Heterodox mystics and heretics of any kind can be sometimes dangerous and other times reliable depending upon political situations, as was the case with Bektashis in Ottoman Anatolia or in early independent Albania. The historical anthropology perspective taken in this article appears helpful in revealing that Bektashism is probably the mystical order of Islam that best exemplifies a transforma...

By a quasi-permutation matrix we mean a square matrix over the complex field C with non-negative integral trace. Thus, every permutation matrix over C is a quasipermutation matrix. For a given finite group G, let p(G) denote the minimal degree of a faithful permutation representation of G (or of a faithful representation of G by permutation matrices), let q(G) denote the minimal degree of a fa...