ABSTRACT

The world's perception of religious circumstances in Turkey is usually unreflecting and uncomplicated: a secular state with a Sunni Muslim population where a religious renaissance until now has been remarkably measured. The number of Alevis are estimated at almost a third of the country's inhabitants. It is a distinctively Turkish Islamic and nominally Shiite group which has been noticed to an astonishingly little extent. However the disturbances in March 1995 in Istanbul and some other cities drew the world's attention to the latent antagonisms between Turkey's Sunni majority and Alevi minority. The Alevis have reason to claim that they have been the object of anti-constitutional discrimination on religious grounds. The origin of the Alevis seems to be found in the border areas of the Ottoman and Persian empires. Nominally the Alevis belong to twelver Shiism. But they have developed their own characteristics which are quite different from Iranian Shiism.