For those with a familiarity of the Sufi orders which existed throughout the lands of the former Ottoman Empire, esoteric manifestations of Shi'ism among the Turkic communities of Iran and Anatolia, or even a passing knowledge of what are often erroneously called the "ghulat" sects of Islam, the Bektashi's may initially appear to the layman as a largely turkified expression of more traditional Sufi orders, syncretising elements of Anatolian folk beliefs with heterodox Shi'ism. It's an order I've become particularly attracted towards in recent years, and through which I've been alerted to a curious phenomena concerning the relationship between ethnic or national identity and religion in the Islamic world. Although existing primarily in Albania as a result of the Tanzimat modernising reforms of the 19th century which sought to break the powerbase of the traditional and military elites to which the order was strongly associated with; as well as the subsequent banning of Sufi orders by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk upon the founding of the Turkish republic, there nevertheless exists a perception (from both westerners and often non-Bektashi Turks) that the teachings of the patron saint Haji Bektash Veli are something of a Turkish redemption of Islam, cleansed from a dogmatic Arab praxis and reoriented towards a Turkish understanding of spirituality.
While in Antakya (Hatay), I was even told that the Bektashi-Alevi faith in Turkey is used as a legitimiser by Turanian advocates to appropriate Bektashi traditions as modernist concepts (feminism, humanism etc.), both to decisively sever any cultural association with Arabs and Iranians, as well as infusing what they interpret as authentic Turkic religious expressions, such as that of the animalist faith, Tengrism. As I conducted more research into the faith, I noticed this trend, being raised by orientalist scholars who have unfortunately been responsible for much of the misinformation about the order, as well as by Bektashis and Alevis themselves. This is no doubt similar to claims by Iranian nationalists that reinterpret Shi'ism as a distinctly Persian phenomena, Neo-Zoroastrianism in a thinly veiled Islamic visage, imagining and encouraging a false sectarian dichotomy between Arabs and Persians based on a supposedly ethnic understanding of Islam. The same could be said of the existing accusations in Arab discourse of the cultural customs (often the finger is pointed towards Pakistani and Indian communities) which have supposedly been confused with the purity of Islamic doctrine as exemplified by the Arabs.
Of course, such postulations are preposterous and completely ignorant of actual historical (probably deliberately so) circumstances surrounding the evolution of those varying expressions of faith as well as an overstating of the cultural boundaries and the translatability of those theological innovations between Arab, Turk, Iranian and beyond. After all, how is it that an order founded by a Persian born mystic, though liturgically Turkish and theologically Arab be explained within a pan-ethnic understanding? The ethnic nationalist will no doubt stress the supposed Turkic roots of the patron saint but the ideas that are supposedly so cherished as unmistakably Turkish are in reality a synthesis of already existing doctrinal Islamic traditions with origins from South Asia and the Qalandarriyya as well as the Iranian Hurufis. Indeed, even the identity of the Bektashi order during it's time under Ottoman patronage is one of constant fluctuation and resistant to definite identities, being presented at times as a Sunni order, heterodox Shia-Sufi movement and an essentially syncretic religious ideology. The idea of Shi'ism as an Iranian answer to Islam also fails to account for the long period prior to the Safavid conversion of the region, whereby Iranian remained a stronghold of Sunnism while those lands often associated with Islamic orthodoxy, namely Egypt and Syria were at times under the banner of what would today be described as the heterodox Ismailis.
These unfortunate reconstitution of the symbolic identifications of faith is no doubt the result of the paradigmatic shift brought about by rapid modernisation, new ideological developments and the looming spectre of the dominant European example of statehood, all of which contained an implicit rejection of religion as a fluid phenomena, existing in an impenetrable sacred space, for use at the sovereigns own peril. The exact moment in which variations of Islamic esotericism were selected and segregated into individual national or ethnic models is difficult to pinpoint. One could see the national awakenings during the fragmentation of the Ottoman Empire as necessitating a nationalist individuation of a now dominant belief, using the European national churches as a model to emulate, or as a product of bio-power and the manipulation of faith as a means to subjugate a population and reorient them towards nationalist goals. Both these theories have merit but what I intend to argue, is that segregation, labelling and defanging of spiritual movements by mostly secular-nationalist regimes in the Islamic world was the result of a neurotic crisis of identity brought about by the realisation that those newly established states, rested upon precarious and often contradictory internal factors.
No comments:
Post a Comment