ماه: آوریل 2016

The thing that divides Turkey first and foremost is not religion. It is the Turkish-Kurdish conflict, an ethnic-military confrontation that has been going on for more than 32 years.

But there is one major religious disparity between two large sections of Turkish society, which creates tensions and potentially threatens to aggravate the ethnic conflict and emerge as an acute threat to the country’s stability: a row between the Sunni and Alevi followers of Islam.

This almost sounds like the 17th-century wars in Europe between Catholics and Protestants.

Well, yes, though not exactly. The Sunni-Alevi conflict started 500 years ago. In the early 1500s, the Alevis of the Ottoman Empire sided with the country’s neighbor to the east, the Safavids of Iran, who were fierce Shi’ite believers and made Shi’a the official school of Islam in Iran.

During the wars between these two regional “superpowers” of the time, Turkish Alevis strongly supported the Iranians and helped the Safavid clan rise to power. They were ideologically and militarily trained by Iran and sent back to the Ottoman lands to incite social upheaval. The Ottoman Army and regional tribal forces killed and deported the rebellious Alevis for being “heretic agents of Shi’a Iran.” Tens of thousands of them immigrated to Iran while large groups of Iranian Kurds found refuge and support in the Ottoman Empire.

This was the first and largest Sunni-Shi’a/Alevi confrontation in history and its “aftershocks” would be felt for centuries to come.

A Bit  Of History

Alevis are Sufi or mystical Shi’ite Muslims who are NOT Sunnis like the majority of Turks. They are followers of Imam Ali, the fourth caliph of Islam who succeeded the Prophet Muhammad in ruling the Muslim world. Unlike the Sunnis who recognize all four caliphs, the Alevis believe that the first three caliphs “usurped” their power from the “rightful” Ali, the prophet’s cousin, and his descendants. That is why they call themselves Alevis or “followers of Ali” a group inside “Twelver Shi’a Islam” whose adherents believe in the divinely ordained leadership of Ali and his 11 successors.

Syrian Alevis are usually known as “Alawites” in the Western world.

Sunnis account for around 85 percent of the world’s Muslim population of some 1.6 billion people, while the Shi’a make up about 15 percent of that number. Iran is the country with the biggest Shi’ite population.

There are estimated to be around 15-20 million Alevis in Turkey out of a total population of 78 million.

Initially, the Alevis mostly lived in rural areas. Originating in Central Asia, centuries before they settled in what is now Turkey, parts of Iran, the Caucasus, Iraq, and Syria, they lived mainly as Turkic tribal groups and were the last to urbanize and integrate with their new social and political environments.

In the Ottoman Empire, the confrontation with Safavid Iran pushed the Alevis further into poverty as well as into political and social isolation.

Both Alevis and Shi’a are followers of the Twelver Shi’a branch of Islam. But there are major differences between them.

Unlike the Shi’a in Iran and Iraq, Alevis do not pray — as tradition prescribes in both the Sunni and Shi’ite beliefs. Nor do they fast the same way in the month of Ramadan. They also don’t go to mosques to pray or to Mecca for pilgrimage. Alcohol is not forbidden in the Alevi faith, and women don’t have to wear Islamic clothing or the head scarf known as the “hijab.”

Many scholars believe Alevis have mixed their Islam with heavily mystical or Sufi approaches, which they adopted from the pre-Islamic, Shamanist traditions of Central Asia prior to their migrations westward a few centuries later, as well as from Iranian mysticism.

In the first centuries of Islamic expansion in Central Asia, mainly Iranian and not Arab thinkers and sheikhs taught and guided Turkic tribes to convert to Islam.

While converting to Islam and migrating to Iran and Turkey, Alevis took the essence and dropped the form of their new religion. In daily life, many political observers consider Alevis to be far more secular and “liberal” than most other schools of Islam — Shi’a or Sunni.

In the last few decades many historians and researchers have argued that, after the Islamization and Turkification of Byzantine Anatolia, thousands of formerly Greek, Armenian, Aramaic, and Iranian-speaking members of the indigenous population had to change their first language to Turkish and convert to Islam.

These scholars also claim that, with respect to religion, a large portion of the converts chose the Alevi faith since it was easier for them to adapt to. For decades if not centuries, they say, these converts have lived as “genuine Muslims and Turks” although their origins once used to be Greek, Armenian, Aramaic, and Kurdish.

This is the essence of a potential split in Turkish society – if the players choose to play with it. And they have — at least partly — done so given the rising religious and ethnic tension in the wider Middle Eastern region.

In the next edition of this report, we will take a look at the sociopolitical implications of this religious tension in modern Turkey and the potential threats it poses.

In today’s Turkey, there is not one, not two, but at least three major areas that deeply cut society into occasionally quite antagonistic fronts: politics, religion, and, more importantly, ethnicity, which is being translated into terror. All of them intertwine.

The first deep divide is about politics.

In Izmir, there are two grocery shops (markets or “bakkal,” as they are called in Turkish) just a few steps from our home in a middle-class neighborhood where hundreds of government employees also live. These two markets are divided along political lines.

One shop owner is a tough, secular, pro-Ataturk retiree who does not miss any opportunity to criticize the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The other shop owner has a portrait of the president hanging in his store and every small manner of his speaking and behavior suggests that he is a devout Muslim.

The first shop owner greets you in a traditional Turkish manner with “gunaydin” (“nice day”) and the second in a traditional, Islamic way: “Selamun-Aleykum.”

Finally, the second shop owner sells no alcoholic drinks whatsoever, not even beer, in a city that has traditionally been quite secular. The first shop owner used to sell any sort of alcoholic drink in the past, especially the Turks’ favored raki (Greek ouzo). But with increasing pressure, direct or indirect, by the Islamic-leaning government of Erdogan, our secular “bakkal” started to cover the shelves holding “undesired” drinks. No law (yet) bans the sale of alcohol and the secular bakkal keeps selling it. But the shop owner doesn’t want to incur the protests of loyal government employees, either.

Depending on your political point of view and to which party or personality you lean toward (and that can vary,) you don’t trust parliamentarians a word, nor TV moderators, nor in fact TV channels, or newspapers, or neighbors and co-workers considered to be supportive of the other side.

The deepest political divide is between seculars, who think of themselves as true followers of principles of laicism and a democratic republic introduced in 1923 by Ataturk, on the one side, and those who claim to be faithful and committed to Islam and tradition, on the other.

The second group is far more conservative and primarily religious in all aspects of life, from women wearing Islamic clothing to men publicly going to mosque to pray during work hours.

The seculars are in fact more “democratic-minded” in some sense of Western standards. Not only do they not pressure women to wear head scarves, but they even encourage them not to do so, although their mothers or at least grandmothers usually went out with their heads covered in the traditional way (different from the “political” hijab that became fashionable among the Islamic movements of the Erdogan era.)

The seculars usually don’t pray but still fast during the month of Ramadan. Also, drinking beer or raki, and more recently the more fashionable wine, is a normal thing for them. Family relations are more liberal but still very traditional. They are oversensitive to any criticism of Ataturk and the Turkish Army and history. They usually don’t like the Ottoman sultans, especially the last ones before the founding of the republic, and believe most of them had become puppets of Western colonial powers in the early 20th century.

But ironically their understanding of democracy is usually very anti-Western and generally overwhelmed by diverse and occasionally incomprehensible conspiracy theories that are impossible to prove, although sometimes difficult to deny. All bad that has come upon Turkish society was and still is from the West, as well as Israel and Armenia. All the world is plotting against the Turks and now the West is helping the Kurdish groups in Iraq, Syria, and inside Turkey to split their country, as they did with Iraq and Syria. Their political representation is mostly in the main opposition “social democratic” party, the Republican People’s Party (CHP), but also in the main nationalist party, the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP).

In many aspects, the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Unity Party (HDP) also shares a lot of these political concepts. Probably they are more areligious, called secular, and more liberal toward women, at least in urban and politically rather leftist circles. But before anything else, they are heavily ethnicity-focused — with the Kurdish community in Turkey and neighboring countries as their guiding compass.

Many of the conspiracy theories enthusiastically defended by seculars and the Kurdish groups, and more, and in different variations, are shared by the conservative/religious group that is politically represented by the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). The outbursts by Erdogan that we regularly hear and read in local media are partly played for political consumption, but are generally genuine, though embarrassing. They are, in essence, Islamic-minded with a quite strong, though not MHP-like, nationalism that borders on racism.

This brings us to the second factor, the religion dividing the Turkish nation, before we talk about the main divisive cut through society: the Kurdish issue and the ethnicity problem.

Stay tuned.