Alevism: Turkey's Misunderstood Minority Tradition
Alevism is the largest religious minority tradition in Turkey and the most persistently misdescribed. This guide covers what Alevis believe about Hak, Muhammad and Ali, what actually happens in a cem, the role of the dede and the ocak, how Alevism differs from Sunni and Twelver Shia Islam, its relationship to the Bektashi order, and the unresolved cemevi dispute.
What is Alevism?
Alevism is a distinct religious tradition of Anatolia whose followers, called Alevis, form the largest religious minority in Turkey and worship in a hall called a cemevi rather than in a mosque. The name comes from Ali ibn Abi Talib, the Prophet Muhammad's cousin and son-in-law, whom Alevis hold in a position that Sunni theology does not grant him. Alevi worship happens in a collective ritual called the cem, led by a hereditary religious figure called a dede, performed by men and women together, in Turkish rather than Arabic, and carried by a long-necked lute called the baglama. Turkey has not published religious denomination figures from its census since 1965, so every population figure is an estimate; the usual published range runs from roughly ten to twenty-five percent of the country, which puts the community somewhere between eight and twenty million people. Alevis are not one ethnic group. Turkish speakers are the majority, but large Kurdish-speaking Alevi populations, in Kurmanji and in Zazaki, live in Tunceli and the provinces around it. Alevism has no pope, no seminary and no single authority, and Alevis have a proverb for that: yol bir, surek binbir, the path is one, its practices are a thousand and one.
The tradition took shape among the Turkmen dervish communities of medieval Anatolia, whose wandering babas preached outside the Seljuk religious establishment and led the Babai uprising that Baba Ilyas and his deputy Baba Ishak raised against Seljuk rule in 1239 and 1240. From the late fifteenth century those communities were drawn toward the Safavid movement in Iran, and their red twelve-gored caps, worn for the Twelve Imams, gave the Ottomans the name Kizilbash, red-head. After Selim I defeated Shah Ismail at Caldiran in 1514, Kizilbash communities inside Ottoman territory faced execution, deportation and surveillance. They answered by withdrawing into mountain villages, marrying among themselves, transmitting doctrine orally and holding the cem in secret. That habit of concealment, called sir, survived into living memory. Alevi replaced Kizilbash as the ordinary self-description only in the late Ottoman and early republican decades. Mass migration to Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir and West Germany after 1960 broke the village system apart, and the urban cemevi, a purpose-built hall running a scheduled weekly cem, is a product of that move rather than an ancient institution.
Where does the word Alevi come from?
Alevi comes from the Arabic Alawi, meaning of Ali or belonging to Ali. Ottoman administrative documents rarely used it and wrote Kizilbash instead, a hostile term taken from the red twelve-gored cap that Safavid partisans wore for the Twelve Imams. Alevis themselves often avoid both labels in religious speech and simply say yol, the path, or call themselves talips, followers bound to a lineage.
Are Alevis Muslim?
Alevis disagree among themselves, and the disagreement is real rather than diplomatic. Most dedes, most Turkish Alevi federations and most published Alevi catechisms present Alevism as an interpretation within Islam built around Ali and the Ehl-i Beyt. A sizeable current, strongest in the European diaspora and among Kurdish Alevis, argues that Alevism is a separate faith carrying pre-Islamic Anatolian and Iranian material. Neither side speaks for everyone.
Where do Alevis live in Turkey?
Alevi populations concentrate in a belt across central and eastern Anatolia: Sivas, Tokat, Amasya, Corum, Yozgat, Malatya, Erzincan, Tunceli, Kahramanmaras and Adiyaman. Separate Alevi groups live along the Aegean and Mediterranean coasts, including the Tahtaci woodcutter communities, and the Cepni are found toward the Black Sea. That has changed. Since the 1960s the largest concentrations have been urban: Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir, and the industrial cities of the German Ruhr.
What do Alevis believe about God, Muhammad and Ali?
Alevis compress the core of their belief into the formula Hak-Muhammed-Ali, three names spoken as a single unit at almost every turn of the cem. Hak, from the Arabic al-Haqq, the Real, is the ordinary Alevi word for God and is preferred over Allah in ritual speech. Muhammad brought the outward revelation, the zahir; Ali carries its inner meaning, the batin, which is why Alevi commentary reads the Quran for hidden sense rather than for legal rulings. Sunni polemic has accused Alevis for centuries of worshipping three gods or of making Ali divine. Dedes reject both charges and describe the formula as one light seen in three places. Devotion extends to the Ehl-i Beyt, the household of the Prophet, and to the Twelve Imams. The killing of Huseyin at Kerbela in 680 is the central grief of Alevism and the reason for the twelve-day Muharrem fast. The moral content fits in one maxim attributed to Haci Bektas Veli: eline, diline, beline sahip ol, be master of your hand, your tongue and your loins. Alevis locate the sacred in human beings rather than in buildings.
Alevi doctrine travels in the Buyruk, a family of manuscript books attributed to Sheikh Safi al-Din of Ardabil and to the sixth imam, Jafar al-Sadiq, copied and held privately by dede families, and in the sung poetry of the seven great poets. The scheme those texts use is the four gates and forty stations, dort kapi kirk makam, attributed to Haci Bektas Veli's Makalat: seriat, tarikat, marifet and hakikat. Sharia is the first and lowest gate, and Alevi practice does not treat Sunni legal obligation as the measure of piety. Alevis also hold devriye, a doctrine of the soul's circuit through forms, and speak of don degistirme, changing the garment; the cross-tradition picture belongs in Reincarnation: How Different Traditions Describe Rebirth. Scholars disagree about the mixture. Irene Melikoff argued for a strong Central Asian Turkic substratum beneath the Shia vocabulary, while Ahmet Yasar Ocak placed the tradition inside medieval Anatolian heterodoxy. The question is open.
What does Hak-Muhammed-Ali mean?
Hak-Muhammed-Ali names God, the Prophet and Ali in one ritual phrase rather than three separate objects of worship. Hak is the Alevi name for God, the Real. Alevi teaching treats Muhammad and Ali as two faces of a single light, one bearing the outward revelation and the other its inner meaning. Dedes answer the charge of tritheism directly and say the phrase counts nothing.
Why does Kerbela matter so much to Alevis?
Kerbela matters because the killing of Imam Huseyin and his companions in 680 is the event Alevis mourn every year through the twelve-day Muharrem fast. Alevis read Kerbela as the permanent shape of unjust power set against the righteous, and the poetry sung in cem returns to it constantly. The fast closes with ashure. The pudding of grains, dried fruit and nuts is cooked in quantity and carried to neighbors, Alevi and Sunni alike.
What is the insan-i kamil?
The insan-i kamil, the completed or perfect human being, is the goal Alevi teaching sets for the follower: a person whose hand, tongue and appetite are governed and in whom the divine has become visible. Alevis quote Haci Bektas Veli's instruction to seek whatever you are seeking inside yourself. For the wider mystical vocabulary of self-annihilation, see Ego Death: What It Means, What Triggers It and How to Integrate It.
What happens during a cem ceremony?
A cem is the collective Alevi worship service, held in a cemevi or, in older village practice, in a large private house, led by a dede and running several hours from evening into the night. It opens with rizalik, the taking of consent: the dede asks whether anyone present holds a grievance against anyone else, and the service cannot proceed until every complaint raised has been heard and settled in front of the congregation. That judicial opening is the part outsiders least expect and the part Alevis treat as indispensable. Twelve ritual offices, the on iki hizmet, are then carried out by named participants, covering everything from sweeping the floor to pouring water for hand-washing to tending the lights and singing. The dede sits on the post, a sheepskin or designated seat at the head of the meydan, the cleared ritual floor. Men and women sit together, without partition and without shoes. The zakir plays the baglama and sings deyis and nefes, the poems that carry the doctrine. Semah is turned near the end. A shared meal, lokma, ends the night, distributed so that everyone present eats the same food from the same pot.
The twelve services vary by region and by ocak, but a common list runs: the dede, who presides; the rehber, who guides candidates; the gozcu, who keeps order; the cerakci or delilci, who tends the lights; the zakir, who plays and sings; the ferras or supurgeci, who sweeps the meydan with three symbolic strokes; the meydanci, who sets the floor; the ibrikci, who pours water for washing; the kurbanci, who handles the sacrifice; the lokmaci or sofraci, who serves the meal; the semahci; and the bekci or kapici at the door. Cems come in kinds. The gorgu cem is the service of examination and account. The ikrar cem is where a couple gives its word and enters the path. There are also the musahiplik cem, the Abdal Musa cem, the birlik cem of unity, and the dardan indirme cem held after a death. Urban cemevis have added weekly scheduled services, funerals and open attendance for visitors.
What is rizalik and why does the cem begin with it?
Rizalik is consent, and the cem begins with it because Alevi teaching holds that worship offered by people at odds with each other is void. The dede asks the congregation whether anyone has a complaint, cases are heard in the open, restitution is set where it is owed, and only when everyone has given consent does the ritual go forward. One refusal can stop the whole service.
Can non-Alevis attend a cem?
Non-Alevis can attend most urban cemevi services today, and many cemevis welcome visitors, journalists and school groups. That openness is recent. Under Ottoman and early republican pressure the cem was closed, held at night behind a posted watchman, because attendance carried real danger. Some village services and some ocak-specific cems, the gorgu cem in particular, are still restricted to members of the community.
What is the dar?
The dar is the spot on the meydan where a person stands to give account, feet together with the right toe over the left and hands crossed on the chest. The word carries the memory of the gallows of Mansur al-Hallaj, executed in Baghdad in 922, and Alevis speak of the dar-i Mansur. Standing in the dar means placing yourself under the community's judgment without argument.
What is semah and why is the baglama central to Alevi worship?
Semah is the turning ritual performed inside the cem by men and women together, barefoot, to the sound of the baglama, and Alevis distinguish it firmly from folk dance: it happens within the service, it is worship, and it is not staged for an audience. Arms are lifted with the right palm turned up toward heaven and the left turned down toward the earth while the body turns and the group moves in a circle. Alevi tradition grounds the ritual in the Kirklar Meclisi, the Assembly of the Forty, where the Prophet is received among forty saints and turns with them after drinking from a shared cup. Much of the imagery comes from the turna, the crane, whose call and flight are read as carrying the voice of Ali. Regional forms differ widely, and the Tahtaci, Hubyar and Erzincan semahs are separate repertoires with their own steps and tunes. UNESCO inscribed the Semah, Alevi-Bektasi ritual, on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2010. Alevis call the instrument telli Kuran, the stringed Quran. In ordinary practice the zakir's part is not treated as optional. The best known of them, Asik Veysel Satiroglu, born in the Sivas village of Sivrialan in 1894 and blinded by smallpox as a child, taught saz at the Village Institutes from 1941, starting at Arifiye and later at Hasanoglan and others, and by the time he died in 1973 his songs were known across the country.
The baglama is a long-necked fretted lute of the saz family, built in sizes from the small cura up to the large divan sazi, usually strung with seven strings in three courses, and fretted with tied gut or nylon that yields intervals falling between the semitones of a piano. Alevi playing uses several named tunings, of which baglama duzeni and kara duzen are the ones most tied to this repertoire. The player in a cem is the zakir, sometimes called asik, and the pieces are deyis and nefes, sung poems attributed to named authors rather than anonymous hymns. Western esoteric groups have borrowed dervish turning and restaged it as movement work outside any Muslim setting; that thread belongs to G. I. Gurdjieff: Core Teachings, Key Ideas and Practices, and it has no bearing on what happens on the meydan. Semah performed by folklore ensembles on a concert stage is a separate argument, and Alevi opinion on it splits sharply.
Is semah a dance?
Semah is worship, not dance, and Alevis correct the description often. It is performed only inside the cem, at a fixed point in the service, by people who have taken part in the rest of it, and the movements are prescribed rather than improvised. The confusion comes from tourism material and television folklore programs, which lift the turning out of the ritual and present it as regional entertainment.
What is a deyis, and how does it differ from a nefes?
A deyis is a sung Turkish poem in syllabic meter, attributed to a named ozan, performed in the cem with baglama accompaniment. Nefes, literally breath, usually names hymns of the Bektashi order and often carries more explicit doctrine. In ordinary use the two words overlap heavily, and different regions apply them differently. No clean line separates them.
Who are the seven great poets?
The yedi ulu ozan, the seven great poets, are the authors whose verse forms the backbone of the cem repertoire: Nesimi, Fuzuli, Sah Hatayi, Pir Sultan Abdal, Kul Himmet, Yemini and Virani. Sah Hatayi is the pen name of Shah Ismail, the founder of the Safavid dynasty. Pir Sultan Abdal, remembered as a sixteenth-century poet hanged at Sivas on the order of a provincial governor, has become the tradition's emblem of resistance; the documentary record behind the life is thin, and scholars have argued that more than one poet wrote under the name.
How does Alevism differ from Sunni Islam?
Alevism differs from Sunni Islam on nearly every visible practice, beginning with the building: Alevis worship in a cemevi, not a mosque, and their service is the cem rather than the five daily prayers. The leader is a dede, whose authority comes from descent within a sacred lineage, not an imam appointed and salaried by the state. Alevis worship in Turkish. Doctrine travels in sung poetry rather than in Arabic sermon, and men and women sit in the same room, without partition and without a covering requirement. Most Alevis do not fast the month of Ramadan. They keep instead a twelve-day Muharrem fast for the Twelve Imams and, in February, a three-day fast for Hizir. Pilgrimage to Mecca carries no obligation, and Alevi commentary reads the hajj inwardly. The Quran is read for its batin, its inner sense, rather than for legal rulings, and sharia is only the first of the four gates. Where a Sunni jurist would look to fiqh, an Alevi dede looks to the consent of the congregation and to the maxim about hand, tongue and loins. The two traditions part on charity as well: Alevi giving runs through the sacrifice and the shared meal of the cem, and through the customary contribution a talip family made to its dede, rather than through the Sunni calculation of zakat.
These are not neutral differences, because Ottoman and republican institutions treated Sunni Hanafi practice as the standard and Alevi practice as deviation. The asymmetry is old. Ebussuud Efendi, chief mufti from 1545 until his death in 1574, issued fatwas declaring the Kizilbash outside the faith and their blood lawful, and those rulings supplied legal cover for campaigns against Anatolian villages. The Republic changed the framing and kept the asymmetry: the Diyanet, the Presidency of Religious Affairs, was founded in 1924 and staffs and funds Sunni mosques from the general budget. From the 1980s onward the state built mosques and posted imams in Alevi villages that had never had either, which Alevis widely read as assimilation policy. Compulsory school classes in religious culture and ethics teach Sunni practice as the default. The Alevi internal argument over whether to describe Alevism as Islam at all cannot be separated from this history, because the label carries consequences in law and in schooling.
Do Alevis perform the five daily prayers?
Most Alevis do not perform namaz, the five daily prayers, and Alevi teaching does not treat them as the required form of worship. The cem is the service. Outside it, Alevi prayer takes the form of gulbank, spoken benedictions recited by the dede or by an elder to open a meal, a journey or a sacrifice. Individual Alevis do pray in the Sunni manner, and nothing forbids it, but it is uncommon.
Are there mosques in Alevi villages?
Traditionally Alevi villages had no mosque, because the cem was held in a house and the community had no use for one. That changed after 1980, when state programs built mosques and assigned salaried imams to Alevi villages across Anatolia. Many stand largely unused. Alevi organizations cite the building program as evidence that the state has treated their tradition as a defect to be corrected.
Do Alevis drink alcohol?
Alevi practice does not impose the categorical prohibition on alcohol that Sunni law does, and social drinking is ordinary in many Alevi communities. In some ritual settings a cup called dolu is shared, a survival of the Kirklar story in which the forty saints drink together. What Alevi ethics condemn is drunkenness. Losing command of the tongue is the failure the maxim names, and it applies to a sober man as much as to a drinking one.
Are Alevis Shia, and how do Alevism and Bektashism relate?
Alevis venerate Ali and the Twelve Imams as Twelver Shia Muslims do, but they are not Twelver Shia in the Iranian or Iraqi sense, and the differences are structural rather than decorative. Alevis do not follow Jafari jurisprudence, keep no seminary system, recognize no marja or ayatollah, and take no rulings from Qom or Najaf. Their religious authority is hereditary and local: a dede from an ocak, serving families tied to that lineage. Their mourning for Kerbela runs through a twelve-day fast and sung poetry rather than the processions and chest-beating of Iranian and Iraqi Ashura observance. Their liturgy is in Turkish. Bektashism is a different thing again: an initiatory Sufi order, the Bektasi tarikat, traced to Haci Bektas Veli and entered by choice through initiation rather than inherited at birth. Because the two share saints, poetry, doctrine and the four-gate scheme, they are usually named together as Alevi-Bektashi, and many cems draw on Bektashi hymns. The reliable distinction is transmission. You are born an Alevi; you become a Bektashi. Many Alevis also decline the Shia label outright, on the grounds that it imports a legal and clerical system they have never used.
The Bektashi order was organized as an order well after its namesake died. Balim Sultan, who led the central lodge around the turn of the sixteenth century, is called pir-i sani, the second pir, and is credited with fixing its ritual and hierarchy. The order became the religious wing of the Janissary corps, and when Mahmud II destroyed the Janissaries in 1826 he suppressed the Bektashis with them, closing lodges and executing or exiling babas. The order recovered in the nineteenth century, then lost its legal existence again when the Republic closed all dervish lodges under Law 677 in 1925. Salih Niyazi Dedebaba moved the world headquarters to Tirana at the start of the 1930s, and apart from the years when communist Albania suppressed religious institutions outright, from 1967 until the end of the 1980s, Tirana has been the seat of the dedebaba ever since. Two branches persist. The Celebi branch descends by blood from the family of Haci Bektas Veli. The Babagan branch transmits authority by initiation and has maintained a celibate rank of babas. Albania, where the world headquarters reopened in 1991, holds the largest openly organized Bektashi community anywhere, which is an odd outcome for a Turkish order.
What is the difference between an Alevi and a Bektashi?
An Alevi is born into the community and inherits a relationship with a particular dede lineage. A Bektashi joins. Initiation admits members from any background, which is why Bektashi lodges historically drew urban converts and large numbers of Albanians and other Balkan Muslims, while Alevi communities stayed village-based and married among themselves. Many people are both, and Bektashi hymns are sung in Alevi cems as a matter of course.
What are the Bektashi ranks?
The Babagan Bektashi hierarchy runs from asik, the sympathizer, to muhip, the initiated member, to dervis, who lives in the lodge, to baba, who leads one, to halifebaba, who supervises a region, and finally to dedebaba at the head of the order. Some babas take a vow of celibacy known as mucerretlik. The Celebi branch instead traces its authority through descent.
Do Alevis follow ayatollahs or Jafari law?
Alevis follow neither. There is no Alevi equivalent of taqlid, the practice of following a living jurist, and Alevi communities do not use the Jafari legal code that governs Twelver Shia practice in Iran and Iraq. Iranian religious outreach to Alevi communities has been reported since 1979, and it has not displaced the older arrangement. Alevi religious authority stays with the ocak and with the congregation that consents to it.
Who leads an Alevi community, and what are musahiplik and duskunluk?
An Alevi community is led by a dede, a man from an ocak, a sacred hearth or lineage whose members claim descent from the Prophet through the imams and are addressed as seyyid. Descent alone does not make a working dede. Every talip family is attached by inheritance to a particular ocak, and the dede's right to serve them depends on their rizalik, their consent, which they can withhold. A dede who behaves badly can be refused, and the tradition preserves the memory of dedes removed by their own congregations. Two institutions do most of the community's binding and disciplining. Musahiplik is a lifelong pact between two married couples, contracted in front of the dede, which makes the four adults responsible for one another materially, morally and in front of the congregation. Duskunluk is the sanction: someone declared duskun, fallen, is barred from the cem, and community members will not eat with them, trade with them or marry into their family until the matter is repaired. Between consent and exclusion, Alevi communities governed themselves for centuries with no courts of their own.
Named ocaks include Dede Garkin, Baba Mansur, Kureysan, Sinemilli, Agucan, Hubyar and Ureyan Hizir, and each covers particular villages and regions rather than a territory drawn on a map. Legitimacy is described as el ele el Hakka, hand to hand and hand to God, a chain of transmission running back through the lineage. Under the village system the dede rode a circuit, visiting his talips once a year to hold the gorgu cem, hear accounts and settle disputes. Urban migration wrecked that arrangement: the circuits broke, a generation grew up without a dede, and by the 1990s associations and federations had taken over much of what lineage once handled, employing salaried dedes at city cemevis and running training courses that no ocak ever needed. Some cemevis in Turkey and Germany now have women leading services, addressed as ana. Ocak-based conservatives dispute the practice. Musahiplik has weakened along the same lines, since the pact assumes two families living close enough to answer for each other's debts, illnesses and children, which city life rarely supplies.
What is an ocak?
An ocak is a hearth, meaning a sacred lineage whose men may serve as dedes. Members are called ocakzade. The lineage claims descent from the Prophet through the imams, usually recorded in a written genealogy called a secere, and often traces itself to a founding saint whose tomb the ocak still tends. Talip families belong to a specific ocak by inheritance, not by choice or by geography.
What does it mean to be declared duskun?
Being declared duskun means being cut off from the community until the offense is repaired. The dede pronounces it in the cem, usually for killing, theft, adultery, abandoning a spouse or breaking a musahiplik pact. A duskun person may not enter the cem, and neighbors will not share food or arrange marriages with the family. Reinstatement requires restitution and a fresh grant of consent from the congregation, which is normally given once the injured party says it is satisfied.
Can a woman lead a cem?
Some women do lead cems today, particularly in city cemevis in Turkey and in the German diaspora, where they are addressed as ana, mother. The practice is recent and contested; conservative ocak families hold that the dede role passes through male descent. The older arrangement is not in dispute. Alevi cems seat men and women together, and women have turned semah alongside men in every published description of the ritual, Alevi accounts and outside observation alike.
How has the Turkish state treated Alevis, and what is the cemevi dispute?
The Turkish state has never recognized the cemevi as a place of worship, and that refusal is the center of the dispute. Mosques, churches and synagogues hold legal status as ibadethane, which has their electricity and water paid from public funds and protects them in planning law; mosques get salaried Diyanet personnel on top of that. Cemevis are registered as cultural associations or foundations. A regulation published in April 2024 lets a cemevi apply to the Ministry of Culture and Tourism for payment of its lighting bill, with commercial sections of the building excluded, but that is a discretionary payment and not a change of legal status. The congregation still funds itself while also paying, through general taxation, for the Diyanet, the Presidency of Religious Affairs founded in 1924, which employs Sunni imams and builds Sunni mosques. Alevis inherited a longer history of exclusion. Law 677 of 1925 closed the dervish lodges and banned the titles dede and baba outright. Military operations in Dersim in 1937 and 1938 killed thousands of Kurdish Alevis, and a prime minister apologized for them in 2011. More than a hundred people, most of them Alevi, were killed at Kahramanmaras in December 1978, and dozens more at Corum in 1980. On 2 July 1993 an arson attack on the Madimak Hotel in Sivas killed thirty-five people, and gun attacks on Alevi coffeehouses in the Gazi district of Istanbul in March 1995, with the police response that followed, killed more than a dozen more. That record shapes how Alevis read every offer of recognition.
The state's stated position has been that Islam has one place of worship, the mosque, and that granting the cemevi separate status would split the religion administratively; the Diyanet has generally held this line, describing cemevis as cultural facilities. Alevi organizations answer that the argument assumes the very thing in dispute, since the Diyanet represents Sunni Hanafi practice and no Alevi. European courts have sided with the Alevi claim more than once. In Hasan and Eylem Zengin v. Turkey in 2007 the European Court of Human Rights found the compulsory religious culture classes incompatible with parental rights, and in Izzettin Dogan and Others v. Turkey in 2016 its Grand Chamber found Turkey's refusal to give Alevi religious services public status both a breach of religious freedom and discriminatory. A series of government Alevi workshops between 2009 and 2011 produced a report and no legal change. A state directorate for Alevi-Bektashi culture and cemevis was created by presidential decree in 2022, under the Ministry of Culture and Tourism rather than the Diyanet; the main federations rejected it as recognition of a culture instead of a faith. Estimates put the number of cemevis in Turkey above fifteen hundred, none of them recognized as places of worship. The diaspora comparison is pointed. North Rhine-Westphalia recognized the Alevi community as a religious body under public law in 2020, Berlin grants it comparable standing, and Alevi religious instruction is taught in public primary schools in several German states, so an Alevi family can have in Cologne what the same family cannot have in Corum.
Why does cemevi legal status matter in practice?
Legal status decides money and permanence. A recognized place of worship in Turkey receives free electricity and water, protection in zoning decisions and, where the Diyanet staffs it, salaried personnel. A cemevi registered as an association is billed at commercial rates, depends on donations and, since April 2024, on a Culture Ministry payment it has to apply for and account for annually, and can be refused a building permit by a municipality that dislikes it. Without recognition each cemevi negotiates with its own municipality, so the same building can be approved in one district and refused in the next.
What happened in Sivas in 1993?
On 2 July 1993 a crowd besieged the Madimak Hotel in Sivas, where writers, musicians and participants had gathered for a festival honoring Pir Sultan Abdal, and set the building on fire. Thirty-five people died: thirty-three festival participants and two hotel employees. Two of the attackers died as well, which is why some accounts give the toll as thirty-seven. The court that tried the case counted thirty-five murder victims and handed down thirty-five life sentences per convicted defendant. Sentences in the resulting trials were widely regarded by Alevis as inadequate, and the demand that the building become a museum remains unmet.
What do Alevi organizations ask for today?
The standard list has four items: legal recognition of cemevis as places of worship, an end to compulsory religious culture classes or a genuine exemption from them, either the abolition of the Diyanet or its restructuring to represent all citizens, and the conversion of the Madimak building in Sivas into a museum. Federations differ on tactics and on whether to accept partial measures, but not on the list.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Alevis are there in Turkey?
Nobody knows. Turkey has not published religious denomination figures from its census since 1965, and no reliable survey has replaced it, so every figure in circulation is an estimate built on something other than a count. Published estimates run from about ten percent of the population up to twenty-five, which works out at roughly eight to twenty million people. Alevi federations cite the higher figures and government-aligned sources the lower ones. Add the diaspora: estimates for Germany start at half a million and Alevi organizations cite figures approaching eight hundred thousand, with smaller communities in Austria, the Netherlands, France and Britain. The missing number is itself part of the argument, since a verified count would make the case for recognition harder to deflect.
What is a cemevi?
A cemevi, literally house of gathering, is the building where Alevis hold the cem. The main room is the meydan, an open carpeted floor with no pulpit and no direction of prayer, ringed by seating for the congregation and with the dede's post at the head. Most cemevis also contain a kitchen for cooking the shared lokma, a library and a hall used for funerals. Village cems were held in ordinary houses; the purpose-built cemevi is an urban development of the last sixty years.
What is the difference between Alevis and Alawites?
Alevis and Alawites are two separate communities whose names both derive from Ali, which is the entire source of the confusion. Anatolian Alevis are mostly Turkish and Kurdish speakers who worship in cem with baglama and semah under hereditary dedes. Arab Alawites, historically called Nusayris after the ninth-century figure Ibn Nusayr, are Arabic speakers concentrated in Syria and in Turkey's Hatay province, with a different theology, a male-only initiation system and no cem. Neither community's own organizations describe it as a branch of the other.
Do Alevis fast during Ramadan?
Most Alevis do not fast the month of Ramadan. The Alevi fast is Muharrem, twelve days observed after Kurban Bayrami in mourning for Imam Huseyin and the Twelve Imams, during which many households abstain from meat and some restrict water. It ends with the cooking and distribution of ashure. Many Alevis also keep the three-day Hizir fast in February. Individual Alevis do fast Ramadan, particularly in mixed neighborhoods and families, and the tradition places no bar on it.
Do Alevis believe in reincarnation?
Alevi teaching includes devriye, the circuit or turning of the soul through successive forms, and speaks of don degistirme, changing the garment, which is a doctrine of rebirth. How literally individual Alevis take it varies enormously, and dedes differ on whether the soul returns in human form, in other forms or only symbolically. It is discussed far less in cem than devotion to the Ehl-i Beyt. For how rebirth is described elsewhere, see Reincarnation: How Different Traditions Describe Rebirth.
Do Alevi women cover their hair?
Alevi women are under no religious requirement to cover their hair, and Alevism has no equivalent of the Sunni jurisprudence on veiling. Older women in Anatolian villages often wear a headscarf, tied in a regional style that differs from the Sunni ones, as dress rather than as an act of piety. Women attend the cem uncovered, sit in the same room as men without partition, and turn semah alongside them. Alevis cite this constantly. It is the difference an outsider can see from the doorway.
Who was Haci Bektas Veli?
Haci Bektas Veli was a thirteenth-century mystic, remembered as coming from Khorasan, who settled at Suluca Karahoyuk in central Anatolia, the town now named Hacibektas in Nevsehir province. The Makalat, a treatise on the four gates and forty stations, is attributed to him; the Vilayetname, which supplies most of the stories about him, is a hagiography compiled later. He founded no order in his lifetime. The Bektashi order was organized around his tomb generations afterward, and an annual August commemoration still draws large crowds there.
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