The Alevis’ Ambivalent Encounter With Modernity. Islam, Reform and Ethnopolitics In Turkey (19th-20th cc.)

This paper studies a little known example of how religion and social change were connected in the process of “national modernization” in a land that was, as home of the caliph, the center of the Muslim world. Turkification and Islamization are the major demographic changes in Asia Minor during the 20th century. They resulted from politics that impacted first on the Anatolian Christians but threatened also the Alevis. Changing from a Muslim to a Turkish nationalism and declaring itself laicist, the Kemalist movement, heir of the Young Turks, won over many Alevis after 1924, an important heterodox Muslim minority that constitutes about a quarter of Turkey’s population. But contrary to the egalitarian idea of the Republic, founded in 1923, the Sunni Muslims continued to dominate national and regional power relations. They retained control over public ressources and determined the contents of the unitary “national culture”. Significantly, in mid-February 2002 a tribunal in Ankara ordered the closing down of the Cultural Association of the Alevis and Bektashis, the most important Alevi umbrella organization, for “separatism”. Since the 19th century the Alevis, especially the Eastern Alevis, looked towards modernity from the West because it promised liberal rights and fundamental social change.