From Common Religious Media to Materialities of Superstition How Folk Books Conveyed Reverence for Ali and Its Consequences in Turkey

Abstract

This article investigates the changing role of folk books and folklore research in the history of the Turkish nation state from a global perspective through a material approach to secularity, including superstition as a third category to the secular-religious nexus. I propose to conceptualize folk books as 'religious media' and to use them as legitimate sources to trace the fluidity between Alevis and Sunnis in terms of reverence for Ali, as well as to recognize the agency of Alevis and the role of Alevism in folklore research before the rise of identity politics in the 1990s. I argue that such a shift in perspective and methodology enables us to understand how Alevism was excluded from the realm of religion during the early Cold War. It also contributes to the recent critical research on religion and secularism with an alternative history of Turkish modernity in terms of religious transformation.