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

the fading of the political and militant content of the qizilbash identity, the policy of the
Ottoman administration was relatively softened. Because of the above-mentioned
changes in the Safavid polity, the Safavid call gradually became less excitant for the
Anatolian qizilbash population, especially in terms of politics. And arguably it became
nominal towards the end of the sixteenth century, when Safavid state turned into a full-
fledged bureaucratic empire, to a great extent diffusing tribal-qizilbash elements from
the state machinery. In the mean time, as a closely connected and parallel process, the
persecution of the Anatolian qizilbashes died down, even though Ottoman-Iranian wars
went on intermittently down to the mid seventeenth century. 2019
On the other hand, the Ottoman policy regarding the remaining qizilbash
elements was not limited to sedentarizing the qizilbash tribes, the government seems to
have attempted to employ the Bektashi Order to neutralize the Qizilbash residue in
Anatolia as a political force as well. The assimilation of the qizilbashes among Bektashis
obviously aimed, on the one hand, to isolate the leaders from their political constituency
and to eliminate all connections with Iran as much as possible, 2020 and on the other hand,
pertaining to Alevi-Bektashi affairs are also published by Cemal Şener and Ahmet Hezarfen. See Cemal
Şener (ed.), Osmanlı Belgelerinde Aleviler-Bektaşiler, Đstanbul: Karacaahmet Sultan Derneği Yayınları,
2002; Cemal Şener-Ahmet Hezarfen (eds.), Osmanlı Arşivi’nde (Mühimme ve Đrâde Defterlerinde)
Aleviler-Bektaşiler, Đstanbul: Karacaahmet Sultan Derneği Yayınları, 2002. Although this publication is
far beyond academic standards, the original facsimile copies of the documents are included.
2019 Compare Suraiya Faroqhi, “The Bektashis, A Report on Current Research”, Bektachiyya: Etudes sur
l’ordre mystique des Bektachis et les groupes relevant de Hadji Bektach, eds., Alexandre Popovic and
Gilles Veinstein, Istanbul: ISIS, 1995, p. 17. For a parallel interpretation, see Krysztina Kehl-Bodrogi, Die
Kızılbaş/Aleviten, Untersuchungen über eine esoterische Glaubensgemeinschaft in Anatolien, Berlin:
Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 1988. According to Faroqhi, a supplementary reason might have been that “by the
1590’s, more militant Kızılbaş tribes had either been eliminated or were forced to migrate to Iran.” See
Suraiya Faroqhi, “Conflict, Accommodation, and Long-Term Survival: The Bektashi Order and the
Ottoman State (Sixteenth-seventeenth centuries)”, Bektachiyya: Etudes sur l'ordre mystique des Bektachis
et les groupes relevant de Hadji Bektach, ed. Alexandre Popovic-Giles Veinstein, Đstanbul : ISIS Press,
1996, p. 175.
2020 Compare Faroqhi, “Conflict, Accommodation, and Long-Term Survival”, p. 177; Irène Mélikoff, “Un
Ordre de derviches colonisateurs: les Bektaşis”, in her Sur les traces du soufisme turc. Recherches sur
l’Islam populaire en Anatolie, Istanbul: ISIS Press, 1992, 115-125; “L’origine sociale des premiers
Ottomans”, in The Ottoman Emirate (1300-1389), ed., Elizabeth Zachariadou, Rethymnon: Crete
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