Stuck Between Two Empires: Transformation of Religio-Political Structure of Qizilbash Groups in Safavid Iran and Ottoman Empire in 17th and 18th Centuries

The scholarship has been conducted on the Qizilbash communities has mainly focused on their “heterodox” religiosity and their relationship with the sunnization process of the Ottoman Empire, as well as their persecutions due to increasing imperial and centralizing power of the Ottoman and Safavid bureaucratic authorities in sixteenth century. These studies, generally addressed these groups from a one-way perspective, either as repressed subjects tortured by the Ottomans or as nomadic heretic rebels who praised shah against the Ottomans. In addition to these one dimensional approaches, the condition of those communities following the first half of seventeenth century, due to the lack of information from archival sources, has remained far from a scholarly interest. How Qizilbash constituted their internal dynamics, in the context of its waning reciprocal relationship with these two empires has hardly been investigated. To comprehend the political and religious re-formation process of Qizilbash population, it is pivotal to follow the changing and growing informal network of these groups, in the perspective of policy changes within two empires towards its Qizilbash subjects. Therefore, this study intents to examine the process of gradual loss of significance of Qizilbash in Safavid Iran and Ottoman Empire in seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and as a result of this process, the adaptation of these groups to the Bektashi Order by the Ottoman Empire. With a comparative analysis of different centers of power, by using Safavid and Ottoman primary sources, imperial decrees, chronicles, and in particular ijāzet-nāme (authorization certificate) texts given to Qizilbash and Bektashi religious leaders from their central shrines, I argue that Qizilbash, after being weakened by the established Safavid and Ottoman bureaucrats and ulama, stuck between two empires and towards the end of the seventeenth century, changed form, turned into a self-contained, self-sufficient society within the border of Ottoman Empire. While some of those groups sustained their relationships with Safavid shahs via certain lodges in Anatolia and Iraq, others started to revere Haci Bektaş Veli and his descendants as a highest authority, in keeping with their religio-political structure.