Making Alevism:Lawfare, Secularism and The Secular
A response to Markus Dressler’s essay, “Making Religion Through Secularist Legal Discourse: The Case of Turkish Alevism”
On a rather chill afternoon in March of 2005, I sat across from Ali Bey, the president of the Cem Foundation, one of the largest civil society institutions dedicated to Turkey’s Alevi community in all of Istanbul. After calling to the kitchen to request a fresh round of tea, Ali Bey proceeded with his monologue:
Think of two families, one Sunni, one Alevi. The Sunni woman is wearing a headscarf, the man has a long beard, they appear to have just arrived from the village. Then look at the Alevi family: the man is clean-shaven, the woman has fine hair, the children are clean and well-dressed. Which of these two would you say is modern, secular? The Alevi family, of course. And yet the (Turkish) state does not recognize us as a legitimate minority. True secularism does not exist here.
These were not unfamiliar or unsurprising sentiments for me to encounter. Throughout two years of research with Alevi NGOs in both Istanbul and Ankara, I frequently spoke with Alevis who drew a direct connection between the ‘modernity’ and ‘secularity’ characteristic of most Alevis and the failures of Turkish secularism, which they typically understand to be fatally skewed in favor of Turkey’s Sunni Muslims. This irony—the ostensible failure of Turkey’s political and legal system of secularism to recognize its most ‘secular’ subjects as a legitimate religious minority—is the crucible and dynamo of much Alevi political mobilization. Continue Reading →