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

territories, from then on the qizilbashes of Anatolia fell enclosed within the Ottoman
borders, progressively losing their connection with and especially their hopes in the
Shah. The rest of the sixteenth century witnessed the downfall of the political and
military content of the qizilbash groups, as well as the severance of their connection with
the Safavids. For this purpose, the Ottoman administration employed a variety of means
of persecution, which is partly reflected in the Mühimme registers.
As a result, the qizilbash population across Anatolia turned into a marginalized
closed community towards the early seventeenth century. The tribal-nomadic social
units with a strong political, military, and mystic content now transformed into
marginalized socio-religious entities, isolated and surrounded by the Ottoman Sunni
society. It constitutes one of the most interesting and original phenomenon of the
Turkish history that the long experience of the qizilbashes in the Ottoman Anatolia
produced an ‘ethnic’, socio-religious group, whose membership was based on the blood
ties, from the Sufi-path. This social, religious, and anthropological process still remains
totally untouched by the modern scholarship. 2042 It is interesting to note that they
attained a permanent existence in Anatolia while disappearing in Iran, where they once
ruled as victorious war-lords.
2042 The only suggestion for this transformation from the sufi-order fundamentals to ethnic basis was made
by Martin B. Dickson, who argues that by the time of Shah Ismail, individual conversion to the
qizilbashism was no more possible, but “an individual became a qizilbash only by being born into one of
the uymaq associated with the Safavid House.” See Martin B. Dickson, Shah Tahmasb and the Uzbeks
(The Duel for Khurasan with ‘Ubayd Khan: 930-940/1524-1540), Unpublished PhD. Thesis, Princeton
University, 1958, p. 8. Nevertheless, Dickson provides no evidence for his assertion. As long as the
Anatolian qizilbashes concerned, one feels legitimate to suspect this assertion. True that the transition
between the qizilbash groups and Sunni society must have decreased by the early decades of the sixteenth
century. However, the total cut off of this transition, which transformed the qizilbashes into an ethnic-like
society, must have occurred in a rather long dure.
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