Prayer and Politics, but No Orgy

The lights never went out, and the rumored orgy failed to materialize. Still, from the point of view of Turkey’s Sunni Muslim authorities, a hundred other heresies were committed on a recent evening at the Alevi Muslim prayer service in Istanbul’s working-class Okmeydani neighborhood. Most noticeable were the girls without headscarves flirting with boys in the entrance hall. Then there was the laxity: with no call to prayer ringing from loudspeakers, worshippers straggled in late, while one of the religious leaders joked about having to compete with TV sitcoms. When the service did start, it was far from the austere, silent genuflection associated with Sunni prayer. There were sermons, call-and-response sessions, a boy-girl hand-washing ritual and traditional music and singing.

And if their style of worship appears out of synch with that of Turkey’s conservative Sunni ruling party, consider the Alevis’ politics. They are Muslim, but their doctrine is unflinchingly progressive, favoring gay rights, access to abortion, equal opportunity for women and pacifism. Many of their rituals stem from pre-Islamic times. 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.

In the current turmoil over Turkey’s identity that pits political Islam against staunch secularism in the courts and on the streets, the Alevis, a Turkish offshoot of Shi’ite Islam, offer a third way: a faith-based humanism big enough to incorporate both piety and modernity. That the Alevis 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 ruling AK Party doesn’t recognize them as a separate faith. The Alevis 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–which refuses to certify Alevi meeting halls as places of worship. To do so, argues directorate head Ali Bardakoglu, would be heresy. Last year AK Party lawmaker Mustafa Ozbayrak scoffed at Alevi requests for state funds: “If you give the Alevis funding … will you give groups like the Satanists the same tomorrow?”

The disdain of Turkey’s Sunni authorities may explain why many Alevis venerate the country’s secularist founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. In his separation of mosque and state, the Alevis finally found freedom from discrimination. But that eroded under subsequent governments, often in violence. As recently as 1993, 37 people, including prominent Alevi poets, writers and musicians, were killed in a fire set by a fundamentalist Sunni mob in a hotel in eastern Turkey.

For 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 Alevis have begun emerging from the shadows. At the Karacaahmet Sultan shrine on the Asian side of the Bosporus, volunteers teach traditional Alevi music and dance, while pro bono lawyers fight for Alevi rights in court. Last year, an Alevi parent won a landmark education case against the Turkish government at the European Court of Human Rights. The court ruled that the predominantly Sunni curriculum “cannot be considered to meet the criteria of objectivity and pluralism.” It criticized the lack of information on Alevi beliefs, rituals and prayer forms, and urged a remedy. The government has so far refused to change the curriculum.

Upstairs at the Karacaahmet Sultan shrine, an Alevi leader named Muharrem Ercan sits behind the desk in his smoke-filled office. He’s confident, he says, that the Alevis are on the winning side. “We solved the issue of whether Islam could be tolerant 750 years ago,” he says. “It’s the rest of Turkey that has to catch up.”

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