INVITATION to a LECTURE
Ahl al-Baytism and Saint Veneration: Deciphering the Common Turkish Folk Islam of Alevis and Sunnis in Turkey
Dr. Gökçen Beyinli-Dinç
Utrecht University/Hamburg University
Thursday, 23th January 2025, 19:00 at the Orient-Institut Istanbul (Turkish Time, GMT+3)
Recent critical literature on Turkish folk/popular Islam has scrutinised the use of binary concepts for the religious history of Turkey, such as heterodoxy-orthodoxy, oral-scriptural, rural-urban and the use of the former concepts, and in relation to them, Shia influence or syncretism, when dealing with Alevis, Bektashis and related antinomian groups. Empirically, these efforts have largely focused on the early modern period, and studies on the modern period tend to assume that saint veneration was a common belief and practice of Alevis and Sunnis. In this talk, I will use three specific genres of books – the epics of Ali, Mevlid and descriptions of Karbala incident – published until the end of the 1970s to demonstrate the fluidity between Alevi and Sunni Muslims in the Republic as a legacy of Ottoman religiosity. I will offer a bird’s eye view on the influential legacy of the work of Fuad Köprülü’s and of his student Ahmet Yaşar Ocak’s research on the historiography of Turkish folk Islam in the Republic. I argue that Ahl al-Baytism, along with the veneration of saints, was part of the Islam common in Turkish society. While saint veneration, albeit as heterodoxy, was a subject of interest for both Turkish theologians and Alevi scholars, Ahl al-Baytism in Turkish folk Islam has been rendered invisible through a process of culturalization as literature.
Gökçen Beyinli is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Utrecht University, Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, and a Visiting Researcher at the University of Hamburg/ Department of Turcology. She holds a PhD in History from Humboldt University-Berlin, and an MA in History from Istanbul Bilgi University. She is the author of two books on the history of midwifery (Elleri Tılsımlı, 2023, 4th edition) and of “folk religion” (İslam ve Sair Halk, 2021) in Turkish modernity, and of several articles on gender and religious history of Istanbul and modern Turkey. She has a keen interest in postcolonial and “global religious history” as well as lived and material approach to religion, which she developed during her postdoctoral studies, and currently engaged in further research into the history of religion in Turkey and the Ottoman Empire along this line of enquiry.
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VENUE
Orient-Institut Istanbul
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Tel: +90 212 293 60 67
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