Turkish Alevis and Syrian (or Lebanese…or Turkish?) Alawites — a Twitter exchange

Teomete تيوميته ‏@THansarayli 6h

That was the pseudo Turkish Republic who used to scare of minority consciousness the current republic is our second republic + who do not scare of their minorities conversely they support and encourage minorities,beliefs and different life styles.

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Ok, lot’s of stuff there.  First, there’s this article from The Independent just y-e-s-t-e-r-d-a-y — not two years ago — the heading on which doesn’t even refer to Alevis as such, but as “Turkish Shias:” “Turkish Shias in Fear of Life on the Edge” (September 12, 2014).  Upon reading the article it immediately makes clear they’re speaking of Turkish Alevis.

There’s so much you can say here.  But let me give one personal example.  When Syria started its descent into hell in 2011, I told an Alevi friend of mine from Istanbul, “You do know that Assad and his Alawites in Syria…they’re Alevis essentially…just Arabs?”  And she said, “No, I didn’t know that.”  And this is a highly politicized, intelligent, critical-minded woman who is very involved in Alevi and wider leftist issues in Turkey.  This summer, 2014, when I was in Istanbul during the Soma mining disaster, she said, in a long role-call of complaints against Erdoğan: “He’s funding Sunni groups in Syria who are just killing and massacring Alevis.”  Not Syrian Alawites.  “Alevis.”  The Syrian crisis, had, in two brutal years, made her realize her connection to that group in Syria, that she was one of them.  This sharpening of consciousness — on the part of perhaps 10 to 20 million Turkish citizens — is clearly what makes Erdoğan and the Turkish Republic nervous and unhappy.  She also works tightly with Arab-speaking Alevis from the Antakya region of southeaast Turkey — which, then, of course, raises the issue of why we don’t just call them Alawites too!

There are problems here.  First, I don’t even know if Alevis/Alawites even like or appreciate themselves being called Shia and lumped together with the Shia of Iran or southern Iraq or southern Lebanon — except when they’re being armed and aided by them.  Or, if more “orthodox” Shia, like those mentioned above, even approve of Alevism entirely: it has a set of very un-‘orthodox’ practices that they — mainstream Shia — might consider heretical — and when they stop needing them to wage their proxy wars for them against Sunni powers in other parts pf the Middle East, they may abandon them to their fate.  Second, like I said in my tweets, Alevism/Alawitism, the supposedly Shia set of practices and beliefs that I’m just going to call Alevism from now on, runs across a region and through a Turkish-Kurdish-Zaza-Arab-speaking group of populations continuum that are perhaps very heterogeneous in one way, but definitely a spiritually, confessionally and even cultural unit in many other ways.  The border between southeast Turkey and Syria and Iraq and along the Mediterranean littoral along which these communities are largely to be found is precisely where the border between the Arab/Muslim Umayyad/Abbasid states and the Byzantine Empire ran for centuries, a region which created the strange inter-ethnic frontier world of the Greek “Akrites” ballads,* and seems like perfect territory where some of the more syncretic, quasi-Christian elements of Alevism: what’s essentially its trinitariamism, its constant impulse towards Ali-Hussein deification and “the sacrificed young god” narrative, shared sacramental meals, music and dance — would have entered into a marriage with more standard Muslim practices.

So are they all the same?  Obviously not.  Are they completely different?  The answer to that is an even more resounding ‘no!”  And I question the impulse — like that of my imaginary guy at the Turkish consulate calling the Times with his complaint — to emphasize their differences.  There’s obviously nation-state identity borders being guarded there, and the fraternizing and developing of too much solidarity with groups in neighboring states on their citizens’ part is unlikely to make any regional government very happy.  What probably makes the Turkish government even more nervous is the further mixing and crossing of boundaries again — the many Alevis, for example, who are also Kurds — just the idea must give any AK politician a migraine — the many Arabs of the southeast that are Alawite and who, though heavily Turkified already, might be tempted by a sense of community with an extra-territorial group of Arab religious brethren, to re-examine the process of Turkification they were subjected to when Turkey strong-armed that little corner of Syria out of French protectorate hands just before WWII in a process I still don’t understand — the usual plebiscite theory given just smells bogus to me.  It’s certainly clear from the Independent article that Turkish Alevis are considering the Syrian Alawite refugee influx into Turkey a group they need to care for and look after:

“Doğan Bermek, the president of the Alevi Foundation, a lobbying group mostly made up of better-off Alevi, asserts: “In Syria and in Turkey we are all the same Alevi. The differences between us are only regional because we have developed in different regions without contacts. We are on the same road though it has a thousand paths.'”
[my emphases]

Finally, with all due respect to “Teomete’s” Second Turkish Republic, set up in 1961 (and set up and backed by the military coup that ousted and hanged Menderes and his crowd I believe? right? wrong? No tears shed on my part for that crew, believe me, I’m just asking…), it’s rather an exaggeration to say that they respect Turkey’s minority rights.  To begin with, by the time it was established in the early 60s, Turkey’s non-Muslim minorities had already been ‘taken care’ of essentially: the Greeks of Istanbul had been chased out by vicious discriminatory taxation and imprisonment in the 40s, and then a one-night pogrom in September of 1955 that effectively destroyed most of the still some 100,000 strong community’s commercial, ecclesiastic, academic and domestic infrastruture and that killed about 30 people as well.  After this, the Armenians and Jews made a point of keeping quiet and keeping their heads down, but a slow hemorrhaging of their numbers has continued to take place to this day also.  (See my post: “Nobody really cares about Gezi Park: Greek thoughts on the protests of 2013“ from last November.)

But it was under “Teomete’s” Second Turkish Republic, that Istanbul’s remaining Greeks suffered the practically overnight expulsion of almost half their community who held Greek citizenship in 1964.  And it was under the Second Turkish Republic that the Greek populations of the islands of Imbros (Imroz) and Tenedos (Bozca Ada) were driven out of their homes through a campaign of terror and thuggish violence and West-Bank-style settlements of mainland Turks and appropriation of property and land, all in violation of the Lausanne Treaty.  It was under the Second Turkish Republic that the Orthodox Theological Seminary on the island of Khalke (Heybeli Ada), crucial to the Church’s functioning and central in the hearts of the entire Orthodox world, was closed — because the Second Turkish Republic suddenly remembered in 1971 that no institution of higher education, according to the Turkish Constitution, was allowed to be in non-governmental hands, and though all of Turkey is now full of private universities run and owned by any Yörük goatherd-turned-millionaire who has the funds to open one, the Seminary has still not been reopened.

 And it was under the Second Turkish Republic that Turkey continued to prosecute a vicious war against Kurdish language, cultural and political rights that is only finally drawing to a close…we hope.

(So, give me a little bit of a break on your “second” republic, please.  I’m sorry, but this persistent belief in Turkey’s — especially Istanbul’s — essential “multiculturalism” and the persistent popular belief that it still exists, under the second Turkish Republic that “do not scare of their minorities conversely they support and encourage minorities,beliefs and different life styles…” is so irrational and Orwellian that I mostly don’t even know how to respond to it any more.)

As for Alevis, and the Second Turkish Republic’s record of defending and respecting their rights or even just physically protecting them, I’ll just close extensively with another quote from the Independent article:

“How great is the danger of Sunni-Shia hostilities that have torn apart Iraq, Syria and Bahrain in the last decade erupting in Turkey? There are marked differences in religious observances between the Sunni majority and the Alevi who do not use mosques, but worship in some 3,000 prayer houses where men and women dance and sing during services. As a large Shia minority under the Ottoman Empire, the Alevi were persecuted and massacred as dissidents and potential sympathisers with the rival Shia Safavid empire in Iran. Oppression of the Alevi was much like that of Roman Catholics in Ireland by Britain from the 16th century on and it continued after the foundation of the modern Turkish state, with at least 8,000 Alevi Kurds of Dersim in the south-east being slaughtered in the late 1930s.

The Alevis became the bedrock of opposition movements in Turkey and make up much of the membership of leftist parties. In 1993 their spiritual leaders, intellectuals and artists held a festival in the eastern city of Sivas to celebrate a 15th-century poet. Trapped in a hotel by a mob of thousands of Sunnis protesting, among other  things, at the presence of the Turkish translator of Salman Rushdie, some 35 people were burned to death without the police intervening.

Three years later there was an assault on Alevis by the police, killing 20 people in the same Gazi quarter where Syrian Alawites are now taking refuge.

Since Erdogan won his first general election in 2002 there has been less state violence. But during the protests that started in Gezi Park in Istanbul this summer, all five of the demonstrators killed across the country came from the Alevi community.

This is probably as much a token of their prominence in protests as it is of the police targeting them. It is also a sign that Alevi anger is growing because of memories of past violence against them; discrimination which turned them into second-class citizens and lack of state recognition or support for their religion.”

The bold emphases are mine, because they cover key points in Alevi history in Turkey (before and during the Second Republic) that I couldn’t get into — the perception of them as Persian “fifth-columnists” in Ottoman times, when they were known by the much-hated epithet “kızılbaş” — the reason they are Turkey’s staunchest secularists and therefore Erdoğan’s staunchest opponents — finally their sense of community with Alevis/Alawites in different countries.

Demographic distribution of Alevis in Turkey

And distribution of Alawites in the Levant, which clearly shows major concentrations in Turkish Antakya and also northern Lebanon.

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And please “Teomete.”  I’ve tried to be as respectful as I could on this topic.  Our tweeting was going fine till this last tweet:

@jaddeyekabir   No one likes defamations and lies

I spend much of my time on this blog supporting and defending Turkey and Turks against the genuine defamations and lies of ignorant Greeks and other hateful imbeciles.  I don’t need to prove my credentials.  My Greek enemies all have large files on me they can provide you with.  As do all Arab agents of the MESA Thought Police, who used to all be convinced that I was incorrigibly anti-Arab and a closet anti-Muslim….because it used to give them a sense of professional purpose and something they could snarl about.  (As they say about academia: “the competition is so fierce because the stakes are so low.”)  Probably “God and the Serbs” are my only friends.

But if you consider the assertion that a certain religious-cultural-language group in your country is connected and related — and feels connected and related — to another religious-cultural-language group in a neighboring country…a “lie” or “defamation,” then you’re talking a nationalist language that I refuse to participate in with anyone.

I hope I haven’t hurt or offended you or anyone else.

See also: Alevis and Alawites addendum: a “p.s.” from Teomete

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Comment: nikobakos@gmail.com

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* “Akrites”: Like during the Reconquista in Spain, or during the competing Russian/Polish/Cossack struggles over Ukraine, or the two-centuries long Russian offensive against the peoples of the Caucasus, or the centuries of Montenegrin-Albanian feuding, or right here on the U.S. border with Mexico — Byzantine-Arab conflict gave rise to an ethnically, culturally, not-particularly-observant-religiously (despite stated purpose of their cause) and linguistically mixed warrior culture, that shared more similarities than differences and waged war more because that’s just who they were socially (or existentially), or for its material perks — or just for fun…really — than out of any real conviction of their enemy’s evil-ness.

The “akrites” were the Byzantine border warlords who defended the Empire’s southern frontier — the άκρη or “edge” — which as I mentioned here is what the word “krai” or “kraj” in Ukraine means, or in Serbo-Croatian Krajina — but were half-Arab culturally and every other way themselves.  The most famous is the ballad of “Digenes Akritas” who was born of a Greek father and Arab mother.

You will still find this attitude among professional soldiers, or men who have lived long military lives even today, and even coming from scary mercenary/contractors like I met in Afghanistan or one man I talked to at the Serbian monastery of Hilandar on Athos who had gone to fight with some shadowy group in Kosovo in the 90s: the line between hate and respect — even love — between you and the enemy is razor-thin.  Plus, the “Blackwater” phenomenon — see one of my journalist-hero’s, Jeremy Scahill’s gripping Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army (they’re now called “Academi” after trying out “Xe” for a while) — is not new in history and all of the above conflicts were fought by men who much more resembled today’s mercenary/contractor fighters than they did a regular, state army.  (These truths about war is why we will always have paramilitary groups operating somewhere in the world, who do the dirty work that the nation-state can’t.)