Is he one of those who burned or those others who were burned to death? Ever since I could remember, this was the first question my mum asked me when I had a new boyfriend. She always wanted to learn if this man was a Sunni or an Alevi. My reaction was always the same: “Mum, I don’t care whether he is an Alevi or a Sunni as long as he is a good person.” Even though I come from an Alevi family, I had never identified myself with my religious identity.

With this question, my mum was referring to the Madimak Massacre, which took place in Sivas, Türkiye, on July 2, 1993. On that day, some intellectuals, mostly Alevis, gathered in a hotel for a conference organized by Pir Sultan Abdal Cultural Association (PSAKD), an Alevi organization. Some locals targeted participants of this event on the grounds that they were infidels. They also protested Aziz Nesin, one of the guests of the conference, because of his attempt of translating Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses to Turkish. This novel was not well received by some Muslims because it was accused of ridiculing Islam. After Friday prayers in a mosque, a group of extremist Sunni Muslims marched to this hotel and set it on fire. Thirty-three Alevis, mostly intellectuals and artists, were killed in that mob attack. It is a known fact that this was a state-backed incident and the lawyers of the perpetrators had been actively engaged in politics with the ruling Islamist party AKP (Justice and Development Party) in Türkiye. Unfortunately, it was not the first time Alevis were massacred, and it was not an isolated incident either, but rather, just another attack against them for centuries, both during the Ottoman Empire and its successor, the Turkish Republic. Some recent attacks against Alevis include, but are not limited to, the Maras massacre in 1978 and the Corum massacre in 1980.

The followers of Alevism, Alevis, are a minoritized religious group in Türkiye, a country where the majority of citizens are Sunni Muslims. Alevism is a liberal and an alternative theology when compared with the orthodox interpretations of Sunni Islam. Alevis are known to be secular, peaceful, and respectful of differences in faith. They have always been keen supporters of democracy, and of the modernization process in Türkiye. The religious practices of Alevis are quite different from those of the Sunnis. While Alevis gather in a “Cemevi” (their place of worship), Sunnis worship in a mosque. Unlike Sunni Muslims, Alevis, both women and men, pray in the same room during their rituals. However, Sunni Islam does not allow women and men to worship together. The two groups’ ways of worship are different too. In the case of Alevis, worship includes singing and Samah (a spiritual dance), whereas Sunnis perform Namaz (prayer).

My parents have talked about their Alevi identity all the time. My dad was telling us some stories about his dad, a “dede” (elderly religious leader of an Alevi community) in their village. As an elder, his dad led religious and funeral ceremonies, acted as a judge to resolve day-to-day conflicts between community members, and so on. However, my parents did not practice their religion strictly. Maybe it is because they migrated to Germany when they were young. My father was fifteen years old when he went to Germany as a guest worker. My mum was around twenty-two years old when they got married and she joined him in Germany. Living in an urban setting, mostly with German neighbors, would have distanced them from their traditions, I’m guessing. They returned to Türkiye after staying in Germany for about twenty years. As non-practicing Alevis, they often talked about how Alevis have been systemically oppressed since the Ottoman Empire. I would hear my parents talking about how some of their friends hid their Alevi identities so they would not be discriminated against. My parents never hid their Alevi identity. Indeed, they were proud Alevis. I remember how my mum was persistently ridiculing one of her friend’s comments on her Alevi identity: “Even though you are an Alevi, I still love you.”

The state and some in society have been suspicious of Alevis for decades. Therefore, Alevis had to worship secretly for the fear of being discovered and persecuted by the authorities or fundamentalist Muslim groups until recently. They have been systematically forced to assimilate into Sunni Islam. For example, the Turkish state has built mosques where Alevis were the majority in number. However, being isolated from everyday clashes between Alevis and Sunnis, and growing up in a secular environment, I never had to think about my Alevi identity seriously. If not an Alevi or an assimilated Sunni, who was I? Did I have to choose between being one or the other, I asked myself?

***

The Turkish Republic was founded on the ashes of the Ottoman Empire in 1923. The New Republic claimed a fundamental rupture from the Ottoman past and its Islamic culture. It turned its face to the “West” as the so-called West symbolized “civilization” and “progress.” On the contrary, the East was associated with fundamentalist Islam and backwardness. From a very early age at schools, we were taught that secularity was one of seven principles of the Turkish Republic that differentiated the Turkish Republic (“our” country) from other Muslim countries. With the establishment of the Turkish Republic, the New Republic adopted the Latin alphabet and dropped Arabic. The new dress code, introduced in 1925, made it mandatory to replace traditional headgear with the western hat for men. Women were banned from wearing hijab in public institutions until the election of an Islamist party, AKP, in 2002. Political parties associated with Islam were shut down to keep the secular state intact, usually with the support of the Turkish military.

However, it is not easy to break ties with the past. The identity of Turkish society has been caught between Ottoman/Islamic culture and Western identity. The Turkish Republic has always carried the social and political heritage of the empire. Indeed, the election of AKP with the majority vote, first in 2002, and until now as of 2022, has clearly indicated the Ottoman legacy. Alevis were amongst those who felt most insecure and anxious. The newly elected AKP’s rhetoric of freedom did not calm the feeling of insecurity among most of them.

The Ottoman empire had a very cosmopolitan structure because of its expansionist policies. Although the empire was a caliphate- an Islamic state governed by the Muslim community’s ruler-it gave non-Muslim groups the authority to govern themselves in exchange for being taxed. On the contrary, passionate about Western modernization, especially the French model of nationalism, the Turkish Republic was founded as a unitary secular state. It established the Directorate of Religious Affairs in 1924 to have control over religious groups and prevent their attempts to intervene in secular governance. However, the Turkish Republic, although claiming to be a formally secular state, continued to promote the Sunni interpretation of Islam through a generously funded Directorate.

The Republic emphasized Sunni Muslim Turkish identity as the constitutive element of the nation. Accordingly, it pursued Islamization and Turkification policy to construct an imaginary unitary nation. This policy attempted to assimilate all groups other than Sunni Muslim Turks, including Alevis, Kurds, Jews, Armenians, and other Christian groups. Acts of violence have taken a systemic form of controlling these groups. Indeed, it would not be speculative to suggest that violence is ingrained in the psyche of the people of Türkiye. The history of the Turkish Republic has been marked by the conflict between different groups, including massacres of Alevis, civil war against Kurds, the 1915 mass deportation of Armenians, ongoing harassment of those deemed others such as non-Muslim groups, and the tension between secular and radical Muslims.

Interestingly, in an atmosphere like this, my Alevi identity never stood out until I moved to Canada. My family sent me to a private elementary school in a midsize town, which shielded me from the realities of Türkiye to a certain extent. I had to take a mandatory course on religion built on Sunni Islam; it was a watered-down version of it, though. For instance, as an Alevi student, I was never forced to pray in Arabic, which has always been a big problem for Alevi students. Indeed, our teacher was more like a grandpa telling stories about Islam. But he never told us stories about Alevi Muslims: his stories were always about Sunni Islam. Although Sunni Islam was the major narrative in my school, and where I then lived, people around me always had liberal interpretations of Sunni Islam. They were passionate defenders of the “Westernized” and the secular Turkish Republic.

***

When I got to high school, we moved to Ankara, the capital city of Türkiye, in 1998. This time, I went to a public school. My high school was not the best in Ankara, but it was similar to my elementary school as ideologically it aligned with a secular and modern Türkiye. That was the first time ever that I realized the extent of poverty. I also had friends who self-identified as Kurdish for the first time. I began to understand how some Kurds had suffered at the hands of the Turkish state. My interaction with different ethnic groups crystallized my Turkish identity. At that time, I saw myself as a secular Turkish woman, with an emphasis on my gender. My life was mainly shaped around my gender identity more than anything.

My body defined my everyday challenges when I lived in Türkiye. I knew that when it was dark, the streets were not safe. Like most women in Türkiye, I received comments about my body all the time from total strangers, friends, family members, and even educators. I was ridiculed because of my weight a great deal during this time. When I was in high school, one of our teachers surprised us with baklava (a Turkish dessert). He turned to me and said: “Obviously you have eaten enough, it is okay if you don’t eat.” It was a joke for him to cheer everyone in the class but it was not fun for me. Another time, when we, girls, lined up for our physical education class, our gym teacher commented that other than me everyone was in good shape in front of my peers. When I was at university, after a gathering with friends and professors, one of my professors begged me to go home with him. However, I was so numb from my previous experiences that I did not even think much of it, let alone make a big deal of it. Sexist comments and jokes were so common. When we reacted against them, we were treated as frigid women; singled out, stereotyped as being oppressed and so unable to experience our sexuality freely; or worse still, accused of exaggerating. Men always looked up and down our bodies walking on the street. Overall, it was inevitable that in my self-perception, my gender identity stood out among my multiple identities.

All women’s bodies are controlled in different ways. When I was an undergraduate student, women wearing hijabs were denied access to public institutions, including universities. Some female students would wear wigs to hide their hair. When I ran into them in the washroom, I could not help but stare at them looking into the mirror and fixing their wigs. I always felt sorry for them. However, their eyes always seemed confident. Rather than being victims of the state policies, they were resilient and created ways to acquire a university education.

******

It was the summer of 2002. I went to the United States to spend my summer holiday. Not even a year had passed after the 9/11 attack. Before getting onto the plane, after already passing security checks, I was searched a second time. The airport security stopped me just after the security checkpoint so that they could go through my carry-on luggage in detail. They made me sit and take off my socks. I thought it was odd. Why was it me? It was embarrassing. Everyone passing by looked at me. Back then, I did not have the tools to evaluate my experience. I would have never guessed that I was seen as a threat to the United States of America.

I stayed at my uncle’s apartment in New Orleans. He was travelling back and forth between Washington DC and New Orleans, and I was enjoying staying alone almost all the time. A few days into my American holiday, I began to meet and mingle with new people. Most of them were university students working at my uncle’s restaurant, or they were his customers. After having numerous questions thrown at me, I came to see that they were curious about me and where I came from. It became clear from their questions that Türkiye as a “Middle Eastern” country was an “exotic” place to them: Do you ride camels in Türkiye? Oh wow, you wear miniskirts and shorts, you didn’t buy them from Türkiye, right? You should have bought them from here. Oh wow, do you drink alcohol? Although I did not see myself as a Middle Eastern woman, or Türkiye as a Middle Eastern country, the people who asked these questions certainly did.

There were some Orientalist assumptions about “Middle Eastern” countries and people: We were all suspended in time. Our culture was not open to technological advancements and “modernization”. All Middle Eastern women are oppressed. I came to understand that the Middle East was seen as one homogenous entity. To them, all the countries in the region, and all the people living there were identical. Interestingly, though they had never been there before, they had a lot of ideas about this part of the world, and its inhabitants. Now, I understand better where their information comes from. It is the news, the Hollywood movies, and maybe the educational institutions as well. Indeed, let alone the ideas about the Middle East, even the term “Middle East” was not proposed by its inhabitants. It was first coined by the British and later used by the U.S. and became widespread.

I was shocked by the questions. I lived in my little bubble, and I was not exposed to the outer world so much. I was just out of high school without a critical understanding of politics and cultures. I was very defensive about Türkiye and the Turkish people. As a racialized woman with a colonized mind, I tried to prove the contrary: “We” in Türkiye were very different from other “Muslim” countries. We were a Westernized democratic nation with its secular institutions. I sometimes felt like a diplomat who had to present their country successfully abroad. When I look back, I can see three things. Firstly, their questions reflected an Orientalist approach- a set of European assumptions and knowledge about the Middle East. Secondly, I noted that I had internalized the superiority of Western values, and there was this constant effort in me to prove that we were just like them. We, “secular Turkish people,” waited for an approval from Europeans to be counted as one of them. And finally, I reproduced the dominant discourse about the Middle East by claiming that “we” were so different from “them” (the rest of the Middle Eastern countries).

In response to these loaded questions and assumptions, I continuously told them-I mean my interlocutors- that I had nothing to do with religion. I mean, I was Muslim because it was on my national identity card, acquired automatically upon my birth. However, nobody asked me or my parents if we preferred to have it on my ID card. During these discussions, I resented that the Turkish state imposed this “Muslim” identity upon me. Now, it was white people who imposed a Muslim identity upon me. In my mind, I shouted at them, “Hey, I am a free soul. Can’t you see it? I am a nineteen-year-old woman travelling alone. Why would you think that I am an oppressed woman?”

****

Almost ten years after my U.S. trip, in 2011, I arrived in Canada as an international student. Following three months of homesickness, I went out with some of the Ph.D. students from my department. I had jeans and a simple tee on me. We were out for drinks. One of the Ph.D. students in my cohort, a self-identified Muslim woman, asked me if my parents were upset because I did not wear a hijab. I smiled and said ‘no’ to her. To myself, I said, on the contrary, they would be very upset if I wore a hijab. But I did not get into a potentially controversial discussion. I thought to myself that even a Muslim woman has some assumptions about all women in the Middle East.

After my arrival in Canada, driving from Canada to the United States, I was always made to wait at the border by police officers. While every white person made it across in 5–10 minutes, I always waited at least two and a half hours in a room full of people like myself, i.e., not white. I grew more nervous each time this happened because I knew it was not coincidental. They targeted me because of my Middle Eastern passport. Driving from Canada to the U.S. became a nightmare for me. To this day, I still try to avoid going to the U.S. via car because of the fear of being stopped and questioned. These border police officers have a typical attitude: intimidating, snobby and rude. Subconsciously perhaps, in response to such a treatment, when I see police at border crossings, I feel anxious and nervous.

****

I have learned from these experiences that even if I don’t feel like a Muslim, I am seen as a Muslim. As a member of a minoritized group, I have understood that how I identify myself is less important than how others see me. Tired of explaining myself, I began to play the part. Yes, I am a Muslim woman. My experiences and interactions with people have definitely turned me into a Muslim woman.

If I am a Muslim, what kind of a Muslim woman am I then? I did not have to think about this question previously. Certainly, I am not a Sunni Muslim. I was brought up in an Alevi family. I remember our neighbours fasting and celebrating Ramadan. As a tradition, my friends’ families would buy them new clothes before celebrations. I always asked for new clothes during that time, too. But it was always a “no.” My parents’ explanation for “no” was never about our Alevi identity. It was because I had enough clothes. They would have bought me new clothes if I had needed them. Still, I was very aware that we were different from most people.

To my understanding, being an Alevi is more like a lifestyle rather than a set of religious practices. There are some adages I have consistently heard from my parents growing up. For instance, “watch your hand, tongue and waist.” In other words, don’t steal; don’t gossip and don’t commit adultery. Another adage I heard was that both heaven and hell are earthly. Don’t dream and imagine that heaven and hell are unknown places. We -human beings- are the ones who create a dreamy or an unbearable place on earth.

So here I am, close to my forties, thinking about my Alevi Muslim identity seriously for the very first time.

London, Ontario, Jan. 19th, 2022