Sufism in transition: Bektashism in the late Ottoman and post-Ottoman spaces

You are cordially invited to the upcoming lecture in the Nafi Baba Sufism Talks Series titled 'Sufism in transition: Bektashism in the late Ottoman and post-Ottoman spaces' by Nathalie Clayer. Please find attached the announcement poster.

The talk is scheduled to take place in Nafi Baba Building 103 on October 8, 2024, at 17:00. Additionally, the lecture will be live-streamed via the following link: bit.ly/NafiBaba

ABSTRACT:

The second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century were periods of tremendous political and social changes within the Ottoman lands and the successor states. Within this context, Sufism is sometimes seen as a dying tradition, or an unchanged relic of the past, mainly because of the dominant position of (religious and non-religious) reformist discourses. This talk argues to the contrary that we should look at Sufism and Sufi brotherhoods as transformed and reshaped by the global transformations, and as participating in these transformations. This reshaping process was very much marked by transformations in three areas: governmentality, knowledge, and politics. In this presentation, we will consider in particular the case of Bektashism. For this brotherhood, if, with the end of the Empire, the political contexts led to divergent trajectories in Albania and Turkey (the two main spaces of the Bektashi networks) - a reinforced institutionalization in the first case , a ban in the second - it seems that similar tensions appeared within the Bektashi networks around the issue of authority, because of these changes.

BIO:

Nathalie CLAYER is professor at the EHESS and a senior research fellow at the CNRS-CETOBaC (Paris). Her main research interests are religion, nationalism and state-building process in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman spaces. Her publications include Aux origines du nationalisme albanais (Karthala, 2007), L’autorité religieuse et ses limites en terres d’islam (Brill, 2013), co-edited with Alexandre Papas and Benoît Fliche and more especially on Sufism, Mystiques, Etat et société. Les Halvetis dans l'aire balkanique de la fin du XVe siècle à nos jours (Brill, 1994), “The Bektashi Institutions in Southeastern Europe: Alternative Muslim Official Structures and their Limits”, Die Welt des Islams, 52 (2012), pp. 183-203 and “Sufi Printed Matter and Knowledge About the Bektashi Order in the Late Ottoman Period », in Rachida Chih, Catherine Mayeur-Jaouen and Rüdiger Seesemann (eds.), Sufism, Literary Production, and Printing in the Nineteenth Century (Ergon Verlag, 2015), pp. 351-367.