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

Junayd and Haydar evidently attributed to their shaykhs the authority to enact cannons.
In other words, they regarded decrees of their shaykhs rather more eminent than the
well-defined orders of Islamic law. Again as in the first case, the role of illiteracy should
be taken into account seriously when assessing this point. Lastly, early qizilbashes were
quite ignorant on the officially ratified prayers of shari’at, neglecting duties of namaz,
fasting in Ramazan etc.
Khunjī provides enough hints in his explanations on that these deviations from
the true path of Islam were not simply the personal innovations of Junayd and Haydar;
rather these two shaykhs were caused to acquire ‘bad habits’ because of the excessive
obedience of their disciples. 736 Thus, the roots of this newly emerging form of faith in
the Safavid world must be sought in the socio-cultural roots of the new type of disciples,
who were nomadic Turkoman tribes of Anatolia and Syria and who were described by a
learned and fervent sunni scholar as “the fools of Rūm, who are a crowd of error and a
host of devilish imagination” 737 .
Perhaps the most interesting point in Khunjī’s account is that he does not anyhow
mention the adoption of shi’ism 738 by Haydar and his followers. As delineated before,
Aşıkpaşazāde clearly states the fact that Shaykh Junayd propagated some shi’ite ideas in
Anatolia. One would strongly expect that the same sort of shi’ism must have survived
certain limits to its meaning. Because sound has no definite confines but visual image has. As Goody and
Watt have verified, “writing establishes a different kind of relationship between the word and its referent,
a relationship that is more general and more abstract, and less closely connected with the particularities of
person, place and time than obtains in oral communications.” (See Jack Goody and Ian Watt, “The
Consequence of Literacy”, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 5, no. 3, 1963, p. 321.)
Thus, literate mind has an ability to distinguish different segments of thought or knowledge, which is
simply lacking, or very weak, in the oral mind.
736 I would like to note again the fact, which I think had a considerable part on the advent of events, that
these two shaykhs, especially Haydar, were very young when they succeeded to the post; thus they were
open to innovations, especially to those promising excitement, adventure, and outwardly outcomes.
737 TA, p. 65.
738 If we disregard his reference to Bābak’s Khurramites.
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