4 - Bektashism as a Model and Metaphor for ‘Balkan Islam’

Summary

Introduction

Shi‘ism is theorised as the politics and poetics of Islam, the Islam of protest, as Hamid Dabashi calls it, a theology that thrives in opposition always ready to face reoccurring Karbalas, revitalising faith and commitment to set things right. It is also the colour green honouring Fatima al-Zahra, the daughter of the Prophet Muhammad, or the shining inspiration of the Twelver tariqas who in remembering and revering her righteous deeds and those of the Twelve Imams recount and relate the ‘providential assurances that all will one day be well’ (Dabashi 2011: xi). Much of the Bektashi tariqa is informed by the Shi‘a experience – from the continued memory of Karbala, the ceaseless mourning and devotion of Imam ‘Ali, to the oath to follow and emulate the ways of the ahl al-bayt and all those ‘who sleep’. Those ‘who sleep’ for the Bektashis are all those dervishes, babas and the few dede-babas whose turbehs become the sites of veneration and vindication of Bektashi faith, fears and desires. To invoke them unjustly or to swear by their sacrifice is to defy the continuation of the cosmic order on whose shoulders the righteous path is maintained and passes on from one time to another since the occultation of the Imam.

From Dagestan to Dar-al-Salam and Detroit, Shi‘ites opt for a more modest and discrete manifestation of their rituals than the public ta‘ziya enactments and ‘Ashura’ mourning processions in Qom or Karbala. Among the Bektashis in particular, to draw attention to oneself in tremors gained by the insights of mourning is considered to disfavour one from the founder's gaze – Pir-i Haxhi-Bektash Veli (1209–71), venerated for his virtue in reticence. The more practical explanation for this understatement or taqiyya, Albanian and Turkish Bektashi babas suggest, is due to their continued persecution in the last century of the Ottoman Empire, which required modesty and mysticism to both nurture the faith and escape attention. A tension that has become part of the Bektashi way, where the public display and the private/communal becoming have taken on ceremonial features. That which one is in public and that which one becomes in the community is observed closely through the prag, the doorstep that divides the inside from the outside, the times outside from those within, crossing it is one of the most respected rituals of entering any Bektashi tekke.