[ Cevap | Dersim Forum ]
Posted by Kerem Öktem-akr on 19/10/2009, 15:13:54
Being Muslim at the Margins: Alevis and the AKP
Kerem Öktem
Source: http://www.merip.org/
Kerem Öktem is a fellow at the European Studies Centre of St. Antony’s College at the University of Oxford.
On January 6, 2008, newspapers in the province of Tunceli in eastern Turkey appeared festooned with the holiday wishes, “May your Gaghand be merry.”[1] Celebrated on the same day as Armenian Christmas and bearing the same name, Gaghand is an important, if almost forgotten event in the religious calendar of Tunceli, or Dersim, to use the area’s historical appellation. In the villages of Dersim, bearded men calling themselves Gaghand Baba (Father Christmas) pay visits to children and the elderly, offering them presents of sweets and pistachios. Historical accounts from the early twentieth century also mention a ritual administered by religious leaders the very same day and highly reminiscent of Holy Communion.[2]
The people of Dersim are not Christians, but Alevis, a catch-all term for a variety of ethno-religious minorities in Turkey whose core religious heritage is Islamic but whose beliefs and practices are highly varied and syncretistic.[3] In Dersim, Christian and other influences infuse a heterodox Islam of distant Shi‘i origin whose adherents do not normally pray in mosques, fast in Ramadan, accept the Qur’an as a source of jurisprudence or make the pilgrimage to Mecca. Like many Alevis, they do commemorate the martyrdom of Imam Hussein on the plains of Karbala’ in the month of Muharram, a reminder of the Shi‘i component of their tradition.
As the state does not disclose census and other data regarding religious orientation and ethnic origin, estimates of the overall size of the Alevi population vary widely, ranging between 10 and 25 percent of the population of Turkey. The large majority of Alevis speak Turkish and live in the big cities.
By contrast, the Dersimli Alevis speak an Indo-European language called Kurmancki or Zazaki that is related to Kurdish and Persian.[4] Protected by the Munzur mountain range, the Dersim tribes resisted attempts at state centralization until the late 1930s, when the republican government mounted a devastating air campaign, destroying a third of the villages in the province.[5] The survivors were forcibly evacuated to western Turkey. A special law for the region aimed at eradicating Dersimli Alevi identity by repopulating the area with Turkish settlers. Despite these extreme policies, however, many Dersimlis returned in the 1940s, only to be driven out again in the following decades as labor migrants or political refugees. Tunceli today is a thinly populated province with slightly less than 100,000 inhabitants and high levels of out-migration, while more than a million Dersimlis have created a noteworthy diaspora in western Turkey and Europe.
Tunceli remains Turkey’s only province with an almost exclusively Alevi population. Recently built mosques cater only to government officials, alcohol is on sale in every corner shop and the use of public space is not sex-segregated as in the nearby provinces of Elazig or Erzincan. The Munzur valley, only a few minutes walk from the town center, teems with cafés and bars frequented by couples and groups of young men and women. The mayor, Songül Erol Abdil, was elected on the strength of a coalition of socialist parties and the Kurdish Democratic Society Party. She is one of the few female mayors of a provincial capital, even if the center of Tunceli is home to only 25,000 inhabitants, guarded by several thousand members of the army and the security services.
In places like Tunceli, the war that crippled the Kurdish provinces after the military coup of 1980 continues at lower intensity. More than half of 2007’s casualties in the conflict between Kurdish guerrilla organizations and the army occurred in Tunceli. And here the war’s intrusive security controls upon the civilian population, long abolished elsewhere, are still enforced, albeit with a lighter hand. In order to enter or leave the province, one has to pass through checkpoints. Soldiers collect identity cards and check them against a new electronic database indicating terrorist suspects. Officers are proper in their demeanor, yet leave no doubt that one is entering a danger zone.
Yet not even the checkpoint can prepare the visitor for the dramatic spectacle of the Munzur valley, with its raging rivers and alpine landscapes. The valley is home to a myriad of sacred places, shrines, revered stones and cemeteries that are markers of Dersimli Alevi identity. Generations of state-employed engineers and technocrats have planned dams and hydroelectric power plants that would destroy the Elysian beauty of the place and turn the ferocious river into a lake. Virtually everybody in Tunceli is against the present dam project, at Konaktepe; posters indicating opposition are displayed in every other shop window in town.
Suffocated by the omnipresent security apparatus, closed-circuit TV cameras in the city center and the observation posts in the surrounding mountains, the few citizens of historical Dersim might well hope for a more comfortable relationship with the state.
A Timid Coming to Terms
A recent initiative by Reha Çamuroðlu, a member of Parliament from the governing Justice and Development Party (or AKP, the acronym of the party’s name in Turkish), could have been a first step. One of the party’s few Alevi members, Çamuroðlu authored a plan for a government-hosted iftar to break the Muharram fast on January 11. Yet the initiative met with little support from the rank and file of Alevi civil society. Alevi organizations, with very few exceptions, are staunchly secular, left-leaning and anti-Islamist, and they declared the ruling party’s iftar a misguided attempt at appeasing the European Union in its demands for more inclusive policies toward the country’s sizable minorities. Others insisted that this was yet another plot to destroy Alevi identity through assimilation into the Sunni mainstream. A few religious leaders went so far as to threaten Alevis attending the iftar with excommunication.[6]
With its ideological roots in Turkey’s version of Sunni political Islam, its proximity to Sufi orders and its professed orientation as conservative-democratic, the AKP indeed seems an unlikely candidate for the job of embracing Turkey’s syncretistic Alevi communities. The party’s ideology and policy are largely irreconcilable with Alevi notions of ethics and justice: From its tacit promotion of “Islamic dress” to its inherent social conservatism, from its gendered policies to its anti-alcohol stance, AKP policies appear to most Alevis as socially regressive and threatening to their identity and lifestyle.
Prominent party members are on record belittling the Alevi rite as a “subculture within Islam” or scorning their shrines of worship (cem evleri) as places for carousing, hinting at the chanting in the ceremony of ayin-i cem, the semah dance that includes both men and women, and the use of wine during services.[7] Finally, some AKP members have downplayed and even defended the massacre of Sivas in 1993, when 37 Alevi intellectuals died in a fire set by Islamists under the noses of security services and allowed to burn by firefighters.[8]
In spite of the dismissive position taken by Alevi organizations, voices from Brussels positively acknowledged the government’s attempts. Some commentators in Turkey wondered whether the government’s timid steps would lead to a long-awaited “Alevi opening.” Was this a break with the history of discrimination and oppression? Even a coming to terms with the country’s religious diversity, which has survived waves of ethnic and religious cleansing during the last decades of the Ottoman Empire and throughout much of the Turkish Republic? Could it be that a party with Islamist roots can overcome its own demons and find a modus vivendi with what are generally agreed to be the most heterodox interpretations of Islam, without subjecting them to assimilation?
62
Responses: