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

synthesized at the cross-section of two separate lines of story: it was the interference of
the ‘dream of Osman Beg and that of Shaykh Safī, one started in Söğüt and the other in
Ardabil at the beginning of the fourteenth century. After following two separate - but
increasingly interrelative – trajectories for one and a half century, two lines of story
intersected in the Anatolian peninsula. And this intersection created one of the most
unique religio-social – and also political and military during the formative period –
identity of the Islamic world. Apart from the foremost actors of the two lines, the
Ottomans and the Safavids, the common actors of both lines, on whom the present study
focused, were Turkomans.
Turkomans were composed of the nomadic-tribal units, each constituting a
‘compact community’ separate from each other and from the sedentary societies.
Chapter I delineated that the most differentiating feature of the compact communities
lays in its high degree of communality and low degree of individuality. As a social
entity, a nomadic tribe is more like a biological unit rather than a set of individuals.
Individual, as long as one can speak of the concept of ‘individual’ in such communities,
is simply an incomplete part of the community and can not sustain separately. When
abstract concepts such as faith, ideology, and polity are taken into account, the
boundaries between individuals and the community as a whole further diminish. Thus,
this is why in a compact community the faith is a social issue rather than an individual
experience. Similarly, polity is also a social entity but not a collective initiative of
individuals; therefore, the tribe constitutes an ‘indivisible’ – but greater and more
influential - political unit.
It has been one of the major arguments of this thesis that the nomadic-tribes as
compact communities and indivisible political units posed an uncompromising problem
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