Hadji Bektach, un mythe et ses avatars: Genese et evolution du soufisme populaire en Turquie & Syncretistic Religious Communities in the Near East & Alevi Identity.

• Author: DANKOFF, ROBERT
• Position: Review

Hadji Bektach, un mythe et ses avatars: Genese et evolution du soufisme populaire en Turquie. By IRENE MELIKOFF. Leiden: E. J. BRILL, 1998. Pp. xxvi + 317.

Syncretistic Religious Communities in the Near East: Collected Papers of the International Symposium "Alevism in Turkey and Comparable Syncretistic Religious Communities in the Near East in the Past and Present," Berlin, 14-17 April 1995. Edited by KRISZTINA KEHL-BODROGI, BARBARA KELLNER-HEINKELE, and ANKE OTTER-BEAUJEAN. Leiden: E. J. BRILL, 1997. Pp. xvii + 255.

Alevi Identity: Cultural, Religious and Social Perspectives: Papers Read at a Conference Held at the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul, November 25-27, 1996. Edited by TORD OLSSON, ELISABETH OZDALGA, and CATHARINA RAUDVERE. Istanbul: SWEDISH RESEARCH INSTITUTE IN ISTANBUL, 1998. Pp. 210.

Irene Melikoff's attempt at synthesis, and the two conference volumes, follow on the heels of three collections of papers published by Editions Isis in Istanbul, two consisting of Melikoff's own scattered articles: Sur les traces du soufisme turc: Recherches sur l'Islam populaire en Anatolie (1992); De l'epopee au mythe: Itineraire turcologique (1995), and one consisting of papers presented at a conference on the Bektashis held at Strasbourg on 29 June--2 July 1986: Bektachiyya: Etudes sur l'ordre mystique des Bektachis et les groupes relevant de Hadji Bektach, ed. Alexandre Popovic and Gilles Veinstein (1995).

In a revealing "Avant-propos" to one of the collections of her articles (Le soufisme turc, p. 3) Melikoff recounts her astonishment one day in 1969 when she heard someone singing a nefes containing the words: Men Ali'den gayri Tanri bilmezem ("I know no other God than Ali"). She had been visiting Turkey regularly for twenty-five years and had never imagined the possibility of such an assertion. "Je croyais tout connaitre de ce pays et voila que je decouvrais une Turquie inconnue, insoup-connee, qui vivait en marge de l'autre, la Thrquie officielle!" And so she spent the next twenty-five years investigating this hidden and intriguing side of Turkish culture. Her remarkable career as the doyenne of Bektashi/Alevi studies, to which the Strasbourg conference paid homage, has culminated in the book under review. Hadji Bektach is useful in providing an overview of her own researches, extending, as she puts it, "over a quarter of a century" (p. xiii). But there is little in it that is not found in her earlier articl es, to which she...