TURKOMANS BETWEEN TWO EMPIRES: THE ... - Bilkent University

and feeding the qizilbash sentiment: the resentment against the rising Ottoman imperial
regime, which was identified with the antipathy against the Ottoman sultans, and the
love for the Safavid shaykhs/shahs. Thus, the present study is a history of the
Turkomans searching for a ‘paradise’ between two empires, i.e. the Ottoman and the
Safavid empires: a history shaped by the struggle of two mutually irreconcilable political
systems, which were accompanied by increasingly diverging religious and cultural
grounds; and a history that created an ‘ethnic’ socio-religious entity from the synthesis
of the Turkoman culture and the Safavid mysticism.
It is an established acceptance among scholars that the roots of the Qizilbash
belief trace back to Central Asia, to the pre-Islamic religions of the Turks, and to some
extent to Iran and Mesopotamia. 2 However, the formation of Qizilbash identity as a
social entity and a system of beliefs is mostly a legacy of the late fifteenth and the
sixteenth-century. 3 Without a doubt, the fierce political and military rivalry between the
Ottomans and Savafids had primary influence on shaping this identity. It is known from
contemporary sources that by the beginning of the sixteenth-century a considerable
portion of the Anatolian population supported the Safavid dynasty against Ottoman rule
with an intense religious vigor. As soon as Shah Ismail promulgated his state, brutal
revolts broke out against Ottomans in Anatolia. Among these rebels some managed to
2 See, for example, Fuat Köprülü, Türk Edebiyatında Đlk Mutasavvıflar, Ankara, 1976; Iréne Mélikoff,
Hacı Bektaş Efsaneden Gerçeğe, çev. Turan Alptekin, Đstanbul, 1998; Sur les traces du soufısme Turc,
Recherches sur l’Islam populaire en Anatolie, Istanbul: ISIS, 1992; De l’épopée au mythe, Itinéraire
turcologique, Istanbul: ISIS, 1995; Ahmet Yaşar Ocak, Bektaşi Menâkıbnâmelerinde Đslam Öncesi Đinanç
Motifleri, Đstanbul, 1983; Osmanlı Đmparatorluğunda Marjinal Sufilik: Kalenderiler, Ankara, 1992; Türk
Sufiliğine Bakışlar, Đstanbul, 1996; Türkler, Türkiye ve Đslam, Đstanbul, 2000.
3 Among a number of studies, consider especially Iréne Mélikoff, “Le problème Kızılbaş”, in her Sur les
traces du soufısme Turc, Recherches sur l’Islam populaire en Anatolie, Istanbul: ISIS, 1992, pp. 29-43;
Ahmet Yaşar Ocak, "Babailer Đsyanindan Kızılbaşlığa: Anadolu’da Đslam Heterodoxisinin Doğuş ve
Gelişim Tarihine Kısa Bir Bakiş", Belleten, LXIV/239, 2000, 129-159.
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