Word: alevi
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...lights never went out, and the rumored orgy failed to materialize. Still, from the point of view Turkey's Sunni Muslim authorities, a hundred other heresies were committed on a recent evening at the Alevi Muslim prayer service in Istanbul's working-class Okmeydani neighborhood. Most noticeable were the girls without headscarves, flirting with boys in the open entrance hall. Then there was the laxity: With no call to prayer ringing from loudspeakers, worshipers straggled in late, while one of the religious leaders joked about having to compete with TV sitcoms. When the service did start, it was far from...
...current turmoil over Turkey's identity that pits political Islam against staunch secularism in the courts and on the streets, the Alevis offer a third way - a faith-based humanism big enough to incorporate both piety and modernity. Indeed, Alevi Islam is as layered as the ceremonial dress worshipers sometimes wear, originating in pre-Islamic times when the Turks were nomadic horsemen in Central Asia. Their circular prayer rooms, veneration of horses and participation in sports such as javelin throwing, all predate the quasi-Shi'ite form of Islam they later adopted (Alevi means "follower of Ali," the grandson...
...That the Alevi are such a large group - anywhere from 15% to 30% of Turkey's population, depending on who's counting - makes it all the more confounding that the Sunni-led AK Party doesn't even recognize them as a religion. The Alevi are also up against secular Turkey's greatest irony - the Religious Affairs Directorate, a massive state-run bureaucracy whose billion-dollar budget employs 88,500 people and funds mosques, churches and synagogues, but refuses to recognize Alevi cemevi meeting halls as places of worship. To do so, argues Directorate head Ali Bardakoglu, would be heresy. Last...
...find them in any census. That's because Turkey, mindful of its fractious past, forbids large minorities from formally identifying themselves as anything other than Turkish Muslim. "As a result," says Dertli, "most Europeans don't even know we exist." The building is Berlin's Anatolian Alevi Culture Center, one of nearly 300 such facilities scattered across Europe. Delegates from 165 centers converged on Brussels this summer to form a pan-European Alevi Union, something unheard of back home. Turgut Öker, who heads the union, hopes the organization's existence will speed the process of reform and help bring...