Writing Religion

Abstract

Academic and political debates on the nature and the history of the Alevis of Turkey have since the early 20th century, within the politics of Ottoman/Turkish modernization and Turkish nation-building, been locked in discourses of religious and ethnic essence and homogeneity. Within these discourses, groups previously referred to as Kızılbaş (“Redhead”) and regarded as heretics with no attention to their ethnicity, were renamed “Alevi” and marked as Turkish and “heterodox” Muslims. This book analyzes the process of this re-signification within the complex historical dynamics of the late Ottoman Empire, marked by the implosion of the ideal of Ottomanist pluralism, and the first years of the Turkish Republic, when the Kemalist nation builders developed and acted upon their vision of ethno-religious homogeneity. The first part of this book is genealogical, tracing the formation of the new concept of Alevism from the Kızılbashes’ encounter with Christian missionaries and other Westerners in the second half of the 19th century through the core phase of Turkish nation-building until the 1930s. It combines historical analysis with theoretical discussion of the role of modern discourses of religion in that process. Part II is dedicated to the religiography of the eminent Turkish historian Mehmed Fuad Köprülü, whose work was highly influential in the establishment of the modern concept of Alevism. Particular attention is given to his conceptualization of inner-Islamic difference and to the convergence of a Western religion concept and Islamic modernist thought in his approach to religion/Islam.

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