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Baba Rexheb, a Muslim mystic from the Balkans, founded the first Bektashi community in America. This is his life story and the story of his communities: the traditional Bektashi tekke in Albania where he first served, the displaced persons camps to which he escaped after the war, the centuries-old tekke in Cairo where he waited, and the Bektashi community that he founded in Michigan in 1954 and led until his passing in 1995. Baba Rexheb lived through the twentieth century, its wars, disruptions, and dislocations, but still at a profound level was never displaced. Through Bektashi stories, oral histories, and ethnographic experience, Frances Trix recounts the life and times of this modern Suf...
A work of iconic status One of the most important Turkish scholarly works of the twentieth century A guide to sources on the genesis of Turkish culture in the Muslim world A major contribution to the study of the evolution and spread of Islam and Sufism in general Describes the influence of Arabic and especially Persian literature on the rise of Turkish literature
The eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire used to be a multi-ethnic region where Armenians, Kurds, Syriacs, Turks, and Arabs lived together in the same villages and cities. The disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and rise of the nation state violently altered this situation. Nationalist elites intervened in heterogeneous populations they identified as objects of knowledge, management, and change. These often violent processes of state formation destroyed historical regions and emptied multicultural cities, clearing the way for modern nation states. The Making of Modern Turkey highlights how the Young Turk regime, from 1913 to 1950, subjected Eastern Turkey to various forms of nationalist ...
An analysis of Balkan Islam and the formation of one of the largest Muslim communities in the early-modern Ottoman Balkans.
Dealing with the roles of the Bektāshīs in Turkey's recent history, especially in its National Struggle (1918-1923) as well as their situation in late 19th and early 20th centuries Ottoman Empire, this volume is packed with well documented historical information on individuals who belonged or claimed to belong to the Bektāshī milieu, and contains many documents and several pictures hitherto unknown. It also treats the roles of the other Sufi orders in the National Struggle to emphasize its thesis that the Bektāshīs acted not differently during the National Struggle. It sheds lights on many unknown aspects of Turkey's National Struggle and brings new commentaries on Turkey's official policies regarding the Bektāshīs and Alevis.
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Waqfs (pious endowments) long held a crucial place in the political, economic, and social life of the Islamic world. Waqfs were major sources of education, health care, and employment; they shaped the city and contributed to the upkeep of religious edifices. They constituted a major resource, and their status was at stake in repeated struggles to impose competing definitions of legitimacy and community. Closer examination of the diverse legal, institutional, and practical aspects of waqfs in different regions and communities is necessary to a deeper understanding of their dynamism and resilience. This volume, which evolved from papers delivered at the 2005 American University in Cairo Annual History Seminar, offers a meticulous set of studies that fills a gap in our knowledge of waqf and its uses.
Cemal Kafadar offers a much more subtle and complex interpretation of the early Ottoman period than that provided by other historians. His careful analysis of medieval as well as modern historiography from the perspective of a cultural historian demonstrates how ethnic, tribal, linguistic, religious, and political affiliations were all at play in the struggle for power in Anatolia and the Balkans during the late Middle Ages. This highly original look at the rise of the Ottoman empire—the longest-lived political entity in human history—shows the transformation of a tiny frontier enterprise into a centralized imperial state that saw itself as both leader of the world's Muslims and heir to the Eastern Roman Empire.
Based on a thorough examination of buildings, inscriptions, archival documents and hagiographies, this book uncovers the political significance of Bektashi shrines in the Ottoman imperial age. It thus provides a fresh and comprehensive account of the formative process of the Bektashi order, which started out as a network of social groups that took issue with Ottoman imperial policies in the late fifteenth century, was endorsed imperially as part of Bayezid II's (r. 1481-1512) soft power policy, and was kept in check by imperial authorities as the Ottoman approach to the Safavid conflict hardened during the rest of the sixteenth century. This book demonstrates that it was a combination of two...
One of the most famous poets in the history of Turkish literature, Yunus Emre (d. 1320) is well-known as a Sufi saint-poet who has exerted a great influence in both the East and the West. This book is an analysis on Emre's ardent, deceptively simple, yet powerful expressions of love, the musicality of the verse, and the daring and sometimes even daunting imagery. UNESCO celebrated 1991 as the year of Yunus Emre.