Alevism as Islam: rethinking Shahab Ahmed’s conceptualization of Islam through Alevi poetry

Shahab Ahmed’s What is Islam?: The Importance of Being Islamic, published in 2016, has significantly impacted discussions on the definition of Islam. This article focuses on Ahmed’s reconceptualization of Islam as ‘hermeneutical engagement with Pre-Text, Text, and Con-Text of Revelation to Muḥammad’. As an Islamic tradition which greatly contradicts various normative Islamic traditions, Alevism is a valuable locus for testing Ahmed’s reconceptualization of Islam. In the first part of this article, I aim to show how Alevis formulated their relation to Islam in their poetry and other classical texts, in order to address whether we can situate Alevism within the sphere of Islam as defined by Shahab Ahmed. In the second part, I compare Ahmed’s conceptualization of Islam to those of Alevis. For both parts, I use as my source the historical and literary documents of Alevism, such as buyruḳs, mathnawīs, dīvāns, and poems in poetry collections. I argue that including cases like Alevism to Islam’s landscape of contradictions (limited to Sunni Islam in Ahmed’s work) not only deconstructs our (in this case, Ahmed’s) existing conceptualizations of Islam, but also serves to reconceptualize Islam.