Alevism: Turkey's Misunderstood Minority Tradition

What is Alevism?

Imagine you are meeting your partner's family for the first time. Someone mentions that the family is Alevi, not Sunni, and that grandmother still goes to cem. You smile and nod, but on the way home you realize you have no idea what that means, and you really do not want to say the wrong thing next time.

The short answer: Alevism is a distinct religious tradition of Anatolia, and Alevis are the largest religious minority in Turkey. They worship in a cemevi, not a mosque, in Turkish, with music, men and women together. At the heart of it is love for Ali, the Prophet Muhammad's cousin and son-in-law.

The name comes from Ali ibn Abi Talib, whom Alevis honor in a way Sunni theology does not. Worship is the cem, a shared ritual led by a hereditary religious figure called a dede and carried by a long-necked lute called the baglama.

Turkey has published no religious census figures since 1965, so numbers are estimates: usually ten to twenty-five percent of the country, eight to twenty million people.

Alevis are not one ethnic group. Most speak Turkish, but large Kurdish-speaking Alevi populations, in Kurmanji and Zazaki, live in Tunceli and nearby provinces. There is no pope, seminary or single authority. As the Alevi proverb says, yol bir, surek binbir: the path is one, its practices a thousand and one.

If your Alevi friends seem private about faith, history explains it. The tradition grew among the Turkmen dervish communities of medieval Anatolia, whose wandering babas preached outside the Seljuk religious establishment. Baba Ilyas and his deputy Baba Ishak led the Babai uprising against Seljuk rule in 1239 and 1240.

From the late fifteenth century these communities leaned toward the Safavid movement in Iran. Their red twelve-gored caps, for the Twelve Imams, gave the Ottomans the name Kizilbash, red-head. After Selim I defeated Shah Ismail at Caldiran in 1514, Kizilbash communities in Ottoman lands faced execution, deportation and surveillance.

So they withdrew to mountain villages, married among themselves, taught orally and held the cem in secret. That habit of concealment, sir, survived into living memory, like a family recipe never written down because writing it once got someone hurt.

Alevi replaced Kizilbash as the usual self-name only in the late Ottoman and early republican decades. Mass migration to Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir and West Germany after 1960 broke up the village system; the urban cemevi with a weekly cem is a product of that move, not an ancient institution.

What do Alevis believe about God, Muhammad and Ali?

If you sit in a cem, you will hear one phrase again and again: Hak-Muhammed-Ali. Alevis pack their core belief into those three names, spoken as one unit.

Hak, from the Arabic al-Haqq, the Real, is the everyday Alevi word for God, preferred over Allah in ritual. Muhammad brought the outward revelation, the zahir; Ali carries its inner meaning, the batin. So Alevi commentary reads the Quran for hidden sense, not legal rulings.

For centuries Sunni polemic accused Alevis of worshipping three gods or making Ali divine. Dedes reject both and say the phrase counts nothing: it is one light seen in three places, like one lamp reflected in three windows.

Devotion extends to the Ehl-i Beyt, the Prophet's household, and the Twelve Imams. The killing of Huseyin at Kerbela in 680 is the central grief of Alevism, mourned through the twelve-day Muharrem fast.

The moral core is one maxim attributed to Haci Bektas Veli: eline, diline, beline sahip ol, be master of your hand, your tongue and your loins. Alevis find the sacred in people, not buildings. How much of your own day would that one line change?

There is no single Alevi holy book on a shelf. Teaching travels in the Buyruk, manuscript books attributed to Sheikh Safi al-Din of Ardabil and the sixth imam, Jafar al-Sadiq, copied and kept privately by dede families, and in the sung poetry of the seven great poets.

These texts use 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, so Sunni legal duty is not the measure of piety. Alevis also hold devriye, the soul's circuit through forms, called don degistirme, changing the garment; see Reincarnation: How Different Traditions Describe Rebirth.

Scholars debate the mix. Irene Melikoff argued for a strong Central Asian Turkic layer beneath the Shia vocabulary; Ahmet Yasar Ocak placed the tradition inside medieval Anatolian heterodoxy. The question is open.

What happens during a cem ceremony?

Picture yourself invited to a cem for the first time. Before any music starts, you will see something unexpected: people settling their quarrels in public.

The cem is the shared Alevi worship service, held in a cemevi or, in older village practice, a large house. A dede leads it for several hours from evening into the night.

It opens with rizalik, consent. The dede asks whether anyone holds a grievance against anyone present. Complaints are heard in the open, restitution is set where owed, and only when everyone consents does the ritual go on. One refusal can stop the whole service, because Alevi teaching holds that worship offered by people at odds is void. Imagine if your own family gatherings could not begin until every quiet resentment was settled.

Then twelve ritual offices, the on iki hizmet, are carried out by named people, from sweeping the floor to pouring water for hand-washing, tending the lights and singing.

The dede sits on the post, a sheepskin or set seat at the head of the meydan, the cleared ritual floor. Men and women sit together, without a partition and without shoes. The zakir plays the baglama and sings deyis and nefes, the poems that carry the teaching. Semah is turned near the end. A shared meal, lokma, closes the night, everyone eating the same food from the same pot.

The twelve services vary by region and ocak, but a common list is: 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; the kurbanci, who handles the sacrifice; the lokmaci or sofraci, who serves the meal; the semahci; and the bekci or kapici at the door.

There are several kinds of cem. The gorgu cem is the service of examination and account. In the ikrar cem 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 after a death. City cemevis have added weekly services, funerals and open attendance, which is why you may be able to go.

What is semah and why is the baglama central to Alevi worship?

If you have seen a video of men and women turning together, arms raised, to a long-necked lute, you have probably seen semah. Just do not call it a dance in front of an Alevi elder.

Semah is the turning ritual done inside the cem by men and women together, barefoot, to the baglama. It is worship, at a fixed point in the service, by people who took part in the rest of it, with set rather than improvised movements, and not staged for an audience. The dance label comes from tourism material and TV folklore shows that lift it out of the ritual.

The right palm turns up toward heaven and the left down toward the earth as each person turns and the group circles. Tradition roots it 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 imagery comes from the turna, the crane, whose call and flight are read as carrying Ali's voice.

Regional forms differ: 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 baglama telli Kuran, the stringed Quran, and the zakir's part is never optional. The best-known, Asik Veysel Satiroglu, was born in Sivrialan, a Sivas village, in 1894 and blinded by smallpox as a child. From 1941 he taught saz at the Village Institutes, starting at Arifiye, later Hasanoglan and others, and by his death in 1973 his songs were known nationwide.

The baglama is a long-necked fretted lute of the saz family, from the small cura to the large divan sazi. It usually has seven strings in three courses, fretted with tied gut or nylon that gives intervals between a piano's semitones. Alevi playing uses several named tunings; baglama duzeni and kara duzen are 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 by named authors, not anonymous hymns.

Western esoteric groups have borrowed dervish turning as movement work outside any Muslim setting; that belongs to G. I. Gurdjieff: Core Teachings, Key Ideas and Practices, and has nothing to do with the meydan. Semah by folklore groups on a concert stage is a separate argument, and Alevi opinion splits sharply.

How does Alevism differ from Sunni Islam?

If you grew up around Sunni practice, nearly everything you notice at a cem is different, starting with the building: a cemevi, not a mosque, and the cem instead of the five daily prayers.

Most Alevis do not perform namaz; outside the cem, prayer takes the form of gulbank, spoken blessings by the dede or an elder to open a meal, a trip or a sacrifice. Some Alevis pray the Sunni way, and nothing forbids it, but it is uncommon.

The leader is a dede, whose authority comes from descent in a sacred lineage, not a state-paid imam. Worship is in Turkish, teaching travels in sung poetry rather than Arabic sermon, and men and women share the room with no partition and no covering rule.

Most Alevis do not fast Ramadan, keeping instead the twelve-day Muharrem fast and a three-day February fast for Hizir. Pilgrimage to Mecca is not required, and Alevi commentary reads the hajj inwardly. Where a Sunni jurist looks to fiqh, a dede looks to the consent of the congregation and the maxim of hand, tongue and loins.

Charity runs through the sacrifice and shared meal of the cem, and the customary contribution a talip family made to its dede, not the Sunni calculation of zakat.

Alcohol carries no blanket ban, and social drinking is ordinary in many communities. Some rituals share a cup called dolu, echoing the forty saints drinking together. What Alevi ethics condemn is drunkenness: losing command of your tongue, which applies to a sober man too.

These differences are not neutral, because Ottoman and republican institutions treated Sunni Hanafi practice as the standard and Alevi practice as deviation.

Ebussuud Efendi, chief mufti from 1545 until his death in 1574, issued fatwas declaring the Kizilbash outside the faith and their blood lawful, giving legal cover to campaigns against Anatolian villages.

The Republic kept the imbalance. The Diyanet, the Presidency of Religious Affairs, was founded in 1924 and staffs and funds Sunni mosques from the general budget. Compulsory school classes in religious culture and ethics teach Sunni practice as the default.

So when Alevis argue over whether to call Alevism Islam at all, it is not just theology. The label has consequences in law and in your children's schooling.

Are Alevis Shia, and how do Alevism and Bektashism relate?

If you assumed Alevis are simply Turkish Shia, you are half right. Alevis honor Ali and the Twelve Imams as Twelver Shia do, but they are not Twelver Shia in the Iranian or Iraqi sense.

They follow no Jafari law, keep no seminaries, and have no marja, ayatollah, or rulings from Qom or Najaf. There is no Alevi equivalent of taqlid, following a living jurist. Iranian religious outreach to Alevi communities has been reported since 1979 without displacing this. Authority is hereditary and local: a dede from an ocak, serving families tied to that lineage, with the congregation's consent. Mourning for Kerbela is a twelve-day fast and sung poetry, not Ashura processions and chest-beating, and the liturgy is in Turkish. Many Alevis reject the Shia label outright for bringing in a legal and clerical system they never used.

Bektashism is an initiatory Sufi order, the Bektasi tarikat, traced to Haci Bektas Veli. They share saints, poetry, teaching and the four gates, so people say Alevi-Bektashi, and Bektashi hymns are sung in cems as a matter of course.

The simplest test is how you get in. You are born an Alevi, inheriting a bond with a dede lineage; you become a Bektashi by initiation, open to any background. That is why Bektashi lodges drew city converts and many Albanians and other Balkan Muslims, while Alevi villages married among themselves. It is like the difference between a family and a club many family members join, and many people are both.

The Bektashi order took shape well after its namesake. Balim Sultan, head of the central lodge around the turn of the sixteenth century, is called pir-i sani, the second pir, and credited with fixing its ritual and hierarchy.

The order became the religious wing of the Janissaries, so when Mahmud II destroyed the Janissaries in 1826 he suppressed the Bektashis too, closing lodges and executing or exiling babas. It recovered in the nineteenth century, then lost legal existence again when the Republic closed all dervish lodges under Law 677 in 1925.

Salih Niyazi Dedebaba moved the world headquarters to Tirana in the early 1930s. Apart from 1967 to the end of the 1980s, when communist Albania suppressed religious institutions, Tirana has been the dedebaba's seat ever since; the headquarters reopened in 1991, and Albania now has the largest openly organized Bektashi community anywhere, an odd outcome for a Turkish order.

Two branches continue: the Celebi, descended by blood from Haci Bektas Veli's family, and the Babagan, which passes authority by initiation and keeps a celibate rank of babas.

Who leads an Alevi community, and what are musahiplik and duskunluk?

If your partner's family talks about our dede like a trusted uncle, this is why. An Alevi community is led by a dede 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 is not enough. Each talip family is tied by inheritance to an ocak, and the dede serves them only with their rizalik, consent, which they can withhold. A dede who behaves badly can be refused, and the tradition remembers dedes removed by their congregations.

Two institutions hold the community together.

Musahiplik is a lifelong pact between two married couples, made before the dede, making the four adults responsible for one another materially, morally and before the congregation. If you have a couple you would call at 3am, you already know the feeling.

Duskunluk is the sanction. The dede declares someone duskun, fallen, in the cem, usually for killing, theft, adultery, abandoning a spouse or breaking a musahiplik pact. They are barred from the cem, and neighbors will not eat, trade or arrange marriages with the family. Coming back takes restitution and fresh consent from the congregation, usually given once the injured party is satisfied.

Between consent and exclusion, Alevi communities governed themselves for centuries without courts of their own.

Named ocaks include Dede Garkin, Baba Mansur, Kureysan, Sinemilli, Agucan, Hubyar and Ureyan Hizir, each covering particular villages and regions rather than a mapped territory. Legitimacy is el ele el Hakka, hand to hand and hand to God, a chain back through the lineage.

In the village system the dede rode a circuit, visiting his talips yearly to hold the gorgu cem, hear accounts and settle disputes. Urban migration broke the circuits, a generation grew up without a dede, and by the 1990s associations and federations had taken over much of the lineage's work, employing salaried dedes at city cemevis and running training courses no ocak ever needed.

Musahiplik weakened too, since it assumes two families close enough to answer for each other's debts, illnesses and children, which city life rarely allows.

How has the Turkish state treated Alevis, and what is the cemevi dispute?

If an Alevi friend goes quiet when politics comes up, this may help you understand. The history is painful and unfinished.

The Turkish state has never recognized the cemevi as a place of worship. Mosques, churches and synagogues have legal status as ibadethane: free electricity and water, protection in zoning decisions, and for mosques, salaried Diyanet staff. Cemevis are registered as associations or foundations, billed at commercial rates, dependent on donations, and at the mercy of municipalities that can refuse a building permit, so the same building can be approved in one district and refused in the next.

Since April 2024 a cemevi can apply to the Ministry of Culture and Tourism for payment of its lighting bill, excluding commercial parts, and must account for it yearly. It is a discretionary payment, not legal status. Meanwhile Alevis pay, through general taxes, for the Diyanet, which employs Sunni imams and builds Sunni mosques.

The longer history is harder. Law 677 of 1925 closed the dervish lodges and banned the titles dede and baba. Military operations in Dersim in 1937 and 1938 killed thousands of Kurdish Alevis; a prime minister apologized in 2011. More than a hundred people, mostly Alevi, were killed at Kahramanmaras in December 1978, and dozens at Corum in 1980.

On 2 July 1993 a crowd besieged and set fire to the Madimak Hotel in Sivas, where writers, musicians and participants had gathered for a festival honoring Pir Sultan Abdal. Thirty-five died: thirty-three participants and two hotel staff. Two attackers also died, so some accounts say thirty-seven; the court counted thirty-five murder victims and gave each convicted defendant thirty-five life sentences, sentences many Alevis still call inadequate. In March 1995 gun attacks on Alevi coffeehouses in Istanbul's Gazi district, and the police response, killed more than a dozen more. That record shapes how Alevis hear every offer of recognition.

The state's position is that Islam has one place of worship, the mosque, and a separate status for cemevis would split the religion; the Diyanet generally calls them cultural facilities. Alevis answer that this assumes the point in dispute, since the Diyanet represents Sunni Hanafi practice and no Alevi.

European courts have sided with Alevis. In Hasan and Eylem Zengin v. Turkey in 2007 the European Court of Human Rights found the compulsory religion classes incompatible with parental rights. In Izzettin Dogan and Others v. Turkey in 2016 its Grand Chamber found the refusal to give Alevi services public status a breach of religious freedom and discriminatory.

Government Alevi workshops from 2009 to 2011 produced a report and no legal change. A 2022 presidential decree created a directorate for Alevi-Bektashi culture and cemevis under the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, not the Diyanet; the main federations rejected it as recognizing a culture, not a faith. Turkey is estimated to have over fifteen hundred cemevis, none recognized as places of worship.

The diaspora contrast is sharp. North Rhine-Westphalia recognized the Alevi community as a religious body under public law in 2020, Berlin grants similar standing, and several German states teach Alevi religion in public primary schools. A family can have in Cologne what it cannot have in Corum.

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