Ottoman Sufism

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Ottoman Sufism is the institutional mysticism of Anatolia and the lands the Ottoman dynasty ruled — Sufism as it was organized, not as a private practice but as a network of orders, each a tariqa, a “path,” with its own lineage, rule, and lodge. By the empire’s classical centuries the tariqa was less a fringe than a fabric: most adult men held some affiliation, and the lodge stood beside the mosque as a familiar institution of religious life.

The orders trace themselves to founding masters whose tombs became their centers of gravity. The Mevlevis grew up around the teaching of Jalal al-Din Rumi, the thirteenth-century poet of Konya whose Persian Masnavi the order treated almost as a second scripture; it was Rumi’s son and successors who turned a circle of disciples into a structured fellowship, famous for the sama, the turning ceremony that gave the West its phrase “whirling dervishes.” The Bektashis looked back to the semi-legendary Hacı Bektaş Veli, absorbed older Anatolian currents, and became bound — by a tie historians still work to specify — to the Janissary corps, the empire’s slave-soldier infantry. The Khalwatis (Halvetis), named for the khalwa or retreat into solitude, spread so widely through the central provinces that they functioned almost as the established order of the Ottoman heartland. Others ran alongside them: the Naqshbandis, austere and law-minded; the Qadiris; the Rifais.

What the lodges held in common was a shared grammar of practice. A disciple submitted to a living master, received a chain of transmission reaching back through the generations, and undertook dhikr — the disciplined repetition of the divine names — as the engine of the path, whether murmured in stillness or carried, among the Mevlevis, into music and motion. Around this ran the veneration of saints: the evliya, “friends of God,” whose tombs drew pilgrims seeking blessing and intercession, a devotion central to lived piety and, then as now, contested by stricter readings of Islamic law.

The metaphysics most often associated with these circles is the doctrine of the wahdat al-wujud, the “unity of being” elaborated from Ibn al-Arabi, on which all that exists is a self-disclosure of the one divine reality. How far any given lodge held it, and how far popular devotion grasped it at all, varied enormously; the phrase is a scholar’s label for a family of positions more than a creed any order signed. The resemblance such teaching bears to other monisms — the emanative One of the Neoplatonists, the non-dual brahman of the Vedanta — is real and has been traced often, though each was reached by its own road and stated in its own terms.

The institution outlasted the empire only briefly. In 1925 the Turkish Republic closed the lodges and banned the orders by law. The buildings survive as museums, the poetry and music as heritage; what had been the ordinary religious furniture of a civilization was carried out of public life almost overnight. But the rupture was not an ending. The Bektashis moved their world headquarters to Tirana, where it stands today; Alevi-Bektashi communities in Anatolia and the Balkans still keep their own rites; and the Mevlevi sama still turns — in Konya, where public performance was permitted again from 1954, and in lodges revived abroad. What survives is narrower than what was lost: constrained in Turkey, open in Albania and the diaspora, the orders remain lived as well as studied.

→ In the library: Rūmī — The Mesnevī, Book the First (Redhouse, 1881) · Rūmī — Masnavi i Maʿnavi (Whinfield, 1898)

→ Related: Gnosis · Neoplatonism · Emanation