Mysticism and Imperial Politics: The Safavids and the Making of the Kizilbash Milieu

Teasing out the wider implications of the findings presented in previous chapters, Chapter 5 formulates an alternative account of the Kizilbash movement as a nexus of various mystical circles, dervish groups and sayyidfamilies who came together around Safavid spiritual leadership over the course of the late fifteenth century and early sixteenth. This chapter also shows how the Kizilbash communities in Anatolia persisted through the Çaldıran defeat in their attachment to their distant spiritual masters, the Safavid shahs, who in turn appear to have never entirely abandoned their spiritual claims over these communities. Contacts between the Safavids and the Kizilbash communities in Anatolia were maintained not only indirectly through the mediation of the Karbala convent in Iraq but also through other mechanisms. Of the latter, I identify three: the dispatching of religious treatises, the granting of the position of ḫalīfe(P. khalīfa) to selected Alevi ocaks and the mediation of a branch of the Safavid family in southeastern Anatolia that evolved into the Alevi ocakof Şah İbrahim Veli.