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

social units maintaining a low degree of religious and cultural interaction with
neighboring – especially sedentary – communities. This characteristics survived even
after the disintegration of the tribal structure. The qizilbashes usually, though not
exclusively, formed uniform villages and maintained their beliefs and rituals among
isolated, close social groups within the Ottoman realm.
This was perhaps the aim of the Ottoman administration with its two-fold policy
indicated above. By confining the qizilbashes whose political threat had already been
neutralized into a pre-determined social and spatial sphere, Ottoman bureaucrats reduced
the qizilbash ‘heresy’, which once posed the most formidable threat to the very existence
of the Ottoman imperial regime, to a manageable ‘religious heterodoxy’. From the
seventeenth century on, the Ottoman government seems to have totally raised the
persecution on the qizilbashes, even though the ulemā still proclaimed that they were
heretic. The once overemphasized ‘religious heresy’ of the qizilbashes was now dealt
with the policy of ‘do not talk so that there is not a problem!’
To sum up, the present study argued that the ‘qizilbash heresy’ in the Ottoman
context consisted, for the most part, of the politico-military aspects of the rising
Qizilbash identity. Nevertheless, both sides employed an intense religious discourse in
expressing their political concerns. As far as the political aspect of the issue is
concerned, Çaldıran might be regarded as the last duel of the bureaucratic state and tribal
organization on the basis of equal conditions and power. From then on, tribal efforts
against bureaucratic organization would be no more then hopeless, ‘rebellious’ attempts.
Consequently, following the defeat of Çaldıran, the politico-military character of the
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