of social harmony after this has been
disturbed by disputes. There is a class of hereditary religious specialists called
dede, without whose presence the cem cannot take place and who are considered
as the chief repositories of religious knowledge. A corpus of sacred poetry, long
handed down orally (although some dede or singers kept notebooks for memory),
contains the most important religious ideas.
In the course of time, and because of the increasing penetration of the
Ottoman state, many of these communities were gradually brought into closer
conformity with ‘High Islam’. The Bektashi Sufi order, which had rituals and
esoteric doctrines that were sophisticated versions of those of village Alevis but
which was patronised by powerful members of the religious and bureaucratic
establishment (Birge 1937), appears to have been instrumental in this process.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, there were many Alevi communities
- especially in the European part of Turkey and the western half of Asia Minor
- in which at least some people regularly prayed, fasted during Ramadan and
performed the hajj. Rural-to-urban migration, which began on a large scale in
the second half of the twentieth century, initially speeded up the integration of
individual Alevi migrants into the national mainstream. Gellner’s claim that
modernity erodes the social foundations of ‘folk Islam’ has a particularly strong
plausibility in the case of Alevi belief and ritual, for the cem and other rituals were
intimately connected with the village community, and whoever left the village
thereby gave up Alevi religious practice. Alevi identity was, moreover, a social
stigma, so that many migrants attempted to hide their religious origins in their
new environment. Other rural heterodox communities were affected in much
the same way by the break-up of their isolation and their social and economic
integration into the nation state. Individually, members of these communities
adapted the outward behaviour of the majority, becoming practising orthodox
Muslims in some cases or, more commonly, non-practising, ‘secular’ Muslims.
But this is not how it ended. Several of these heterodox communities, instead
of gradually merging into the orthodox mainstream, experienced a revival in
the urban environment and developed ‘high’, learned forms of their beliefs and
rituals (Olsson 1998). Most remarkably this was the case of Turkey’s Alevis,
who, as larger numbers of them moved to the cities, often clustered together in
compact urban neighbourhoods and, in response to discrimination, established
voluntary associations that became the nuclei of new forms of community life.
Efforts by the state to impose a Sunni Turkish orthodoxy through obligatory
religious education and the appointment of religious personnel even to Alevi
villages strengthened an awareness among the Alevis of their being different,
and stimulated debates on what Alevism ‘really’ was. Sacred texts – the religious
poetry and a sort of catechism that had been handed down in dede families – were
made available to everyone in cheap printed editions. Alevi intellectuals, who
emerged as the new, self-made authorities that largely replaced the dedes in all