This paper deals with the ambivalent position of Turkish nationalism vis-à-vis the Alevi ethno-religious identity. The Alevi are the largest ethno-religious minority in Turkey. Via a critical pluralist stance, the authors argue that the debates revolving around the origins and nature of the Alevi identity disclose the cultural –and, to a lesser extent, romantic – characteristics of Turkish nationalism and its relative inability to accommodate a fully civic and pluralist notion of national identity. The paper argues that the Alevi question is one of the litmus tests that reveal Turkish nationalism's uneasiness with adopting the idea of an ethno-religiously plural society. Two hegemonic branches of Turkish nationalism conceptualize the Alevi identity through ethno-cultural and religio-cultural lenses. This leads to the Alevi being coded as ‘ambivalent citizens’. This ambivalent status creates a bifurcated yet intertwined process of belonging and non-belonging, authenticity and stigmatization. The paper argues that the unremitting oscillation between the status of ‘genuine self-ness’ and ‘heretical otherness’ discloses the very non-civic and cultural foundations of Turkish nationalism.

This paper aims to focus on the position of the ethno-cultural and religio-cultural nationalist discourses that have constituted the citizenship discourses and practices as full membership in the national community vis-à-vis the Alevi identity in Turkey. It examines the extent to which these discourses fail to adopt a genuinely civic and culturally plural definition of national identity (Young 1989; Kymlicka 1995; Miller 1995). It is argued that the idea of an organically unified Turkish ethno-national or religio-national Gemeinschaft incessantly produces an ambivalent status for Alevi citizens in Turkey. The mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion judge the Alevi on the basis of their symbolic capability to be incorporated into an organically defined nation. By focusing on the status of the Alevi ethno-religious identity, we aim to point out the limitations of the two hegemonic yet rival branches of Turkish nationalism – the ethno-cultural and religio-cultural branches. Their being hegemonic means that historically, these two main currents shaped the official and unofficial discourses and policies as much as they were influenced by them.

The current debates revolving around the status, nature and origin of the Alevi identity, we believe, make this the right time to examine more closely the ethno-cultural and religio-cultural foundations of Turkish nationalism. Focusing on the Alevi identity, which has hitherto been conceptualized through ethnic and/or religious nationalist discourses, we argue that the Alevi have been conceptualized as ambivalent citizens. Although the Alevi are the largest ethno-religious minority in Turkey, due to lack of official census data, their number is unknown, but estimated at between 10 and 15 percent of the total population.

In the first section of this paper, we elaborate theoretically on the concept of ambivalence and the status of ambivalent citizens with reference to the available literature on nationalism and citizenship. The second part of the paper tries to trace the main contours of the Alevi issue historically and the ways in which the Alevi subjects/citizens have been conceptualized during the early Seljuk and Ottoman rule. Albeit historical, this section provides the reader with some analytical tools with which to understand the discursive formation of the Alevi issue. In the third and last section, we discuss the significance of the Alevi identity in drawing the symbolic boundaries between the ethno-cultural and religio-cultural versions of Turkish nationalism in the twentieth century. This part, after pointing out that Turkish nationalism went through a formative bifurcation in the forms of ethno-cultural (secular-Kemalist) and religio-cultural (Turkish-Islamic conservative) nationalism, shows how the Alevi were perceived as ambivalent citizens through complex and intertwined discourses of inclusion and exclusion.

Citizenship refers to the processes of becoming political subjects and being endowed with certain civil, political and social rights. Having said that, citizens are not only political subjects, they are also subject to a political community (Balibar 1991a). Thus, citizenship can be defined as an identity constituted through membership in the political community. As the nation-state becomes the modern form of political community, ‘individuals are socialized in the national citizenship’ (Sassen 2006: 282). Socializing individuals ‘as homo nationalis from cradle to grave’ is the way for a social formation to present itself as a nation (Balibar 1991b: 93). In this sense, nationalism is the answer to the question of collective solidarity and collective identity among the citizens of a territorial population (Habermas 1994; Miller 2000). All the social processes that produce national identity and nationalist ideology also reproduce modern citizenship. Thus, nationalism not only defines who the full members of the community of citizens are, but also who are not.

Brubaker, too, defines citizenship as ‘a legal institution regulating membership in the state, not a set of participatory practices or a set of specifically civic attitudes’ (2001: 51). As the modern state is characterized as both a territorial and a membership organization, Brubaker conceptualizes citizenship as a process of ‘social closure’ (2001: 21), accompanied by a set of strategies of inclusion and exclusion. By way of this definition, Brubaker differentiates between the historically significant models of national membership using the examples of France and Germany. Of these, the French model corresponds to a political, territorial and assimilationist model built on the principle of jus soli, while the German model depends on ethno-cultural, differentialist and dissimilationist strategies built on the principle of jus sanguinis (Brubaker 2001: 123); German citizenship law changed to include the jus soli principle as of 1 January 2000 (Hogwood 2000: 127).

Taking Brubaker's distinction between France and Germany as the historically ideal types of strategies of citizenship as a starting point, in this paper, we will try to further clarify the conception of cultural nationalism. Our paper, though inspired by Brubaker's distinction, tries to show that the German type of nationalism needs to be further elaborated upon and divided into two sub-categories – ethno-cultural and religio-cultural nationalism. The specificity of Turkish nationalism, which appears to become rather vivid through its perception of the Alevi identity, is that it simultaneously comprises both ethno-cultural and religio-cultural nationalism. The term, ‘ethno-cultural’, has rather more specific connotations in our paper than in that of Brubaker. We consider the religio-cultural branch to be a variant of cultural nationalism and one that is capable of taking the form of ethno-cultural nationalism as, in it, ethnicity is transformed from a community of blood to a community of belief. The second issue that our paper emphasizes is that both ethno-cultural and religio-cultural nationalism may adopt assimilationist strategies as in the case of the secular Kemalist nationalism and the conservative Turkish-Islamic nationalism. These points, we believe, need to be further studied in other cases so as to enrich the literature on cultural nationalism (Kohn 1961: 331–332; Meinecke 1970: 11–22; Smith 1986, 1999; Hastings 1997). In sum, by cultural nationalism, we understand a form of nationalism that seeks its origins in the cultural, linguistic, ethnic or religious values of an ethnic group or nation. In this conceptualization, the nation's ethos is not derived from the politics of the present in the sense emphasized by Ernest Renan (1996 [1882]), but rather, from the presumed authentic values of a distant past, be it ethno-linguistic or religious.

In this paper, the notion of ambivalence is of ultimate significance for explaining the Janus face of cultural nationalism as it tries to determine the symbolic coordinates of ideal citizenship. The notion of ambivalence ‘implies a dual symbolic strategy which simultaneously comprises the strategies of refusal and embracing’ (Açıkel 2002: 136). Unlike Brubaker's Germany, the Turkish case suggests that the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion can operate simultaneously, and are not mutually exclusive. The indispensability of the processes of embracing/idealization and refusal/stigmatization is very crucial for our discussion simply because as far as the Alevi citizens are concerned, both branches of Turkish nationalism are assimilationist in the last instance.

Freud elaborates on the term, ‘ambivalence’, to explain complex psychological processes in which mixed feelings of ‘fear’ and ‘respect’ and ‘hate’ and ‘love’ are simultaneously accommodated for the same person or the same object (1959, 1961). Ambivalence implies a dual process that can be given both negative and positive meanings simultaneously without necessarily annihilating the possibility of the other. It is a dual process from which, potentially, both negativity and positivity can be derived. In that sense, ambivalence may lead to ambiguity, but in its technical sense, it is more than ambiguity, vagueness or haziness; it is the coexistence of two fiercely conflicting images. Ambivalence is not about the central or mean position; it is about the irreconcilable extremes. In our discussion on the ambivalent position of the Alevi identity and Alevi citizens, we use the term in the sense that national identity produces ‘intrinsically conflicting strategies’ towards what it considers to be a love or hate object of a nation that is defined in cultural terms. These strategies draw the culturally defined boundaries of national identity. In the case of Turkish nationalism, the discursive status of the Alevi as embraced or ostracized citizens emerges as one of the litmus tests that demarcate the cultural frontiers of citizenship and nationhood. Although the Alevi citizens are far from being the only ethno-religious group in Turkey, the stigma attached to the other such groups by both secular and conservative nationalist discourses needs to be examined separately.

According to Bauman (1991: 1), ambivalence is not only the leading excuse for modern states to classify the fields of meaning in line with what is considered authentically national, but also the ideological means with which the idea of an orderly and structured society is created. Bauman argues that modernity is in constant search of order and desires to escape from cultural ambiguity. Consequently, the criteria of authenticity turn into a systematic quest for the repression of obscurity in the lexicon of nation-states. Similar to Freud's suggestion that repression is one of the ways of resolving a conflict due to ambivalence to protect the individual ego (Freud 1959: 28), Bauman uses the notion of ‘intolerance to difference’ as the consequence of the ‘cultural crusades’ (1991: 104) that the nation-states set out on to keep the authenticity of their collective self. When the emphasis is on organic membership, ambivalence turns out to be what a thus defined modern nation-state aims to eliminate.

Bauman suggests that modernity as conscious of the ambivalent status of Western Jews dooms the Jews to the status of strangers. For modernity and nation-building, the Jew represents the stranger rather than the friend or the enemy (1991: 53). The presence of the stranger is so overwhelming that the cultural nationalist imaginary is invited to tackle it. Nation-building is expected to sweep aside all ethno-cultural ambiguities. According to Bauman, neither the acculturated Jews’ desire to become an assimilated part of the German nation, nor the nation-state's desire to bring the Jews out of their ghettos, will work because Germanhood ‘is not a product of learning’. Nation in the case of Germany is ‘an issue of commonality of fate and blood’ (1991: 121).

For cultural nationalism, the Jew as a metaphor represents the one who belongs to neither the blood community nor the belief community of the nation. The image of the Jew epitomizes the unsurpassable boundary for ethno-cultural nationalists. For them, the Jew, even if converted to Christianity, stands as the strange(r) neighbour, rather than kin or brethren. From the viewpoint of belonging and non-belonging, the Jew represents the universalist and cosmopolitan spirit of modernity, but is still alien to the organic national culture. The Jew is the representative of modern Zivilization, yet less representative of national Kultur.

The specificity of the Alevi identity and its ambivalent status stems from the fact that it is constituted through the intermingling of two sub-identities – religious and ethnic. The Alevi identity functions as an umbrella identity unifying various ethno-linguistic groups under a heterodox and syncretic belief system vis-à-vis the Sunni Muslim identity. As a compound belief system, it articulates a non-orthodox Islamic tradition with the ethnic identities of various Turkish and non-Turkish speaking groups. According to their sub-divisions, the Alevi can be grouped into four different ethno-linguistic groups in Turkey: the Turkish, the Kırmanchi, the Zaza and the Arabic-speaking Alevi communities.1

Generally speaking, the religious differences of the Alevi from the Sunni Muslim majority bear significant connotations as not only are the prayer houses, called the cemevis, religious ceremonies and prayers dramatically different because the deyişes and nefeses are sung with music, but theologically too, the Alevi beliefs hold a strong resemblance to the Shiite version of Islam in which immense emotionality is invested into the personality of the Caliph Ali and his family, the cousin of Prophet Mohammed. The Alevi religious ceremonies are headed by the Dedes, a clergy-like aristocratic stratum, in which titles are passed on hereditarily. Besides its Shiite-inspired theological background, the Alevi rituals, too, are different. For example, the Alevi fast according to the Islamic calendar in the month of Muharram, unlike the Sunni Muslims, who fast in the month of Ramadan. The symbolic content of the ritual of fasting also differs from that of the Sunni version. The Alevi fasting is based on mourning for the grandsons of the Prophet, and the symbolism is about the history of the family of Ali. The Alevi's duty of pilgrimage is fulfilled not in Mecca, but symbolically in the hometowns of the Anatolian Bektaşi dervishes – the town of Hacı Bektaş, the Elmalı Abdal Musa shrine and the village of Pir Sultan Abdal Banaz. The 12 Imams of the Shias are considered holy and their names are given to newborns, along with the names of prominent Bektaşi and Alevi religious figures of the Anatolian Seljuk and Ottoman times.

In addition to these theological characteristics and religious rituals, the social settings of the Alevi prayer houses also differ. Alevi men and women pray together (Melikoff 2006; Şener 2007). Although some Arabic and Persian elements are included in the prayers (Massicard 2007: 111), the most culturally distinctive feature of the Alevi rituals is that the language of the prayers is predominantly Turkish and that the Turkish prayers are also used by the non-Turkish-speaking Kurdish and Zaza communities. But despite a strong resemblance to the Shiite version of Islam, the most important aspect of Alevi theology is that it depends mostly on a syncretism of various Islamic and non-Islamic beliefs. The ongoing debates among the Alevi about whether Alevi beliefs are Islamic or pre-Islamic and whether all Alevi are of Turkish ethnic stock are far from decided. There are diversifying discourses and different self-perceptions among the Alevi communities and intellectuals. When overlapped with the different political stances, the process by which the self-images of the Alevi are constructed becomes even more complicated (Erman and Göker 2000: 99–118). Although more research needs to be done on this issue, interestingly enough, it could be argued that there is less disagreement among the Alevi about what they are not – i.e. conservative Muslims – than what they are. How the various Alevi communities perceive themselves and their culture appears more disputed than how they are perceived by the conservatives and nationalists.

The antecedents of the Alevi question date back to around the thirteenth century, when the nomadic Turkish tribes were first seen in the plateaux of Anatolia (Ocak 2000). During the rule of both the Seljuk and the Ottomans, as the differences between Sunni orthodox and Alevi heterodox Islam overlapped with the tension between the sedentary urban and nomadic peripheral ways of life, the tension began to be represented as a struggle between conformist and rebellious world-views (Öz 1992; Ocak 1998, 2000; Çamuroğlu 2000) as well as orthodox and heterodox interpretations of Islam. Although, initially, the Ottoman state paid remarkable respect to the urban forms of Bektaşi Islam and even allowed the identification of its elite Janissary units with Hacı Bektaşi Veli, who is regarded with great respect by the Alevi-Kızılbaş and Bektaşi communities, the mostly rural Alevi-Kızılbaş communities of Central and Eastern Anatolia continued to be perceived as disloyal. And from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries onwards, they were considered to be a part of the politico-religious wars with the Safavids, the Western European history equivalent of which is the wars between the Catholics and the Protestants. The relations between the Ottomans and the Safavid rulers, especially Shah Ismail, deteriorated as the Safavid state increased its influence among the heterodox and predominantly Turkish population of Anatolia. And this confrontation had a decisive impact on the consolidation of the perception of the Alevi ethno-religious identity as Turcoman but disloyal, and Muslim but heterodox.

In modern times, Ottoman modernization pushed the Alevi-Bektaşi identity to the periphery of the socio-political system due to a combination of reasons. From the nineteenth century onwards, the Naqshbandi-Khalidi branch became an ally of the Ottoman state and thus gradually replaced the Bektaşi identity (Yavuz 1999; Abu-Manneh 2004). This process was, in the collective memory of the Alevi, seen as part of the Sunnification and retribution policies, the zenith of which was reached by Abdul Hamid II's overt favour displayed towards the Naqshbandi Brotherhood. It must be noted that Abdul Hamid II represents the pinnacle of conservative symbolism and religious nationalism. As the late nineteenth century was perceived as a period of struggle between the various Christian missionary groups propagating their religion among the non-Muslim subjects of the empire, most notably among the Armenians, Abdul Hamid II became all the more significant in the imaginary of religious nationalism.

The fact that some Ottoman subjects were approached by Christian missionaries and converted to Christianity might have alerted the Supreme Porte to the risk that some Muslims too could be enticed by this propaganda. That is why it did not take long for Abdul Hamid II to try to convert the Kızılbaş-Alevi population to the orthodox Sunni version of Islam (Deringil 1998: 40; Kieser 2005). In many texts, the Alevi were perceived as a borderline heterodox community, susceptible to foreign influences and whose loyalty was yet to be won. This image did not change even after the rise of Turkish nationalism at the beginning of the twentieth century. What is interesting and probably quite ironical is that from Mahmud II to Abdul Hamid II, despite certain inner tensions, modernization and Sunnification went hand in hand with each other and the Ottoman modernization contributed to the reproduction of Sunni Orthodox Islam, instead of paving the way for the birth of a more secular and tolerant culture.

As can be seen through the Alevi ethno-religious identity and its historical formation, the relations between the Alevi citizens and the Sunni Muslim majority in Turkey bear no similarity to the relations between the nationalists in Germany and the Western Jews as formulated by Bauman. The Turkish case is more complicated and rather reminiscent of the relations between the German Catholics and Protestants with the exception that in the German case, the Catholics and Protestants belonged to the same ethnic group, whereas the Alevi are Kurdish, Zaza and Arabic in origin. Due to this complex interaction of different religious and ethnic identities, the notion of ambivalence is of invaluable use as it allows the disclosing of the intertwined processes of stigmatization and authentication of minority identities.

So far as the strategies of cultural nationalism are concerned, stigmatization and/or authentication strategies are utilized by either ethno-cultural secular nationalism or religio-cultural Islamic nationalism. However, in both cases, the Alevi can be neither totally excluded from nor totally included in the framework of national identity. The irony is that even if the Alevi were totally included into the national identity, the sole criterion would be the one of authenticity – that the Alevi are more authentic Turks than the rest of the Anatolian Muslims, who are descendants of converted autochthonous peoples. Therefore, the dual discourses of authentication/inclusion and stigmatization/exclusion are interlinked as these represent two faces of the same coin, i.e. the cultural variants of Turkish nationalism, even if the political consequences are different. In that sense, the term, ‘ambivalence’, as we perceive it, differs from the type of ambivalence that signifies the Alevi subjects’ self-perception of being modern and/or traditional (Erdemir 2005: 937–951) or how the Alevi relate to modernity (Kieser 2001). It is about the processes of belonging and non-belonging as well as that of authentication and stigmatization through various culturalist forms of nationalist discourses.

Even long before the republican regime was founded, the nationalist Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), which remained in power during the Second Constitutional Period between 1908 and 1918, had felt the need to send some officials to investigate the ethnic composition of the Anatolian population and to show the demographic predominance of Turkish ethnicity vis-à-vis the Christian minorities (Dündar 2002: 894). Baha Said was appointed by the CUP to investigate whether, as alleged, the Anatolian Alevi communities had supported uprisings against the Ottoman Empire. In some cases, the suspicion had gone so far as to ask whether the Alevi were susceptible to being affected by the Christian missionaries. To test this possibility, they were examined by Said through anthropological reports, which were published in the 1920s during the Kemalist period (Birdoğan 1994). Said's investigations, which were expected to prove that the Alevi were authentic Turks, had significant implications as he opened the way for ethnic nationalist historians and scholars to idealize the Alevi as authentic Turcoman tribes who were thought to have arrived from Central Asia. This approach was later adopted by secular ethnic nationalists and many Alevi intellectuals (Şener 2004: 30–35; 2007). Yet, during the same period, Şemsettin Günaltay, a former modernist Islamist who later became a prominent Kemalist figure and then the prime minister between 1949 and 1950, and who left a significant impact on the Turkish intellectual agenda, depicts the Alevi as an untrustworthy heretic group living in ‘ignorance and superstition’ (1916).

As more examples will clearly show below, the Alevi are perceived either as genuine representatives of Turkish ethnicity, who took refuge in the mountains of Anatolia and successfully avoided intermingling with other cultures, or as absolute aliens in terms of national identity, i.e. ignorant and superstitious people, Christian converts and the Armenians. The Turkish-speaking Alevi represented the uncorrupted tribal Kultur vis-à-vis the rotten and cosmopolitan Zivilization of the Ottoman empire (Birdoğan 1994; Gökalp 2004: 32). For secular ethno-cultural nationalism, the Alevi's understanding of the Islamic faith represents a specifically Turkish interpretation of Islam. According to this, the Alevi successfully conserved the spirit of the ancient Central Asian and Anatolian belief systems without necessarily subjugating the Turkish ethos into a universalist religion such as Islam. However, as Massicard points out, the Kemalists never paid attention to the cultural specificity of the Alevi, except their supposedly being ethnically Turkish and remarkably secular. The various demands for the cultural-religious rights of the Alevi were considered to be against the unity of the nation (2007: 130).

Accordingly, in the Republican regime, a new system of Islamic education was introduced to the uneducated masses by the Directorate of Religious Affairs in such a way that not only would abuse of religion be prevented at the hand of Islamist demagogues, but any likely bifurcation within Islamic interpretations and practices would also be precluded (Berkes 1998: 479–485). These measures contributed to the consolidation of the state monopoly. And the more the reproduction of religion became an issue of the state's monopolistic intervention, the less were heterodox religious interpretations of Islam tolerated in the urban space. For that reason, the Kemalist project, even if not deliberately, did contribute to the promotion of the nationalist version of Sunni Islam (Çağaptay 2003: 601–619; Koçak and Öncü 2004: 471). Kemalist secularism meant not only controlling the ‘conservative, backward Islam, but also encouraging a new nationalist, modernized version of Sunni Islam, the “Kemalist Sunni Orthodox version of Islam”’ (Parla and Davison 2008: 64).

It is curious that despite the fact that the Kemalist movement clearly did not align itself with conservative Islamist tradition, risking massive resistance, it did not establish an alliance with the Alevi either. For that reason, the Republican regime not only abolished the Sunni Caliphate in 1924, but also banned all Islamic brotherhoods, Sunni and Alevi alike. With the closure of popular religious centres and shrines – the tekkes and zaviyes – using which both the Sunni and Alevi-Bektaşi brotherhoods contacted the masses, the state gradually gained monopoly over the representation of religion (Berkes 1998; Özdalga 1998: 17–31; Mardin 2005: 96–98).

For the secular nationalists, the Alevi version of Islam was the least Arabized and the least cosmopolitan, and one that kept intact successfully the ancient democratic traditions of the Turks. Therefore, from the viewpoint of ethno-genetic or authentic religious idealization, the Alevi represented the authentic past of the Turks. It is only through such an idealization of authenticity that the Alevi are admitted into the corpus of the national community. In the discourses of the secular ethnic nationalists, the more the Alevi prove themselves to be non-cosmopolitan and pure, the higher the status granted to them. However, for secular nationalists in the 1920s and 1930s, like the intellectual figures, Fuad Köprülü (1966, 1970, 2005), Yusuf Ziya Yörükan (1998), Hilmi Ziya Ülken (1969, 2003), and especially for Hasan Reşit Tankut (1938, 2000), Cemal Bardakçı (1940, 1945) and Baha Said (Birdoǧan 1994), the authentic origins of the Alevi were not a persuasive enough reason to incorporate them into the national community and overlook their good relations with the non-Muslim population of Anatolia (Kieser 2003, 2005).

Nevertheless, in all these studies, the authentic Turkishness of the Alevi was stressed repeatedly and the Alevi were represented as the carriers of authentic pre-Islamic Turkish cultural values. Tankut (1938, 2000), another secular Kemalist nationalist, one of the founders of the Turkish Language Institution, a supporter of the Sun-Language Theory and a deputy of the Republican's People Party (CHP) prepared reports on the Zaza-speaking and Arab-speaking Alevi. Tankut, in his reports, claims that all the Alevi, including these groups, are ethnic Turks in origin. However, he notes two ‘dangerous’ characteristics of the Alevi: First, they consider Sunni Muslims to be their enemies (2000: 39), and second, they accept the Christians, especially the Armenians, as their closest friends (2000: 79). Thus, again, the status of the Alevi is positioned between ‘authentic Turkishness’ and ‘untrustworthy heretics’ in the view of the Kemalist secular nationalists.

Although the Alevi communities had not become a matter of central concern for the Kemalists, unlike the counter-revolutionary pro-Caliphate Islamists, two serious Kurdish-Alevi upheavals in 1919 and 1937–38 revealed that the tension between the Republican centre and the Alevi periphery was far from resolved. For ethno-cultural nationalists, the problem seems to begin just at the moment when the presence of the non-Turkish-speaking Alevi (the Zazas, Kirmanci Kurds and Arab Nusayrians) is noticed. For ethno-cultural nationalists, the only way of admitting these groups into the national imaginary is to claim that they were originally Turkish-speaking Turcoman tribes who, in time, moved away from their tribal cultures and got assimilated into other communities. Interestingly enough, at this point, and in order to substantiate its claims, ethnic Turkish nationalism created the myth of the lost Turkish tribes – lost in the mountains – similar to those of the lost tribes of Israel. Only by getting lost and found again could the Alevi ethnic groups be admitted back into the Turkish organic nation. At this point, we need to underline a peculiarity of Turkish nationalism, a peculiarity not found in Western ethno-cultural nationalisms, particularly in the German case – the incessant denial of the identity of the other so as to increase likeness and thus ease the assimilation of non-identical groups within the dominant identity. The strategy of denial, therefore, is assimilationist in the long run as opposed to the discriminatory strategies of the German ethnic nationalists.

After the liberal Democratic Party came into power in 1950, a conservative nationalist discourse gradually began to supplant the strictly secular ethno-cultural nationalism. Without totally discarding the basic premises on Turkish history and language, the conservative nationalists claimed that Sunni Islam was one of the constitutive components of Turkish national identity. Accordingly, being a Turk was tantamount to being a Sunni Muslim. Thus, the more the conservative nationalist discourse became hegemonic and so redefined the status of the citizens, the more the Alevi identity was stigmatized and Alevi citizens excluded from full membership of the national community. Moreover, from the late 1950s onwards, various elective affinities and convergences evolved between Alevi citizens and secular-leaning political parties, as the initial convergence between the populist centre-right Democratic Party and the Alevi electorate ended (Schüler 2002: 156–158). The reason for this was the gradual identification of the centre-right political parties with the orthodox Sunni tradition. As a result, the more the right wing parties moved towards Islamic populism, the less support they received from the Alevi citizens.

Due to the Alevi's heterodox understanding of Islam, a relatively lasting cooperation was established between them and the secular parties. The Alevi electorate began to be perceived as the stronghold of the secular parties and the natural allies of Kemalism. But to the extent that the Alevi approached the secular parties in search of a refuge, the nationalist-conservative parties stigmatized the community. Thus, one of the constitutive axes of Turkish politics, the Sunni-Alevi axis, became institutionalized gradually. With this development, the Alevi communities, irrespective of their ethno-linguistic origin, perceived the a la Turca style of secularism as a form of protection against the pressures of the Islamic conservatives (Şener 1994: 25–30; İlknur and Şener 1995; Aydın 2005: 225).

Throughout the 1970s, particularly under the religio-nationalist National Front Coalitions, three stereotypes were invented to stigmatize the Alevi communities. These were the three Ks in Turkish: Komünist,Kürt, Kızılbaş (the Communists, the Kurds, the Kızılbaş/Alevi). During this period, the Alevi were seen as the carriers of leftist ideology and atheism as well as the remnants of the heretic fifth column, particularly by the activists of the Nationalist Action Party (MHP). Gradually, the Alevi population became increasingly susceptible to suppression by the far-right nationalists and suffered physical and armed attacks. In the smaller towns, where the Alevi and Sunni communities lived in segregated neighbourhoods, while the paramilitary groups of Turkish right-wing nationalists targeted the Alevi citizens, curiously enough, the security forces proved reluctant and incapable of protecting them. The build-up of tension against the Alevi reached such a level that by the end of the 1970s, sporadic attacks by the far-right nationalists on Alevi communities in the cities of Çorum, Malatya and Kahramanmaraş claimed hundreds of lives (Benhabib 1979: 16). Thousands of Alevi families were forced to leave their homes and resettle in other cities. The identification of the Alevi with disloyalty and left-wing militancy had given the nationalist far-right the excuse to attack the ‘ambivalent other’ of the Turkish nation. The fact that the Alevi gave considerable support to the leftist and socialist parties and that a significant number of the Alevi youth participated in socialist-communist organizations and that these organizations developed strong relations with the Alevi communities (Küçük 2007: 904–917) further contributed to the consolidation of the stigma attached to the Alevi. After a certain point, the association of the left wing militancy with the Alevi youth became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

In the late 1960s, a group of intellectuals gathered together to redesign Turkish nationalism in the form of a ‘Turkish-Islamic Synthesis’ by way of merging the ethno-cultural and religio-cultural elements of nationalism. The Synthesis became the ideological inspiration for the right-wing National Front Coalitions in the 1970s. In the wake of the military junta of 1980–83, the Synthesis was given semi-official status to support the secular Kemalist state discourse (Güvenç et al.1994; Bora and Can 1999; Mert 2002). After the military junta, systematic Sunnification policies aiming at assimilating the Alevi resulted in further alienation of the latter. In the 1990s, the number of religious schools exclusively established to Islamize students along with orthodox Islamic theology reached a record high (Çakır et al. 2004). Conservative right-wing politicians, from Necmettin Erbakan to Süleyman Demirel and Turgut Özal, all in their own way contributed to the consolidation of religio-nationalism at the expense of the marginalization of the Alevi ethno-religious identity.

In the 1980s and 1990s, both the conservative and nationalist parties, far from recognizing the Alevi's religious-cultural rights, stubbornly censored the Alevi identity and, via the Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı), tried to assimilate the Alevi into the Sunni-Islamic beliefs of the majority (Çakır and Bozan 2005: 265–283). The elimination of Alevi ‘hereticism’ and primordial beliefs was expected to boost national unity and religious nationalism. For that reason, in many central Anatolian villages, Alevi communities were given the choice between allowing a mosque to be built or being deprived of basic amenities such as roads, clean water and schools (Bozkurt 2003: 104–114; Çakır and Bozan 2005). In hundreds of Alevi villages, rural communities were exposed to cultural-religious faits accomplis of conservative-nationalist local and central governments. Speeded up by the military coup d'etat in 1980, the Islamization of Turkish society meant that Sunnification became an effective antidote to the ‘anarchist’, ‘communist’ and ‘Kızılbaş/Alevi’ identities.

Most conservative nationalists have held on to the idea that the Alevi are ‘pure Turks’ and some even define the Alevi beliefs as the ‘Turkish version of Sunni Islam’ (Fığlalı 1994: 6). For them, the essence of the Alevi-Bektaşi belief is Islam, Sufism and the authentic Turkish culture (Eröz 1977; Türkdoğan 1995; Sezgin 1996, 2002). The conservative nationalists tolerate the heterodox and syncretic elements of the Alevi beliefs on the condition that they do not contradict Sunni Islam. Beliefs inherited from non-Islamic origins must be either repressed or realigned with the ‘Islamic codes’ (Türkdoğan 1995: 540).

In the discourses of conservative-religious nationalism, the Alevi identity represented merely a heretic deviance from the genuine Islamic orthodox tradition. Historically, religious nationalist parties, besides depriving the Alevi of their own religious-cultural institutions, also tried to impose a definition of what Alevi identity is and should be about (Kısakürek 1994: 162–163, 2005: 77–79; Sezgin 2004: 36–48). Thus, conservative nationalist discourse chose the strategy of denial of any cultural rights to the Alevi. Their policies oscillated between ‘ultimate denial’ and ‘authoritarian stigmatization’, but in both cases, they resisted the idea of a pluralist notion of national identity in which Alevi's ethno-religious identity would be tolerated. Similar to those discourses which perceived the Kurds as ethnic mountain Turks who lost their identity during their long history in the mountains (Yeğen 1999: 126), the religious nationalists implied that the Alevi were in fact ‘mountain Muslims’ who had lost touch with the genuine orthodox Sunni tradition.

The religious nationalists regarded the ‘Mountain Islam’ of the Alevi as corrupt, deviant and heretic and the Alevi, therefore, as unworthy of being included in the national culture unless they were taught the basic tenets of Islam. Due to this perception, the discourse that states that ‘ninety nine percent of Turkey's population is Muslim’ has become a totalistic discourse that is shared by most conservative-nationalist politicians. This discourse places the Alevi within the majority Sunni Muslims without acknowledging any of the former's distinctive features, and this further contributes to the strategy of non-recognition. As in the case of ‘the mountain Turks’ who are regarded as having lost their authentic identity, the Alevi beliefs, too, are portrayed as ‘backward’ from the viewpoint of the process of Islamization. Aldülkadir Sezgin, the former chief inspector of the Directorate of Religious Affairs, the highest constitutionally recognized religious institution in Turkey, claims that all Alevi and Bektaşis are in fact Sunni and Hanafi (2004: 39) and that there is no substantial difference whatsoever ‘between the Sunni and Alevi in terms of belief system and worship patterns’ (1996: 226). Some aspects of Alevi culture, like drinking alcohol or accepting cemevis as prayer houses, result from centuries of ‘ignorance’ or the activities of ‘internal (Marxists-atheists) and external (Jews and Christians) enemies’. According to this conservative version of nationalism, the main characteristic of national culture was given by the Turks’ historical relationship with Sunni Islam, not as an ethnic identity as such, but as an ethnic identity blended with Islam.

The long history of friction between the Ottoman Empire and the Alevi/Kızılbaş tribes suggests that both Turkish state formation and the religious background of the society were shaped by the influence of Sunni Islam and its Hanafi School. For that very reason, religious nationalism does not consider non-Sunni Muslims an organic part of the national identity, but prefers to treat these communities according to what we may call a different version of the Ottoman Millet system, a system of cohabitation in which the superiority of Sunni Islam is admitted by all other religious groups and sects, and social hierarchy decided accordingly. In this hierarchy, 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.

The alienation of Alevi citizens from the conservative-Islamic nationalism reached its highest point after two tragic incidents. In July 1993, an angry crowd organized a march to protest against a cultural festival organized by left-wing and secular intellectuals in the province of Sivas. The organizing committee and the participants of the festival, most of whom were Alevi in origin, were attacked in their hotel by the arsonist Islamist-nationalist mob and 37 people lost their lives. The July 1993 massacre in Sivas damaged interreligious relations and deepened the suspicions between the Alevi communities and the Islamist conservatives. In March 1995, a similar conflict broke out between the police and the Alevi residents of a slum in the Gazi neighbourhood of Istanbul. As a result of indiscriminate firing, 22 people were killed by the police. This incident further contributed to the Alevi citizens’ distrust of the police and right-wing parties.

In the following years, with Turkey's full accession in process, the European Union (EU) got involved in the Alevi question and produced Progress Reports criticizing the government's reluctance to recognize the Alevi's cultural-religious rights. The EU, together with the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), proved influential in the democratizing dynamics in Turkey as they urged the government to halt the rampant discrimination and administrative uncertainties. Criticisms revolved around the status of the cemevis (prayer houses) and the authorities’ refusal to allocate places of worship for the Alevi as well as the compulsory religious education in schools. With the ECtHR's 2007 decision concerning an Alevi father's objection to his daughter being educated in the orthodox Sunni fashion, the question of the Alevi identity gained a new dimension. The Alevi citizens’ objection to compulsory Sunni-style education was found legitimate by the Court (Hürriyet 2007). In the wake of the ECtHR decision, the Danıştay (Council of State) decided that the curriculum of the Religious Culture and Moral Lessons course was against secularism, but the Minister of Education stated that stopping the course would be illegal (Radikal 2008). This was followed by renewed discussions on equal representation of the Alevi religious authorities at the Directorate of Religious Affairs.

In sum, since the early 1990s, the Alevi's demands have brought the various Turkish governments – albeit reluctantly – to the point of recognizing the urgency of the Alevi issue. There is no doubt that the EU accession process and the decision of the ECtHR have contributed positively to this. As a result, in 2010, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government organized a series of workshops and conferences. But these fresh beginnings proved futile and premature, as Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan did not miss the chance to play the anti-Alevi card to regain the support of the conservative-nationalist electorate all through the 2010 Constitutional Referendum process. This further contributed to the Alevi's feelings of being excluded and alienated from the public sphere. New waves of mass protests demanding ‘equal citizenship’ and ‘recognition’ expressed this frustration. Thus, once again, a realistic solution was deferred to an unknown date. Meanwhile, the stigmatized identity of the Alevi continues unrelieved.

Throughout this paper, we have tried to show the close relationship between assimilation strategies and the concept of ambivalence. Paradoxically enough, to the extent that ambivalent citizenship is an obstacle to adopting a civic and pluralist notion of citizenship, it is also an obstacle to turning the Alevi into the absolute other of Turkish nationalism. The constant oscillation of the status of the Alevi citizens between genuine selfness and heretical otherness in that sense is a symptom of lack of recognition, but at the same time, it is also a symptom of lack of total exclusion. Any other ethnic or religious group that does not culturally comply with ‘the criteria of authenticity’ is potentially liable for the status of ambivalent citizenship. As this status is decided on the grounds of being either ethnically Turkish or religiously Sunni Muslim or a blend of both, those who do not comply with these requirements fall beyond the pale of the ‘organic community’. The more an ethnic or a religious community qualifies itself as an organic part of the nation, the more it manages to escape from the stigmatizing tag of cultural nationalism. Ethnic or religious authenticity appears to be the only way of joining the nation as first class citizens. For the rest, the stigma will remain till such time as a pluralist conception of citizenship comes to prevail in Turkish politics.

1.

In our analysis, unlike that of van Bruinessen (2004: 117), we consider the Kırmanchi- and Zaza-speaking Alevi different, yet akin, groups in terms of ethno-linguistic criteria. According to this, there are four ethno-linguistic Alevi communities in Turkey: a) the Turkish-speaking Alevi are concentrated mainly on the Central Anatolia and Mediterranean-Aegean plateaux, i.e. the Turcomans, Tahtacıs and Yörüks, b) the Kırmanchi-speaking Kurdish Alevi in Eastern and South-Eastern Anatolia, and c) the Zaza-speaking Alevi of the Tunceli province. To these three groups, a fourth (d) should be added: the Arabic-speaking Nusayrians of the southern provinces of Antakya, Adana and Mersin (Andrews 1989). However, despite these ethno-linguistic – and, to an extent, ritualistic – differences, the Alevi identity emerges as a unifying ethno-religious identity, cutting across four ethno-linguistic groups, and it thus distinguishes itself from its Sunni-Muslim counterpart.

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Fethi Açikel is an associate professor of political sociology in the Faculty of Political Science at Ankara University. He has published articles in the fields of historical and political sociology, nationalism and Turkish politics.

Kazim Ateş is a PhD candidate in Political Science at Ankara University. His research interests include nationalism, citizenship, human rights and political theory

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