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

Despites all his sunni biases, his efforts to shift them into heresy, and his
despising attitude, however, the three points regarding the faith of ‘the early
qizilbashes’ 734 become apparent in Khunjī’s account, as well as in Venetian reports.
Firstly, their adherence and devotedness to Junayd and Haydar was far beyond the limits
of the liaison between shaykh and murid in the traditional Islamic Sufism. So excessive
their sense of devotion was, that the line between the spiritual mastership and being of
the nature of deity became obscure. One should not disregard here the role of the
cultural milieu of the new type of disciples. The illiterate mind is, indeed, devoid of the
ability to draw clear-cut lines between ideas. 735 Secondly, the followers of Shaykh
734
My intention by this term is the new type sufis of Ardabil emerged under Junayd and were identifiably
shaped under Haydar.
735
One might reasonably argue that one of the most revolutionary changes that writing brought the human
mind is precision. ( For an analysis on how the use of tables and writing shifted human perception towards
more precision see Goody, The Domestication of Savage Mind, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1990 (first published 1977), pp. 72-73.) Exteriorization, visualization, and storage of thought and
knowledge give way to the dissection, organization, re-organization, analysis, and division into parts of
the information. Classification exists in the oral mind as well, but is rare and ambiguous. Writing sharpens
and clarifies the notion of classification in the human mind. (I.b.i.d., p. 105) It was simply by the help of
the organizational capacity of the writing that human the brain reached the ability to put clear and certain
lines between several parts of the knowledge corpus. Number of modern anthropological studies among
illiterate folks, sometimes called ‘primitive society’, showed that the oral mind does not recognize such
sort of clear separating lines between several segments of human discourse. Though an illiterate man can
differentiate and identify knowledge pertaining to different things or beliefs, they are not completely
separated from each other; there is not a net borderline between them. As Goody stated, “the absence of
writing means that it is difficult to isolate a segment of human discourse.” (I.b.i.d., p. 13) One can regard
oral mind as a cloud, which floats with continuous variation. Though being not homogenous and varying
intensity in different parts, it is not possible to draw a clear-cut borderline between distinct bulks of a
cloud; to determine a definite line which one side belongs to one bulk and other side belongs to other.
Rather one can talk about a transition region, whose borderline is still flue.
Oral culture has a homeostatic economy, in which nothing is well-defined. Even the concept of definition
is quite alien. The relationship between word, which is simply an evanescent vibration of particles in the
air, and the meaning attached to it is a very dynamic and uneven one. It thereby changes, though one can
speak of a certain perpetual core, according to situational context. Thus, even the meaning loaded to a
word is not well-enshrined with a clear-cut boundary. It is rather like bulks in a cloud. The focus of
meaning may easily move in the bulk pertaining to it, with regard to present conditions. What a word
refers to is simply the bulk of meaning, which is obviously not clear. Thus, oral communication is heavily
context-dependent. One can not attain the exact meaning of any word without participating to the whole
context, which profoundly includes situational, emotional, historical, and cultural elements.
Writing, on the other hand, made possible what is called ‘context-free communication’, which was
principally the result of precision that came with literacy. First of all, letters shifted the container of
meaning from variable and evanescent aural media to more stable and fixable visual one. Now, with
writing, it is possible not only to put the word outside the mind and treat it as a thing, but also to allocate
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