As Irene Mélikoff reminds her readers, she has been engaged in the study of Bektashism and kindred phenomena for more than a quarter of a century. She therefore intends the book under review to be an authoritative synopsis of her findings (p. xiii). Measured by the expectations this description arouses, her book is disappointing. Uneven in coverage, chaotic in organization, excessively speculative, containing many verbatim repetitions, and by no means free of demonstrable error, the work reads too often like a series of disjointed lecture notes.

To impose coherence on a shiftingly syncretic creed such as Bektashism is admittedly a challenging task. Mélikoff approaches it as an archaeological undertaking, one that involves the excavation of successive layers of influence, borrowing, and adaptation. The deepest layer, she maintains, is “an ancient phenomenon we can describe as an Islamized shamanism” (p. xx), and it is to this that she devotes her first chapter and that she returns on many other occasions. The main defining element of this revised shamanism is the Sufi pīr who replaces the Central Asian thaumaturge and replicates all of his miracles. This equivalence holds true only to a certain degree: while magic flight and transformation into a bird are generally unknown to Sufi hagiography outside the Turkic world, many other miracles attributed first to shamans and later to Bektashis can also be found in Iranian Sufi tradition. They cannot therefore be automatically ascribed to “Islamized shamanism.” Another element of shamanism Mélikoff is intent on discerning in Bektashism is the trance-inducing inhalation of smoke from burning juniper trees (ardıç), evidence for which she claims to find (pp. 85–86) in the Vilâyetnâme. In fact, the juniper tree appears only once in the Vilâyetnâme (ed. Abdülbaki Gölpınarlı [Istanbul, 1990], 25), when it offers to transform itself into a tent to shelter Haji Bektash. As for the episode in which, insensate from the ecstasy of samā

, Haji Bektash throws his cloak into a fire on the top of a mountain, thus giving it the name of Hırkadaǧı, it contains no mention of a juniper fueling the fire, contrary to Mélikoff's assertion (Vilâyetnâme, 36).

At the center of the Islamized shamanism scenario stands Ahmed Yesevî, to whom is attributed an implausibly conscious desire to “assimilate the principles of the new religion to ancestral traditions” (p. 8). Mélikoff accepts the traditional view that Ahmed Yesevî was one of the four khalīfas of Yusuf Hamadani and asserts that the latter “played an important role in the Islamization of the Turks of Khwârazm and Transoxiana” (p. 66). In the context of the work under review, the important question to solve in connection with the Yesevî would surely have been the validity of Bektashi claims to Yesevî ancestry. Mélikoff does not address it in any detail, simply remarking, with respect to the Vilâyetnâme's report that Ahmet Yesevî had dispatched Haji Bektash to Rum, that the latter “very probably was a dervish issuing from the Yeseviye” (p. 95). Identifiable traces of the Yesevî order in Anatolia are, however, minimal; a probable explanation of the anachronistic report in the Vilâyetnâme is that the hagiographic tradition of Bektashism wished to gain for Haji Bektash the prestige accruing from connection to the person of Ahmet Yesevî.

Whatever elements Bektashism may have inherited from an Islamized shamanism, they are fewer and less important than those derived from Ghulāt Shi

ism, the provenance of which the author does not adequately discuss. She suggests at one point that Shi

ism was already present in Anatolia in the 13th and 14th centuries, and that in its “popular” form it then congealed with “Islamized shamanism,” because both forms of religion “appeal to the imagination” (p. 47 ff.) Elsewhere she remarks that the distinction between Sunnism and Shi

ism did not appear in Anatolia until the 16th century (p. 67), and she puts forward as possible sources for the Ghulāt Shi

i aspects of Bektashism the Akhī sodalities (pp. 52, 114) and the Kalenders. Similarly inconsistent is her portrayal of the relationship between Bektashis and Alevis. Early on, the reader is instructed that “Alevism is nothing other than a form of Bektashism” (p. xxi), but elsewhere attention is drawn to the antagonisms and differences of ritual and belief that have existed between the two sects. These can allegedly be explained by the differing destinies of each group: because of settlement in the Balkans the Bektashis lost touch with their tribal origins, while the Alevis of Anatolia were spared such dislocation (pp. 197–98). Bektashism cannot be reduced, however, to a pre-eminently Balkan phenomenon, nor can Alevism be reduced to an exclusively Anatolian one.

Mélikoff gives due importance to the Hurufī component of Bektashism, but aspects of her account are questionable. Her assumption that Fazlallah Astarabadi, the founder of Hurufism, derived his theories from Ibn

Arabi is untenable (p. 118); the latter's

ilm al-ḥurūf has little in common with the teachings of Hurufism. There is no reason to ascribe to Isma

ilism the sevenfold circumambulation of his maqtalgāh by the ḥurūfīs (p. 123); the ceremony was plainly a parody of the rite of ṭawāf that takes place during the hajj. Likewise, the fact that the tekke of Otman Baba at Hasköy (present-day Haskovo) has seven posts hardly justifies the assumption that it was once an outpost of Isma

ilism (p. 124–25). Were the existence of sevenfold objects, entities, or practices to be an automatic sign of Isma

ilism, surely the whole world would be Isma

ili.

Some of Mélikoff's translations in the chapter devoted to Bektashi poetry are contestable. This line from Abdal Musa: Cemî'-ı mushafdan nikabın attı/ Kur'ân yok gördüler Ali'den gayrı is translated as, “Celui qui a rejeté le voile du sens caché du Livre, / Celui qui nous a fait comprendre le Coran, qui est-ce, si ce n'est Ali?” (p. 223). By making

Ali simply a uniquely authoritative interpreter of the inner aspects of the Qur

an, this rendering dilutes the radical and distinctively Bektashi sense of the original—that the very person of

Ali is identical with the Qur

an. Likewise, Sürülüp kasaba gittik/ Kanarayı meskân [should read mesken] ettik is clear and vivid enough. Why not give the obvious meaning, “We were dragged off to the butcher/we made the slaughterhouse our dwelling” instead of “a la voie, nous nous sommes abandonnés/ nous nous sommes résignés au sacrifice”? (p. 232).

The last chapter of the book, “Réactualisation,” is perhaps the most interesting, for it discusses the permutations that Bektashi/Alevi identity has recently undergone as the result of large-scale migration to cities in both Turkey and Europe. Syncretic malleability has become a disadvantage in an age and an environment given to sharply defined ideologies. Mélikoff notes dispassionately attempts made by Kemalists, leftists, and Kurdish nationalists to co-opt these migrants (pp. 263–69), but she is alarmed by the embrace of Twelver Shi

ism made by some Bektashis/Alevis, which “threatens to give rise to an uncontrollable fanaticism” (p. 269). However, the spectacle of an Alevi dede in Germany donning the garb of Santa Claus has her approval, as does the swift integration of Alevi women into the European environment, shown by their wearing of “tight-fitting garments and skirts.” This contrasts with the misery of Sunni women, “held back by an attachment to the traditions of a dogmatic Islam” (pp. 262–63). The Sunni environment in which Bektashism/Alevism has existed over the centuries goes largely unnoticed and unexamined throughout the book, except as a threatening mass of medieval fanatics; this presumably justifies in her eyes the exclusion of Sunnis made by Bektashi/Alevis from the otherwise all-embracing tolerance she attributes to them (pp. 229, 257, 276). The final chapter of her book ends in a crescendo that is both Atatürkist and Gallic: “properly channelled, Alevism can, and indeed must, become an element of progress, a barrier to fundamentalism (intégrisme)…thus helping to ensure loyalty to Atatürk as the symbol of secularity (laïcité) and enlightened nationalism, and the triumph of secularism (laïcisme) over the forces of obscurantism” (pp. 276–77).