ISTANBUL, Turkey (AP) — It’s Sunday and prayer leader Bektas Akkaya is twanging a Turkish version of the electric banjo, working some 200 members of this country’s largest religious minority into a trance.
Women in headscarves slap their knees, sway to the music and wipe tears from their eyes. A young man swings his arms wildly and beats his chest, his head gyrating like a bobblehead doll until he collapses.
Here, there is no imam, minaret or call to prayer. But for an estimated 20 percent of Turkey’s 71 million people, this is Islam.
The worshippers are Alevis, followers of a tradition rooted in the beliefs of the Shiite branch of Islam — but which diverges greatly from Shiite majorities in neighboring Iran and Iraq. The Alevis incorporate shamanistic rites such as singing, ritual chanting and dance, and shun many customary Islamic practices, including the separation of men and women in prayer and the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca.
“Without women, without dancing, and without a song, you can’t have an Alevi ceremony,” smiled Cemal Sener, a spokesman for the Alevi community in Istanbul.
He likened the followers to “Islamic Protestants” for their focus on the message and intensity of Islam rather than its rituals. But Muslim traditionalists have other names for the Alevis — calling them heretics and outcasts — and have made them a target of discrimination in Turkey.
The strains are now drawing the attention of the European Union, which has made religious liberties a condition for Turkey’s troubled bid for membership. The latest EU progress report on Turkey, issued in November, cited “no developments” in addressing Alevi claims, including difficulties opening their houses of worship and obtaining state funds for religious facilities.
The plight of the Alevis was not mentioned in Pope Benedict XVI’s pleas to improve the lot of religious minorities during his Nov. 28-Dec. 1 visit. But their fate is a good barometer of Turkey’s willingness to tolerate free religious practice at a time when conservative Islamic sentiments are on the rise.
“They want to act like Alevis don’t exist,” said Sener, an author of more than 20 books on Alevism. “They see us as perverts, heretics.”
Sonmez Kutlu, a professor of divinity at Ankara University, said that much of the antagonism against Alevis has origins in the centuries-old rivalries among Islamic groups — a fact still relevant across much of the strife-torn modern Muslim world.
But he also acknowledges that there is a general feeling that the Alevis are simply wrong. Traditionalists see this as a threat to their way of life and an obstacle to their ideal of creating a pious society built around the Quran.
“From the standpoint of practices, like regular prayers, fasting and the hajj, Sunnis see the Alevis’ religious level as being lower,” Kutlu said.
Adherents of Alevism, which is mostly confined to Turkey, complain of discrimination in business and education, barriers to getting government jobs and forced assimilation through mandatory courses on Sunni Islam — the overwhelming majority faith in Turkey and one which accounts for about 85 percent the world’s 1.2 billion Muslims.
Alevis are denied funding from the powerful religious affairs directorate, or Diyanet, which uses state funds for nearly 80,000 mosques. The “cem houses,” where Alevi ceremonies are held, are seen as illegitimate and un-Islamic.
“A Muslim prays in a mosque,” the Diyanet president, Ali Bardakoglu, said in an interview aired earlier this month.
Bardakoglu claimed Turkey’s problems with religious minorities were being hyped as groups tried to exploit the EU spotlight for their own political or material gain.
“To say there’s no religious freedom in Turkey by exaggerating some isolated problems that need to be solved with debate is unfair,” he said.
But earlier this year, he said the state did not have funds for “supporting mystical worship.”
This would also seem to include not only Alevis, but Sufis and other mystic groups that were banned after the founding of the secular Turkish republic in the 1920s. But Sufis — with their close ties to Sunni Islam — are embraced more warmly by the current government, which speaks lovingly of Mevlana, or Rumi, the well-known Sufi mystic poet who lived in Turkey.
Estimates of the number of Alevis vary, but by any measure they are significant. Alevis themselves claim to represent nearly a third of Turkey’s Muslims — or more than 20 million people. The U.S. State Department’s International Religious Freedom Report for Turkey estimates Alevis number at least 15 million people, or about 20 percent of the population.
They have frequently been the victims of brutal attacks.
The worst in modern history came in 1978, when a weeklong rampage of killing, raping and looting targeting Alevis left 111 people dead, several thousand injured and turned hundreds of buildings in the southeastern town of Kahramanmaras into rubble.
In 1993, a group of Islamic fundamentalists emerging from Friday prayers burned down a hotel in Sivas, killing 37 mostly Alevi intellectuals gathered to commemorate a 16th century poet hanged for his defiance of Ottoman oppression.
Soon afterward, Recep Tayyip Erdogan — then the mayor of Istanbul and now Turkey’s prime minister — gave orders for the pre-dawn destruction of an Alevi cem house, saying it was “unlicensed construction.”
Hundreds of Alevis helped to rebuild the house of worship, though the status of the reconstructed and enlarged building remains in limbo.
“We don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow,” says Ali Altunay, a board member of the Karacaahmet Sultan Foundation, an Alevi group in Istanbul.
http://www.siouxcityjournal.com/articles/2007/01/06/news/faith/bcc24c6f25b52a858625725b00140d20.txt
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