Prayer and Politics, but No Orgy

By Pelin Turgut and Nathan Thornburgh

The lights never went out, and the rumored orgy failed to materialize. Still, from the point of view 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 open entrance hall. Then there was the laxity: With no call to prayer ringing from loudspeakers, worshipers 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, rituals such as a boy-girl hand-washing session, and a lighting of lamps, along with long stretches of traditional music and singing.

And if their style of worship appears out of sync with that preferred by Turkey's conservative Sunni ruling party, consider the Alevis' politics: They are Muslims, but their doctrine is unflinchingly progressive, favoring abortion, gay rights, equal opportunity for women, and pacifism. They praise everyone from Buddhists to Baptists, and admit to liberal borrowing from many faiths. 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 offer a third way -- a faith-based humanism big enough to incorporate both piety and modernity. Indeed, Alevi Islam is as layered as the ceremonial dress worshipers sometimes wear, originating in pre-Islamic times when the Turks were nomadic horsemen in Central Asia. Their circular prayer rooms, veneration of horses and participation in sports such as javelin throwing, all predate the quasi-Shi'ite form of Islam they later adopted (Alevi means "follower of Ali," the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad venerated in Shi'ism). They say the Koran is open to interpretation, and temper its teachings with such Alevi dictums as "control your hand, your groin and your tongue."

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That the Alevi 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 Sunni-led AK Party doesn't even recognize them as a religion. The Alevi 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, but refuses to recognize Alevi cemevi meeting halls as places of worship. To do so, argues Directorate head Ali Bardakoglu, would be heresy. Last year, AKP lawmaker Mustafa Ozbayrak, referring to Alevi demands that they be allocated state funds, said, "If you give this to the Alevis, will you give the Satanists the same tomorrow?"

Aykan Erdemir, assistant professor of sociology at Middle East Technical University in Ankara, argues that the treatment of the Alevi is a crucial litmus test that Turkey is failing. "The [Alevi] are not only offering an alternative, more Western-ready version of Islam," he says. "They also show that Sunni conservatives in power in Turkey are in fact extremely bigoted and spreading hate language."

The disdain of Turkey's Sunni authorities may explain why many Alevi venerate the country's secularist founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. In his separation of mosque and state, they finally found freedom from discrimination. But that eroded under subsequent governments, often violently. As recently as 1993, a group of 33 prominent Alevi poets, writers and musicians were burned to death 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 Alevi have begun emerging from the shadows. At the Karacaahmet Sultan shrine on the Asian side of the Bosphorus, the cemevi runs entirely on donations to the tune of $159,000 a year. Volunteers teach traditional Alevi music and dance, while the group's pro bono lawyers fight for Alevi rights in court. Last year, an Alevi parent, angered by compulsory religion classes his teenage daughter had to attend at school, took Turkey to the European Court of Human Rights and won. The court ruled the predominantly Sunni Muslim curriculum "did not uphold the principles of pluralism and objectivity that a democratic society needs". It criticized the lack of information on Alevi beliefs, rituals and prayer forms, and urged 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 his desk in his smoke-filled office. He's confident, he says, that the Alevi 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."