The Alevi question and the limits of citizenship in Turkey

ABSTRACT

The Alevi question in Turkey is not only about a manifestation of the demands for religious freedoms and pluralism but also an issue of citizenship at least for the last three decades. This article argues that as a result of the rise of the Alevi identity and collective capacity of the Alevis to formulate demands in the national and international public spheres, the issue has increasingly turned to a matter of struggle for the long-denied equal citizenship rights of the Alevis in Turkey. Expected failure of workshops process, namely Alevi Opening, during the second term of the Adalet ve Kalk?nma Partisi (AKP) period increasingly brought a sense of the disappointment among the Alevi organizations due to the fact that the issue was not managed with a perspective based on equal citizenship rights but with a discussion on the authenticity and originality of the Alevi demands. Enduring silence for the solution of the Alevi question in the last decade would lead Alevi organizations to the search for the extension of the self-creation of the survival mechanisms without the state support. This paper, within these considerations, is based on the demands of the Alevi society in Turkey and their struggle for the legal recognition, which increasingly challenged the Turkish form of secularism and citizenship regimes today.     

Hubyar: Alevi Texts

Following their exposition of religious practice among the Hubyar Alevi of Central Turkey in a previous issue (British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 37(3) (December 2010), pp. 287–334.), the authors offer a selection of seven deyi? sung by cantors during Hubyar ceremonies, of which they are an indispensable part. This is the first time such Hubyar texts have been published in the West. They are largely specific to the Hubyar, but the notes review their context in both general Alevi and Sufi terms. The authors also attempt to explain the meaning of allusions which are often inaccessible to the non-specialist Western reader.     

Re-Imagining Identity: The Transformation of the Alevi Semah

Until the early 1990s, the Alevi community, a heterodox Islamic sect in Turkey, actively avoided explaining their beliefs to outsiders and were against permitting non-Alevis to enter their cem rituals. By the mid-1990s they began to hold their rituals publicly in the cemevi (lit. cem house) in Turkish cities and in their cultural centres in the diaspora. Almost all Alevi associations or the cemevis in the diaspora and ‘at home' have a semah group educated and organized by the executive. As opposed to rural/traditional cem rituals in which everybody may take part in the dance, the semahs performed in the urban cems are carried out by the semah groups consisting of young men and women. Moreover, these semah groups also perform in the non-ritual context. Thus, if the predominance of semah within the Alevi cem ritual is a ‘fact' to be studied, then differences in their present interpretations in Turkish cities and in the diaspora is another. This article examines these differences in the context of the transformation of the semah from the representation of religious identity to that of ethno-political identity.     

Between Nationalism,Modernism and Secularism: The Ambivalent Place of ‘Alevi Identities’

This study discusses the position of Alevi identity and Alevi community with regard to the Turkish national identity-building project. There was a partial compatibility between the Kemalist objective of laicization and nation building and the Alevi practice and understanding of a ‘local’ version of ‘Turkish Islam’. Besides these compatibilities, Alevis faced the challenges of nation-building and homogenization policies, which involved homogenization in ethnic, religious and sectarian domains. Kurmanji- and Zazaki-speaking ethnically Kurdish/Zaza Alevis of Eastern Anatolia had a different experience during the project of centralization and ethnic homogenization, in comparison to Turkish-speaking Turcoman Alevis. This different experience still is a source of division among Alevi communities.     

The latent politicization of Alevism: the affiliation between Alevis and leftist politics (1960–1980)

Abstract

Traditional Alevism, which was based on rural/isolated life started to dissolve as a result of urbanization in the 1960s and the 1970s. The social dynamics of Turkey associated the dissolution of archaic Alevism with political mobilization that Turkey experienced in the same period; therefore, the Alevis affiliated themselves with socialist movements in order to participate into political process more efficiently. This article analyses the affiliation between Alevis and socialist movements within the framework of the overlap between the socio-political culture of the Alevis and the political needs of the socialist movements in the 1960s and the 1970s. This affiliation might be followed in Alevi folk songs, squatter settlements, villages and the massacres that Alevis suffered in the late 1970s. Because the relation between the Alevis and socialist movements meant not the politicization of the Alevism as an independent politics of identity, but rather the politicization of Alevis through their affiliation with leftist politics, this article conceptualizes the politicization dynamism of the Alevism between 1960 and 1980 as latent politicization.     

Understanding urban Alevism through its socio-spatial manifestations: cemevis in İzmir

Cemevis emerged as the spaces of the Alevi identity in contemporary cities of Turkey. On the basis of in-depth interviews conducted in ?zmir with the heads of cemevi associations, this study claims that, while cemevis were enforced by the process of urbanization, they have been transforming the Alevi practices and collective organizations and eventually constructing a new type of Alevism as to religious practices, community institutions and collective imagination. Though no legal–political recognition has yet been granted to cemevis as the places of worship, they have established themselves as central institutions of urban Alevis with their extensive use beyond the limited oppositional categorization of culture–religion. This denial of legal status which has been seen as the violation of basic human rights is one of the main constitutive dynamics in the ongoing debates on Turkey's Alevi question. It is to such an extent that the denial of legal status to cemevis has today come to be identified by Alevi groupings with the denial of Alevi collective identity itself.     

Living in an Age of Precarity in 21st Century Asia

ABSTRACT

The term “precarity” pays attention to the various ways in which policies and processes that promote economic growth can also, at the same time, induce a state of precarity or precarious living. In this introductory article, we interrogate one of the paradoxes of Asian development: greater precarity set against the backdrop of an economic “miracle.” The focus is on how policies and processes that are part of neo-liberal orthodoxy create new forms of marginalisation or precarity and new classes of the marginalised or the precariat. These include: transnational migrants without basic protection; factory workers employed on casual contracts; elderly with no old age state support; minorities dispossessed by land grabbing or resettled to make way for mega-projects; and farmers facing declining terms of trade, shrinking landholdings, and growing debts as they invest in new farm technologies. These disparate experiences provide a telling antidote to the growth-at-all-costs philosophy that favours economic expansion over matters of distribution, material prosperity over human flourishing, and corporate profitability over workers’ basic incomes.     

Shi’i division over the Iraqi state: decentralization and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq

ABSTRACT

This article traces the evolving political platform of one of Iraq’s oldest and most powerful Shi’i political parties, the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI). Drawing on an analysis of 15 years of primary materials produced by ISCI, it focuses principally on their promotion of decentralization as a path towards peace and stability in Iraq. However, the article also traces the origins of a deep schism that emerged within ISCI between the movement’s old guard who were beholden to the Iranian regime and their model of vilāyat-i faqīh, and the youth-led Iraqi nationalist faction who wanted to see the instalment of a civil government without religious oversight. The article demonstrates that this division is indicative of a theological debate between Shi’i religious scholars over differing interpretations of the role of Shi’ism in politics. The article concludes by arguing that understanding the extent to which such esoteric religious debates manifest themselves politically is crucial to interpreting divisions within Shi’ism not just in Iraq, but across the broader Middle East.     

Religious Innovation and Competition in Contemporary African Christianity

ABSTRACT

This introductory essay lays out the main themes of a special issue of Journal of Contemporary African Studies which brings together six empirically grounded papers by African social scientists of different disciplinary backgrounds. These works touch on various aspects of the social impact of religious innovation and competition in present day African Christianity. They represent the first fruits on the social science side of an interdisciplinary initiative that made 23 research grants for theologians and social scientists to study Christianity and social change in contemporary Africa. These articles focus on a variety of dynamics in contemporary African religion (mostly Christianity), including gender, health and healing, social media, entrepreneurship, and inter-religious borrowing and accommodation. The editors conclude that the research and learning reflected in this volume will enhance understanding of religion’s vital entanglement in contemporary African society. The articles reveal problematic ethical and psychological dynamics in some of these new movements, particularly among some of the neo-Pentecostal groups. Yet the authors are determined to go beyond perspectives that are overly fixated with African problems and victimisation. They are keen to explore opportunities for understanding African agency and African wellsprings of hope. The editors conclude that scholars of religion and religiosity in Africa need to invest new conceptual and methodological energy in researching what it means to be actively religious in Africa today.     

Protesting gender discrimination from within: women’s political representation on behalf of Islamic parties

Abstract

In recent decades, Islamic political movements, and their subsequent political parties, have been increasingly recruiting and nominating women to high-level decision-making positions despite the fact that the ideology they espouse often acts to dissuade women from assuming positions of political leadership. My ethnographic research on religious women’s activism in Iran and Turkey helps explain this unexpected trend by shedding light onto the role of Islamic party women in challenging the gender discriminatory attitudes and behaviours of their male party leaders. In particular, I highlight the role that a number of high-ranking Islamic party women with close ties to the ruling elites played in pressuring their male party leaders to address women’s political underrepresentation in formal politics. Women’s close ties to the ruling elites consisted of formal ties with key Islamic leaders that evolved thanks to women’s long-term devotion to the Islamic movement or learning at Islamic seminaries. I demonstrate that such close ties to the leaders, as well as the presence of a public discourse in favour of women’s increased access to politics, enabled influential Islamic women to leverage a form of ‘internal criticism’ as an important strategy to enhance women’s political rights and status from within the Islamic movements.     

North Korea's juche ideology: indigenous communism or traditional thought?

ABSTRACT

This article examines the content of North Korea's juche ideology by analyzing official texts in comparison with Confucian classics and new religious movements in South Korea. The comparison revealed a series of similarities that vividly demonstrate that juche ideas have absorbed core elements of Korean and East Asian philosophical traditions.     

Educational infrastructure created in conditions of social exclusion: ‘Kyrgyz clubs’ for migrant children in Moscow

ABSTRACT

This article demonstrates how social exclusion affects the strategies that migrants and their children experience vis-à-vis the preschool education system of the host society. We use the example of two private institutions established in Moscow by Kyrgyz migrants to explore their role in helping integrate migrant children into the host society. I examine the role the Kyrgyz community plays in the life of labour migrants in Moscow, and why private migrant infrastructure is created today by people from this particular country, though eventually migrants from other countries use it as well. I find that in recent years migrants have been creating private infrastructure in Russia as an alternative to the public one. It replaces state institutions for migrants that are not accessible to them. Migrants also view it as one of the channels for entering the Russian society and state institutions. These centres do not so much help migrants’ children escape social isolation as compensate for the lack of adjustment programmes in Russian schools.     

‘Only by learning how to live together differently can we live together at all’: readability and legibility of Central Asian migrants’ presence in urban Russia

ABSTRACT

This paper questions the effectiveness and usefulness of the Russian government's policies of migrant integration. Using a unique combination of ethnographic research methods (observations, interviews and survey) with methods from psychology (cognitive mapping) and urban studies (GIS mapping), I depict the presence of Central Asian migrants and their interaction with local long-term residents in two cities of the Russian Federation: Kazan and Saint Petersburg. On the basis of my findings, I argue that the readability (defined as the ease with which the city can be ‘read’ and understood) and legibility (defined as the degree to which individual components of an urban environment are recognizable by their appearance) of urban space in Kazan have positive effects on the relationship between these two communities, while the ambiguity and uncertainty of urban identity in Saint Petersburg make the life of migrants very vulnerable and unpredictable, and result in the growth of xenophobic views among the local residents. This allows me to argue that the policy of migrant integration will be more successful if it is built on learning to live with differences, instead of trying to ‘Russify’ migrants or create various forms of supra-ethnic identity.     

Appropriating and contesting ‘traditional Islam’: Central Asian students at the Russian Islamic University in Tatarstan

ABSTRACT

Based on an ethnographic case study of an Islamic university in Russia, I examine how the state-implemented and bureaucratized traditionalization of Islam in Russia affects the everyday life of Central Asian students and how this project ‘from above’ is entangled with their coping strategies. I show how religious education has become a resource for the state as well as for young students and their parents. The Russian state uses these official religious institutions to control the Muslim population by creating and promoting a state-approved version of ‘traditional Islam’ and producing official religious specialists. For the young Muslim students, however, Islamic education provides, in addition to religious knowledge, access to networks, social security and new economic opportunities. It thereby offers a way to cope with the uncertainty caused by high unemployment rates and other socio-economic difficulties among young people.     

RETHINKING AFRICAN SEXUALITIES IN THE CONTEXT OF HIV AND AIDS: THE LIFE AND DEATH DISCOURSE OF ‘MODERNISED POLYGAMY’ IN SUE NYATHI'S THE POLYGAMIST

ABSTRACT

This article is a study of Sue Nyathi's novel The Polygamist as a cultural production dealing with African modern polygamy1 in the context of HIV and AIDS. What is termed ‘modern polygamy’ in this article is a practice where men have several ‘wives’ but not in the African traditional sense, especially within the Shona culture, but in the sense of what is popularised as a ‘small house’ phenomenon. Nyathi's novel is discussed within the following frameworks corresponding to the three distinct parts of the article. In the first part of the discussion, the dichotomy between economic/ social status and ‘modern polygamy’ is explored. The second part of the discussion is a gendered perspective of ‘modern’ polygamy and particularly highlights gender constructions in Nyathi's representation of ‘modern’ polygamy. In the last section, multiple sexual relations and HIV and AIDS are discussed. Significantly, the article demonstrates that imaginative literature is a cultural site that can help us understand human behaviour and HIV and AIDS; particularly in what in religious terms would be referred to as ‘old testament’ polygamy that poses a danger to health and the social fabric in its new form in modern Zimbabwean society.     

Unsettling Narratives: Overcoming Prejudices in the Hostel Stories Project

ABSTRACT

In 1988, Jock Collins boldly suggested that Australia’s earlier migrant arrivals, the subject of prejudice themselves, often become the perpetrators of prejudice. Indeed, as we collect oral histories from post-war migrants, we are regularly confronted with angry statements such as “asylum seekers are just let in and given everything”. What lies at the heart of this phenomenon? Clearly, prejudice and stereotyping exists in all societies but seems to be particularly evident in societies where an ongoing flow of migrants continues to change and alter the ethnic and racial mix. This article reflects upon research conducted in the Hostel Stories project, where we frequently were confronted with stereotyped, prejudicial, and even racist comments about other migrants and refugees during interviews with migrants. These statements made us ask whether Collins was correct in his observations. Drawing on the literature from various disciplines, we consider various influences on migrant attitudes towards other migrants. We propose that it is critical to continue to progress beyond the conventional topics explored in migration studies and ask difficult questions in order to contribute to a growing global discussion on ethnicity and intergroup relations, especially in relation to prejudice and racism.     

Can smartphones empower labour migrants? The case of Kyrgyzstani migrants in Russia

ABSTRACT

In the last two decades, mobile phones and new technologies have transformed migration. Some scholars argue that they help empower migrants, who are otherwise often marginalized in their host country. We discuss the extent to which this is true for Kyrgyz labour migrants in Russia, a relatively large diaspora that suffers from multiple levels of disempowerment, ranging from precarious living and working conditions to a lack of legal support and representation from their home government. Relying on fieldwork conducted in Kyrgyzstan in 2017 and 2018, we explore the extent to which smartphones are enabling Kyrgyz labour migrants in Russia to be informed about migration rules, help each other abroad, connect as a diaspora, and discuss important diaspora topics. Our findings are relevant beyond academia, as many international and governmental agencies are trying to assist migrants through technology; they also point to several missed opportunities for these organizations.     

How Angel Gabriel Became Our Brother of the Hereafter (On the Question of Ismaili Influence on Alevism)

This article attempts to analyse Alevi cosmology within heterodox Islamic tradition. The main primary source is a recording made in 2009 in Istanbul. The Alevi creation myth (told by a 92-year-old man from the Dersim [Tunceli] region) offers a remarkable combination of symbols and an interpretation of why mankind was created. The role Archangel Gabriel fulfils from the beginning to the creation of the first man, and the notion of ‘looking for a second one’ as the cause of creation, are the most striking features of this myth. The story has given me the opportunity to explore the cosmological views of certain Shi’i sects. Interesting parallels with the cosmological speculations of Ismailis cannot be underestimated. The Alevi studies mainly focus on the period after the thirteenth century. Analysis of this creation myth, on the other hand, in which Archangel Gabriel plays the leading role, leads us, at least on theological matters, to reconsider the formation and circulation of ‘heretical’ ideas from the tenth to the thirteenth century in the Middle East in general and in Seljuk realms in particular.     

Avoidance and appropriation in Bishkek: dealing with time,space and urbanity in Kyrgyzstan's capital

ABSTRACT

Much has changed since Frunze was renamed Bishkek in 1991 and became the capital of independent Kyrgyzstan. Though it was once considered to be among the ‘greenest’ and most ‘orderly’ cities of the Soviet Union, today many of its long-term residents complain about the new settlements (novostroiki) that have emerged during the last two decades. To Bishkek's urbanites, the recent arrival of migrants is not associated with an escape from rural poverty and a rightful struggle for civic rights, but indicates a massive cultural and aesthetic degradation of familiar urban life. In this article, beyond contesting narratives of cosmopolitan nostalgia vs. legitimate belonging, I investigate how urban practitioners in fact produce and deal with different spaces in the city. My ethnographic accounts not only identify social avoidance as an essential pulse of Bishkek's current rhythm, but also illustrate that after a period of post-rural socialization previously stigmatized migrants may manage to smoothly blend into urban spatial flows and lifestyles.     

The intersectionality of gender,sexuality, and religion: novelties and continuities in Turkey during the AKP era

ABSTRACT

This article argues that in the AKP era, gender and sexuality play a central role in reshaping the secular-religious divide to instil ‘yeni milli’ (new national) – or as AKP members call it, ‘yerli ve milli’ (homegrown and national)- values. Adopting a feminist and reflexive approach, this article seeks to demonstrate that Erdo?an and the AKP have used gender and sexuality-related issue areas not as diversions to highjack the public agenda, as it is often assumed, but as a medium to regulate the neoliberal redistribution of conservative values. After a brief presentation of the historical background of the gendered evolution of the secular-religious divide in Turkish politics, this article focuses on the following three particular cases: the policies and discourse on LGBTI rights; the link that was established between the reproductive rights of women and ethnic identity; and how the AKP created new types of ‘other men’ and ‘other women.’ The article also seeks to show that in each case the meanings attributed to the secular and the religious in the secular-religious divide have shifted accordingly and that shift was reflective of, and was used to instil the particular set of values supportive of particular political positions.