1st Edition
Sufism in Ottoman and Post-Ottoman Europe Entanglements in Past and Present
List of Figures
List of Contributors
1 Entangled Sufism in Ottoman and Post‑Ottoman Europe: An Introduction
Cem Kara, Evelyn Reuter, and Zsófia Turóczy
Part I: Crossing Boundaries
2 The Amalgamation of Two Religious Cultures: The Conceptual and Cultural History of Alevi‑Bektashism
Cem Kara
3 Body of the Shāh: Entangled Portraits in Bektashi and Alevi Religious Space
Edmund Y. Bezem
4 Turkish Sufism as Seen by Western Esotericists in the 20th Century
Thierry Zarcone
5 Post-Ottoman Idealisation and Transspatial Entanglements within German Sufism
Yunus Valerian Hentschel
Part II: Places of Remembrance
6 Places of Remembrance or Remembrance of Places?: Social Memory and the Transformation of the Sufi Lodges in Republican Turkey
Lucía Cirianni Salazar
7 Modifications of a Sacred Place Gül Baba’s Tomb from the 17th Century to Post-Communist Times
Zsòfia Turòczy
8 Entangled Ambiguities: Sarı Saltuk, St George, and the Dragon in Eastern Europe
Sara Kuehn
Part III: Continuation and Disruption of Tradition
9 The Revival of the Mesnevihan in Sarajevo Entanglements of “Urban Sufism”
Zora Hesová
10 Building Sufi Authority: The Pilgrimage of Sheh Ali Çoban in Çaja as a Multi-Layered and Entangled Practice Gianfranco Bria
11 “Communicating the Mystical”?: An Exploratory Case Study on the Imagined Sufi Communities through the Use of Social Media
Evelyn Reuter
Part IV: Conflicting Loyalties
12 From Entanglement to Disentanglement and to Re-Entanglement?: Competitive Interconnections among the Albanian and the Turkish Bektashis in Macedonia
Evelyn Reuter and Viktor Trajanovski
13 Subjective Sacralising: Contradictory Naqshbandi Perspectives on Neo-Ottoman Involvement in Bosnia and Herzegovina
Dejan Aždajić
Name Index
Place, Group and Subject Index
Biography
Cem Kara is a professor of Alevi Theology at the University of Hamburg, Germany. In his award‑winning dissertation (Grenzen überschreitende Derwische, 2019), he examined the transcultural history of the Bektashi order in the long 19th century. His current research focuses on ambiguities and emotions in Alevi textual sources.
Evelyn Reuter is a research fellow in Religious Studies at the University of the Bundeswehr Munich, Germany. She explores religious diversity and governance in Southeast Europe, focusing on Sufis and interreligious contacts. Her monography, Die Mehrdeutigkeit geteilter religiöser Orte (2021), examines shared religious spaces in Macedonia.
Zsófia Turóczy is a university assistant (postdoc) at the University of Graz. She defended her doctoral thesis, “Freemason Networks in Southeast Europe (1886–1920)”, at Leipzig University in 2023. Her fields of interest include literature and cultural history of Southeast Europe, focusing on Albania, Kosovo, Turkey, and Hungary.
