3 Transnational Alevi Politics and Alevi Citizenship

Unlike the majority of researchers on Alevism, Koçan and Öncü (2004) situate the Alevi movement within debates on citizenship rather than debates on the rise of identity politics. They argue that ‘what Alevis seek is a revised citizenship model in terms of a system of rights assuring the condition of neutrality among culturally diverse individuals’ (464). This is in response to the Turkish model of ‘secular’ citizenship, which has been culturally exclusionary (472). Özmen (2011) also considers Alevi rights claims as a claim to multicultural citizenship and suggests that constitutional change would secure rights and freedoms for all segments of society in a globalised world. Unfortunately, this conceptual insight into Alevi citizenship has not been explored in further research. Here I would like to pursue this and situate Alevi political subjectivity within theories of citizenship. Therefore, this chapter focuses on Alevi cultural citizenship and how transnational Alevi politics has carved out spaces for citizenship to emerge. First, I look at how Alevis have been excluded from Turkish citizenship and how this has eventually engendered the emergence of Alevi citizenship. I then define the key dynamics of transnational Alevi politics, which have expanded the scope and scale of Alevi citizenship, including transnational and regional dynamics. In the final section, I demonstrate how citizenship enactment theory helps us to see the Alevi movement in a light different from that suggested in other studies on Alevism. Drawing on Isin’s (2008, 2009, 2012, 2013) theory of enacting citizenship, I focus on Alevi citizenship acts and situate them within the framework of events, sites and scales. Therefore, this chapter addresses Alevi cultural citizenship in non-media realms, before focusing on media and transversal citizenship.

In this section, I consider the two facets of Alevi citizenship – as a top-down status defined by membership of the nation-state, and as a bottom-up movement claimed by the community. Here I argue that Turkish citizenship is based on the exclusion of Alevi identity, while that exclusion has paradoxically paved the way for the birth of Alevi citizenship. Thus, the casting of Alevis as ‘aliens’ (Isin and Wood 2002; Isin 2009) or ‘heretics’¹ (Ateş 2011) from the perspective of Turkish citizenship has led them to become claimants to an Alevi citizenship. In this section, I shall critically engage with research that focuses on how Turkish nationalism defines citizenship and the Alevis’ place within it. Finally, I shall look at how Alevis make rights claims that create the Alevi political subject and hence the Alevi citizen.

There are two seminal studies that examine how Alevis are situated within discourses of Turkish nationalism (Ateş 2011; Dressler 2013). Ateş’s (2011) work focuses primarily on the official nationalism of the early Republican period (1923–50), whereas Dressler (2013) refers to the late 19th-century Ottoman era, when Alevis began to ‘enter the gaze of nationalists’. While these studies look at how Alevis are seen by the state and from the point of view of hegemonic Turkish nationalisms, studies investigating Alevi citizenship from a bottom-up approach are limited (Koçan and Öncü 2004; Özmen 2011). There might be several reasons for this. First of all, the discriminatory approach towards Alevis has also infiltrated academic research, where studying Alevis has not been given much value. One can also argue that academic research on ethnic or religious minorities has always been a risky route to take in Turkey. The second reason is how in Turkey citizenship is defined with reference to ethnic and religious categories. Historically, the two significant ‘other’ categories in relation to Turkish national identity, the Kurds and Armenians, could be clearly identified as ‘ethnic’ categories, whereas it was difficult to categorise Alevis due to their multi-ethnicity (Turks, Kurds) and Alevism’s different associations with Islam as a sect, a syncretic religion, a heterodox version of Islam or as ‘real Islam’. Furthermore, the ethno-religious character of Alevism, paradoxically, makes it difficult to situate Alevis as a whole, including Kurdish Alevis, within or against Turkish nationalism. All these reasons have rendered Alevis invisible in their attempts at defining themselves as citizens. There has also been a strong stream in Alevism studies that situates Alevi movements within identity politics (see Bruinessen 2016; Massicard 2017; for a combined approach of identity politics and citizenship, see Ertan 2017).

According to Açıkel and Ateş (2011) and Ateş (2011), Turkish nationalism has an ambivalent relationship with Alevism. Ateş distinguishes between religious and secular nationalisms, which, according to Ateş, can be considered hegemonic. Both hegemonic forms of nationalism regard Alevis as heirs of an authentic culture of Turks originating in Asia, and thus Alevism is seen as an ‘authentic’ ethnic component of national identity.

But, at the same time, Alevis are deemed to be heretics who are difficult to situate within Islam due to the ‘syncretic’ character of their faith (Ateş 2011: 20–1). Akpınar (2016) and Çakmak (2019) demonstrate that the perception of Kızılbaş/Alevis² as heretics dates back to the Hamidian Era (1876–1909). They were regarded as a security risk to the Ottomans during this period since their ethno-religious diversity was perceived to be a rising threat to the unity of the Empire. Hence, attempts at systematic modernisation, which had begun during the Hamidian Era, marked Alevis as ‘others’ who had to be dealt with. Zırh (2008: 111) says that there was no place for Alevis in the Ottoman millet³ system as ‘the Kızılbaş Alevis occupied an inferior place to non-Muslim groups such as Christians and Jews simply because they refrained from fully acknowledging the authority of the state’s official orthodox Sunni Islamic theology’ (Açıkel and Ateş 2011: 727). Such a view continued during the Republican era (1923–50). Açıkel and Ateş (2005, 2011) draw attention to the parallels between nationalist discourses on Kurds and Alevis. While the Turkish nationalism of the Republican period and later post-1980 coup defined Kurds as backward ‘mountain Turks’ who would be civilised through Republican policies of Turkification, Açıkel and Ateş say that a similar view was evident in the designation of Alevis as ‘mountain Muslims’, although this term was never employed officially.

According to Dressler (2013), in romanticised accounts of Turkish nationalism, the Islamisation of the Turks is identified as the historical point when the nomad communities of Turks settled in Anatolia in the 11th century and converted to Islam. From this perspective, Alevis represent nomad communities (Turcomans) who preserved their Turkish origins and integrated shamanism into Islamic tenets. Dressler (2013) echoes Ateş’s analysis of Turkish nationalism and its interplay between ‘difference’ and ‘sameness’ in the way it frames Alevis as either heretics or authentic Turks.⁴ He demonstrates that the Turkification of Alevis began in the period of the Young Turks (1908–18) as a way of gaining the loyalty of the Kızılbaş/Alevi tribes. However, Dressler (2015) adopts a critical approach to the term ‘Alevi’ as a homogenising concept and argues that the ‘modern concept of Alevism is rather new, barely a hundred years old, [and was] formed in the context of the Turkish nation-building process and developed within a semantic framework akin to that of the nation’ (15). However, Kehl-Bodrogi (2012) and Çakmak (2019) argue that the term ‘Alevi’ has been used since the 16th century by the Kızılbaş themselves.

Dressler (2013: 231) argues that Markussen’s (2012) study of the Alevi Centre in Istanbul demonstrates that Alevis draw on an etic mainstream historiographical discourse concerning Alevism by adopting terms such as shamanism, heterodoxy and syncretism, albeit with positive connotations. However, this perspective implicitly assumes an ‘authentic’ identity formation that existed prior to the emergence of the nation-state, which was then submerged by the overwhelming power of the state apparatus. It makes more sense to acknowledge a dynamic relationship between state discourses on Alevis and their self-definitions. Such a perspective also comes with a risk of undermining emic definitions of Alevism, barely leaving room for Alevi agency in defining the boundaries of the broader imagined Alevi community. It is also important to take into account the existence for hundreds of years of the relationships established between Alevi ocaks across Anatolia and the Balkans, which are still part of the Alevi collective memory and practices (see Karakaya-Stump 2015; Yıldırım 2017b, 2019). For instance, the use of the term Kızılbaş, with its negative connotations of heresy, to describe Alevis was used long before the 19th century (Yıldırım 2017b), although Alevis have more recently reclaimed this term and rejected its negative associations. Also, Çakmak’s (2019) study demonstrates that the state’s policies on Alevis became more systematic and comprehensive during the Hamidian Era (1876–1909).

Massicard (2017) argues that Alevism was partially accepted as a culture but excluded as a religion during the nation-building process. It is important to emphasise that in the early years of the Republic, Alevis were not excluded from the nation-building process per se as Kemalists actively sought their support. However, in this process there was no room for Alevi political subjectivity within Turkish citizenship, as the latter aimed to exclude any religious identity other than Sunni Islam. Kemalists adopted a utilitarian approach to their relationship with Alevis. They formulated a definition of Turkish citizenship premised on a necessary link between Islam and Turkishness, while also controlling religious practice through the Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı (the Directorate of Religious Affairs, DRA),⁵ which has been criticised by Alevis for representing only Sunnis and for not recognising Alevism as a religion, despite also being sponsored through Alevi taxes. This view was clearly stated when, in 1994, the head of the Diyanet said: ‘Alevism is not a religion. Nor is it a sect of Islam. Alevism is a culture complete with its own folklore’ (Turkish Daily News, 7 January 1994) (Şahin 2005: 481). Nearly a decade later, in 2003, Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan, when visiting Berlin, gave the following reply to the demand, raised by the General Secretary of the Germany Alevi Federation, that Alevi places of worship (cemevis) should have equal legal status with Muslim mosques: ‘One is a house of prayer, the other is a culture house’ (Sökefeld 2008b: 292). Erdoğan expressed a similar opinion in 2013, recalling a common nationalist trope that Alevis are really a type of Muslim, a comment which was widely criticised by Alevis, when he said: ‘Doesn’t Alevism love His Holiness Ali? Aren’t Alevis Muslims? Sunnis are Muslims too. If Alevism is to love Ali, I am a proper Alevi’ (Milliyet, 17 July 2013).

As indicated by these statements, and as argued by Ateş (2011), the state holds an ambiguous position towards Alevis, one which oscillates between regarding it as a ‘culture’ and as a ‘religion’. In this formulation, Alevism can be regarded as a culture in its own right but as a religion can only be viewed as part of Islam. Şahin (2005) and Massicard (2017) point out that Alevi organisations and events were financially supported by the Ministry of Culture during the 1990s, even though the governments of the time did not officially recognise Alevis. Such ambiguity is also demonstrated when looking at the role of the Diyanet. At the same time as casting Alevism as a cultural phenomenon, until 2009 the state also regulated its relationship with Alevis through the Diyanet, after which the Alevi Opening (see Soner and Toktaş, 2011; Ecevitoğlu and Yalçınkaya, 2013; Özkul, 2015) created a temporary change in attitudes. Lord (2018: 32) argues that ‘the Diyanet has played a crucial role in providing a more favourable environment for Islamist mobilisation and has delimited the nation’s boundaries along religious lines through its engagement with and rejection of Alevism’. In other words, the exclusion of Alevis has also be used in the battle to define what the Turkish nation and Turkish citizenship are and are not since ‘Alevis at least for two decades [have] systematically challenged limits of secularism and citizenship in Turkey’ (Boyraz 2019: 768).

In 2009 the government of the JDP launched a series of workshops with a number of Alevi leaders, intellectuals and representatives from different organisations, along with researchers, journalists, theologians and non-governmental organisations, which became known as the Alevi Opening (Özkul 2015). Even though a similar attempt was planned by the state in 1961, it was not realised until the JDP’s initiative (Ata 2007; Yalçınkaya 2020). The Alevi Opening had the aim of resolving ongoing tensions with Alevis and addressing Alevi rights claims. This can be considered part of the JDP’s broader move to create a consensus for the 2011 referendum, which proposed a number of changes to the Turkish constitution. Bardakçı et al. (2017: 108) emphasise that the Alevi struggle for recognition, through protests, demonstrations, court cases and lobbying of the EU, along with the European Commission’s progress reports, which identified discrimination against Alevis as a problem for Turkey’s European Union membership process, played a significant role in the JDP’s initiative. Notably, the Alevi Opening was the first serious move in which members of the Alevi community were invited to the discussion table with the government, which therefore meant a formal acknowledgement of ‘the Alevi citizen’ as an addressee. Soner and Toktaş (2011: 429) see the Opening as a turning point in the rapprochement between the government and Alevis, even though Alevis remained suspicious and critical of the government. During the workshops,

[t]he Alevi representatives, despite the differences of these institutions in their political views and opinions on Alevism, agreed on the following matters as their core demands: giving legal status to cemevis, the abolition of mandatory religious education classes, turning the Madımak Hotel into a museum, stopping the mandatory construction of mosques in Alevi villages and sending away the appointed imams, and finally leaving the places of Alevi faith to Alevi institutions (Alevi çalıştayları önraporu 2010).

(Akdemir 2015: 66)

Akdemir (2015: 64) argues that this communication with Alevis gradually broke down because the government tried to impose its own definitions and policies concerning Alevism. Hence, although it was the first official move to include Alevis as a party for ‘resolving the Alevi issue’, the workshops did not in the end result in any rights gains. In fact, the Alevi Opening ended with the government re-addressing Alevis as the cause of the problem, as a heterogenous and uncompromising party that had not been able to produce a unified position. Alevis were publicly portrayed as a group of people who refused to negotiate (Akdemir 2015: 68) and the religious, political and ethnic diversity of the community was problematised. Previously, the government had already used the diversity of the community, the multiplicity of Alevi organisations and the disagreements within organisations as to what Alevism constituted as an excuse not to negotiate with them on the basis of ‘being unable to find an addressee which represents Alevis as a whole’. An alternative view to the government’s formal concluding report on the negotiations with Alevis was prepared by the Hacı Bektaş-ı Veli Anatolian Culture Foundation, which produced a detailed and critical account of the workshops in which they argued that the state had imposed its own definition of Alevism upon Alevis (Ecevitoğlu and Yalçınkaya 2013). In the end, despite the Alevi Opening, under the JDP administration Alevi disenfranchisement only deepened through their top-down Islamisation, intensified sectarianism and use of a divisive discourse (Karakaya-Stump 2018).

Alevi political subjectivity, which emerges through a complex set of relations, acts and connections, is often examined through its relationship with the state (Bozkurt 1998; Jongerden 2003; Kehl-Bodrogi 2003; Keiser 2003; Koçan and Öncü 2004; Poyraz 2005; Öktem 2008; Göner 2017b; Karakaya-Stump 2018; Tekdemir 2018; Boyraz 2019) and Alevi membership and support for leftist organisations in Turkey (Sinclair-Webb 2003; Erman and Göker 2006; Küçük 2007; Ertan 2019; Yalçınkaya and Karaçalı 2020). Here I would like to suggest a different approach from these two perspectives and consider Alevi politics as a form of cultural citizenship. This is because Alevism is not a homogeneous identity but consists of a variety of interpretations, as discussed in Chapter 1. In addition, Alevi politics often does not limit itself to identity politics but includes broader claims for equality and diversity. These claims, which since the 1960s have crystallised in their demand for a new constitution, cannot simply be explained with reference to the Alevi inclination towards the politics of the left; rather, it is a form of citizenship which juxtaposes the notions of ‘rights for Alevis’ with ‘rights for “others”’. In order to understand how the Alevi political subject emerges in the form of citizenship, we first need to unpack the dynamics of transnationalism.

There are two key moments which define the emergence of the transnational Alevi movement (Sökefeld 2008a; Massicard 2017): the establishment of the Hamburg Alevi Culture Group in Germany, soon followed by the Alevi Culture Week; and the Madımak massacre in Turkey, which was followed by another massacre in the Gazi neighbourhood of Istanbul. According to Sökefeld (2008a: 220–8), the Alevi Culture Group operated as a ‘germ cell’ of transnational networking and went on to produce the Alevi Declaration in 1989, something that has been influential in shaping Alevi intellectual thinking and politics both in Germany and Turkey. The Alevi Declaration publicly claimed the right to recognition in Turkey and Germany and was followed by other detailed publications written and distributed in Turkey. The Alevi Culture Group then organised the Alevi Culture Week, which was attended by numerous Alevi musicians and intellectuals from Turkey, so establishing an ongoing transnational practice (Sökefeld 2008a). But, arguably, Alevi transnational space emerged long before the late 1980s when Alevi migrants in Germany worked closely with the first political party established by Alevis in 1960s (Ata 2007). Undoubtedly, the connectedness and scale of this early transnational space was far more restricted than the enthusiasm and impact facilitated by the Alevi Culture Week and the Declaration of 1989.

Collective memories of persecution have been highly formative in the development of Alevi identity (Poyraz 2013; Ertan 2017; Çavdar 2020; Temel 2021); they are deeply enmeshed within Alevi myths and history, going back to the Kerbala massacre of 680 and the death of Hüseyin,⁶ one of the twelve imams in Alevism, from whom the ocaks are believed to be descended (Kehl-Bodrogi 2008; Göner 2017b; Dressler 2021). The massacres during the Ottoman period (Kehl-Bodrogi 2017; Yıldırım 2017b), the Koçgiri and Dersim massacres of the pre-and early Republican period (Keiser 2003), the more recent Ortaca (1966), Sivas (1978), Kahramanmaraş (1978) and Çorum (1980) attacks (Jongerden 2003), and the persecution and large-scale imprisonment of Alevis following the 1980 military coup (Sökefeld 2008b) have created a collective memory around violence and annihilation which culminated in a public outcry after the Madımak massacre of 1993. The collective memory of massacres has created a sense of continuity in Alevi history and has played a significant role in politicising Alevis (Ertan 2017: 171).

In this regard, the Madımak massacre was decisive in the emergence of an organised Alevi movement at the national and transnational level. Alevis from the urban neighbourhoods of Istanbul, Ankara and other cities had gathered at the Pir Sultan Abdal Festival in Sivas in 1993. The Madımak Hotel, where the festival attendees were staying, was set ablaze by a large mob shouting Islamist slogans, while the police and gendarmerie looked on (Bruinessen 2016). The massacre resulted in thirty-seven deaths, including of Alevi community members, Alevi and non-Alevi artists and intellectuals, two of the hotel workers and two of the attackers, while more than fifty people were severely injured. Two years later, in the Alevi neighbourhood of Gazi in Istanbul, a violent incident took place in a coffeehouse which resulted in police shootings that targeted members of the Alevi community (Vorhoff 1998; Jongerden 2003; Bruinessen 2016). Within a few days, nineteen people were dead and many injured, and a member of the community, Hasan Ocak, disappeared while in police custody – his dead body was later found in a village.⁷ Including those who also died after protests in other cities following the Gazi massacre, a total of thirty people were killed (White 1997, cited in Jongerden 2003: 86). Sökefeld (2008a: 222) argues that although the Madımak and Gazi massacres were local events, they can be regarded as transnational because they facilitated the spaces and means for Alevi collective memory to emerge through the number of commemorative events inside and outside of Turkey that followed with invited speakers from Turkey. For instance, 100,000 people attended the funeral of the Madımak victims in Istanbul and 50,000 attended protests in Cologne (Massicard 2017: 45). This transnational impact is still alive in the UK even more than two decades later. At the Madımak commemoration that I attended at the Sivas Massacre monument in the park at Stoke Newington Common in London in 2018, a father who had lost his children in the massacre was invited to speak at the event about his loss and the gravity of the massacre for the Alevi community.

Sökefeld (2004: 138) notes that the first Alevi organisation was established in Munich in 1973–4, along with a branch in Hamburg following the Maraş massacre of 1978, where more than 100 Alevis were lynched by fascists and locals. In a similar vein, the Madımak massacre led to new organisations in Germany during the 1990s, which then mushroomed across Europe in countries to which Alevis had migrated. Many of these organisations gathered under the umbrella of countrywide federations and the European Confederation, with the Alevi Federation Germany being the most influential in defining transnational Alevi politics (see Coşan-Eke 2014, 2017, 2021). On this point Coşan-Eke (2017: 153) notes that:

the main binding feature of all Alevi organizations in Europe remains their place of origin, the shared history related to this, and fundamental principles of Alevism which they all share. Yet Alevis have developed with multiple identities rather than a single national identity, related to just one country.

Many researchers on Alevism now agree that Alevi politics takes place on a transnational scale and is one of the key forces that shapes Alevi politics in Turkey (see Sökefeld 2008a; Coşan-Eke 2014, 2017; Issa and Atbaş 2017; Karagöz 2017; Massicard 2017; Uçar 2017). Transnationalism in the case of Alevis does not simply refer to bonds and connections between ‘sending’ and ‘receiving’ countries, but is a multi-country connection. This growing form of transnationalism is evidenced by the European Alevi Unions Confederation, an umbrella organisation for Alevi Federations based in different European countries, and Alevi television stations, which produce programmes depicting the lives of Alevis in different countries.

One can distinguish several underlying dynamics of Alevi transnational politics. The first dynamic is Europeanism, European identity and Turkey’s process to become a member of the European Union, which have influenced the legal, political and identity dynamics of Alevism (Hurd 2014; Çalışkan 2020). The second dynamic consists of the different actors and movements within politics in Turkey, where ‘the growth of political Islam, and the struggle of the Kurds, gave an impulse to turn towards Alevi identity’ (Sökefeld 2008a: 221). This view is also shared by Çamuroğlu (2008), Massicard (2017) and Ertan (2017), who draw attention to how the escalation of identity politics in Turkey and abroad has also given impetus to the development of the Alevi movement. The third dynamic has two dimensions which stem from the community’s own history and the way it characterises itself. First, some Alevis have strong symbolic and political associations with the programme of Kemalist modernisation that anchored Westernisation as essential to the development of Republican Turkey after the demise of the Ottoman Empire. Some Alevis shared this Kemalist vision, as indicated by their support for the secular young Republic and the fact that they have been regarded as its ‘true guards’ (Massicard 2017).⁸ This support was based on the hope that the Kemalist project would result in the secularisation of Turkey and would guarantee a socio-cultural space for Alevis free from violence and oppression. Secondly, along with this historic association with Kemalism, Alevi political discourses define the community as inherently modern and progressive, citing the fact that both women and men attend and participate in the cem and that education is a key priority for Alevis.

The fact that many Alevis have close connections to each other through family, kinship and birthplace across different countries in Europe also supports transnationalism, although no doubt this does not necessarily mean that it results in equal degrees of engagement and connectedness. However, to an ever-greater extent it has become possible for Alevis to ‘expand’ their imagination to encompass Alevis living in countries different from their own. That is why I argue that Alevi cultural citizenship is not only transnational but also transversal as it cannot be contained within national borders and legal orders and is also defined by a regional identity. I choose to draw on both the concepts of transnational and transversal as they identify different degrees of dispersion across national borders which may apply differently to various Alevi communities. For instance, Alevi citizenship in Germany is likely to be transversal due to the leading role played by the Alevi Federation Germany in establishing and shaping the European Confederation, whereas Alevi cultural citizenship in the Netherlands is likely to be more transnational because of the bi-national links between the Netherlands and Turkey. In a similar manner, the Cem Foundation in the Balkans is likely to have strong regional connections across Greece, Bulgaria, Macedonia and Albania, rather than two-way transnational connections with Turkey, making them more characteristically transversal. Hence, cultural citizenship may take different forms of the transnational and transversal depending on the population and the organisation and connectedness of the community. As Sökefeld (2008a: 227–8) rightly contends:

mobilization for transnational concerns, the imagination of diaspora, and sentiments of community among ‘ordinary’ Alevis cannot simply be taken for granted but need permanent re-creation. Such sentiments and imaginations are constantly invoked and reconstituted in the discourse produced by the agents of the movement.

Nevertheless, we must bear in mind that what constitutes a transnational imaginary is not only discourses about shared identity but also social interactions and connectedness on a transnational scale. In other words, a transnational imaginary is not only culturally constructed but also socially generated, and ‘transnational social and cultural spaces are intricately interwoven’ (228).

It is argued that the growing sense of an Alevi community is a consequence of migration to the diaspora. For instance, Sökefeld says that the Alevi diaspora is able to accommodate the classical understandings of diaspora defined by loss and traumatic experience. He cites the strong sense of community among migrants such as Italian Americans in the USA and Turks in Germany and that such ‘a sense of community is very strong among Alevis in Germany’ (2008a: 219). This argument is valid but incomplete because Alevis in Turkey also have a strong sense of community and therefore whether a strong sense of community stems from migration per se is debatable. With this in mind, we need to carefully distinguish between migrant communities which are a majority in their home country and those which are a minority. Therefore, being a religious minority in Turkey, Alevis already had a strong sense of community and sense of belonging, yet the transnational social space created by Alevi migration to Western Europe has operated as a significant force in Alevi collective identity formation.

This study does not limit itself only to passive forms of citizenship such as voting but focuses on active forms of citizenship, including acts such as campaigning, litigating and advocating for particular rights claims. Nevertheless, it is still useful to look at how Alevis are situated within the Turkish political party landscape and which parties they have supported since Alevi organisations in Turkey and abroad have shaped the so-called Alevi parties. Identifying a particular community with a political party and worldview has essentialist undertones; however, we know that some Alevis widely supported leftist organisations during the 1970s, which must have translated into votes for leftist parties in the following decades. Alevis have also been considered as the ‘guards of secularism’ in Turkey as some have widely supported the Kemalist modernisation project and its secularism. Massicard (2017) rightfully questions the assumption that Alevis have overwhelmingly supported the Kemalist Republican People’s Party. Despite their high support for the party, it is difficult to associate Alevis with a particular Turkish political party. Massicard (2017) questions such an attempt and underlines the lack of data and limited research about the Alevi vote. In addition, Alevi religious leaders and individuals have been members of the Turkish Parliament across different parties since the early years of the Republic (Salman Yıkmış 2014). It should also be noted that Alevi politicians and later an Alevi businessman also established political parties that have not been widely embraced by Alevis themselves (Ata 2007; Ertan 2017).

The relatively liberal political climate following the 1960 constitution led the state to address the inclusion of Alevis. The president of the time, Cemal Gürsel, invited a group of Alevi leaders to meet him, which resulted in the establishment of the Hacı Bektaş associations and a proposal for the Diyanet to have representatives from the Alevi community. The proposal sparked a discourse of hate against Alevis in the Turkish press, which was followed in 1963 by the very first Alevi public manifesto written by a group of undergraduate students (Ata 2007: 49). Yalçınkaya (2020, 92) highlights this moment as the birth of the Alevi movement; more importantly, he argues that the hate discourse circulated in the press later paved the way for the Ortaca massacre in 1966 (also see Ata 2007).⁹  Ertan (2017) says that the Ortaca massacre reinforced the disappointment felt among Alevis and facilitated the emergence of the Unity Party, which was later re-branded as the TUP. The party has been associated with Alevism because it employed Alevi symbols such as the lion, a symbol of the Prophet Ali, and was established by Alevi individuals, members of parliament and dedes (Ata 2007; Ertan 2017). The TUP was not able to appeal to the majority of Alevi voters and has been accused of engaging in divisive politics on the basis of sectarianism and dividing the votes of the leftist parties (Ata 2007). Nevertheless, eight members of parliament from the TUP were elected in 1969 and two other members of parliament joined the party later. But the following elections were disastrous for the party as there were no elected members of parliament and the leading politicians were divided in terms of political differences and opportunistic political moves. The TUP eventually was wound up after the 1980 military coup.

Ertan (2017) says that cultural rights were a key theme for the Democratic Peace Movement, which evolved into an Alevi party, the Democratic Peace Movement Party (DPMP) in 1996. The DPMP was established by an Alevi businessman and was later supported by Alevi organisations in Turkey and Germany because some, such as the German Alevi Federation, found Alevi associations ineffective in getting their cause onto the broader public agenda and were looking for alternatives, such as an Alevi party (Ertan 2017). However, later Alevi organisations in Turkey ceased to support the DPMP and, furthermore, the movement did not receive much support from the broader community. In the meantime, the DPMP was accused of breaching political party law by including the demand to abolish the Diyanet in its programme. The case for closure paved the way for the establishment of the PP by the same politicians, community leaders and members. The DPMP had been critical of the cultural formation of the state, which based itself on Turkishness and Sunniness, and argued that the cultural rights of Kurdish, Alevi and non-Muslim groups must be constitutionally guaranteed (Ertan 2017: 251). The DPMP had proposed a ‘constitutional citizenship’ to address the cultural rights of different ethnic and religious communities (252). Strikingly, as with their predecessor, the TUP, both the DPMP and PP emerged following Alevi persecutions (the Madımak and Gazi massacres), but the PP’s political life was much more short-lived. The party only received 0.25 per cent of the votes in the 1999 election and as a result of this failure dissolved itself, donating all of its financial and material assets to the ministry of education.

According to Ertan (2017: 233), the difficulty of mobilising Alevis around a single party stems from Alevi heterodoxy and the multiple meanings attributed to Alevism. However, as Ertan rightfully argues, Alevis do adhere to a secular political party system and think that Alevi demands can be implemented within other political parties’ programmes. This is significant in understanding Alevi citizenship and challenges the widely held assumption that the Alevi movement is built around identity politics. Alevis demand their rights on the basis of equal citizenship and a secular society which does not require a particularistic political agenda that can be implemented by a single political party. Instead, Alevi political agency emerges as an active form of citizenship where rights claims do not necessitate a political party affiliation and can be contained within the Alevi movement.

At this point, I draw on Isin’s (2008, 2009, 2012, 2013) framework of citizenship as enactment and examine the acts, sites and scale of Alevi cultural citizenship. According to Isin (2009: 383), ‘[c]itizenship is enacted through struggles for rights among various groups in their ongoing process of formation and reformation. Actors, scales and sites of citizenship emerge through these struggles.’ Isin develops four methodological propositions that constitute acts: 1) events; 2) sites; 3) scales; and 4) durations. Unlike actions, which may be routine and ordinary, ‘events are actions that become recognizable (visible, articulable) only when the site, scale and duration of these actions produce a rupture in the given order’ (Isin 2012: 131). In other words, events have power to initiate a change, a rights claim for addressing an injustice. Events take place within sites both as physical and imaginary spaces based on their strategic value for advancing rights claims; thus, they can be temporal and temporary. For instance, in 1994 feminist activists in London campaigned for a memorial to the Madımak massacre to be erected in Hackney and occupied a space in front of Hackney Town Hall until their demands were met (Savaşal 2021). The tent they erected became the site for this event and defined this space as a site of struggle. Isin (2013: 25) contends that ‘[s]cales also stretch and permeate sites’, enabling ‘enactments across borders and boundaries’. Sites and scales are connected and sometimes overlap. In the case of the Madımak memorial, the scale of the event was local as it took place in a particular London borough to demand the placing of a monument in a local place. Nevertheless, despite its local siting, the demand concerned a transnational community and the remembrance of a massacre which took place outside the national borders of the UK. Finally, in relation to duration, Isin (2012: 135) says that the ‘duration of the act cannot be reduced to the moment of performance’; the time required for its subsequent interpretation also constitutes duration. For instance, the duration of an act of litigation to exempt Alevi pupils from compulsory religious culture and morality lessons in Turkey would also include the aftermath of the court decision, how it is implemented by the ministry of education and how parents respond to it by opting their children in or out of the lessons. Similarly, the duration of the Alevi Festival in London is not solely confined to the days of the event; rather, it stretches beyond to include the sustained transnational political connections which are carried beyond the site (see Salman 2020). Drawing on Isin’s theory of citizenship as enactment, Table 1 identifies events, sites and scales of Alevi cultural citizenship.

Alevi rights claims in Turkey do not constitute a ‘coherent’ list of demands because of the different perspectives concerning what Alevism is and the various political agendas and priorities that different Alevi organisations adopt. This fact is often seen as a problem by Alevi organisations, members of the community and even Alevism researchers (see Massicard 2017). Naturally, Alevis do not constitute a homogeneous body, no more than any other ethno-religious group, and their understanding of Alevism differs depending on various factors, such as ethnicity, socio-economic background and political orientation (as discussed in Chapter 1). It can also be argued that Alevis advance and prioritise different rights claims depending on the political context and their different priorities. Nevertheless, it is possible to identify distinct rights claims that are sought by Alevi organisations and made by Alevi individuals through citizenship acts such as litigation. These can be summarised as follows:

During the 1990s, at the peak of the armed conflict between Kurdish guerrillas and the state, Alevi organisations in Turkey issued reports on human rights violations in Alevi villages which were later submitted to the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) (Zırh 2008: 118) and since 2008, in relation to their demands, Alevis have been campaigning for the abolition of compulsory religion lessons in schools in Turkey (Ecevitoğlu and Yalçınkaya 2013). In 2008 and 2009 they organised various demonstrations in Ankara, Istanbul and Izmir in order to make this claim more visible. Alevis organised a Demonstration for Equal Citizenship in 2010 where tens of thousands of Alevis from across Turkey gathered in Ankara (Zırh 2012a). They also initiated various court cases in Turkey and the ECtHR,¹⁵ mainly on the basis of religious discrimination. According to Dressler (2011: 193), Alevis have employed the courts as a major arena for contesting secularist legal discourse in Turkey.¹⁶

Commemorative events are also prominent in the making of Alevi cultural citizenship. With regard to their other demands, Alevis have organised demonstrations and commemorative events to remember the Madımak and Maraş massacres and to keep them on the political agenda as reminders of the oppression of Alevis (Solieau 2017). Alevi festivals (Massicard 2003; Solieau 2005; Salman 2020; Coşan Eke 2021) also play a key role in transversing local and national boundaries, gathering Alevis from different towns, cities and countries, and serving to practise boundary-making. Salman (2020: 115) identifies the two longest-running cultural activities in recent Alevi history as the celebration of Hacı Bektaş-ı Veli (1964), which was reclaimed by the state in 1990s as an official celebration (Massicard 2003; Poyraz 2005; Ertan 2017; Salman 2020), and of Pir Sultan Abdal (1978); both of these activities are named after two symbolic figures in Alevism. Geaves (2003) notes that young Alevis based in London were attending Hacı Bektaş festivals in large numbers in the early 2000s. With the festivals, Alevis gained a great deal of public visibility following decades of secret worship (Sener 1992, cited in Solieau 2005: 101). In this regard, Solieau draws attention to the continuity of rituals. such as performances of the semah, the singing of deyiş, the venerating of saints (particularly in village festivals) and the emergence of new practices such as talks, political debates and presentations. Salman (2020: 119–20) also highlights the role that such events play in creating what Solieau calls ‘continuity’:

Alevi communities have had temporary, transitory and nomadic festivities such as a gathering at a ziyaret for a sacrifice ritual, oblation or a prayer for abundance once or a few times a year. These rituals (known in Turkish as ziyaret, birlik kurbani, adak and bereket duasi) are experienced as both festivals and a form of worship by the rural community (Yıldırım 2018). Mélikoff (2011) cites three festivals celebrated by Anatolian Alevis in January, February and March: Kagant, Hizir and Haftamol.

Bin Yılın Türküsü, which was organised by the Germany Alevi Federation in Cologne in 2000 and later in Istanbul in 2002, where 1,000 people played the bağlama and performed the semah, was a key event for Alevi transnational politics (Sökefeld 2008a; Massicard 2017). Religious rituals, cultural performances and political manifestations are interwoven in Alevi festivals. One can argue that following the Madımak massacre, which is commemorated during the Pir Sultan Abdal Festival, Alevi festivals themselves have become a political statement, a way of stressing the presence of Alevis and their ability to gather as a community, despite previous threats of persecution. For instance, Solieau (2005: 99) mentions that in the year following the Madımak massacre, even though the Pir Sultan Abdal Festival did not take place in the Sivas town centre, it was held in Pir Sultan’s village. Alevi festivals are ways of celebrating and affirming the community while accommodating ‘others’ as spectators of such a public representation (Massicard 2003). Festivals enable face-to-face contact among Alevis of different origin while reinforcing a broader social imaginary beyond local contacts and lineage. Therefore, festivals serve as a space for Alevi identity making as well as being a form of citizenship enactment through commemoration (of massacres) and political debates.

In this chapter, I have demonstrated that Alevis strive for their cultural rights and struggle for recognition as a community in their own right. To put it bluntly, Alevi citizenship is cultural citizenship. However, the way they mediate their rights claims through media as multi-spatial and the way they imagine themselves as part of a broader yet connected community across localities and borders enable us to identify transversal citizenship as a particular form of cultural citizenship. In the following chapter, I turn the focus towards Alevi media and acts of transversal citizenship.