A Transregional Kizilbash Network: The Iraqi Shrine Cities and their Kizilbash Visitors

Abstract

A notable revelation of the Alevi sources regarding the relationship between the Kizilbash/Alevi communities and the Bektashi order is the relatively institutionalized relations between the Kizilbash/Alevi saintly lineages and a group of (would be-) Bektashi convents in Iraq that acted as liaisons between the Safavids and their Kizilbash followers in Anatolia. The hub of this network was a convent in Karbala that originally belonged to the Abdals of Rum, but that was eventually appropriated by the Bektashi order. Many Alevi documents were issued or renewed there. Focusing on this convent and relations that developed around it, this chapter attempts to shed further light on Alevi-Bektashi symbiosis, and the evolution of the Alevi ocak system on the basis of a set of informal networks connecting the Safavids, the Bektashis and the Kizilbash/Alevi communities. It was only through the course of the nineteenth century, when the policies of the Ottoman state undermined the powerbase of the local sayyid families and abrogated the institutional identity of the convents that this long-standing network began to lose its vibrancy and eventually collapsed. This, in turn, heralded a process whereby the Alevi-Bektashi milieu gradually lost its transregional character and came to be confined largely to Anatolia.