Bektashiyya (Bektashi Order)

The Bektashi order is the most heterodox of the major Sufi orders, and its fate was bound to a military institution in a way that eventually destroyed and then relocated it.

Between Sunni and Shia

Looking to the thirteenth-century saint Haji Bektash Veli but organised into its distinctive form by Balim Sultan around 1500, the Bektashis blend Shia veneration of Ali and the Twelve Imams with older Anatolian elements and a notably tolerant, syncretic outlook. They practise a ritual meal and confession, admit women to ceremonies, and do not observe some standard Sunni obligations, which places them well outside the mainstream of Sunni Sufism.

The Janissary tie

The order was institutionally bound to the Janissary corps of the Ottoman army, and that connection proved fatal: when the Janissaries were destroyed in 1826 the Bektashis were suppressed with them, and again in 1925 with the other orders. Its centre later moved to Albania, where it survives as a recognised community closely linked to Alevism. The Bektashi case shows how completely the standing of a Sufi order could depend on its political and military attachments rather than on its doctrine alone.

The Bektashiyya's later history was shaped decisively by an institutional alliance rather than by doctrine alone: the order became closely associated with the Ottoman Janissary corps, the elite infantry recruited largely through the devshirme levy of Christian boys, who adopted Bektashi spiritual affiliation and gave the order a political and military weight far beyond what its own lodges alone would have carried. That alliance made the order's fortunes rise and fall with the Janissaries' own standing, and when Sultan Mahmud II abolished the corps by force in 1826, in the episode Ottoman history calls the Auspicious Incident, the Bektashi order was suppressed alongside it, its lodges closed on the grounds of the same association that had once given it influence.

The order recovered gradually over the following century, only to face a second suppression when Ataturk's republic banned Sufi orders across Turkey in 1925, and it was in the aftermath of that ban that Albania, where Bektashi communities were already well established, became the order's effective centre, with Albanian Bektashism preserving and continuing a tradition whose original heartland in Anatolia and Istanbul had twice been closed down by the state.