History of Culture of the Modern Near and Middle East – serie

This volume examines transmission processes of Alevi religious knowledge and ritual practice in the last decades. It assembles contributions by researchers from Germany, Great Britain, and Turkey. They focus on the question how religious knowledge and ritual practice are constantly (re-)negotiated and (re-)distributed in Alevism and, as a comparison, in Yezidism. These processes are discussed in regard to the conditions of social and cultural change, transnational migration, and globalised communication. In doing so, the contributions to this volume follow different approaches and discuss fundamental methodological issues.

Over the last decades of the 20th century, Alevi identity, religion and culture have gained an increasingly public character in both Turkey and Western Europe. This book analyses the ongoing efforts of negotiating common cultural denominators and shared repertoires of texts, sources, practices, or musemes, which are to represent Alevism across its ethnic, social, political, and regional differences. Bringing together international contributions from a wide range of disciplines, such as Islamic and Religious Studies, Musicology, Anthropology, and Islamic Theology, this book focusses on the processes of negotiating an Alevi ‘Cultural Heritage’ between standardisation and plurality—processes in which Alevis and non-Alevis, politics and scholarship partake.