Abstract
This article investigates the changing role of folk books and folklore research in the history of the Turkish nation state from a global perspective through a material approach to secularity, including superstition as a third category to the secular–religious nexus. I propose to conceptualize folk books as ‘religious media’ and to use them as legitimate sources to trace the fluidity between Alevis and Sunnis in terms of reverence for Ali, as well as to recognize the agency of Alevis and the role of Alevism in folklore research before the rise of identity politics in the 1990s. I argue that such a shift in perspective and methodology enables us to understand how Alevism was excluded from the realm of religion during the early Cold War. It also contributes to the recent critical research on religion and secularism with an alternative history of Turkish modernity in terms of religious transformation.
1 Introduction: How do Folk Books and the Epics of Ali ‘Matter’?
On 7 November 1944, a year before the end of the Second World War, the General Directorate of Press and Publications (Basın ve Yayın Umum Müdürlüğü) of the Turkish state sent a document to the Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) with a list of books and asked for its opinion. The internal archives of the Diyanet show that the list included several epics of Ali, such as ‘Hayber Kal’ası Cengi’ and ‘Muhammed Hanefi Cengi’. These epics, which until then had been regarded as folk books,1 are heroic combat stories in which Ali—the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad—fights against the ‘infidels’ as the protagonist. The Diyanet recommended a ban on their distribution on 20 December 1944, declaring in an angry tone that such books were ‘neither legends nor translations’, had no ‘religious, scientific or moral value’, and were ‘the product of the intention and impertinence to fill ignorant minds with superstitions’ (‘Dini Kitaplara Dair’ 1944). The then president of the state, İsmet İnönü, followed the Diyanet’s recommendation and banned them a month later on 18 January 1945. Interestingly, 67 years later, in February 2012, İnönü’s decision would become an issue for President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, providing him with an(other) opportunity to portray İnönü, and by extension the rule of the Republican People’s Party (1923–1950), as authoritarian (CNN Türk 2012). The authoritarian character of this period is beyond dispute and has already been explored by historians of Turkey. In light of this, it is pertinent to question why this archival document issued by the Diyanet merits attention today.
My purpose in recalling this specific document is not to discuss the history (and continuity) of authoritarianism in Turkey, nor the history of secularism (and religious politics) and the role of the Diyanet in it. There are several invaluable works on these topics, and therefore also on Alevis,2 the largest religious minority in Turkey, though they lack the legal privileges of minorities. Rather, I propose to revisit the history of Turkey from a global perspective by focusing on these epics in particular, and folk books in general, which have until now not been considered worthy of analysis. Initially categorized as secular, then marginalized as superstition,3 but considered religious for many people in Turkey until the 1980s, I argue that they are also invaluable sources for recent critical studies on secularism and religion.
With regard to studies on secularism and religion, three lines of research are important. First, the concept of secularity, or ‘how conceptual distinctions and institutional differentiations are made between religious and non-religious spheres and practices’ (Kleine and Wohlrab-Sahr 2020; Burchardt et al. 2015) is crucial when revisiting Turkey’s history. Rather than approaching secular or religious politics dichotomously or separately, examining their relationship through the lens of secularity while taking into account global developments allows for a reassessment of a Muslim-majority nation state’s experience of modernity. In this regard, secondly, we should consider superstition to be a third category alongside religion and secularism. As Josephson-Storm argues, the primary target of secular nation states is not the ‘elimination of religion, but of superstition’ (Josephson-Storm 2018, 16). The meaning and content of superstition varies over time and place, including Turkey. What is remarkable, however, is that, from 1944 onwards, superstition was mobilized by the Turkish state and its secular and religious institutions in relation to Alevis. In other words, the Turkish state used the global circumstances of the early Cold War period to redefine the category of religion strictly as Sunni and the category of superstition as Alevi, the latter being framed as a threat to secularism but not the former. More importantly, this policy went beyond discourse and the focus on books shows how the distinction between Alevi and Sunni was demarcated ‘materially’. Accordingly, we should incorporate the contributions of the material approach to the study of religion (Houtman and Meyer 2012; Morgan 2021), and in relation to this, the book as a material object (Rakow 2023).
Of particular importance is the notion of ‘medium’ enabling humans to connect with the ‘transcendental’ or the ‘divine’ (Meyer 2011). If we conceptualize folk books, including the epics of Ali, as ‘media’, we can see how they make Ali ‘accessible’, ‘tangible’ and ‘sense-able’ in the ‘world’. As I will show, Ali’s epics mediated religious meaning in oral, pictorial and scriptural forms for both Alevi and Sunni Muslims living in cities as well as villages. Recognizing these epics as sources, however, is only possible by paying attention to their role within the larger framework of folklore in the history of a nation state. In Western scholarship since the 1970s, the findings of folkloric research on nations have been used innovatively as historical sources in the rediscovery of ‘popular culture’ and ‘history from below’ (Burke 2004), as well as to shed light on the vernacular, lived and material aspects of religion to move beyond binaries such as elite-folk and popular-official religion (Primiano 1995). Less attention, however, has been paid to the changing role of folklore and folk books in the history of a nation state within the framework of secularism. Since ‘what a medium is and does is constituted socially’ as well as politically, focusing on folk books allows us to analyse religious transformations by tracing the conflicts and clashes over their use as media by different actors (Meyer 2013: 10). To rephrase it in line with the focus of this special issue, I argue that it is only through a material approach to secularity that includes superstition as a third category that we can understand how these common ‘religious media’ were used in the politics of secularity to exclude Alevism from the realm of religion.
Such a perspective can also contribute to the agency of religious minorities in Muslim-majority countries, which has largely only become visible with the rise of identity politics since the 1990s. As the Turkish case shows, the history of Alevis in Turkey after World War I and before the Alevi revival in the late 1980s represents a period that is mostly glossed over in modern academic publications on Alevism (Weineck and Zimmermann 2018: 26–27).4 Furthermore, as Weineck points out, ‘a positivistic understanding of historical texts (as “sources”) is still widespread in Alevi historiography’ (Weineck 2018: 253), a critique that is also valid for historiography on Turkey. Why are Republican or Diyanet archival documents regarded as legitimate sources, while their content, such as the epics of Ali, failed to receive academic attention in terms of their meaning and use at the everyday level? I think that focusing exclusively on state archives to ‘prove’ the exclusion of Alevis risks paving the way for a ‘prioritisation of political action over worldviews’ of Alevis (Oktay 2021: 38). Therefore, it is necessary to shift the methodology and pay closer attention to the specifics of folklore research and folk books in this period. Such a shift also enables us to see that those living in both cities and villages, whether Sunni or Alevi, were not ‘ignorant’ and isolated from each other before the mass migration after the 1950s. If we pay attention to how folk books as religious media were part of the ‘religious world-making’ of many people in Turkey at the micro-level (Meyer 2012: 30), we can reconstruct the religious history of Turkey by taking into account the global circumstances of the early Cold War period. In other words, I will use folk books as sources for a reassessment of Turkey’s religious history with Alevis in it in order to contribute to the critical literature on secularism and religion.
Given the diversity and sheer number of publications,5 I will be highly selective. Accordingly, this article must be seen as an attempt to facilitate further research on the role of folklore research and folk books in the religious history of a nation state before the rise of identity politics, i.e., before the Alevi revival in the late 1980s and before the rise of political Islam in Turkey starting with the 1970s. I will begin by discussing the fluidity of the boundaries between Alevis and Sunni Muslims in Turkey in terms of reverence for Ali and the role of folk books as common religious media. I will continue with a brief overview of folklore research from the late Ottoman Empire to the early years of the Republic to provide the context in which folk books were published, followed by a discussion of the significance of the folklorist Pertev Naili Boratav in recognizing Alevi difference. I will then examine the Diyanet’s politics of superstition, supported by the Turkish state’s secularist institutions. Finally, I will assess the religious transformation of Turkey and the legacy of the discourse on superstition to offer an alternative history of Turkish modernity that is open to future research. The article draws on a wide range of primary sources, from Republican and Diyanet archives to memoirs, newspapers and folk books.
2 Beyond Nationalism, Towards Fluidity: ‘Turkish Folk Literature’ and Reverence for Ali
After the Prophet Muhammed, ‘there is no one in Islamic history about whom as much has been written in Islamic languages as Ali’ (Nasr and Afsaruddin 2024). It is therefore interesting to note that his epics are not included in this literature. Ali’s epics date back to the 13th century and contain certain elements of Arabic and Persian literature, as well as Turkish sagas such as Dede Korkut. There are several handwritten manuscripts, lithographs and editions that are imbued with a strong admiration for Ali, or what I call, for lack of a better term, reverence. Ali is venerated by Shii Muslims, who see him as the first Imam and the rightful successor of Muhammad, and by Alevis, who see Ali and Muhammad as one, ‘as two inseparable halves of a cosmic entity emanating from the primordial divine light’ (Karakaya-Stump 2020: 4). I would suggest that ‘reverence’ is the most appropriate term to describe the meaning of Ali in these warrior epics at the everyday level for the people, implying ‘profound respect mingled with love, devotion, or awe’ (Merriam-Webster 2024). ‘Reverence’ and, by extention, ‘revere’ may encompass, on the one hand, the Alevi/Shii veneration of Ali but also hero-worship rather than veneration per se. On the other hand, since Ali’s descendants are not included in these stories, reverence for Ali emphasises solely Ali himself. The non-secterian veneration of Ali and his descendants, framed as ‘Alid loyalism’, ‘Alidism’ or ‘Ahl Al-Baytism’, has been the subject of recent innovative research on the early modern Ottoman Empire (Erginbaş 2017; Terzioğlu 2022), but for the modern context, i.e., late Ottoman Empire and the history of the Republic, religious difference prevails. The historian Cemal Kafadar’s remark about the period of the construction of the Ottoman state, i.e., the 14th century, that ‘the liquidity and fluidity of identities in those centuries is hard to imagine in the national age’ (Kafadar 1995, 28) is highly relevant here. The liquidity and fluidity of boundaries between Sunni and Alevi Muslims in the history of a nation state is equally hard to imagine in the age of identity politics.
Let me illustrate my point with two examples, one from an Islamist scholar and the other from an Alevi scholar. İsmail Kara states that the religious world view of the ‘Muslim folk’ (Tr. Müslüman halk) until the 1970s was shaped by mystical and poetic books that had their own cosmology, such as Mevlid, Muhammediye or Ali’s epics (Kara 2010, 184). Yıldırım learned from his interviewees that the books owned and read in Alevi villages included Buyruk, Faziletname, and epics of Ali, Ebu Muslim and Battal Gazi (Yıldırım 2018, 296). How can we understand the common media, here the epics of Ali, if we continue to emphasize difference, as in the latter, which actually contributes to the former’s Sunni understanding of the ‘Muslim folk’? In so far as we seek out Alevis with an ‘Alevi identity’ or ‘Alevi sources’, the history of the ‘Turkish folk’ becomes Sunni. Conversely, if we do not acknowledge the Alevi difference, such common media become symbols of a romantic ‘Muslim-Turkish’ past that ‘shares’ Ali.6 In any case, the fluidity between Sunnis and Alevis in terms of revering Ali remains invisible because the ‘literalist readings of historicist folklore’ in Turkey mostly focus on ethnicity, specifically Turkishness, on the one hand (Kafadar 1995, 82) and on Muslimness on the other. In particular, the approach of the leading historian Fuad Köprülü (1890–1966) on folk books as an aspect of his conceptualization of ‘Turkish folk literature’ was crucial. In an article written in 1925, Köprülü subsumed all the books mentioned by Kara and Yıldırım, together with stories of Battle of Kerbela,7 under the term ‘Turkish folk literature’, which he argued constituted the majority of ‘our’ folk literature rooted in Islamic tradition (Köprülü 1991: 366–370).
Certainly, these and Ali’s epics are part of an Ottoman tradition of printing, storytelling and communal listening (Öztürk 2003; Neumann 2005), and reverence for Ali in them was framed as ‘Alid affection’, being ‘the product of a collective memory’ (Sezer-Aydınlı 2022: 27). It is interesting to note that, despite the modernization efforts that will be discussed below, the majority of Ali’s epics published in the early 1930s contained Alevi symbols and idioms. The sacred sword of Ali, Zülfikar, was an integral part of these books with its illustrations, and both Ali and Zülfikar, as well as his horse Düldül, are portrayed as having supernatural powers. Alevi titles defining Ali, such as İmam-ı Ali, Şah-ı Merdan or Merd-i Meydan were common in these books. Some books were promoted to explain to the people the reasons why Ali is called ‘Şah-ı Merdan, Merd-i Meydan, Şîr-i Yezdan, Sahib-i Zülfikar’ (Korgunal 1933). What is more interesting is that ‘Sunni’ religious folk books also contained these ‘antinomian’ representations of Ali, explained with ‘heterodox’ effects in the ‘Islam of the Ottoman folk’ following Köprülü (Arpaguş 2015), as a deviation from ‘correct’ Islam. In other words, reverence for Ali in all these folk books was, if not equal, at least closer to the Alevi understanding of Ali, and this is exactly what is made invisible by the dominant approach established by Köprülü.8
During the transition from the Empire to the Republic, Turkish folk books also became a subject of interest to Orientalists. The first extensive research on folk books in the late Ottoman Empire and Turkey was carried out by German orientalists as Volksbücher (Jacob 1901; Spies 1929). Spies posited that folk books were an important part of ‘Turkish folk literature’ like Köprülü. However, unlike Köprülü, he did not include epics or ‘Sunni’ ones such as Mevlid, but only folk tales such as Köroğlu or Leyla ile Mecnun. According to Spies, folk books were largely secular and contained ‘very little Muhammadian in terms of religion’ (Spies 1929: 59). He was looking for normative symbols of (Sunni) Islam, such as Allah (God), mosques or iman (belief), and although his approach was devoid of Alevi difference and reverence for Ali, its consequence was surprisingly positive for the people of Turkey because it created an atmosphere of freedom for the publication of all the folk books mentioned by Köprülü. Despite the limited publication of normative Sunni Islamic books in the 1930s as a period of strict religious control (Kara 2017: 415–416), these books could be published widely because they were seen as part of the folk books, and therefore as ‘secular’.
3 Beyond the Urban-Rural Binary: Folklore Research, Pertev Naili Boratav and Alevi Difference
Folk books were published as part of the broader research agenda on folklore in Turkey. The beginning of interest in folklore coincides with the birth of folklore as a concept in the West, that is, in the second half of the nineteenth century. The field developed in a similar way in relation to nationalism and used folklore research to construct a national identity (Başgöz 1972). Folklore research, which began in the late Ottoman Empire, was institutionalized in the Republic by the Folklore Association (Halk Bilgisi Derneği), founded in 1927, and later by the People’s Houses (Halk Evleri), which were established in various provinces from 1932. The journals of these institutions contained not only articles on the material collected from the villages, but also various articles on Alevi and Bektashi poets and culture, a considerable number of them written by Alevis and Bektashis themselves.9 In other words, research on these groups intensified, not as a separate line of research, as was the case in the late Ottoman Empire, but as part of ‘secular’ folkloric research. This folkloric research activity in the single-party period is usually dismissed as a criticism of the Republic’s ideological approach to ‘folk’ as a unified, homogeneous entity that sought to suppress religious, ethnic or linguistic differences. I do not deny the Republic’s policy of homogenization, or that folklore research was part of the Turkish state’s wider support for research into Turkish culture and language, which tried to establish officially that the Turks had their roots in Central Asia and were shamanists before the advent of Islam. After all, the study of culture has always been political, and ‘folklore is politics’ (Dégh 1999). This becomes evident in the case of the folklorist Pertev Naili Boratav, who joined Ankara University in 1939 with a teaching post in folk literature and brought folklore research to a scholarly level. His department at the Faculty of Language, History and Geography (DTCF), became a hub for the academic study of ‘Turkish culture’, rooted in Alevi and Bektashi literature where left-wing intellectuals worked.
Boratav’s different approach to folklore, not from a Turkish nationalist perspective, but ‘as an effort to understand people and what it means to be human,’ has been thoroughly investigated (Öztürkmen 2005: 209). However, his distinctive approach to ‘Turkish folk literature’ and how he recognized Alevi difference has mostly remained invisible in the scholarship, especially regarding how it differed from that of his teacher Köprülü. Boratav recognized the religious aspect of all the above-mentioned folk books and did not include them in this category (Boratav 1946: 3), but listed them separately as works that could be useful for folklore studies (Boratav (1942) 2000: 40). In other words, while for Köprülü such books constituted the majority of ‘Turkish folk literature’, for Boratav they were not even part of it. His habilitation thesis was on folk tales and storytellers, the product of extensive research through several visits to villages in north-eastern and central Turkey, in which he acknowledged reverence for Ali, but unlike Köprülü and his followers, did not associate it with negative terms such as superstition, remnants of shamanism from Central Asia, syncretism or heterodoxy (Boratav (1973) 1994: 7, 256).10 In short, folklore research in Turkey was inclusive until 1946, the year that marks the change of folklore research as well as Turkey, as will be discussed below. In this respect, while the strict controls on religion until the mid-1940s did not allow much religious activity in the public sphere, it influenced more Sunni religious figures and the Diyanet, though Alevis less in terms of publications. For example, the epics of Ali became one of the most important printing activities of the 1930s.
The wide circulation of these books throughout the country deserves some discussion here in relation to the urban-rural binary that is dominant for this period, and their role as religious media carrying reverence for Ali across boundaries. In particular, Alevis are perceived as communities residing in rural areas, ‘isolated’ from urban centres and Sunnis, whether as villagers or urban dwellers. We must remember that most of these books were written and printed in Istanbul, the urban centre, but they were widely distributed in the peripheries. In particular, itinerant booksellers would buy books, paintings, fragrances, etc. in Istanbul, load them into their saddlebags, and take them to the remotest villages of Anatolia to sell them. If necessary, they would exchange the books for products such as eggs and beans that the villagers had in their possession (Güloğlu 1937, 6). Many of these booksellers came from Darende, a district in the south-eastern province of Malatya. A theologian, Yaşar Kandemir, born in 1939 in the village of Uzunçayır in Yozgat, a province in central Turkey, remembers from his childhood that booksellers from Darende visited their village every harvest season. The books they sold were folk books such as Muhammediye and epic stories, which were read collectively in the village coffeehouse with awe and excitement (Ceyhan 2014: 147). One of the prominent authors of folk books, Muharrem Zeki Korgunal, had his own printing house in Istanbul. He narrates that Darendelis visited him every season to ask what he had that was new. As they were illiterate, they would first look at the pictures in the book and then ask Korgunal to read a few paragraphs. By listening, they could identify which book would be admired by the people and sold in large quantities. Korgunal was surprised that their decision was always correct (Ataç 1937). Istanbul bookshop owners made their main profits by selling to the villages of Anatolia, and the villagers bought books especially for the winter, to be read together during the long nights (Son Posta 1932; Kesler 1942). The storytellers still active in Anatolian villages performed folk tales and the epics of Ali, Hamza or Ebu Muslim, sometimes for forty consecutive nights (Boratav 1946: 127).
Figure 1
Cover of an epic of Ali written by Muharrem Zeki Korgunal (Istanbul: Bozkurt, 1944)
Citation: Secular Studies 7, 2 (2025) ; 10.1163/25892525-bja10081
These examples demonstrate that the urban centre of Istanbul and the rural areas were not isolated from each other, as was previously assumed. This is further evidenced by the numerous research trips undertaken by folklorists to the villages until the mid-1940s, which included invitations extended to several villagers to visit the capital city of Ankara and the faculty where Boratav was working (Başgöz 2021). We can also see that the rural population, whether as booksellers, readers or listeners, was not ‘ignorant’, a position that Boratav had exactly taken. Here, people’s preference for folk books is especially important, including those who are illiterate, such as booksellers who identified books that would sell well through listening, or listeners/readers in the villages. The wide circulation of folk books demonstrates that the rural population was simply not ‘modern’ and ‘enlightened’ in a Western sense, that is, in respect of parameters such as literacy, schooling or rationality.11 As for the Sunni-Alevi difference and fluidity, we must also note that Darende was and is a district with a considerable number of Alevis and Alevi villages, so presumably some of the booksellers were Alevi. One Alevi bookseller, the father of Abuzer Ayyıldız, visited both Alevi and Sunni villages. In 1940 he also established his own publishing house in Adana, a province in south-eastern Turkey nd published several folk books (Ayyıldız 2024). They must have sold all sorts of folk books to anyone who was willing to buy them in order to earn a living, presumably without prioritizing religious identities. We also know that leading Sunni Muslim Turkish writers started reading or listening to epic stories and ‘Sunni’ folk books from an early age (Ceyhan 2014). While epic stories were read by both Sunnis and Alevis, we have evidence that the latter folk books with reverence for Ali were read by Alevis in the Ottoman and Republican contexts (Arpaguş 2015: 30–31). The theologian Kandemir’s favourites were the epics of Ali, and he personally compiled an epic from the relevant parts of Muhammediye (Ceyhan 2014: 147). In other words, while the epics were common religious media for Alevis and Sunnis, revering Ali was also a common motif in other religious folk books that functioned as media of Ali through oral, scriptural and pictorial forms. I am not denying that revering Ali had a different meaning for Alevis, or implying that Sunnis and Alevis read or listened to all these books in the same manner. Rather, I maintain that Ali was an essential part of the religious world-making of the people of Turkey, which transcended religious boundaries. Therefore, instead of defining folk books as either Sunni or Alevi, conceptualizing them as religious media from a material angle, in its both visual and auditory forms, allows us to see the fluidity in terms of reverence for Ali.12 Indeed, it was precisely this fluidity and its visual and auditory aspects that later led the Diyanet to criticize these publications as being full of superstitions (e.g., Mevlid) or as the embodiment of superstition (e.g., Ali’s epics).
4 The Politics of ‘Superstition’: Attacking Folk Books and Excluding Alevism from ‘Religion’
The term superstition, used to denounce ‘other’ religions or ‘wrong’ religious attitudes, has a long history. In the West, it was largely part of the discourse on the disenchantment and decline of magic with modernity, and ultimately collecting superstitious customs as folklore and symbols of a pre-modern cultural identity prevailed (Cameron 2010: 26). However, in Turkey, as in East Asian countries (Broy 2016), superstition has not only served as a conceptual tool, it has also been influential in shaping political, legal and social realities. In the Turkish context, the term ‘hurafe’ refers to the concept of superstition that draws attention to beliefs and practices that are remnants of ‘non-Islamic’ religions and cultures and that ‘poison’ the ‘purity’ of Islam. Especially in the modern context, i.e., after the mid-19th century, this discourse became prominent, and its elimination from Islam was a common goal in order to reconcile Islam with modernity (Dinç 2021: 61–67). The discourse became tangible in the Republic with Law 677 of 1925, which closed Sufi orders, their convents and shrines, and banned their religious titles and activities such as magic and healing. However, this republican policy influenced the discourse on superstition by limiting it to the Sufi religious communities and activities mentioned in the law. For example, Alevis were one of the main targets of the discourse on superstition during the late Ottoman Empire. However, this discourse was largely silenced by the strict control of religion, and similar to Western nation states (Valk 2014), the study of superstitions, i.e., folk beliefs, was encouraged without a devaluing or marginalizing attitude.
The initial indications of a shift in policy towards folklore research and folk literature emerged in 1937. This was a year prior to the commencement of the Second World War and the demise of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, which signified the ascent of İnönü’s influence. In other words, this illustrates the emergence of suspicion of the secular Turkish state towards Alevis. On 11 May 1937, the Minister of the Interior, Şükrü Kaya, sent a letter to Turkish writers (the specific addressees remain unknown) entitled ‘On the Modernization of Folk Books’ (Kaya 1937). In this letter, he complained that the number of folk books exceeded the number of books published for the elite (münevver) (more than 50,000 compared to two or three thousand). Sixty-five books were listed as folk books, including folk tales such as Leyla ile Mecnun. Interestingly, this list did not include the ‘Sunni’ folk books mentioned above, but it did include the epics of Ali and books on the Battle of Karbala. However, they were listed separately as being religiously reactionary and full of superstitions. In other words, the politics of secularism acquired a new aspect after 1937 by now excluding the previously ‘secular’ folk books relating to Alevis as ‘religious’.
Towards the end of the Second World War, the politics of secularism extended to increased state control over the publication of folk books with a new state actor in the struggle, the Diyanet. Established in 1924 to manage all matters related to Islam and to ‘protect secularism’ (Gözaydın 2008), the Diyanet was not very active as a decision-making institution on matters of Islam during the early republican period. Its increasing activity coincided with its anti-superstition policy, which first appeared in its archives in 1944 (Yaltkaya 1944). In other words, the Diyanet used the discourse on superstition—which originated in the late Ottoman Empire and was legalized in the early republican period but was limited to the scope of the law—to establish its visibility in the public sphere. The Diyanet’s anti-superstition policy towards Alevis, which was to continue until the end of the 1980s, can be seen in its treatment of folk books after the mid-1940s. On the one hand, the elimination of the ‘superstitious’ parts that revered Ali from the ‘Sunni’ folk books, and thus making them properly ‘religious,’ was crucial. On the other hand, the folk books in which reverence for Ali was central were pushed out of the realm of religion into the category of superstition, exemplified by the epics of Ali. In other words, revering Ali, which used to be central to the fluidity of the boundaries between Alevis and Sunnis, came to play a central role this time in establishing and reifying the boundaries between them through the politics of superstition.
Figure 2
Ali with his legendary sword Zülfikar in an epic published presumably in the 1950s
Citation: Secular Studies 7, 2 (2025) ; 10.1163/25892525-bja10081
Hz. Ali Şeytanlar Mağasında, Istanbul: Ayyıldız Kitabevi, no date, p. 65It should be noted that neither the discontent of the ulema and the elites with religious folk books (Öztürk 2003: 145; Sezer-Aydınlı 2022: 87–90), nor the discrimination against Alevis, nor the attempt to teach them ‘true Islam’ was new but constitutes a continuity with the Ottoman Empire, as does the Ottoman state’s privileging of Sunni-Hanafi Islam. However, the fluidity between Alevis and Sunnis persisted and was further strengthened by the Sufi religious orders, which were more decisive in people’s everyday lives than the teachings of the ulema. In almost all religious orders, revering Ali was strong during rituals. With their closure in 1925, the Diyanet, as the continuation of the Ottoman ulema, became the sole legal authority in the religious field in a secular nation state, with the power to define ‘correct religion’. Hundreds of religious books were sent to the Diyanet for examination between 1944 and 1950 during the single-party period (Toprak 2019: 318–334), and it is interesting to see that the publication of normative Sunni Islamic books such as Sunni İlmihals (Islamic manuals) was approved by the institution and, by extension, by the secular state. In other words, normative Sunni Islamic books were not affected by the secular control of the Turkish state with the Diyanet as its religious institution.
The dominant discourse in Turkey, which framed secularism (laiklik in the Turkish context, taken from the French understanding of secularism as laïcité) not as being against religion, i.e. Islam, but against superstition, was also shared by the secular elite and indeed contributed to the Diyanet’s policy on superstition. Even if the secular elite’s understanding of superstition did not always align with that of the Diyanet, its association with religious reactionism and communism enabled the Diyanet and related Islamist actors to mobilize the discourse on superstition and consolidate ‘religion’ as Sunni Islam, legitimized as the antidote to communism (Dinç 2024). The growing conservatism in the country after 1946, with its loosening of controls on religion, shared by the ‘secular’ Republican People’s Party and the newly established Democratic Party, influenced not only the folk books with reverence for Ali, but also folklore research in general. Conducting research on ‘superstition’ and Alevis without denigrating or marginalizing them or associating them with each other or with shamanism and heterodoxy had its consequences. The purges at the faculty where Boratav worked began that same year, resulting in his dismissal and forced exile, and the closure of the folklore department in 1948. This was followed by the closure of the People’s Houses, they and their associated actors being accused of communism. Folklore research that acknowledged reverence for Ali and Alevi difference could no longer be tolerated, as both were increasingly perceived as superstition and ‘Shii propaganda’, often conflated with ‘communist propaganda’.
5 Conclusion: Religious Transformation in Turkey and the Legacy of ‘Superstition’
This article has examined the ambivalent role of folk books and folklore in the history of a Muslim-majority nation state in relation to the politics of secularism and superstition from a material approach to religion. Similar to Japan, defining religion in Turkey has been a ‘politically charged, boundary drawing exercise’, with superstition influentially used for various political purposes (Josephson-Storm 2012: 2). The Turkish case also shows that, rather than defining secularism, a focus on secularity enables us to see the changing politics, definitions and effects of secularism. Strict secularism can be beneficial for religious minorities at certain times, and the nationalization of religious folk books can contribute to their framing as secular. Moreover, supported by strict secularism, this can contribute to the freedom of publications that are not accepted by religious authorities. The loosening of control over secularism during the Cold War period can be exploited to empower a particular understanding of religion, namely Sunni-Hanafi Islam in Turkey (cf. Aytürk 2014).
This also highlights the religious change in Turkey in two crucial aspects: the category of religion became normatively Sunni; and Alevism was constructed as a distinct tradition, but outside the religious. For example, the epics that were once sold in front of the mosques as religious books were replaced by normative Sunni books (Süreya (1991) 2019: 390–391). Hence, ‘religious’ books became ‘properly Sunni’, even at the expense of excluding the ‘Sunni’ folk books that revered Ali. In particular, books on Ali’s epics lost their role as common religious media carrying reverence for Ali across boundaries, but although certain stories such as the Conquest of Hayber Castle retain their significance for contemporary Alevis (Alevi Canlar 2020), their books did not become Alevi. Folk books that Alevis adopted as ‘Alevi books’ continue to be reprinted, such as the Battle of Kerbela (Şakir 2024), but they are not considered worthy as sources of Alevi history. In other words, Turkey’s experience of modernization has changed the understanding of ‘religious’ books, whether Alevi or Sunni, into canonical texts, such as the Buyruk for the former, or the Qur’an and İlmihals written by Diyanet officials, for the latter. To move beyond this narrow understanding of religious books, and by extension the category of the religious, there is an urgent need for recent approaches such as material and lived religion to bring the study of religion in Turkey into dialogue with global critical scholarship on religion, as I have sought to do in this article.
Today, the epics of Ali and the folk books are no longer banned or accused of superstition, and indeed the Diyanet itself has published an epic of Ali (Ünlüer 2010). Nevertheless, this does not rectify the enduring legacy of the discourse of superstition, which emphasizes rationality, including religiosity. As Gezik notes, these epics and other historical legends are considered unworthy by Alevis as a result of a scientific and positivist approach (Gezik 2016, 309). Similarly, ‘Sunni’ folk books such as Mevlid or Muhammediye are no longer read by the Sunni population, but have only recently become a topic of interest to Sunni theologians in Turkey. Boratav pointed out decades ago that efforts to modernize these books by removing superstitious elements, such as reverence for Ali or supernatural aspects, would lead to their abandonment by the people (Boratav 1946: 214–215). Further research may reveal new evidence for folk books as both scripture, pictorial and auditorial devotion, and a comparative content analysis of their many versions, including the Ottoman manuscripts, may shed light on their similarities, differences and Sunni interventions.
Last but not the least, it should be noted that folklore research, which was carried out until the mid-1940s, not only came to an end but that its findings were transferred to the religious field to combat superstitions among the people (Dinç 2021: 67–76). The dominant discourse shared by almost all the leading elite actors of Turkish modernity, namely the ignorance of the Turkish folk (the rural population of Anatolia, more than 70 percent until the 1960s) and its association with superstition, was influential here. However, there were folklorists such as Boratav whose discourses were markedly different, not only in terms of superstition, but also in terms of reverence for Ali and Alevi difference, but they have remained largely invisible to this day. Bringing them to light through collaborative research that considers folklore research from the 1930s to the mid-1940s as a legitimate source can allow us to rewrite Turkish modernity from an entirely new perspective in the future.
Acknowledgments
This article is partly based on my project “The Battle of Superstition: Alevis and the Construction of Islamic Orthodoxy in Secular Turkey” conducted at and funded by The Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences “Multiple Secularities—Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities”, University of Leipzig (March–August 2023). This article is also part of my project “Superstition, Material Religion and Hıdrellez in Turkey”, which has received funding from the European Research Executive Agency’s Horizon Europe Programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions 2023, Grant Agreement No. 101154559. I would like to thank my colleagues at Kolleg-Forschungsgruppe “Multiple Secularities” and the editors of the special issue for their invaluable comments and suggestions.
I use the term ‘folk book’ simply to refer to books favoured and read or listened to by large segments of the population. I use the term ‘folk’ for the Turkish term ‘halk’, meaning ‘the people’ as used in the British context; for a discussion, see (Canovan 2005).
In this paper, I use Alevi as an umbrella term that also includes the terms Kizilbash and Bektashi. Kizilbash groups in the Ottoman Empire are the forefathers of contemporary Alevis. Bektashism is an Islamic Sufi order that has very similar traditions to Alevis.
In order to avoid redundancy in the text, I will use quotation marks around terms such as superstition, religion, religious or secular only when necessary in terms of their political use by state actors.
For exceptions on the 1960s, see the chapters on Alevis in Azak 2010; Lord 2018.
These publications are part of my ongoing research to build a database that grows over time.
For example, Sunni Islamic theologians have recently used the epics of Ali to prove that they are ‘remnants’ of a ‘common’ Sunni-Muslim-Turkish oral religious culture that praises Ali in a similar way, thus eliminating Alevi-Sunni difference. Furthermore, this recent literature attempts to prove that the epics of Ali are not Alevi, but rather carry strong influences of Sunni Hanafi Islam. In other words, the nationalist approach to these books has taken on a new aspect, emphasizing their Sunni-Muslimness over their Turkishness. For an example, see Atalan 2010.
This battle took place on 10 October 680 (10 Muharram), when the grandson of Muhammad and the son of Ali, Huseyin, was defeated and massacred by an army sent by the Umayyad caliph Yezid I.
For example, Çetin discusses the role of Ali in relation with the epics through the works of Alevi poets under the title ‘Ali in Turkish Folk Poetry’ without using the terms Alevi or Bektashi (Çetin 2005). Mattei elaborates on the possible Alevi or Bektashi identities of the authors of certain epics of Ali, but does not include the role of Ali in the Alevi tradition and concludes, like Çetin, by emphasising their contribution to Turkish literature (Mattei 2004). According to this literature, following Köprülü, Ali as a hero of the Turks is a continuation of the Turkish heroes Alp and Gazi, before and after their conversion to Islam, discussed in his book under the title ‘The Development of National Literature’ (Köprülü 1981, 252). Thus, Ali as a Muslim is Turkified in a nationalist way.
This is not the place to delve into the details of this extensive literature, which consists of hundreds of articles. However, I will just note that a famous Bektashi intellectual, Vahit Lütfi Salcı, alone published a series of fourteen articles on Alevi poets in the journal Halk Bilgisi Haberleri (Folklore News) from April 1940 to November 1941.
For an extensive discussion of the role of syncretism, shamanism and heterodoxy in Köprülü’s historiography, see Dressler 2010.
In this sense, the history of the people of Turkey before urban migration should be revisited through recent innovative approaches to ignorance, exemplified by Burke 2023.
Here, I must note that conceptualizing folk books as ‘religious media’ does not mean approaching them as ‘media from outside’ influencing the masses during urbanization and modernization, which is the prevailing approach to Turkey’s transformation. This is not the place to delve into this discussion, but I will just note that, like Meyer, I believe this is in fact a ‘reificatory approach’ and that we should instead approach media ‘as both constituted by and constitutive of transmission and communication’ (Meyer 2013: 15). For an alternative and insightful reading of Turkey’s religious transformation and Alevi revival, see Ellington 2010.
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