Word: sunni
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...their style of worship appears out of sync with that preferred by Turkey's conservative Sunni ruling party, consider the Alevis' politics: They are Muslims, but their doctrine is unflinchingly progressive, favoring abortion, gay rights, equal opportunity for women, and pacifism. They praise everyone from Buddhists to Baptists, and admit to liberal borrowing from many faiths. They don't believe in heaven or hell, don't perform the Hajj pilgrimage, and don't face Mecca when they pray. God, they like to say, resides in people, not in mountains or stones...
...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...
...Aykan Erdemir, assistant professor of sociology at Middle East Technical University in Ankara, argues that the treatment of the Alevi is a crucial litmus test that Turkey is failing. "The [Alevi] are not only offering an alternative, more Western-ready version of Islam," he says. "They also show that Sunni conservatives in power in Turkey are in fact extremely bigoted and spreading hate language...
...disdain of Turkey's Sunni authorities may explain why many Alevi venerate the country's secularist founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. In his separation of mosque and state, they finally found freedom from discrimination. But that eroded under subsequent governments, often violently. As recently as 1993, a group of 33 prominent Alevi poets, writers and musicians were burned to death by a fundamentalist Sunni mob in a hotel in eastern Turkey...
...centuries, the Alevi response to persecution has been to worship in secret, while trying to pass as Sunni. Amid the political liberalization that has accompanied Turkey's efforts to join the European Union, however, many Alevi have begun emerging from the shadows. At the Karacaahmet Sultan shrine on the Asian side of the Bosphorus, the cemevi runs entirely on donations to the tune of $159,000 a year. Volunteers teach traditional Alevi music and dance, while the group's pro bono lawyers fight for Alevi rights in court. Last year, an Alevi parent, angered by compulsory religion classes his teenage...