GROWING INFLUENCE OF ISLAM ALIENATING ALEVIS, TURKEY’S ‘TRUE SECOND-CLASS CITIZENS’

Irish Times
Feb 20, 2006

AZG Armenian Daily
21/03/2006

TURKEY: Most Alevis wholeheartedly aligned themselves with Kemal
Ataturk’s secular revolution of the 1920s, writes Nicholas Birch
in Istanbul Remote, mountainous and poor, Tunceli has all the
ingredients of a typical, conservative eastern Turkish town. Except
that Tunceli is anything but typical. Few women under the age of 60
wear headscarves. The fine central mosque lies empty, even on Fridays.

Dominated by a medley of Marxist-Leninists, communists and socialists –
political groupings insignificant elsewhere in Turkey – local politics
has a distinctively cold war feel about it.

The key to Tunceli’s strangeness lies in the identity of its
people. Like around 20 per cent of Turkey’s population, they are
not Sunni Muslims, but Alevi, members of a sect whose beliefs are
distantly related to Shiism.

Not that the place of worship opened on the outskirts of town five
years ago in any way resembles the mosques of neighbouring Shia Iran.

Attended by men, women and children, the Thursday meeting at the cemevi
opens with a lament sung to the accompaniment of an amplified saz,
the metal-stringed lute played throughout Anatolia.

Later, the music gathers speed, and a group of young men and women
stand to perform a stylised circular dance. The ceremony ends with
the religious leader, in tears, describing the death of the Imam
Hussein at the hands of the Sunni Caliph’s army.

Persecuted by the Ottoman Sultans, most Alevis wholeheartedly aligned
themselves with Kemal Ataturk’s secular revolution of the 1920s. Many
continue to describe themselves as staunch Kemalists.

But Islam, all but banished in the early years of Republican Turkey,
crept back in with multi-party democracy in the 1950s. Its growing
influence continues to alienate Alevis.

“Do you know what is really meant by ‘how happy is he who can say
I am a Turk’?” asks schoolteacher Nuriye Bagriyanik, referring to
one of Ataturk’s most popular slogans. “How happy is he who can say
‘I am a Sunni Muslim.'”

She ascribes the resurgence of Alevi identity to ultra-nationalist-led
pogroms in the late 1970s in which well over 100 Alevis
died. Forty-five more were killed in a second bout of sectarianism
in the mid-1990s in Istanbul and the Anatolian city of Sivas.

The real triggers to Alevi activism came later, though, first with
Turkey’s improving relations with the EU. And then there was the
overwhelming 2003 electoral success of the Justice and Development
Party (AKP), a pro-western offshoot of traditional Turkish political
Islam.

“Every one of the AKP’s 360-odd MPs is a Sunni,” explains Tunceli
journalist Haydar Toprakci, adding that “it’s the Alevis, not the
Kurds, who are Turkey’s true second-class citizens”. His attitude is
shared by Izzetin Dogan, head of Turkey’s most influential Alevi group,
the Istanbul-based Cem Foundation.

“Previous governments may have been cowardly on the Alevi issue, but
at least we could talk to them”, Mr Dogan says. “With the present
government, all contact has been lost.” Deteriorating relations
left his Cem Foundation with no alternative but to take the Turkish
Education Ministry to court over school religious classes that were
made obligatory after the 1980 military coup.

The curriculum teaches only Sunni Islam. Individual Alevis have taken
their complaints far further. Any day now, the European Court of
Human Rights is expected to rule on a landmark case brought by parents
demanding that their children be excused from religious education.

“The thought of going to court didn’t occur to me until one Ramadan,
when the religious teacher began insisting all Muslims should fast,”
parent Hatice Kose told Turkish daily Radikal. “My son said that
because everybody else in the class was fasting, he would too.” If
they fast at all, Alevis do so not during Ramadan, but Muharrem,
four months later.

In an apparent effort to stave off further legal cases, Turkey’s
education minister Huseyin Celik last week announced that the
curriculum had been changed to include a discussion of Alevi beliefs.

Izzetin Dogan describes the move as an attempt by the government
“to get Brussels on its side”. The ministry’s aim, he adds, “is to
present our beliefs as being no different from Sunni Islam”.

The fisticuffs over the school syllabus are, however, only the most
visible symptom of a much broader debate – not just confined to Alevis
– about the role of Islam in Turkish society.

Turkey is often described as a model of Muslim secularism. In fact,
the state keeps close tabs on religion, seeing it both as a threat
and a potential social cement.

As the well-known Istanbul theologian Zekeriya Beyaz puts it, “the
state promotes and protects religion while religion encourages people
to support the state”. The centre of the bureaucratic web is the
Diyanet, the powerful state body responsible for maintaining Turkey’s
80,000 mosques and monitoring their state-employed preachers. Sitting
in his elegantly furnished office in the outskirts of Ankara, Diyanet
head Ali Bardakoglu brushes off suggestions that his foundation is
a Sunni monopoly. “Every belief group is our partner,” he insists.

But then he goes on to argue that Alevis are actually Sunni. “It’s
not that we are opposed to cemevis,” he says, “but they are not an
alternative to mosques. ”

Ali Bardakoglu is a moderate. After the 1980 coup, led by generals
who saw Sunni Islam as an alternative to murderous clashes between
left and right, his predecessors complied in a campaign to build
mosques in 100s of Alevi villages.

The initiative was not a success, says Aykan Erdemir, a sociologist
specialising in Alevism. “Some imams gave up and left within months of
arriving, and others never left their homes. I’ve even heard stories
of preachers corrupted by the villagers’ beliefs.”

Attempts at forced conversion have now stopped. Even now, though,
Turkey’s few cemevis exist in a legal limbo, officially described as
cultural centres, not places of worship.

And while imams in state-funded mosques receive their salaries from
Ankara, Alevi communities pay everything from their own pockets.