1In the course of an Alevi cem ritual, during the phase in which the zakir sings a narrative poem recounting Muhammed’s mythic ascension to the presence of the divine and his subsequent joining in the gathering of the Forty, the singer at one point relates of Muhammed:
Vardı Kırklar makamına
Oturuben oldu sakin
Eğiliben secde kıldı
Eşiğine kıblegâha
|
He reached the place of the Forty
Sitting, he became still
Bending, he performed prostration
To its threshold, to the orientation
|
2At the moment of hearing that Muhammed in the story sits, participants present in the ritual, who have been standing, will themselves physically sit down in their own places; and when hearing that Muhammed bends in prostration, they too will then, as one, actually bend forward, place their hands on the floor in front of them, right over left, and touch their foreheads to their overlapped hands.
3In this scene from the Miraçlama—the Alevi rite narrating the Mi‘raj, Muhammed’s mythic ascension—participants are aurally following the narrative line-by-line as it is sung, while at the same time bodily enacting certain of its events themselves, all together at the same moments. At each such moment, what happens in the narrative happens in the room: Muhammed’s movements and those of participants coincide precisely, mythic event and ritual act becoming one, the past entering the present. Participants themselves also act in unison with each other, their movements coordinated into a single series of collective gestures. And the constituent forms of the rite—poetic narrative, music, bodily movement—likewise advance in concert, as parts of a single whole, carrying all present forward in a common flow. It is ritual performance that allows these convergences to take place, bringing inherited forms into living realization so that they present not just a mythic narrative but the sense of an entire past—a past shaped by centuries of Alevi tradition—made available to those gathered in the here and now.
4How, then, do distinct expressive forms— the poem, the music, the movement—each with its own logic and temporality, work together as a single unified whole in the performance of the Miraçlama? How do certain points within this performance stand out as especially palpable moments of the convergence of mythic event and ritual act? And how does participation in the performance constitute a way of engaging with a past fashioned by Alevi tradition and presented in ritual form?
5The Miraçlama rite is a core component of the cem, the definitive periodic ritual of the Alevi tradition; it can thus be considered a dominant cultural form. By cultural forms I mean patterned, iterable configurations through which discursive and performative practices take shape within a cultural tradition and persist over time—these would include verbal texts, musical compositions, choreographies, rituals, and other works with a repeatable sequential order. Cultural forms share a key property identified by Karin Barber (2007: 2) in her discussion of texts as oral or written utterances “woven together in order to attract attention and to outlast the moment.” Applied to non-verbal cultural forms as well, it is this weaving together—the patterned organization of elements into a series to be followed in a particular order—that gives cultural forms their replicability, durability, and recognizability, even as each realization necessarily differs to some extent from previous ones, and only certain forms come to matter enough to sustain their continuation.
6Cultural forms persist as patterned organizations, but they only become operative when realized in time. To account for this, we can distinguish between a sequence, as a property of form, and a succession, as a property of enactment. By sequence I refer to the ordered relations between elements that constitute a cultural form, according to which one element is meant to follow another. By succession, I refer to the realization of that sequence in actual performance, as the form’s ordered relations play out in time. It is only through the realization of the form in time—the sequence becoming a succession—that we can speak of actual temporal passage; and while the same sequence can thus be realized repeatedly, each succession occurs only once, bound to the specific conditions of its realization. This distinction allows us to describe how cultural forms endure as repeatable patterns while each performance remains unique, different to some extent from all previous ones.
7We can see the dynamics of sequence and succession more clearly if we look at the two prominent types of cultural form at work in the Miraçlama: narrative and ritual. Narrative forms organize reported events into an ordered progression—what Paul Ricoeur (1984) calls emplotment—that exists independently of any particular telling or reading, becoming temporal only in its realization as succession, when it is spoken, sung, or read, allowing the sequence to play out in time. Ritual forms operate according to a similar logic. What Roy Rappaport (1999: 35) terms a liturgical order—“more or less invariant sequences of formal acts and utterances of some duration repeated in specified contexts”—encodes relations of before and after without itself constituting temporal passage; it is only through performance that this order is realized as a succession of events, as ritual actions unfold in time under concrete conditions. In performance, succession is constrained by an inherited sequence, even as each realization remains contingent on its specific circumstances.
8Given the parallel logic through which both narrative and ritual forms organize time as sequence to be realized as succession, it is particularly revealing when the two are combined in a single practice—as they very often are in ritual traditions that enact foundational narratives. In such traditions, narrative and ritual are not merely coordinated but, as McKinnon (2018: 13) argues, genuinely inseparable: in cases like the Christian Mass or the Passover Seder, extracting the narrative would leave the ritual without purpose, while the narrative without its ritual enactment would lack its means of being embodied; the forms combined are like “conjoined twins that share a heart.” The Miraçlama is precisely such a case, and understanding how its narrative and ritual dimensions work together requires attending to the distinct media through which each is realized and the specific temporalities those media bring to the performance.
9Ritual forms are usually enacted through a combination of expressive media, such as language in various forms, sound production including music, and bodily movement including posture, gesture, and dance. Each medium, then, has its own way of organizing temporal movement: language through syntax and sequence, music through rhythm and tempo, bodily movement through timing and pacing. These distinct temporalities then fall into alignment when the sequence is enacted as a succession, and this alignment of temporalities in performance we can refer to as synchronization. The capacity to synchronize develops through repeated enactment within traditions, with the different medial forms coming to work together as a matter of course under conditions of co-presence and within an established setting. In each performance, the distinct temporalities then proceed together as a unified succession, a single coordinated flow that participants can follow together. Within this unified flow, certain moments might stand out as points where features of different media coincide—a verbal cue with a shift in bodily posture, a rhythmic change with a narrative transition—making the alignment of temporalities especially noticeable. It is through these synchronizing moments that the workings of ritual presentation as well become most vivid.
10Rituals are often described in terms of what they mean, what they symbolize, or what they represent, but this way of relating observable action to something beyond—an idea, a value, a past event—leaves unexplored how ritual actually operates through temporal unfolding and sensorial engagement. Approaching ritual instead as a process of presentation shifts attention from interpretation to practice, and from reference to affordance. By presentation I mean the process by which something otherwise absent is made present—present in the sense of being available to the senses of participants, here and now—in the course of performance. Presentation is thus inseparable from enactment: a ritual form presents only when it takes place in time before present participants, when its sequence becomes a succession that can be seen, heard, followed, and engaged with.
11And because ritual presentation takes place through multiple media simultaneously, synchronization lends it a holistic quality: when distinct media are aligned in succession, what is made present is not a mere aggregation of medial inputs but an integrated whole, resembling the multisensory texture of lived experience itself. Participants face a unified field of sights, sounds, and movements, and experience this together in the course of a single, collectively realized enactment, engaging with what its form presents.
- 1 I use the term “historical sense” rather than Rüsen’s “historical consciousness” in order to avoid (...)
12What is presented in ritual performance, then, is what the ritual form bears forward through tradition. Ritual forms are shaped through repeated enactment, and over time they accrete traces of prior practice—patterns of action, orientation, valuation, and relation that have become embedded in their sequential organization. This process can be understood as one of sedimentation, through which ritual discourse, practice, space, and material objects come to bear the accumulated past of their repeated use. This sedimentation of the past is operative in material culture as well, as with William Hanks’s (2017: 14) observation about Maya ritual that “power objects become powerful because they embody a history of ritual time”; the same is true of ritual forms, which carry within their sequences the deposits of countless prior enactments. When such a form is realized through performance, these sedimented traces are in a sense activated as they are made sensorially available to participants in the present. What comes to be presented is a past as it has taken shape within the tradition-bound evolution of the form itself: a mythic world narrated through words, an ethos expressed in modes of comportment, a praxis enacted through coordinated action. In this way, ritual presentation can give rise to a historical sense, one understood along the lines of what Jörn Rüsen (2004) calls a “historical consciousness”—not as knowledge of past events, but as a practical and embodied orientation in which present action is shaped by its relation to a past that continues to matter.1 Such an orientation, as David Carr (2014) emphasizes, need not take the form of historical knowledge at all, but can consist in becoming part of an ongoing history through participation in shared forms of action—a sense not of knowing the past but of belonging to it, of acting within a continuity transcending oneself and outlasting any individual performance. It is such a continuity that the Alevi tradition constitutes.
13Alevi here refers not to a single, uniformly delimited community, nor to a fixed set of doctrines, but to a range of similarly oriented practical and discursive traditions that have taken shape over several centuries through a particular confluence of historical processes. These traditions, found throughout Anatolia and parts of the Balkans and western Asia, share a repertoire of ritual forms, expressive media, and cosmological and mythological frameworks, while differing in their local articulations. The traditions were carried by itinerant singer-poets, Sufi dervishes, and hereditary religious leaders moving among dispersed communities, transmitting ritual and narrative forms through oral instruction and performance, in face-to-face gatherings characterized by the prominent use of poetry and music and the participation of initiated men and women, giving rise to an ethos blending devotion and esotericism. Written texts played a role in the process of transmission, but a limited and uneven one, supplementing rather than displacing the fundamentally performative and relational modes through which Alevi traditions have been lived, enacted, and passed on. Amidst the local variations and the transformations over time persists a recognizable constellation of ritual and expressive forms sustained through ongoing practice.
- 2 For general historiographical orientations on the emergence and historical positioning of Kızılbaş– (...)
- 3 Published editions of Buyruk manuscripts include Taşğın 2013 and Kaplan 2015. An analysis of the Bu (...)
14From a historiographical perspective, the formation of distinct Alevi (Kızılbaş) traditions is situated in the shifting political landscape of Anatolia prior to and during Ottoman hegemony, emerging from Shi‘i-oriented devotional currents and Sufi mystical movements, and from the late fifteenth century into the sixteenth increasingly influenced by the activities of Safavid emissaries. These traditions were significantly affected by the Ottomans’ privileging of Sunni Islamic forms of religious authority, resulting in the marginalization of the non-conforming communities that practiced them.2 In this context, Kızılbaş–Alevi communities took shape largely in rural settings, coming to be organized around hereditary lines of authority (ocak), with ritual leadership exercised by local elders (dede) rather than by state-sanctioned institutions. Written sources associated with these traditions—most notably the manuscript books known as Buyruk3—reflect both Twelver orientations and Sufi-inflected ritual guidelines, though localized transmission has led to considerable textual variation between regions and lineages. Ultimately, what is retrospectively grouped under the label “Alevi” does not originate from a single founding moment or unified movement, but from a historically contingent set of practices, affiliations, and forms of authority that developed in relation to broader political and confessional transformations.
15Emerging from this historically contingent formation are a set of figures and narratives that have come to define the Alevi tradition’s cosmological and mythological dimensions and feature in its rituals. Among these, Ali (ibn Abi Talib)—from whom the Alevi tradition takes its name—holds an elevated position, especially when conceived in metahistorical terms, while Muhammed bears both prophetic and spiritual significance in his own right. In a distinctively Alevi cosmological move, the two are frequently referred to together as the single figure of Muhammed-Ali, and often further combined with Hakk (“the Real”: one of the many names of God) into a three-part relational configuration, rather than being treated as separate figures. Closely associated with this configuration are the holy family of the Ehl-i Beyt, the spiritual authority of the Twelve Imams, and the tragedy of Hüseyin’s martyrdom at Kerbela—all of which have found a central place in Alevi discourse and practice. These figures and narratives are made present in the course of ritual performance when they are named, invoked, narrated, and gestured to, and their significance is consolidated with each iteration. This consolidation is deepened through repeated alignment with sound, movement, and collective attention, so that cosmological history is made present through ritual enactment.
- 4 On the deyiş genre, see Oktay, Özdemir 2025.
16These figures and narratives are activated and transmitted through expressive media central to Alevi ritual life, foremost among them poetry and music in their combined, sung form. Song—most commonly in the lyric form known as deyiş or nefes,4 but also in other specialized genres—integrates verse and music into a unified expressive medium, one in which the phrasing and meter of the words, the melodic contour and rhythmic momentum of the music, and the affect and meanings they together produce are inseparable. This integration gives sung poetry formal properties that make it especially suited to ritual transmission: it is recognizable, memorable, and repeatable, while its performance draws auditors into a shared temporal flow and sensorial atmosphere. When the songs are performed, the bodily orientation and gestures of auditors further extend this expressive field, aligning their presence with music and words so that what is sung is not only heard but lived through. The performance of such songs has come to animate a range of settings, from the highly formal cem ritual, to more informal or semi-formal gatherings known as muhabbet, and, indeed, any time Alevis come together.
17These expressive forms acquire their fullest force when brought into the formal coordination of ritual practice, which provides the temporal, spatial, and cultural conditions for their collective enactment, and thus for the most intense presentation of what they bear. In Alevi tradition, the most encompassing and consequential form of such ritual coordination is the cem, a periodic gathering involving prayers recited by the dede, the performance of several genres of sung poetry, the carrying out of twelve “services” (hizmet) by officiants, and the dancing of semah, along with other vocal and bodily responses by participants. A cem succession follows a structured liturgical order that constitutes a large-scale sequence of ritual acts integrating smaller sequences—such as the Miraçlama—within it as distinct sections or rites, organizing the ritual’s constituent forms into a coordinated whole. There is considerable variation between the liturgical orders maintained by different Alevi communities, reflecting both the tradition’s organization around independent ocak lineages rather than any centralizing religious authority, and the dispersal of communities across often remote regions. Each community maintains its own inherited version of the cem sequence, with differences in the number and ordering of ritual acts and the specific songs and semah dances performed. Yet amidst this variation, certain core elements remain recognizable: the recitation of gülbank prayers by the dede at key transitions, the performance of düvazimam songs commemorating the Twelve Imams, the dancing of semah, and, in many traditions, the performance of the Miraçlama.
- 5 The variation described here is evident both in cems I have personally observed in many different A (...)
- 6 Yavuz 2015 provides an overview of the düvazimam genre, with many examples of poem texts.
18In light of the variation among different local traditions,5 we can focus on a specific published account of the cem as a heuristic model for understanding its general sequencing and where the Miraçlama occurs within it. One particularly clear description is found in Mehmet Yaman’s Alevilikte Cem (2003), written by a dede who draws on both inherited traditional practice and his own experience leading cems in modern urban communities. Before describing each ritual section in detail, Yaman first presents the “Ordering in the Cem” (Cemde Sıralama: 11–12) as a sequence of twenty-three separate steps, beginning with the preparation of ritual equipment and the gathering of the congregation, proceeding through acts of devotion and consecration, building toward the sequence’s central ritual phase, and concluding with the distribution of food and the closing prayers. Throughout this progression, certain verbal forms recur at multiple points to frame and consecrate key ritual acts: gülbank, prayers spoken by the dede at transitions between acts to orient participants and invoke cosmological figures, and düvazimam (or düvaz, for short), the frequently occurring sung poems recounting the Twelve Imams that commemorate the spiritual authority of the lineage while serving to mark acts as ritually significant.6
- 7 This series is listed as steps 15-18 of the full twenty-three (p. 12).
19The central part of Yaman’s liturgical order—what he describes as the “main worship section” (asıl ibadet bölümü)—is the series beginning with the “sealing” (mühürlenme) of the cem through ritual prayers and prostration, continuing with the singing of three düvazimams with prostration, followed by the singing of three rhythmic tevhid songs with participants striking their knees to the beat, and culminating in the performance of the Miraçlama song with bodily gestures and the dancing of the “Semah of the Forty” (Kırklar Semahı).7 The Miraçlama is then followed by the less structurally central “voluntary” (istek) semahs, the singing of Kerbela dirges, and the communal meal before the cem is brought to a close. The placement of the Miraçlama, then, situates it at a moment of heightened ritual intensity, framed by the preparatory phases that have established the conditions for collective participation and followed by phases that extend and resolve the experience.
20Framed in this way, the Miraçlama rite brings narrative, song, gesture, and collective bodily orientation into especially close alignment, synchronizing multiple temporalities in a unified ritual passage. Before examining how this synchronization unfolds in performance, we should first consider what the rite draws upon as it presents an Alevi past: the mythic narrative that provides its foundational content, the poetic forms through which this narrative has been encoded, and the values and orientations these forms bear forward from the Alevi tradition.
21The Miraçlama stands as perhaps the most consequential ritual form within the cem, occupying a central position in the liturgical order and presenting a foundational narrative of the Alevi tradition and of the cem itself. It consists of discrete medial components—a mythic narrative, a poetic text, a musical composition, and prescribed bodily action—that over centuries of transmission have become integrated and now work together as a densely coordinated, repeatable whole. Before turning to the musical and choreographic dimensions that will be addressed in the discussion of performance, we can begin with the myth that serves as the rite’s foundation and the poem through which it begins to take sequential form.
- 8 The articles in Gruber, Colby 2010 describe various mi‘rajnamah narratives and analyze their litera (...)
- 9 The Alevi myth of the Ascension and Gathering is told in many Turkish publications on Alevism. For (...)
22The term miraçlama is the gerund form of a denominal verb based on the word miraç—the Turkish form of the Arabic Mi‘rāj, referring to the Ascension of the Prophet—so it can be translated literally as “Mi‘rājing,” suggesting that participants in this rite are impelled to, in a sense, make their own ascensions. According to Islamic tradition, the Prophet Muhammad was summoned by the angel Gabriel to ascend through the heavens to the presence of God, and, though the Qur’an offers few details regarding this divine encounter, various narratives emerged over time, elaborating the event into a rich mythic tradition, which came to occupy a prominent place in Islamic devotional literature.8 The version of the Miraç that has found a place in Alevi tradition has come to reflect particularly Alevi mythological and cosmological concerns, and has in fact become inextricably fused with another distinctively Alevi myth, that of the Gathering of the Forty (Kırklar Meclisi/Cemi), to form a single two-part narrative. In the combined story, the character of Muhammed, after encountering the divine—usually referred to as Hakk, “the Real”—in the Ascension, immediately comes upon the Gathering and attends it. Versions of this narrative are widely circulated orally among Alevis, were written down in premodern Buyruk manuscripts, and have of course been told in Alevi poetry.9
- 10 Bülent Akın (2020) provides a comprehensive collection of examples of expressions of the theme of t (...)
23In the Alevi version, Muhammed is called by Gabriel to journey to Hakk, though on the way towards the divine meeting he comes across a lion that challenges him and is only subdued when Muhammed places his signet ring in the lion’s mouth. The lion, it is later revealed, is actually Ali, who here serves as a kind of gatekeeper on the way to Hakk, and Muhammed must pass this test in order to proceed. Muhammed does have an encounter with Hakk, and as he is returning home, he happens upon a gathering of the Forty (Kırklar),10 those mostly unnamed mythic saints with Ali as their leader. Muhammed must pass another test, but is eventually allowed into the gathering. Once inside, he learns that the Forty, though many, act as one, and when a grape is crushed and they all drink from the resulting beverage, they all go into ecstasy, and dance the Semah of the Forty (Kırklar Semahı) —Muhammed included. The story thus serves as the founding myth of the cem itself, with its ecstatic ideal expressed in the semah.
- 11 Akın (2020) identifies three miraçlama poems performed in cems in Anatolia, and another one perform (...)
- 12 Amelia Gallagher (2010) shows how the myth appears in this and other poems of Hatayi (Shah Ismail) (...)
- 13 Turkish poetry in this style is generally consistent in its syllabic prosody, so the pattern may ha (...)
- 14 The version of the poem followed here is that printed in Yaman (2003: 61–65). Due to its oral trans (...)
24Several distinct poems have been composed that narrate the Alevi myth of the Ascension and the Gathering of the Forty and are used in different cem traditions;11 the oldest and most widely performed of these is the one beginning Geldi Cebrail çağırdı (“He came, Gabriel, he called”). This poem is attributed to Hatayi—the pen name of the Safavid leader Shah Ismail—a poet with a foundational role in Alevi ritual,12 so it bears his authority. No “original” written version of the poem is known to exist, and it is sung, and written down in cem descriptions, in various versions, with slight differences in some lines and the ordering of some verses, though they all follow essentially the same narrative sequence. The poem consists of around thirty quatrains with short lines of eight or seven syllables.13 The individual lines of the poem are usually single sentences or units of action—“He reached the door of the dergâh,” “The lion then made a move”—though sometimes sentences are spread over two lines; the poem thus has a tight narrative economy, recounting short flashes of action, moments succeeding one another in a pulsating, repeating rhythm. The particular events recounted make up a certain selection from among those available in a fuller version of the myth, with some left out and others referenced only obliquely; this version is nonetheless sufficient to evoke the full myth, details of which would already be known to experienced auditors. The poem presents an extended third-person, past-tense narrative that follows Muhammed as its main character, though other characters’ actions and words are also recounted. Through its selection and rendering of the myth’s events, the poem articulates values and orientations the poet and the Alevi tradition considers significant, and these we can now examine.14
25In this narrative, Muhammed appears not in his role as the authoritative Prophet of Islam but as a seeker, learning through testing the necessity of guidance, discipline, and awareness as he progresses towards the goal of unity. He thus seems to stand for the Alevi seeker on the path to attainment, and, since most auditors of the song in the cem are positioned as spiritual seekers—Alevi disciples are in fact referred to as talib, “seeker”—Muhammed’s journey would serve as a model for their own spiritual journeys. The poem begins with a third-person account of the angel’s arrival: “He came, Gabriel, he called” (Geldi Cebrail çağırdı). Once Gabriel’s arrival is announced, though, the poem shifts to direct address, with the messenger angel speaking to Muhammed in second person: “Hakk summons you to Ascension” (Hakk seni Mirac’a okur)—as though the listening “you” is also being addressed. As Muhammed’s journey begins, Gabriel’s first advice emphasizes the necessity of proper guidance: that he take a master and guide (Bir pir ü rehber tutasın), using technical terms (pir, rehber) that Alevi talibs would recognize from the tradition’s ritual and mystical discourse. With Gabriel serving as his guide, Muhammed proceeds through the Ascension part of the narrative, notably acting in accordance with the proper attitude, rules of comportment, and ritual gestures—what is often referred to in Alevi-Bektashi discourse as edeb erkân—and these are rooted in the self-effacing virtues of humility, submission, and service. We thus hear of Muhammed that “he fell silent” (sükuta vardı) and “He lowered his self to prostration / He rubbed his face to the dust” (Secdeye indirdi özün / Türaplara sürdü yüzün)—just as a ritually proper Alevi talib would be expected to do in similar situations.
- 15 Kaplan 2015: 235–239. This version of the Gathering myth is presented in this context on its own, w (...)
26The values of humility and service are most clearly illustrated in a key scene from the fuller myth, one that is not touched on in the poem but would be well known to most experienced Alevis: that of Muhammed’s admission into the Gathering of the Forty. When Muhammed comes upon the gathering and wishes to enter it, he first announces himself with the bold words “I am the Prophet. Open the door and let us enter.” The Forty, however, reject him, saying, “A prophet won’t fit among us. Go be a prophet to your community.” He tries again with a similar approach, but is again rebuffed. When on his third attempt he instead introduces himself more humbly and in terms of service—“I am the servant of the poor ones” (hâdimu’l-fukarâyım)—he is welcomed in. This scene is included in most longer prose versions of the myth. In one manuscript Buyruk, in fact, the entire Gathering of the Forty narrative is presented as an illustration of the need for service, with that section of the text being introduced with the rhetorical questions “Who is the servant, and how necessary is servanthood?” (hâdim kimdir ve hâdimlik nice gerekdir), and at the end summarized with “Now, it is necessary that the person who is a servant serve from the heart and soul, from the interior of the heart. And he should have acquired equity and justice from his own persuasion (meşreb).”15 Muhammed here serves as a character in a parable teaching the need for humility and service—a scene experienced Alevis would recognize from the fuller tradition even as they hear a poem recited that alludes to it only indirectly—reflecting in Muhammed the attitude and comportment that listeners too should assume.
27Another aspect of the education Muhammed receives in the narrative is related to the figure of Ali. The character of Ali is of course not just the historical Ali ibn Abi Talib, cousin of the historical Muhammed. Who, then, is this Ali? Where does he stand in the cosmos between the seeking self and Hakk? What truths can the self learn from him? These are some of the things Muhammed learns on his mythic journey in the narrative, and auditors of the poem learn during its recitation. As mentioned above, Ali first appears in the narrative in the form of a lion guarding the door of the lodge (dergâh) that Muhammed reaches on his way to Hakk. Though the lion is not explicitly identified as Ali in the story, his identity would occur to most experienced listeners, for whom Ali’s epithet as the Lion of God (Şîr-i Yezdân, Esedullah) is well known. The narrative then confirms this identification through allusion: Muhammed must give the lion his signet ring in order to calm it so that he can pass by; and later, at the end of the story when Muhammed has returned home and the human Ali has come to visit him, Muhammed sees the same ring on Ali’s finger. What emerges from this narrative thread is that Ali stands at the gateway on the road to Hakk, and Muhammed has to pass by him—and surrender the sign of his authority and selfhood to him—to attain unity. This mystical role of Ali is emphasized throughout the Alevi tradition; what the narrative does through the character of Muhammed is to provide a model to Alevis for how they can reach Hakk through Ali.
28Once Muhammed is admitted into the Gathering of the Forty, we find that Ali is in fact the leader of the group of attained saints, but also that the group, though consisting of many, ultimately acts as one. This is demonstrated most vividly in a scene well-known from the fuller version of the myth: explaining to Muhammed that when one of us bleeds, we all bleed, Ali extends his arm and a lancet appears and cuts it; as blood then flows out of Ali, it indeed flows out of all of the Forty. The poem evokes this scene not through direct narration but through poetic dialogue, allowing the fuller myth—already familiar to experienced listeners—to resonate from the compressed verse; an unnamed member of the group declares: “If you strike a lancet to one of us / To one place flows our blood” (Birimize neşter vursan / Bir yere akar kanımız). The ideal of unity runs as a constant theme throughout the narrative, suggesting that what Muhammed learns most importantly is that reaching the goal of unity with Hakk involves becoming one with the community of those who already have attained. When he and Gabriel join together at the start of the Ascension, the poem tells us: “They made two hearts one” (İki gönül bir ettiler). His conversation with Hakk is described as one of “Two hearts, friend to friend” (İki gönül dost dostuna). And indeed the entire Gathering narrative is a lesson in unity, with Muhammed coming to appreciate its value through a case of experiential learning: he is given a single grape and told to share it among all of the Forty; upon Gabriel’s advice, he then crushes the grape, making a beverage that all can drink from. It is when they do all drink that their unity comes to a state of ecstasy, with the semah as its expression. As the poem describes the scene:
Ol şerbetten biri içti
Cümlesi oldu hayran
Mümin müslim üryan büryan
Hep girdiler semaha
|
From that drink drank one of them
All of them became amazed
Believer, Muslim, bare and roasteda
All entered into semah
|
| a. The pairing üryan büryan—literally “naked/bare” and “roasted”—is a formulaic expression in Alevi-Bektashi poetry for the state of one who has been stripped of the ego-self (nefs) and consumed by divine love. The phrase carries connotations of the Sufi annihilation of self (fenâ) that the ecstatic moment in the narrative enacts. |
- 16 The headgear is referred to as imame (turban) in the Buyruk version, and tac (“crown,” dervish head (...)
- 17 Muhabbet, a term used frequently in Alevi discourse, refers to love, in particular the conviviality (...)
29Muhammed has at this point in the narrative achieved awareness and learned discipline, propriety, humility, and service, and joined with the community as one, so he can now release himself into the experience of ecstasy: “And Muhammed became ebullient” (Muhammed de coşa geldi). He loses himself to such an extent that his turban16 falls from his head, whereupon they cut it into forty pieces and each tie a strip around their waists. It is at this point that the Gathering narrative ends, with the lines: “And love became the victor / The way-and-rites took its place” (Muhabbet de galip oldu / Yol erkân yerin aldı).17
30The Hatayi Miraçlama poem thus presents a narrative in which Muhammed serves as a model for the spiritual wayfarer, learning the proper attitude, comportment, and ritual gestures through which he attains union with those already in communion and with Hakk—a union experienced in a moment of ecstasy. Through its aesthetic rendering of the Ascension and Gathering myth—drawing on a fuller narrative tradition familiar to most Alevis, deploying shifts in voice, oblique allusion, and affectively charged imagery—the poem brings the story to life as a compressed, rhythmically driven recitation that articulates the values and orientations defining the Alevi way. As a cultural form, the poem encodes this narrative as a verbal sequence that can be remembered, recorded, and repeatedly realized on unique occasions. Its resonance led to its continual transmission over the centuries, during which its recitation became coupled with musical compositions and gained a prime place in the liturgical order of the cem, where in ritual performance it came to elicit a set of coordinated bodily responses from participants. The alignment of these elements into a multimedial whole creates the conditions for participants to move through the narrative not merely as listeners but also as actors, following Muhammed bodily through Ali and the Forty to union with Hakk. It is to this realization of the Miraçlama in practice—the tradition of transforming its inherited sequences into lived succession—that we now turn.
31The appointed time has come, the ritually designed space has been prepared, and participants have taken their places. The dede presides from his designated position marked by a sheepskin; the zakir—the singer-musician—sits nearby, ready to perform the ritual’s sung portions; and talibs sit along the walls of the room oriented toward the center, knowing when to stand, when to prostrate, and what responsive gestures and utterances to make. The cem sequence now begins to unfold as a succession of events in real time.
32By the time the liturgical order reaches the culminating point of its central section, the preliminary acts have been completed, the ritual space has been sealed through prayers and prostration, and the three düvazimams and three tevhids have been sung along with the appropriate participatory gestures; the stage is now set for the ritual’s most intense phase. At this point the zakir, accompanying himself on the saz (bağlama), the long-necked stringed instrument central to Alevi musical practice, begins to sing the Miraçlama poem, delivering its compact lines one after another. This sets in motion the distinct temporalities of poetic narration, musical structure, and bodily choreography, united as a single, coordinated succession of words, sounds, and actions.
- 18 Multiple musical compositions are used to accompany the Miraçlama poem in different Alevi tradition (...)
33The musical composition drives the performance forward through the continuous repetition of a brief rhythmic pattern—such as the single 10/8 measure (3+3+2+2) common in many performance traditions—creating a pulsating momentum that draws participants in.18 This pattern repeats with each line of verse throughout most of the recitation, with shifts at key moments to signal significant narrative actions. The short, eight-syllable lines of the poem are delivered in compact units that align closely with these similarly brief musical phrases. This tight coordination between sung lines and musical phrases serves to channel attention and bodily orientation.
34Alongside the rhythmic coordination, the poem articulates the myth as a succession of discrete narrative moments—“He placed a single grape,” “His headgear fell from his head”—each line a single piece of action advancing the story one step at a time, so that narrative content, poetic form, and musical phrasing all proceed in equally brief, coordinated units. This patterning exemplifies a remarkable phenomenon identified in cross-cultural studies of poetic performance: the pulsating repetition of temporally bounded units of roughly two to four seconds, within which rhythmic, semantic, and syntactic closure coincide (Turner, Pöppel 1983).
35Threading through the continuous musical drive and progressive verbal narration, the bodily choreography operates through a different temporality: intermittent and punctuating, it marks only select moments in the narrative with gestural responses, leaving extended intervals of stillness between significant collective motions. The moments of gestural response are coordinated with shifts in the musical pattern—changes in rhythm or quickening of tempo—that signal when participants will act. It is at such moments that the narrative’s account of Muhammed’s actions coincides precisely with participants’ bodily enactment of those same actions, and that the distinct medial temporalities become most palpably aligned.
- 19 The historical figures these positions are named after, Mansur al-Hallaj and Seyyid Imadeddin Nesim (...)
36That these synchronizing moments are deliberately prescribed and ritually significant is shown by the fact that published liturgical descriptions of the cem often indicate specifically which gestures are to be performed at which points in the poem’s recitation. The description in dede Hüseyin Dedekargınoğlu’s account of the cem performed in his own Dede Garkın ocak (2010, 226), for example, footnotes the text of the poem with instructions on the gestures to be made at particular poetic lines. When the zakir sings of Muhammed Secdeye indirdi yüzün (He lowered his face to prostration), all present are to make prostration on the floor in front of them and then straighten up. When the line Muhammed ayağa kalktı (Muhammed rose to his feet) is heard, participants are to rise to their own feet and stand in the position known as dar-ı Mansur (“gallows of Mansur”), with head bent slightly forward. When the narrative says of Muhammed Oturub oldu sakin (Sitting, he became still), all accordingly sit on their knees in the position known as dar-ı Nesimi (“gallows of Nesimi”).19
- 20 Langer (2020) offers a complementary perspective on Alevi ritual from the angle of bodily-and-mater (...)
37What occurs at each of these moments in performance is a precise temporal conjunction: the instant the narrated action is voiced, participants perform that action with their own bodies. The coordination is immediate, because an embodied habit, and collective, because a communal tradition—there is no gap between hearing and doing, and all present move together as one.20 With the performance of these gestures, participants are not merely witnessing Muhammed’s ritual comportment narratively but actually carrying it out themselves, bodily performing the proper attitude of humility and submission that the narrative presents as the path to spiritual attainment, and doing so concurrently with the mythic Muhammed and collectively with the ritual community. The synchronization of poetic narrative, musical phrasing, and bodily movement thus creates moments in which participants can sense the mythic past and the ritual present in convergence, making what Muhammed did in the narrative into what participants are doing in the rite.
- 21 For forms of the Kırklar Semahı in various traditions, see Onatça 2007. Other comprehensive overvie (...)
38The synchronization of narrative, music, and bodily action reaches its most intense expression when the rite transitions into its ecstatic phase. As the zakir continues through the poem, recounting Muhammed’s entry into the Gathering of the Forty and his learning of the ideal of unity, the narrative approaches its climactic moment: the crushing of the single grape into a beverage that all of the Forty drink, sending them into a state of ecstasy. At this point in the recitation, the musical composition undergoes a dramatic shift: the pulsating 10/8 pattern that has driven the narrative forward suddenly gives way to an 8/8 rhythm at a faster tempo that signals the entry into the rite’s most intense phase. As the zakir at this point sings the lines Ol şerbetten biri içti / Cümlesi oldu hayran (From that drink drank one of them / All of them became amazed), designated participants immediately rise from their seated positions, come to the center, and begin to dance the Semah of the Forty (Kırklar Semahı), following one another in a rapid revolving circle.21 The shift in musical tempo, the transition from stillness to movement, and the entry into structured ecstatic dance all occur together in a single moment.
39Those who rise to dance are now not only hearing the music and following the narrative, but have at the same time become the ritual subjects of the mythic moment itself. The dancer hears and feels the music’s tone, rhythm, and drive—the same sonic qualities that shape the Forty’s ecstatic dance in the mythic gathering—while simultaneously dancing out the semah as the ritual expression of that ecstasy. Just as the mythic gathering shifted from discourse to dance at the unifying moment of sharing the intoxicating beverage, so too the ritual gathering shifts from recitation of a story with intermittent gestures to full bodily immersion at the narration of the same moment. The semah as performed is thus not a representation of the Forty’s dance but its realization in the ritual present—the dancers become the Forty, performing with their own bodies what Muhammed and the saints perform in the mythic gathering. Those present who do not perform the semah participate nonetheless through their attention and bodily presence, witnessing the myth-become-real and orienting themselves to it as part of the collective ritual experience.
- 22 This gülbank is included in Yaman 2003: 65.
40When the dance eventually concludes and the music slows to stillness, the dede recites a gülbank that closes the rite and consecrates what has just occurred, beseeching: “May our semahs be the Semah of the Forty” (Semahlarımız Kırklar Semahı ola).22 This prayer makes explicit what the rite has realized: that in performance the ritual dance and the mythic dance become one, with those present in the ritual becoming participants in the Gathering of the Forty. In this way, the past presented in the poem is made present through synchronized enactment.
41What the synchronized performance presents in the process is, most immediately, the foundational narrative of the cem and also of the Alevi tradition: the story of Muhammed’s journey, his encounter with Hakk through Ali, and his joining with the Forty. But the rite presents more than a story: embedded within the narrative are the values, ideals, modes of proper comportment, and ritual ethos—the edeb erkân—that the Alevi tradition holds as exemplary. With the figure of Muhammed, who moves through the narrative as a seeker learning humility, service, and unity, the rite presents a model for the ideal Alevi wayfarer. The mythic narrative and the ethical and spiritual world surrounding it—the path to Hakk through Ali, the attainment of ecstatic unity in community—then constitute an idealized and specifically Alevi past that the performance equally makes present through enactment.
42Participation in a performance of the Miraçlama rite becomes part of participants’ lived experience—not a lesson learned but an event lived through. With repeated participation over time, this experience accumulates, leaving participants with a sense that all this has been done before, that they are taking part in something larger and older than themselves. This sense of the past is rooted in the form itself, which bears the traces of countless prior enactments, the sedimentation of a tradition that has been repeatedly realized, adjusted, and transmitted over the centuries. Each time participants move through the rite’s sequence, turning it into a coordinated succession, they activate this sedimented past, making it available sensorially as a practical orientation toward what it means to be Alevi. They are at the same time the agents through which the tradition continues—the living present of a past that persists as practice.
43The performance of the Miraçlama, as we have seen, brings together poetic narrative, musical composition, bodily choreography, and liturgical order into a unified succession of events, aligning their distinct temporalities into a single ritual flow. But the tradition that bears this form and practice has itself unfolded in time, encountering new historical contexts, incorporating new generations of participants, and finding new expressive media as it has moved through historical time. How, then, does a tradition continue to synchronize? How can it maintain the alignment of its inherited sequences in the face of the ever-changing conditions of their realization? And how might the past it presents—itself continually accumulating—remain available to those for whom it continues to matter? One way to approach these questions is through what we might call re-synchronization: the process by which a tradition realigns its inherited cultural forms to the conditions of new historical moments while preserving the capacity to present what it bears in a recognizable form. As the Miraçlama rite has moved through historical time, its constituent forms have been reshaped, re-embedded, and re-synchronized to new medial and sociocultural conditions—a process that can be traced through the Alevi tradition’s own history.
- 23 Some indications of the evolution of the cem can, though, be gleaned from sources such as the Buyru (...)
44The historical depth of the Alevi tradition, and the obscurity of much of its history, makes such a tracing necessarily selective and partial. The cem and its constituent forms have certainly continued over several centuries, with roots reaching back at least to the early 16th century—the time of Hatayi/Shah Ismail, the purported author of Geldi Cebrail çağırdı—repeatedly performed in rural settings through periods of marginalization under Ottoman rule. While we know from Ottoman sources of the social and legal position Kızılbaş–Alevi communities held through this period, documentary evidence for the internal evolution of their ritual and expressive forms is sparse.23 The dispersed, marginalized position of these communities, and their limited reliance on written transmission, would lead us to expect considerable flexibility and variation in their ritual traditions. The nineteenth century brings this history into somewhat sharper focus, as increased literacy, print technology, political transformation, and shifting relations among Alevi and Bektashi groupings made interventions in the tradition more visible and traceable. It is in this context that Feyzullah Çelebi (1811–1878), a leader of the Çelebi Bektashi lineage and an accomplished poet, composed a new verse work to serve as the narrative component of the Miraçlama rite.
45Like Hatayi's Geldi Cebrail çağırdı, Feyzullah’s poem—signed with his pen name Feyzi—recounts the myth of the Ascension followed by that of the Gathering of the Forty, in a series of compact quatrains of eight syllables per line; its opening line even closely echoes that of the earlier work: Miraç okudu Cebrail (“Gabriel summoned ascension”). Yet the narrative that Feyzullah’s poem presents reflects different selections from the mythic reservoir, highlighting different narrative moments and emphasizing different themes. Where Hatayi’s version lingers on Muhammed’s lessons in humility and the ideal of unity in the Gathering, Feyzullah’s gives far greater weight to the Ascension itself, bringing in learned details not present in the earlier poem—including Muhammed’s mythical mount Burak, and his ascending to the Sidretü’l-Münteha, the tree at the boundary of the heavens—while devoting only three quatrains to the Gathering and saying little about the tests Muhammed must pass to enter it. Structurally, the newer poem maintains the narrative shift into ecstasy at the point when the Forty drink the intoxicating beverage and “fall into the rapture of love” (Cezbe-i aşka düştüler). But while the Hatayi poem relates their then “going into semah,” Feyzullah’s version seems to be more genre-conscious, noting “They did the Semah of the Forty” (Ettiler Kırklar Semahı); the ritual configuration has by his time become established enough to be named as such. Immediately following this moment, the poem shifts into a condensed düvazimam section, naming all twelve of the imams in only two quatrains before closing with a self-humbling verse signed Gedâ (“Beggar”) Feyzi. Feyzullah's poem also differs in the stability of its transmission: likely written down close to the time of its composition, it shows little subsequent variation among the versions that have come down to us, in contrast to the extensive variation of the older Hatayi poem which circulated much more fluidly through oral transmission. What we see in Feyzullah’s Miraçlama, then, is re-synchronization at the level of poetic narrative: a new selection of mythic details, new emphases, and new modes of transmission, while preserving the structural design that allows the poem to coordinate with music, bodily action, and liturgical sequence, most noticeably at the moment of falling into ecstasy.
- 24 A separate Miraçlama poem written by Feyzullah’s uncle Mehmed Hamdullah Çelebi (1767–1836) is perfo (...)
- 25 I have observed performances of this cem in Kısas and in the nearby village of Akpınar, where the m (...)
46Feyzullah Çelebi’s Miraçlama poem found its own liturgical embedding in the cem tradition of Kısas, a Çelebi Bektashi community in the province of Urfa, where it occupies a prominent position in the ritual sequence, framed by gülbanks and düvazimams and culminating in semah.24 The Kısas cem liturgical order has been documented by Halil Atılgan and Mehmet Acet (2001), indicating that by the time their ethnographic account was recorded, the liturgical order had become stable and widely recognized within the community; though we cannot trace its earlier history with certainty, it cannot have predated the time of Feyzullah (mid-nineteenth century) in its present poetic form. One thing the modern account does make clear, though, is the coordination of media in performance: the poem is sung to a repeating musical phrase, participants perform the prescribed gestures at the moments when Muhammed sits, stands, and prostrates in the narrative, and at the point when the myth shifts into ecstasy, the music accelerates and designated participants rise to dance the semah. Notably, this account includes full notation for the musical compositions in the liturgical order, and, like other modern books about cem traditions, notes the points in the sequence when specific bodily gestures are to be made.25 Here, then, is re-synchronization at the scale of the full ritual configuration: a nineteenth-century poem, embedded in a localized liturgical order, coordinated with musical patterns traditional to the region, bodily punctuated by a widely shared choreography, and transmitted as a recognizable whole within a specific community of practice.
- 26 Dertli Divani’s role as a transmitter of the Kısas ritual tradition was formally recognized when he (...)
- 27 The spelling “Mihraçlama” reflects a variant pronunciation found in some Alevi communities.
47If the Kısas ritual tradition exemplifies re-synchronization within relatively stable rural community settings, the modern period has brought far more dramatic changes to the conditions under which the tradition continues. The migration of once-rural Alevi families to the cities of Turkey and to Europe, the dissolution of the close-knit village communities organized around ocak lineages, the spread of literacy and secular education, and the emergence of new media technologies—cassette tapes, CDs, digital platforms—have all created new circumstances to which the tradition has had to adapt. It is figures like Dertli Divani, then, who have taken on the work of carrying the tradition forward amid these transformed conditions. An aşık (poet-singer-musician), recording artist, and ritual officiant among Çelebi Bektashis, Divani (b. 1962) is a product of the Kısas tradition who has also become one of its most effective transmitters beyond its original setting.26 His recordings have brought elements of his local liturgical order into wide circulation: his first album, Divane Gönül (1989), featured a multi-section work titled “Urfa Semahı” drawn from the local cem tradition, and this soon became one of the most recognizable semah pieces in the modern Alevi repertoire, performed by youth semah groups far from Urfa. A later album, Düvaz İmam (1995), opens with a düvazimam song and then presents a suite titled “Mihraçlama/Semah/Tevhid,”27 which condenses key elements of the Kısas liturgical order—Feyzullah’s Miraçlama, the semah section, and a tevhid by Hüseyin Fevzi Çelebi (1886–1928)—into a single continuous piece.
48The recording of this suite, widely available on digital platforms, constitutes a re-synchronized cultural form. It arranges traditional ritual temporalities—narrative progression, musical phrasing and rhythms, the moment of ecstatic shift—into a repeatable sequence, but unlike the traditional ritual performance, here the succession itself is frozen and repeatable. It was performed once, and now gains its historical continuity not by being enacted, but by being played. Each time it plays, it unfolds in exactly the same way, and it always lasts nine minutes. The myth is poetically narrated, continuing to bear its values and ideals, as the music drives it along, with the ecstatic moment arriving at the same point. What the recording cannot capture, though, are the physical space, the co-presence of participants, the bodily enactment, and the full ritual framing that accompany an actual ritual performance. Auditors can still follow the narrative, be drawn into the aesthetic experience, and learn the proper Alevi comportment on the way to spiritual attainment, but they do so through individual aural-aesthetic immersion rather than communal participation. Here too, the tradition finds a way to present itself anew.
49The progression traced here—from Feyzullah Çelebi’s nineteenth-century poetic revising to the Kısas liturgical embedding to Dertli Divani’s recording—shows that synchronization operates not only between medial progressions within a cultural form, but also as the form itself negotiates its way through time. Each historical moment brings its own unique conditions to bear on the momentum of continuing practices, and the interaction of these forces leads to re-synchronization, resulting in new alignments of sequences and their successions, performed by a new cohort of participants arranged in new sociocultural configurations with a new set of tools at their disposal. Through this continual process of re-alignment, the Miraçlama tradition has, by means of the available media, maintained its capacity to present an Alevi past, to bear forward the values, ideals, and ethos the tradition has come to hold worthy of retention, still potentially leaving listeners with the sense that they are part of a historical continuum.
50And yet that past is constantly accumulating layers of sediment, and it is the full accretion that is presented each time. This makes those who engage with these forms, who identify with the Alevi tradition, the inheritors, conservators, and perpetuators of the Alevi tradition in their own moments. As the closing lines of the tevhid of Dertli Divani’s Kısas Miraçlama suite remind us:
Konan göçtü bu haneden
Şimdi sıra bize geldi
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Those who settled moved on from this house
Now the turn has come for us
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Hüüü...
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